Anger Damns the Innocent


William Shakespeare wrote a famous line in Hamlet, “the lady doth protest too much, methinks,” referring to a character who is seen as being overly defensive and therefore, worthy of suspicion. Is this intuition true?

We set out to examine whether anger in response to an accusation was more closely associated with perceptions of innocence or guilt. Like the lady protesting too much, we found that people who express anger—even mild irritation—are more likely to be perceived as guilty than those who react calmly to an accusation.

Yet, we also find that people are usually angrier when they are falsely accused than rightfully accused. This means that although anger is often interpreted as a sign of guilt, it is more likely to be a reflection of innocence.

Perceptions Of Anger And Guilt

First, we tested whether people thought someone was guiltier of wrongdoing when they reacted angrily (versus calmly or silently) to an accusation.

In one study, we showed almost 2,000 study participants a subset of 33 clips from the TV show Judge Faith—a television show in which people publicly plead their cases before a real judge. Participants rated their perceptions of the accused’s anger and guilt. Even holding constant the characters’ demographics and the type of offense, the angrier they believed a person was, the guiltier they seemed.

In another study, we described a fictional case of “Andrew Smith,” who had been accused of armed robbery. Participants read one of four experimental manipulations describing Smith’s reaction: that he had not testified per his constitutional right (i.e., silently), or that that during the testimony he had reacted to the accusation calmly, angrily, or irritatedly. Smith was perceived as most guilty when he was silent. When he was angry or irritated, people thought he was guiltier than when he was calm. People also perceived Smith as more untrustworthy and inauthentic when he was angry rather than calm, which explained why they thought he was guiltier.

The Accuracy Of These Perceptions

We then examined whether this association that people have between anger and guilt was correct—are the guilty more likely to feel and express anger when they are accused?

We asked people to recall a time they had been accused of either a serious or a trivial wrongdoing, and we asked them how angry they had felt. Participants who recalled being falsely accused said that they were angrier than participants who recalled being rightfully accused, regardless of how serious the accusation was.

In another study, we had participants perform an easy or a more difficult task: capitalizing the first and last letter of a series of paragraphs or identifying and deleting the adverbs in those same paragraphs. After they completed the task, participants waited while we said that we were checking their work. Then, we accused all of them (regardless of their actual performance) of not faithfully following the study instructions and said that we might withhold a $2.00 bonus payment.

We anticipated that people who completed the easy task were more likely to be falsely accused, since it was a simple task and they most likely completed it correctly. In contrast, those assigned to the difficult task were more likely to be rightfully accused, since identifying adverbs can sometimes be quite difficult, leading more people to complete this task incorrectly. We found that those assigned to the easy task (and who were therefore more likely to be falsely accused) reported being angrier than those assigned to the difficult task. We also looked at their actual performance on the task, finding that those who were falsely accused reported being angrier than those who were rightfully accused.

It turns out that the very cues that we think reflect a person’s guilt may reflect their innocence: although anger is taken as a cue to guilt, it may indicate that a person has been falsely accused of wrongdoing.

What Does This Mean?

Does this mean that anyone who is accused of wrongdoing and shows anger is innocent? Not necessarily. Our research rests on the assumption that the accused perceive themselves to be innocentwhich obviously may be different from true innocence!

Additionally, it is possible that guilty people sometimes try to appear offended by accusations by acting angrily, or that they are angry about being treated unfairly during the accusation process itself. While we did not see evidence of this occurring in our studies, more research is needed to understand these nuances in more depth.

So, it seems, maybe Shakespeare was wrong?


For Further Reading

DeCelles, K. A., Adams, G. S., Howe, H. S., & John, L. K. (2021). Anger damns the innocent. Psychological Science, 32(8), 1214–1226. doi:10.1177/0956797621994770.

ten Brinke, L., Vohs, K. D., & Carney, D. R. (2016). Can ordinary people detect deception after all? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(8), 579–588. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.05.012

Bond, C. F., & DePaulo, B. M. (2006). Accuracy of deception judgments. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(3), 214–234. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr1003_2

 

Katy DeCelles is the Secretary of State Professor in Organizational Effectiveness at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, with a cross-appointment at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies. She studies emotion, conflict, morality, and crime.

