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Ketelaar, T. and Clore, G. L. (1997). Emotions and reason: The proximate effects and ultimate functions of emotions. In Matthews, G. (Ed.) Personality, Emotion, and Cognitive Science, (pp. 355-396).

February 1997

In book: Advances in Psychology Series, Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers (North-Holland).
Publisher: Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers (North-Holland).

Authors:

Timothy Ketelaar

New Mexico State University

Gerald Clore

University of Virginia

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Project

Psychological Foundations of Political Correctness

Timothy Ketelaar

This project is an extension of my recent interest in Emotions & Motivated Reasoning. The aim is to sketch a rough framework for understanding the psychological processes underlying a peculiar sy ndrome of biased reasoning and irrationality observed in modern W.E.I.R.D. societies, commonly referred to as "Political Correctness." Because Political Correctness is at odds with many of the core principles of liberal science, understanding the etiology of political correctness can be useful in developing tools and strategies for promoting tolerance toward viewpoint diversity. KEY QUESTIONS. The current framework examines the psychological origins of Political Correctness by considering three broad questions: (1) What is Political Correctness? (2) Who engages in Political Correctness? (3) How/why does Political Correctness manifest (what is its purpose)? WHAT IS POLITICAL CORRECTNESS? • What is PC? Is "Political Correctness" primarily a syndrome of psychological responses (i.e., Identity-Protective Cognition, Hyper-Sensitivity to Threat, Virtue-Signaling, etc.) triggered by perceived threats to an individual's “assumptive world” [i.e., the culturally shared/identity-relevant narrative that an individual employs to make sense of their social world]? WHO ENGAGES IN POLITICAL CORRECTNESS? • Who engages in PC? Is "Political Correctness" primarily employed as a tactic for "inter-elite" competition by less dominant members (i.e., the Betas) of "elite" social-identity groups in modern W.E.I.R.D. societies who aspire to join higher status groups (i.e., the Alphas)? HOW/WHY DOES POLITICAL CORRECTNESS MANIFEST (what is its purpose)? • How/why is PC manifest? Do most instances of "Political Correctness" correspond to the deployment of culturally acquired strategies of Argumentation (i.e., Weaponized Rhetoric) that allow individuals to maintain their commitment to identity-relevant beliefs in the presence of strong counterarguments? Does "Political Correctness" typically take the form of "outsider strategies" (i.e., indirect aggression, subordinate coordination, etc.) commonly observed among less dominant "beta" males in non-human primate dominance hierarchies and among less dominant members of human political groups (i.e., outsiders) as a tactic for competing with political insiders? LITERATURE REVIEW. I'm conducting a literature review aimed at synthesizing insights from several disciplines/areas of study including: (i) Historical Social/Cultural Processes (2) Psychological responses to stress (3) Psychological Models of Ideology and Social Identity (4) Evolutionary Psychological Models of Rationality and Argumentation/Rhetoric (5) Philosophical insights into how individuals construct models of their social world EMPIRICAL WORK. A second facet of this project involves designing empirical studies to test assumptions about the psychological processes that underlie observable forms of Political Correctness (e.g., virtue signaling, hyper-sensitivity to threat, identity-protective cognition, etc.). I am developing a testable conceptual framework for explaining the preponderance of identity-politics and weaponized rhetoric among societal elites. ... [more]

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Project

Feelings as Information

This project title serves as a collection link for work on feelings-as-information theory, which addresses how people use their subjective experiences -- including moods, emotions, bodily sensation s, and metacognitive experiences of ease or difficulty-- as a source of information. Much of this work is older, although new pieces will be added off and on. For overview see the Schwarz (2012) chapter: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266330418_Feelings-as-Information_Theory ... [more]

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Article

Choice Criteria, Decision Behavior, and Personality

May 1968 · Journal of Marketing Research

Jerome B. Kernan

Do expected value, maximin, coefficient of optimism, and minimax regret describe real-world decision making, or are these terms limited to theoretical reasoning? This article reports a study designed to test the empirical correspondence of decision theory and the relationship between decision behavior and personality.

Article

Choice Criteria, Decision Behavior, and Personality

May 1968 · Journal of Marketing Research

Jerome B. Kernan

Do expected value, maximin, coefficient of optimism, and minimax regret describe real-world decision making, or are these terms limited to theoretical reasoning? This article reports a study designed to test the empirical correspondence of decision theory and the relationship between decision behavior and personality.

Article

Explaining the link between conscientiousness and forgivingness

October 2012 · Journal of Research in Personality

The current studies tested possible explanations for the link between conscientiousness and forgivingness. Using two Swiss adult samples, we examined three reasons why conscientious people tend to be more dispositionally forgiving. Findings suggest that self-regulation ability served as the best explanation for this relationship. Conscientious individuals tend to be better at self-regulation, ... [Show full abstract] which in turn enables them to be more forgiving of others. Moreover, this explanation only holds when discussing the link between forgivingness and conscientiousness, and not with respect to why agreeable and emotionally stable participants are more forgiving. Findings are discussed with respect to the role of regulatory processes in explaining the linkages between broad personality dimensions and forgivingness.

Article

Temporal self-appraisal and attributional focus

November 2004 · Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

Geoffrey Haddock

Temporal self-appraisal theory (Ross & Wilson, 2002; Wilson & Ross, 2001) states that individuals evaluate their past selves in a way that makes them feel good about their current self. The present studies tested the degree to which differences in attributional focus influence feelings of closeness to positive life events. In Study 1, participants recalled a recent positive life event before ... [Show full abstract] thinking about how either they personally or others were responsible for the event’s occurrence. As expected, participants felt temporally closer to the event when they had thought about internal attributions. In Study 2, after recalling a recent positive life event, participants recalled one (or six) reasons describing how they personally (or others) produced the event. The results revealed that participants used the content of retrieved attributions in deriving their temporal judgment. The implications of the findings for tenets of temporal self-appraisal theory are discussed.