Although the interchange between clinical and social psychological research has been fruitful in the study of cognition in marriage, it has recently waned. This article therefore illustrates the value of continued interplay between developments in the social cognition and marital literatures, focusing on the role of context in understanding marriage. Several studies show how construct accessibi...

People can reliably infer various traits, states, and group memberships from minimal cues. Despite impressive demonstrations of the breadth of social perception, however, few studies have critically examined the sensitivity and limits of social perception in specific quantitative terms. Here, we investigated the just noticeable difference for perceptions of a facial trait with profound conseque...

Current theories of justice emphasize social identity reasons for why people care about justice to the relative neglect of personal identity concerns, that is, people’s need to express, defend, and live up to personal moral standards. The authors present a value protection model that predicts that self-expressive moral positions or stands (“moral mandates”) are important determinants of how peo...

This research explored cases where people are drawn to make judgments between individuals based on questionable criteria, in particular those individuals' social group memberships. We suggest that individuals engage in casuistry to mask biased decision making, by recruiting more acceptable criteria to justify such decisions. We present 6 studies that demonstrate how casuistry licenses people to...

Primate evolution produced an increased capacity to respond flexibly to varying social contexts as well as expansion of the prefrontal cortex. Despite this association, how prefrontal neurons respond to social information remains virtually unknown. People with damage to their orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) struggle to recognize facial expressions, make poor social judgments, and frequently make soc...

In our daily lives we make judgments regarding other people intuiti\~ely, unwittingly, and rapidly. A fleeting glimpse or a mere glance lead to evalu-ative judgments of others. Such judgments have important consequences. They influence whom we sit next to on the subway whom we hire for a job. and sometimes even whom we mam! Thus, as employers: within a minute into a job i n t e ~ e w we decide ...

Previous research suggests that self-evaluations can be influenced by social comparison feedback. The present study tested whether social comparison feedback has stronger effects on self-evaluations of performance than ability. Participants received social comparison feedback indicating that they had performed above or below average. In addition to rating their performance and ability, particip...

People routinely make various trait judgments from facial appearance, and such judgments affect important social outcomes. These judgments are highly correlated with each other, reflecting the fact that valence evaluation permeates trait judgments from faces. Trustworthiness judgments best approximate this evaluation, consistent with evidence about the involvement of the amygdala in the implici...