Gabrielle Adams is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy (Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy) and Business Administration (Darden School of Business) at the University of Virginia. She holds a courtesy appointment in Psychology. She studies the psychological processes and interpersonal dynamics that give rise to ‘good’ decisions, policies, and conditions in organizations.

Holly Howe is a Ph.D. student at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. She studies communication across a variety of contexts including advertising, interpersonal relationships, and self-talk.

Leslie John is a Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. She studies how people make decisions, and the implications of these decisions for firms and society.

The Unexpected Joy of Memories

Have you ever found an old shoe box and spent hours poring over old letters, ticket stubs, photographs, and memories of the good old days?

Around the world, people have recorded and shared memories for centuries, ranging from Hindu funeral customs to modern Instagram timelines. But are we doing this only to build a rear-view mirror for our future selves? Or does recording and revisiting memories offer any benefits in the present as well?

We conducted three studies using “memory jars”—virtual and physical glass jars filled with memories, moments, and experiences—to find out.

Writing And Reading Memories Makes Us Happy

We first investigated the benefits of recording and revisiting memories using notecards stored in physical glass jars.

Students looking back on college years

College is a special time for many people—moving away from home for the first time, making friends at spontaneous parties, stressing about internships, and discovering who you are.

In our first study, 120 college seniors each filled individual glass jars with their 7 favorite college memories. One month later, they either read their own memories, or the memories of another classmate from the study. We found that both writing and reading memories, regardless of whether they were their own memories or a classmate’s, made the students happier. This was true even when the students classified their own and others’ memories as sad—there was a happiness boost from reading and writing all kinds of memories, not just the happy or “good” memories.   

Senior citizens looking back on life

A few weeks after our first study, one of us heard amazing memories from some senior citizens with Alzheimer’s. A man who reported having only 32 memories left—the faces of 32 people he’d killed when he fought for Nazi Germany in World War II. A woman who juggled three husbands in the 1940s, all at the same time. A 105-year-old woman who had been sold as a slave in Alabama. The list went on, and drew us in. We wondered if older individuals would benefit from revisiting memories, much like the college students did.

We replicated our college student study with 105 senior citizens living in 11 different nursing homes across New Jersey. The photo below shows some of them sitting around the table with their memory jars and slips of paper. We found that both writing and reading memories made them feel happier. And less lonely!

image of group of senior citizens writing down memories for their memory jars

Something as simple as opening a memory jar—even if it was someone else’s—brought bursts of joy and feelings of social connection, at a time in life when loneliness may unfortunately be too common.

Digitally Recorded Memories Have Benefits Too

Given our increasingly digital world, where social media platforms with infinite feeds have replaced photo albums with finite pages, we wanted to investigate if the benefits of reading and writing memories remained when done digitally.

In our third study, we recruited 230 individuals online. They typed seven memories and put them in a “digital memory jar” on their cell phone, laptop, or tablet. One week later, they either read their own memories, or those of someone else in the study. As in our previous two studies, we found that people were happier, less lonely, and better off in psychological well-being after reading and writing memories – regardless of who the memories belonged to.  

We Underappreciate The Power Of Memories

Memories seemed to make people feel happy, connected, and well-off. But can people predict how happy reading their memories could make them?

Previous research has shown that people do not accurately predict how they will feel about events like breakups and career difficulties. We found that people aren’t great at predicting how they will feel about revisiting memory jars either. College students, senior citizens, and a diverse sample of people online were all much happier to read their own—and others’—memories than they predicted they would be.

We wondered if this could be because people thought their memories were too “mundane” and humdrum to enjoy later? Maybe they assumed that only looking back on incredible memories—like climbing Mount Everest or meeting Mother Teresa—would make them happy?

Indeed, this mistaken assumption explained people’s underestimation of how happy reading memories would make them—it’s not that people’s memories were more exciting than they realized, it’s that reading even unexciting memories made them happier than they expected. This could explain why people would rather not document everyday moments in the present, not realizing they would love to read those same everyday memories in the future.

Why Does This Matter?

Documenting and revisiting memories matters, because they are potentially a:

  1. Low-effort source of joy: Even spending five minutes writing and reading memories makes people feel happy, less lonely, and improves psychological well-being. This is particularly useful in current times of social isolation due to COVID-19.
     
