Alison Ledgerwood's research while affiliated with University of California, Davis and other places

... Distinguishing between abstract and concrete attribute evaluations has allowed us to ask new questions about how people form abstract representations of liking for attributes. For example, our research suggests that people form abstract attribute preferences by drawing on not only their concrete evaluative experiences, but also incidental features of the learning context (Eastwick et al. 2019;Wang et al. 2020). These incidental contextual features include how plentiful a trait is (e.g., whether the potential mates that one encounters are generally high or low in intelligence) and how much liking someone is generally experiencing (e.g., whether the potential mates that one encounters are generally desirable or undesirable). ...

... [24][25][26] It is well known that collaborative research improves its quality and impact. 27,28 Furthermore, improving the longterm impact and sustainability of global research in any field needs strengthening collaborations between high-and low-income countries. 29 There are a few limitations of our study. ...

... One promising future direction for this line of work is examination of the diversity of relationship science (and social-personality psychology) researchers themselves. As others have discussed (e.g., Medin et al., 2017), the diversity of researchers can be highly influential to what work is valued, and examining the diversity of researchers-along with the patterns of inequity that affect marginalized scholars (Ledgerwood et al., 2022)-could help us to better understand the larger context that has given rise to the state of the science as exemplified in our analysis. ...

... Several studies from moral psychology have suggested that developed moral reasoning, empathy, and moral identity, central to moral and prosocial behaviour, are most strongly tied with the care/harm foundation compared with the other foundations (Dawson et al., 2021;Han & Dawson, 2022). Furthermore, Rosenfeld et al. (2022) addresses how to promote prosociality within the context of the current pandemic and suggests that interventions need to focus on the dimension of harm and threat. Hence, interventions and programs that intend to promote compliance should consider the care/harm foundation as a central theme. ...

... near) goal, people prefer abstract (vs. concrete) representations of the goal (Liberman & Trope, 1998;Sánchez et al., 2021). Applying the premise of the theory to the marketing context, previous research has also demonstrated that when consumers imagine a temporally distant (vs. ...

... Given the accumulating evidence for the pervasive and enduring effects of structural and social determinants on neurobiology and mental health, an immediate reaction could be to "do more, do better." Certainly more research is needed, and, we would argue, particularly more structural, and social determinants that have excluded and harmed those who are underrepresented (122,123). The effects of being the beneficiaries of these determinants are, to be sure, quite different than the effects discussed previously, but they are likely to include unrecognized biases in the questions we ask, the approaches used to address those questions, the populations studied, what is prioritized in the data generated, the interpretations of those data, and the evaluation of others' research (124)(125)(126). ...

... Focusing specifically on the goals of implicit-bias trainings, it may not be enough to raise awareness of the effects of social category cues and to train decision-makers to control effects of social category cues. Rather, interventions would need to include changes at the system level to shift decision-makers' focus away from criteria that have historically been easier to acquire for some social groups than others (Ledgerwood et al., 2021;Salter et al., 2017). ...

... These findings stand in stark contrast to a recently published and then retracted paper by AlShebli, Makovi, and Rahwan (2020), which claimed that opposite-gender mentoring led to more positive career development outcomes. Like Mabry et al. (2020) who challenge the assumed benefits of what they call 'MANtoring', our research indicates that mentoring covers a range of career aspects and needs to address structural problems, and that sharing a female perspective can greatly help mentors and mentees in deriving career benefits. Importantly, while most mentoring is aimed at early career academics, the results stress that the participants perceived value in mentoring across all phases of an academic career. ...

... Fourth, when all studies are included and the analytic model is planned (cf. Vosgerau et al., 2019), IDA as a form of internal meta-analysis can help researchers avoid being misled by natural sampling fluctuations across studies (Braver et al., 2014;Curran & Hussong, 2009;Goh et al., 2016;Lakens & Etz, 2017;Ledgerwood et al., 2017;McShane & Böckenholt, 2017). ...

... Of course, one might wonder whether our Study 2 results truly show a unique consequence of summarized preferences, or whether functional preferences simply did not predict situation selection at a distance because our measure of functional preferences was a poor measure that in fact would not predict anything. In contrast, consistent with work showing that abstract mental tools are specifically recruited to support action at a distance (Trope et al., 2021), we predict that whereas summarized preferences should predict situation selection at a distance, functional preferences should predict situation selection with experience (i.e., a decision to enter a situation that participants have had an opportunity to sample). That is, once people have sampled targets from a novel situation (e.g., previewing other users on a dating website), they will (re-)experience their functional preferences during the sampling process and use those preferences to decide whether to enter the situation. ...