B. Keith Payne’s research while affiliated with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and other places

Introduction Individuals who are depressed, have suicide attempts, and a substance use disorder (SUD) may have different patterns of suicidal thoughts and behaviors and respond differently to cues associated with suicide and death. Method Implicit affective reactions to visual cues suggestive of suicide and death (as well as to pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral cues), were compared among three groups of hospitalized adults: (a) depressed patients without the histories of suicidal behavior (depression only), (b) depressed patients with suicide attempts, but no current substance abuse disorder (SA), and (c) depressed patients with both suicide attempts and substance use disorder (SA + SUD). Results The SA group demonstrated higher positive evaluations of visual cues associated with suicide and death when compared to the SA + SUD group. The SA + SUD group demonstrated the lowest positive evaluation of suicide‐related stimuli as well as less positive evaluation of visual cues of generally unpleasant stimuli. Conclusion Differences observed between SA and SA + SUD participants underscore differences in responses to cues related to suicide, which may reflect differences in mechanisms of risk.

Inequality is perpetuated, in part, by the psychological and behavioral tendencies that arise from the social context of inequality. Cognitive biases lead most people to see themselves as middle class, even when that perception does not align with economic reality. Those who perceive themselves as economically advantaged tend to view inequality as fair and legitimate, often dismissing proponents of redistributive solutions as ill-informed. And unequal contexts increase risky behaviors that can be profitable to some but are more likely to be costly for most. This research program suggests an inequality cycle, in which inequality experienced today tends to reproduce itself.

Explicitly prejudiced attitudes against Black Americans have declined gradually since the 1960s. Yet racial disparities and racial discrimination remain significant problems in the United States. How could discrimination and disparate outcomes remain constant even while racial prejudice decreased? Two prominent explanations have emerged to explain these puzzling trends. Sociologists have proposed that disparities and discrimination are perpetuated by systemic racism, or the policies, practices, and societal structures that disadvantage some racial groups compared with others. Simultaneously, psychologists have proposed that implicit biases may sustain discrimination even in the absence of explicit prejudice. In this essay, we explore newly discovered connections between systemic racism and implicit bias, how they challenge traditional views to reorient our understanding of implicit bias, and how they shed new light on strategies to reduce bias.

Background Subjective socioeconomic status is robustly associated with many measures of health and well-being. The MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status (i.e., the MacArthur ladder) is the most widely used measure of this construct, but it remains unclear what exactly the MacArthur ladder measures. Purpose The present research sought to explore the social and economic factors that underlie responses to the MacArthur ladder and its relationship to health. Methods We investigated this issue by examining the relationship between scores on the MacArthur ladder and measures of economic circumstances and noneconomic social status, as well as health and well-being measures, in healthy adults in the USA. Results In three studies (total N = 1,310) we found evidence that economic circumstances and social status are distinct constructs that have distinct associations with scores on the MacArthur ladder. We found that both factors exhibit distinct associations with measures of health and well-being and accounted for the association between the MacArthur ladder and each measure of health and well-being. Conclusions Our findings suggest that the MacArthur ladder’s robust predictive validity may result from the fact that it measures two factors—economic circumstances and social status—that are each independently associated with health outcomes. These findings provide a novel perspective on the large body of literature that uses the MacArthur ladder and suggests health researchers should do more to disentangle the social and economic aspects of subjective socioeconomic status.

Cesario argues that experiments cannot illuminate real group disparities because they leave out factors that operate in ordinary life. But what Cesario calls flaws are, in fact, the point of the experimental method. Of all the topics in science, we have to wonder why racial discrimination would be uniquely unsuited for investigating with experiments. The argument to give up the most powerful scientific method to study one of the hardest problems we confront is laughable.

How does implicit bias contribute to explicit prejudice? Prior experiments show that concept knowledge about fear versus sympathy determines whether negative affect (captured as implicit bias) predicts antisocial outcomes (Lee et al.). Concept knowledge (i.e., beliefs) about groups may similarly moderate the link between implicitly measured negative affect (implicit negative affect) and explicit prejudice. We tested this hypothesis using data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) 2008 Time Series Study (Study 1) and Project Implicit (Study 2). In both studies, participants high in implicit negative affect reported more explicit prejudice if they possessed negative beliefs about Black Americans. Yet, participants high in implicit negative affect reported less explicit prejudice if they possessed fewer negative beliefs about Black Americans. The results are consistent with psychological constructionist and dynamic models of evaluation and offer a more ecologically valid extension of our past laboratory work.

The degree of economic inequality in a given time and place sets the context in which people understand how they measure up to others. Because of this, inequality does not just describe how outcomes are distributed. It also serves as a kind of input into people’s thinking and decision making. In this paper, we provide an overview of our recent work examining the ways that inequality can function as a social context that shapes people’s expectations, needs, desires, and attributions. We argue that people’s positions in economic hierarchies can shape perceptions of what people believe to be fair and how much people need. Better understanding these psychological mechanisms may help to explain the associations between inequality and effects at the societal level, such as health outcomes and crime. When it comes to inequality, it may be intuitively appealing to emphasize fair processes over equitable outcomes, and having enough rather than some people having more. Yet our research, and others', suggests that inequality in the environment shapes what counts as “fair,” and what counts as “enough.”

Two decades of research have documented a robust racial bias in the perceptual identification of weapons and the decision to shoot in laboratory simulations. In this chapter, we review the advances that have been made in understanding the causes, correlates, and psychological processes contributing to race biases in threat perception across different experimental paradigms. We begin by offering a psychological definition of bias, and considering how it may differ from folk concepts of bias. We discuss the contributions of this work to the broader field of implicit attitudes research. Most implicit bias research uses experimental tasks as measures of underlying attitudes. In contrast, research on racial bias in threat perception has focused on biased behaviors rather than attitudes. As a result, progress has been made in understanding not only automatic threat reactions but also the cognitive control processes that moderate the expression of automatic reactions in overt behavior. This literature has helped integrate research on implicit bias with research on executive control in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Moreover, this research has served as a test bed for developing quantitative models of social biases, including the use of signal detection theory, multinomial models, and diffusion models. We discuss the relationships among these different classes of models, and what each can contribute to understanding biased threat detection. We consider the complexities in linking findings from well-controlled laboratory experiments to field studies on actual police use of force. We end by considering questions about the rationality of racial biases, and argue that the rationality of a behavior cannot be understood as an empirical question apart from normative judgments of the behavior.

Evaluative conditioning procedures change people’s evaluations of stimuli that are paired with pleasant or unpleasant items. To test whether influence awareness allows people to resist such persuasive attempts, we conducted three experiments. In the first two experiments featuring low levels of influence awareness (N1 = 96, N2 = 93) we manipulated the degree of control people have in expressing their attitudes, by providing participants in one condition with the option to “pass” rather than respond, when they felt influenced in their evaluations of conditioned stimuli. In the third experiment (N3 = 240) we manipulated the level of influence awareness by using a warning instruction similar to the one found in prior controllability studies, while giving everyone the option to pass the evaluation when they felt influenced. All studies found that participants often failed to use the skip option to exert control over conditioned preferences. In some cases, this may be because participants failed to notice the pairings, but in most cases because participants lacked awareness that the pairings could influence them. Even when explicitly warned that the pairings could influence them, participants seemed to believe that they were not vulnerable to such effects.

Experiences of discrete emotion play important roles in a variety of psychological domains. Yet, current measures of discrete emotion face significant limitations. Biological and behavioral measures often do not capture subjective experiences related to discrete emotions, while self-reports are susceptible to reporting biases. An indirect measure of discrete emotions would help address the limitations of existing measures; however, few such measures exist. Across 4 studies, we offer an indirect measure of discrete emotion. Our results provide evidence that our measure can distinguish between participants' experiences of same-valenced emotions (Study 1), is relatively less susceptible to deliberate attempts to suppress emotional responses (Studies 2 and 3), and is also relatively less susceptible to the influence of social norms (i.e., gender stereotypes) in self-reported discrete emotions than an explicit measure (Study 4). Overall, these findings demonstrate that our measure of discrete emotions can capture discrete emotional responses above and beyond affective valence, is indirect, and measures affective processes contributing to discrete emotional responses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).