Do Just World Believers Process Unfair Authoritative Decisions Differently?

Mentalizing skills do not differentiate believers from non-believers, but credibility enhancing displays do

The ability to mentalize has been marked as an important cognitive mechanism enabling belief in supernatural agents. In five studies we cross-culturally investigated the relationship between mentalizing and belief in supernatural agents with large sample sizes (over 67,000 participants in total) and different operationalizations of mentalizing. The relative importance of mentalizing for endorsi...

Accepting Authoritative Decisions: Humans as Wary Cooperators

Speakers of different languages process the visual world differently.

Language and vision are highly interactive. Here we show that people activate language when they perceive the visual world, and that this language information impacts how speakers of different languages focus their attention. For example, when searching for an item (e.g., clock) in the same visual display, English and Spanish speakers look at different objects. Whereas English speakers searchin...

Do extraverts process social stimuli differently from introverts?

The personality trait of extraversion has been linked to the network of brain systems controlling sensitivity to cues of reward and generating approach behavior in response, but little is known about whether extraverts' neural circuits are especially sensitive to social stimuli, given their preference for social engagement. Utilizing event-related potential (ERP) methodology, this study demonst...

Just World Beliefs Are Associated With Lower Levels of Metabolic Risk and Inflammation and Better Sleep After an Unfair Event.

This study's goal was to conduct a preliminary test of the theory that just world beliefs can buffer against negative physiological outcomes after people experience certain types of negative life events by testing associations between just world beliefs and physiological outcomes among people with different life event histories. In a sample of 247 adults (Mage  = 46.01; 24.31% men; 60.78% White...