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In two studies, the authors examined the projection of romantic and sexual desire in opposite-sex friendships. In both studies, perceivers who strongly desired their friends projected this desire onto their friends, believing that their desire was more…

People drastically overestimate how often others attend to them or notice their unusual features, a phenomenon termed the spotlight effect. Despite the prevalence of this egocentric bias, little is known about how to reduce the tendency to see oneself …

According to optimal distinctiveness theory, sufficiently small minority groups are associated with greater membership trust, even among members otherwise unknown, because the groups are seen as optimally distinctive. This article elaborates on the pre…

Three studies explored the connection between social perception processes and individual differences in the use of affective and cognitive information in relation to attitudes. Study 1 revealed that individuals high in need for affect (NFA) accentuated…

The impact of hierarchical rank on perspective taking is both practically and theoretically important, prompting considerable research attention to this issue. However, prior research has primarily examined how power affects perspective taking, and has…

Psychological research on wisdom has flourished in the last 30 years, much of it investigating laypeople’s implicit theories of wisdom. In three studies, we took an exemplar and prototype approach to implicit wisdom theories by asking participant…

Ostracism’s negative consequences have been widely documented, but research has yet to explore the personality characteristics of its targets that precipitate ostracism. Based on theories of the functions of ostracism, we found that people are mo…

Paying attention to others’ emotions is essential to successful social interactions. Integrating social-functional approaches to emotion with theorizing on the reciprocal nature of power, we propose that attention to others’ emotions depend…

How are people who generally see others positively evaluated themselves? We propose that the answer to this question crucially hinges on the content domain: We hypothesize that Agency follows a “zero-sum principle” and therefore people who see others a…

Information about the degree of one’s genetic overlap with ethnic outgroups has been emphasized in genocides, is frequently learned about through media reporting, and is increasingly being accessed via personal genetic testing services. However, …