  2. More thoughtful “social media”: Research shows that heavy social media use makes people unhappy and lonely. However, we found that creating and revisiting digital memory jars were good for happiness, loneliness, and well-being. Maybe these digital memory jars could be a way to avoid “memory spam” and could help people focus on the memories that matter, rather than keeping up with clickbait and heavily manicured profiles of strangers?         

Our memories have always shaped our sense of identity, future thoughts, and actions. By documenting these memories intentionally, maybe we can gain feelings of joy and social connection in the present as well. 


For Further Reading 

Sekhsaria, S., & Pronin, E. (2021). Underappreciated benefits of reading own and others' memories. Social Cognition39(4), 504-525. doi: 10.1521/soco.2021.39.4.504

Zhang, T., Kim, T., Brooks, A., Gino, F., & Norton, M. (2014). A “present” for the future: The unexpected value of rediscovery. Psychological Science, 25(10), 1851-1860. doi: 10.1177/0956797614542274
 

Shriya Sekhsaria is a Princeton alumna and CEO of Lumhaa, which helps people save and share memories with their families and favorite groups. Most of her work is focused on making technology more thoughtful and accessible.  

Emily Pronin is Associate Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Much of her work concerns how people perceive themselves and others, and how errors in those perceptions can give rise to misunderstandings and conflict.

Have to Help or Want to Help?


Everyone acts helpful at times. Indeed, most of us act in kind ways several times a day—giving directions to a stranger, explaining the new work process to a colleague, or making the partner’s favorite dinner and maybe even doing their chores as well. But the reasons people give when reflecting on why they help others differ. Some report helping because they like it or enjoy it, because they value the experience and appreciate that their help is useful—they want to help. Others report helping because they feel they should, because they’d feel like a bad person or others would get angry if they did not help—they feel like they have to help.

Imagine this situation. Your friend asks you to help her move. Your friend reminds you how she helped you in the past, tells you how there’s no one else to help and she really can’t do it by herself; she’d likely injure herself trying to move without you. Chances are you’d feel obliged to help because you want to avoid feeling guilty or bad about letting her down. This is the feeling of helping because you have to. Now imagine that you also feel quite excited about spending time with your friend during the moving day. You are glad she is getting a new place and you want to see her happy. You think you’ll enjoy helping her move and contributing to this happiness. This is the feeling of helping because you want to.

Everyone likely encounters situations in which they feel they have to help or in which they feel they want to help. But beyond specific situations, people also generally vary in how much they agree with the idea that helping is enjoyable for its own sake and vary in how much they agree with the idea that helping is an obligation or a duty. Some people might endorse both these reasons, and some might endorse neither.

How Do Want-To and Have-To Reasons Predict Helping?

At Carleton University, Professor Milyavskaya and I asked 619 adults to reflect on their general reasons for helping and found that reasons to help were linked with how often people reported they typically help others and with how much they invest in helping others in a typical day. Feeling the motivation to want to help for its own sake was linked to doing more favors for others and spending more time and effort on helping. Feeling the pressure to have to help was linked with typically spending more money on helping and reporting more effort.

Thinking back to the example of helping a friend move, this finding might be illustrated by considering different ways of helping. If you endorse helping for its own sake, you might spend more time carrying boxes for your friend, whereas if you help primarily out of obligation you might pay for the gas of the moving truck but bow out early on moving day.

When we followed 442 adults over the course of one week, the same pattern emerged. Participants who endorsed the motivation to want to help for its own sake at the beginning of the week, reported more acts of help on a daily basis and reported spending more time and effort on helping on any given day of the week. For example, people who initially stated that want-to-help reasons were “very true” of their personal motivation, would have helped for an estimated 20 minutes more on a given day than people who answered ‘somewhat true.’ Participants who agreed with the sentiment that they feel they have to help at the beginning of the week, reported more acts of help on a daily basis and reported spending more money and more effort on helping at the end of any given day of the week. For example, people who initially stated that have-to-help reasons were “very true” of their personal motivation, would give an estimated $3.00 more on a given day than people who answered ‘somewhat true.’

In sum, both types of reasons to help were independent elements in helping others. Both want-to and have-to reasons to help led to more acts of kindness and to more effort invested in helping others. The more someone endorsed helping for its own sake the more time they spent helping and the more someone endorsed helping out of obligation the more money they spent on helping, but in the end, both were linked to more resources being devoted on other people.

Thus, the people who help the most and in a range of ways in their daily lives (such as  giving both their time and their money) are likely those who help for multiple reasons. There is no bad reason to be kind!


For Further Reading

Peetz, J., & Milyavskaya, M. (2021). A self-determination theory approach to predicting daily prosocial behavior. Motivation and Emotion, 45(5), 617-630. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-021-09902-5
 

Johanna Peetz is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Her research includes a range of topics connected to decision making across domains of personal spending, time perception, and interpersonal relationships. 

 

It’s Not What You Say, It’s How You Say It


In the 1970s, the psychologist Albert Mehrabian suggested that only 7% of the information in speech is contained in the words. The real information, he suggested, was contained in the visual signals we use (the grimaces, the hand-waves, the body movements) and the way we say it (the intonations and inflections, how loudly we speak). These, he suggested, explain 55% and 38%, respectively, of the meaning. His suggestion caused a big stir at the time, but later he was widely criticized for various good reasons, and his ideas have been forgotten.

Our interest in this issue was motivated by the observation that, in a valiant attempt to get at the mechanisms involved in processing communication cues, many studies focus on the meaning encoded in how we say a single word or expression, or even just a laugh. They invariably forget that the words we use are just the bricks that create conversations, and it is the conversations, not the words, that create the elegantly beautiful building of our relationships.

To explore this, we asked a group of native English speakers and a group of native Spanish speakers to listen to audio-only clips of two people engaged in a completely natural conversation. Could they identify the quality of the speakers’ relationship with each other from just hearing what they said and how they said it? We used audio clips representing eight different relationship qualities including such contexts as friends in idle chat mode, friendly banter, provocation, gossip, and annoyance. To avoid boredom, the clips were short (30-60 seconds), but always involved two speakers. Participants listened to clips in only one language (either their own or the other less familiar language), but they listened to three separate versions of the clips. One was the full audio clip; the second was a version in which the words had been masked electronically so that they could hear the rise and fall of the voices but not the words themselves—a bit like sitting at the back of a busy restaurant when you can hear the conversations around you, but not really distinguish what is actually being said; and finally, a version in which the conversation had been converted to pure tones, so that much of the richness of the audio signal was lost, but not the rise and fall of the two distinct voices. They heard all eight clips for each version together in randomized order, so the chances of remembering clips one version to the next was actually quite slight.

We found that, on the full (unaltered) audio clip, people were around 80% accurate on identifying whether the relationship was positive or negative (the criterion in almost all these kinds of experiments), against an expectation of 50% had they responded at random. Moreover, they still managed 75% accuracy with the altered vocal clips, and even 60% accuracy with the pure tone versions (still well above chance). Even when asked to identify the actual type of relationship in individual clips, they performed at much better than chance level: around 30% correct on the full audio clip, and 20% correct on the other two versions—against an expectation of just 12.5% if they had been responding at random. More importantly, both groups of language speakers were as good with the other language as they were with their own.

So it seems that Mehrabian was right after all. Notwithstanding all the criticism of his claims, a lot of the information about social relationships is contained in the nonverbal cues—though our results suggest it is more like 80% than the 93% estimated by Mehrabian. In other words, we certainly get some additional information from the words, but actually we could get by pretty well without them.

That does raise a puzzle. If so little information is contained in the words, why do we have language at all? We could have carried on growling and whinnying at each other, and that would have done just fine. So what difference do the words actually make? I would suggest it allows us to do two thing: specify time and place.

Nonverbal communication, like the equally complex vocal communication of all monkeys and apes, is very good at telling you how I feel about you right now, but it won’t allow me to tell you how I felt about you last month—or would like to feel about you next month. It won’t allow me to suggest that we meet up at the coffee bar on Main Street at four o’clock next Thursday—or that I met Susan and James there last Thursday. What’s more important, perhaps, is that I couldn’t tell you a story that required you to imagine being in another time or place. There would be no novels and no plays, no histories and no community folklore. And it is these that provide an important part of community bonding.


For Further Reading

Dunbar, R. I. M., Robledo del Canto, J.-P., Tamarit, I., Cross, I., & Smith, E. (2021). Nonverbal auditory cues allow relationship quality to be inferred during conversations. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-021-00386-y.
 

Robin Dunbar is Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, UK, and he studies social evolution in humans and other primates.

 

How Benefiting From Discrimination Contributes to Inequality

Legally speaking, discrimination involves choosing people for a job (or other opportunity) based on a protected class or identity—for instance sex, race, or age. Ample research has shown that discrimination creates inequality by holding some back while lifting others up. That is—discrimination happens both via disfavoring or favoring one group. And these two processes are yoked. When Juan gets selected due to his sex, or when Alejandra gets rejected due to her sex, Juan gets the job in either case. However, when we talk about discrimination, we seem to mostly talk about the victims (those who get rejected due to their identity), rather than those who are benefitting from it (those who get selected due to their identity).

Why Do We See The Victims More Than The Beneficiaries?

We asked people to describe an unfair hiring experience and to define discrimination. In both cases, we found that people are much more likely to think about disfavoring examples and definitions—emphasizing rejecting someone due to their identity. This means people neglected to consider the beneficiaries or favoring side of discrimination.

Then, we conducted several experiments. In each study, people read about a hiring decision that came down to two candidates, Alex (who came from an advantaged group, such identifying as male, or White, or straight) and Taylor (who came from a marginalized group, such as identifying as female, or a person of color, or LGBT). For half of the participants, the decision was framed in terms of disfavoring—one candidate was rejected due to their specific identity. The other half read the same hiring decision, but framed in terms of favoring—one candidate was selected due to their identity. In the end, whether due to disfavoring Taylor or favoring Alex, Alex always got the job. We used a wide variety of hiring decision details, including gender, race, sexual orientation, age, and even alma mater or favorite sports team. In another study, we also used hiring decisions that came from U.S. Supreme Court cases about discrimination. Across all of these different variations, people consistently saw the favoring-framed hiring decision as more fair and less discriminatory, compared to the disfavoring-framed decision. Even experts—such as lawyers and hiring managers—were less likely to recognize favoring-framed discrimination as discrimination.

How To Fix This?

Next, we set about trying to fix this lack of recognition. We found that the reason people, even experts, tend to discount favoring discrimination is because it changes how they see the decision-maker’s intentions. When the boss favors someone—even for an illegal reason, like due to their protected identity—people still see the boss as having positive intentions or trying to be helpful. When the boss disfavors someone, people are more likely to see this as reflecting negative intentions. Despite the fact favoring Alex and disfavoring Taylor lead to the same discrimination outcome, people feel like the presumed intentions difference makes favoring less discriminatory. In this way, beneficiaries of discrimination may go relatively unnoticed. In fact, we find that this perception of positive intentions even leads people to be less likely to want to report favoring-based discrimination to authorities and less likely to support litigation against the decision-maker.

This is a very sticky problem—it’s hard to get people to separate their beliefs about positive intentions from their assessment of discrimination. Even when we ask people who saw the favoring type of discrimination to really focus on the harm caused to the victim or to take the rejected candidate’s perspective, people still see favoring as positively intended, and thus as less discriminatory. If we instead highlight that the decision maker had selfish ulterior motives (such as favoring someone because they wanted to get a favor in return), this starts to make people more suspicious of the intentions, and more likely to notice favoring as discriminatory.

Discrimination does not just produce victims, but also beneficiaries. Although this is obvious, what’s not so obvious is people’s tendency not to see this equivalence for what it is.


For Further Reading

Phillips, L. T., & Jun, S. (2021). Why benefiting from discrimination is less recognized as discrimination. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.


L. Taylor Phillips is an Assistant Professor of Management & Organizations at New York University Stern School of Business. She studies beliefs about inequity, especially how people think about privilege and advantage.

Sora Jun is an Assistant Professor of Organizations at University of Texas, Dallas Jindal School of Management. She studies beliefs about racial hierarchies, particularly those involving multiple groups.

John M. Zelenski

John M. Zelenski is a Professor of Psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He completed psychology degrees at Northwestern University (B.A.), the University of Michigan (M.A.), and Washington University in St. Louis (Ph.D.). His research has focused on the causes and consequences of introverted-extraverted behavior, the links among nature, happiness, and sustainable behavior, and the meta-science of improving research practices.


Do you have a favorite conference memory or story?

I am sure that there were many memorable talks at the 2004 conference in Austin, but I missed most of them. This is the SPSP conference where I first met my partner Cheryl. I was in the hotel lobby with my new colleague (Michael Wohl) when he spotted an old high school friend across the room. She joined us for an evening of Austin’s great live music, and their high school reunion took a back seat to new flirtations. Cheryl and I spent a lot of time together in Austin, and at the next few SPSP conferences, until I finally convinced her to move to Ottawa with me in 2010. Since then, I don’t anticipate SPSP conferences quite as passionately, but I do devote more attention to the academic content knowing that I will not have to wait another year to see Cheryl again.
 

Can you recall a moment, experience or person that influenced you or led you to decide that personality and social psychology was the path for you?

Almost certainly, I am a personality-social psychologist because of Bill Revelle’s undergraduate personality research course. His contagious enthusiasm caught my attention, and he posed perplexing questions about why caffeine and arousal seem to have different interactions with introversion-extraversion depending on the time of day. He supported my plodding through these questions with a thesis project that helped paved the way to a personality focus in graduate school and beyond. Bill also argued that psychology was really a sub-field personality (because of personality’s breadth), making it an ideal choice for someone who does not like to choose.
 

What are your current research interests?

My interest in introversion-extraversion continues, but it has evolved from time-of-day effects, through emotional and cognitive correlates, to momentary variations and counter-dispositional behavior. This has led to current interests in authenticity and how traits are linked to identity.

With that said, most of my research currently addresses a completely different topic: how people connect with nature and how this links to well-being and sustainable behavior. In a nutshell, I am trying to understand whether and how we can foster a ‘happy path to sustainability’ where people treat the natural environment better and benefit from a closer connection with nature. (This all began when then student Lisa Nisbet pitched the idea to me as the local happiness guy; the research and my interest in it just continued to grow, an unexpected but wonderful career turn.)
 

Do you have a favorite course to teach and why?

Positive psychology is my favorite course to teach.  A big part of the reason is that I feel very confident with the content having recently written—shameless plug—a textbook for the course. Student questions can still surprise me, but I am better prepared than ever. In our current credibility revolution definitive answers are difficult, but I can at least feel good about my strong opinions. More importantly, reflecting on the good life, priorities, and strategies comes at an ideal time for young people tinkering with their worldviews and future plans. This was particularly evident when I taught positive psychology with Semester at Sea, a dramatically mind-opening experience for most participants and an ideal time for positive psychology content.
 

Outside of psychology, how do you like to spend your free time?

The time I spend doing nature-related activities has grown substantially since I began that research. Perhaps it counts a little as psychology then, but I enjoy birding, kayaking, fishing, and gardening. I also spend pleasurable time with podcasts in my ears, cooking, finding interesting wines, and learning archery (just targets, unless I miss).
 

The Social Costs of Seeking Solitude

What is your idea of the perfect day? Does it involve lively gatherings filled with friends? Or would you rather spend the time in solitude, with a stack of books and your favorite television series? The way that you answer this question will affect how strangers judge you, and whether they consider it okay to socially exclude you.

People differ in the extent to which they enjoy spending time by themselves. While some people consider solitude to be painful and boring, there are others who find solitude to be pleasant and interesting. But those who enjoy solitude—those of us who are introverted and prefer a quiet evening at home over a night out with friends at a noisy bar—are often treated as outliers in modern life. Organizations and social groups can seem tailor-made for extraverts, those who thrive off of frequent, lively social interactions. In our research, we found that there can be negative social consequences for solitude seekers.

In research with Dr. Dongning Ren at Tilburg University, we inquired how people judge and act toward those who enjoy solitude. We found that people are more likely to socially exclude individuals who enjoy solitude. In other words, solitude seekers are more likely to be ostracized from groups and teams. This happens because people assume that everyone involved (both the excluders, and the ones being excluded) will be better off if solitude seekers are left to their own devices. But social exclusion can be a dangerous thing, even for people who enjoy time alone. And this means that solitude seekers face extra challenges in work, and in life.

Assumptions About Solitude Seekers

When we meet someone for the first time, we form an impression of that person, and use that impression to judge what activities they might enjoy and how we should treat them. In our studies, we examined how people judge (and treat) those who enjoy solitude. If someone is seen as a solitude seeker (they are the type of person who enjoys spending time alone), people make a lot of assumptions based on that information. They assume that solitude seekers don’t care much about belonging to groups; that they are disagreeable and hard to get along with; and that they are, to put it bluntly, not warm. Importantly, these negative impressions have consequences. People are more likely to exclude and avoid interacting with solitude seekers.

It’s “Easier for Everyone” This Way

Why do people exclude solitude seekers? Two beliefs helped to explain our results.

First, people exclude solitude seekers due to self-interest: People believe that it would be difficult or unpleasant to spend time with solitude seekers. When we exclude solitude seekers, we are making things easier on ourselves by avoiding potentially awkward social situations.

Second, people also care about the well-being of the solitude seeker: People believe that solitude seekers actually don’t want to be included, and that they wouldn’t enjoy interacting with others. When we exclude solitude seekers, to some extent we might think that we are doing them a favor.

The problem is that these beliefs, particularly the idea that solitude seekers want to be excluded, are probably wrong.

Everybody Hurts

People assume that solitude seekers are impervious to the pain of social exclusion, assuming that they don’t want to join our parties, or work with us on new projects at work. But almost everyone dislikes being excluded. Even subtle forms of exclusion, like being snubbed by an anonymous stranger in a laboratory experiment, can provoke a strong emotional response. Although we didn’t test this directly in our studies, our intuition is that even die-hard solitude seekers would have a negative reaction to being excluded. We would expect that solitude (by choice) is very different from forced solitude.

When we learn about the personality traits of others, it’s only natural to try to predict what they will enjoy and how they want to be treated. The problem is that making predictions about people is hard, especially when you are trying to predict the reactions of someone you don’t know well. You should think twice before socially excluding solitude seekers.

They might be happy to be invited to your next party (or to work with you on your next project), and you might be happy to have them join.


For Further Reading

Ren, D., & Evans, A. M. (2021). Leaving the loners alone: Dispositional preference for solitude evokes ostracism. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 47(8), 1294-1308.

Wesselmann, E. D., Cardoso, F. D., Slater, S., & Williams, K. D. (2012). To be looked at as though air: Civil attention matters. Psychological Science, 23(2), 166-168.
 

Anthony Evans conducts research to understand how people make decisions involving trust, cooperation, and civility, with a focus on user behavior in online marketplaces and communities. He is an assistant professor of Social Psychology at Tilburg University

People’s Appearances Reveal Their Taste in Music

In the 2009 romantic comedy 500 Days of Summer, Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer (Zooey Deschanel)’s whirlwind romance begins when they discover that they both listen to the English rock band The Smiths. In a moment, Tom’s crush grows into an obsession: they both like The Smiths, so she must be his soulmate.

Of course, The Smiths have five platinum albums and more than six million listeners every month on Spotify, making Tom and Summer’s shared interest more coincidental than predestined. But many music fans can probably recall a similar moment. After all, what are the odds of finding someone who also appreciates the subtleties of both Chopin and Cher with equal fervor? Such rare and memorable encounters reveal how music can act as an instant social glue that can effortlessly create close bonds. And for this reason, we often seek out others who share their taste in music, using these preferences as a litmus test for compatible values, attitudes, and personalities.

How Do We Discover Others’ Music Tastes?

One way of discovering others’ taste in music is through casual conversations: In fact, music taste comes up more often than any other hobby or interest, including books, clothing, movies, and sports. But what if our taste in music is obvious from the way we look, even without our disclosure? Our research team tested this question by asking almost 4,000 people to look at photos of 289 individuals and guess their preferences for four types of music: energetic/rhythmic genres such as rap and electronica, intense/rebellious genres such as heavy metal and rock, reflective/complex genres such as classical and jazz, and upbeat/conventional genres such as pop and country. Some photos showed the person’s entire body, whereas others showed as little as the person’s eyes. Remarkably, data showed that people could guess whether someone liked energetic/rhythmic, intense/rebellious, and reflective/complex genres from just their appearance. In many cases, they could even tell by just looking at the person’s face, or even from their eyes and mouth.

But how do metalheads appear different from jazz aficionados? Of course, there are music fans who broadcast their love for an artist or a genre by wearing band merchandise, making their taste unambiguous. Others don hairstyles or accessories specific to a genre’s fandom. But these taste markers are rare and largely absent in our research. They would also fail to explain how someone might guess a person’s musical preferences by just looking at their face, eyes, or mouth.

Another way that we might guess what music people listen to is by first deducing their outward personality. People hold beliefs about whether a typical jazz listener or a metal fan should look more domineering or submissive, attractive or homely, energetic or tired, neat or disheveled, stylish or plain. Indeed, our data showed that people could guess the music taste of others because they expected that fans of reflective/complex genres (such as classical or jazz) would look more submissive and older, and that fans of upbeat/conventional genres (such as pop or country) would look submissive and more energetic. More importantly, these assumptions were often correct: fans of reflective/complex genres did look more submissive and older, and fans of upbeat/conventional genres did look submissive and energetic, even after accounting for taste differences by age, gender, and ethnicity.

Looking For Music Compatibility

If we really do use music preferences to gauge compatibility, then shouldn’t we be looking to meet people who enjoy the same music that we do? We also tested this by showing the photos of the people from the previous studies to a new group of people and asking the new group to rate how much they would like to meet the individuals in the photos. As expected, people wanted to meet others who seemed like-minded in their music taste. Fans of energetic/rhythmic genres and upbeat/conventional genres wanted to meet people who looked like they would also enjoy these genres—even though in many cases, the person didn’t actually share their taste.

Together, our findings echo the longstanding idea that music taste is born from tribalism and social need: war cries instilled fear and rallied groups, national anthems inspired patriotic pride, and counter-cultural songs prompted new values and reform. These genres evolved to reflect who we are and who we were, and we in turn reflect the music that moves us.


For Further Reading

Tian, L., Alaei, R., & Rule, N. O. (2021). Appearance reveals music preferences. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672211048291

Rentfrow, P. J., & Gosling, S. D. (2003). The do re mi's of everyday life: The structure and personality correlates of music preferences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 1236–1256. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.84.6.1236

Rentfrow, P. J., & Gosling, S. D. (2006). Message in a ballad: The role of music preferences in interpersonal perception. Psychological Science17, 236–242. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01691.x
 

Laura Tian is a PhD student at the University of Toronto. She enjoys reflective/complex and energetic/rhythmic music.

Exaggerated Memories of Anger in the Wake of Political Events

Societies are becoming increasingly polarized as people stockpile memories of political victories and grievances. What’s worse, these memories are not always accurate. Conflicting accounts, fake news, and conspiracy theories sow confusion about even the most basic facts concerning political events.

People’s memories of how political events made them feel are also easily distorted. Misremembering events and feelings can inflame political debate, driving individuals and groups further apart. This led my colleagues and me to ask whether people with detailed and accurate memories of the facts about political events are also better at remembering how those events made them feel.

To find out, we tested people’s memories of the facts and their feelings concerning two highly-emotional political events—Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the 2018 referendum vote in Ireland in favor of repealing a law that effectively banned abortion except in cases of substantial risk to the life of the mother. Just days after each event, we asked people to rate how angry, scared, and happy they were feeling. Six months later, we asked them (1) to rate how they were currently feeling about the events, (2) to recall their past feelings, and (3) to recall factual information about the events.

For example, 571 U.S. community members and undergraduates were asked to remember facts such as how Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign, and on which congressman’s laptop did James Comey find emails pertinent to the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email use. Over 700 Irish community members and undergraduates were asked to remember facts such as what percentage of the country voted to repeal the country’s restrictive constitutional amendment on abortion. 

We also included a unique group of participants in our study of the 2016 election: people with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM). People with HSAM are often referred to in the media as “the people who never forget.” They remember personal and public events—even those that happened decades ago—with extraordinary accuracy, vividness, and detail.

This rare ability was first studied in detail by Professor James McGaugh and his colleagues at the University of California, