Maximilian Primbs’s research while affiliated with Radboud University and other places

Terror Management Theory (TMT) proposes that when people are made aware of their own death, they are more likely to endorse cultural values. TMT is a staple of social psychology, being featured prominently in textbooks and the subject of much research. The implications associated with TMT are significant, as its advocates claim it can partially explain cultural conflicts, intergroup antagonisms, and even war. However, considerable ambiguity regarding effect size exists, and no preregistered replication of death-thought accessibility findings exists. Moreover, there is debate regarding the role of time delay between the manipulation of mortality salience and assessment of key measures. We present results from 22 labs in 11 countries (total N = 3,447) attempting to replicate and extend an existing study of terror management theory, study three from Trafimow and Hughes (2012), and the role of time delay effects. We successfully replicate Trafimow and Hughes (2012), and demonstrate that it is possible to prime death-related thoughts, and that priming is more effective when there is no delay between the priming and outcome measure. Implications for future research and terror management theory are discussed.

Sundown towns refer to places that restricted or excluded the movement or settlement of racial and ethnic minorities within their borders. Though civil rights legislation largely put an end to their official aspects, the cultural legacy of sundown towns may persist today within geographical regions. In the present research, we examine whether the geographic distribution of American sundown towns is evident in regional aggregates of the racial biases of modern-day residents. Using the geolocated responses of more than 1.3 million Project Implicit visitors, we found that counties characterized in the past by either sundown policies or the presence of sundown towns have higher levels of implicit and explicit racial bias today. These findings are robust across analytic choices, but generalizability and discriminant tests provided mixed evidence. This research contributes to a growing literature linking environments and biases, and demonstrates that the legacy of a shameful period in American history is not limited to the history books.

Terror Management Theory (TMT) proposes that when people are made aware of their own death, they are more likely to endorse cultural values. TMT is a staple of social psychology, being featured prominently in textbooks and the subject of much research. The implications associated with TMT are significant, as its advocates claim it can partially explain cultural conflicts, intergroup antagonisms, and even war. However, considerable ambiguity regarding effect size exists, and no preregistered replication of death-thought accessibility findings exists. Moreover, there is debate regarding the role of time delay between the manipulation of mortality salience and assessment of key measures. We present results from 22 labs in 11 countries (total N = 3,447) attempting to replicate and extend an existing study of terror management theory, study three from Trafimow and Hughes (2012), and the role of time delay effects. We successfully replicate Trafimow and Hughes (2012), and demonstrate that it is possible to prime death-related thoughts, and that priming is more effective when there is no delay between the priming and outcome measure. Implications for future research and terror management theory are discussed.

Every year, billions of people celebrate Christmas all over the world—a religious event that is characterized by transient yet considerable changes in people’s social, cultural, and demographic environment. Drawing on the Bias of Crowds model, we investigate the impact of Christmas on implicit bias. In Study 1, we used Project Implicit data of more than 4 million White US Americans and find that Christmas affects implicit bias scores towards Black people, Arabs, people with a darker skin tone, Judaism, Islam, and gay people.. In Study 2, we conduct a high-powered pre-registered adversarial collaboration that experimentally tests whether Christmas affects implicit bias (n = 451) in a repeated measures design and find that it affects bias towards gay but not Arab people. Together these studies provide novel evidence for the causal role of the social and cultural environment in determining implicit biases, while highlighting issues with the reliance on self-selected samples.

The values underlying Open Science include equity, diversity, and inclusion—open means open to all. But the research community is far from embodying these values in everyday research practices, work environments and events. Therefore, this meeting brings together researchers and research supporters at the forefront of culture change for a more inclusive, diverse, equitable and therefore more open academia.

The second coming of the Ku Klux Klan popularized the Klan and its ideas in the early 1920s, terrorizing Black American, their allies, and others deemed un-American. This article investigates the extent to which the cultural legacy of racial hatred of the Klan has persisted over the years. We use data from large online databases, multiverse analyses, and spatial models to evaluate whether regions with more historical Klan activity show higher levels of modern-day racial bias, and more modern-day White Supremacist activity. We find that regions with more Ku Klux Klan activity in the 1920s show higher levels of modern White Supremacist activity but, unexpectedly, lower levels of modern implicit and explicit racial bias. We discuss the implications of these findings for models linking historical events with present-day attitudes and behavior, and for situational models of bias more broadly.

Discrimination in the evaluation of others is a key cause of social inequality around the world. However, relatively little is known about psychological interventions that can be used to prevent biased evaluations. The limited evidence that exists on these strategies is spread across many methods and populations, making it difficult to generate reliable best practices that can be effective across contexts. In the present work, we held a research contest to solicit interventions with the goal of reducing discrimination based on physical attractiveness using a hypothetical admissions task. Thirty interventions were tested across four rounds of data collection (total N > 20,000). Using a signal detection theory approach to evaluate interventions, we identified two interventions that reduced discrimination by lessening both decision noise and decision bias, while two other interventions reduced overall discrimination by only lessening noise or bias. The most effective interventions largely provided concrete strategies that directed participants’ attention toward decision-relevant criteria and away from socially biasing information, though the fact that very similar interventions produced differing effects on discrimination suggests certain key characteristics that are needed for manipulations to reliably impact judgment. The effects of these four interventions on decision bias, noise, or both also replicated in a different discrimination domain, political affiliation, and generalized to populations with self-reported hiring experience. Results of the contest for decreasing attractiveness-based favoritism suggest that identifying effective routes for changing discriminatory behavior is a challenge and that greater investment is needed to develop impactful, flexible, and scalable strategies for reducing discrimination.

The 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in response to the murder of George Floyd highlighted the lingering structural inequalities faced by Black people in the United States. In the present research, we investigated whether these protests led to reduced implicit and explicit racial bias among White U.S. Americans. Combining data from Project Implicit, Armed Conflict Location Event Data Project (ACLED), Google Trends, and the American Community survey, we observed rapid drops in implicit and explicit measures of racial bias after the onset of the protests. However, both types of racial bias slowly increased again over time as (attention to) BLM faded. We use directed acyclic graphs to show under which assumptions causal inferences are warranted. We discuss our results in light of situational models of bias, their implications for protest movements, and raise questions about when and how social norms play a role in large-scale attitude change.

Traditionally, causal claims in social cognition research have been reserved for experimental designs. However, restricting causal claims to experimental research limits the type of questions that can be answered satisfactorily – including questions about geographical differences or changes over time recently popularized in the field of social cognition. In this tutorial, we outline a principled approach to causal inference for non-experimental designs. We describe how researchers can use Directed Acyclic Graphs to make their causal assumptions explicit and discuss one strategy to estimate causal effects: Balancing weights. We show how researchers can use balancing weights to obtain unbiased causal effects from non-experimental designs. We provide detailed R Code to implement balancing weights analyses and provide readers with resources to delve deeper into the field of causal inference.

Terror Management Theory (TMT) proposes that when people are made aware of their own death, they are more likely to endorse cultural values. TMT is a staple of social psychology, being featured prominently in textbooks and the subject of much research. The implications associated with TMT are significant, as its advocates claim it can partially explain cultural conflicts, intergroup antagonisms, and even war. However, considerable ambiguity regarding effect size exists, and no preregistered replication of death-thought accessibility findings exists. Moreover, there is debate regarding the role of time delay between the manipulation of mortality salience and assessment of key measures. We present results from 22 labs in 11 countries (total N = 3,447) attempting to replicate and extend an existing study of terror management theory, study three from Trafimow and Hughes (2012), and the role of time delay effects. While we failed to replicate the specific findings from Trafimow and Hughes (2012), we did demonstrate that it is possible to prime death-related thoughts, and that priming is more effective when there is no delay between the priming and outcome measure. Implications for future research and terror management theory are discussed.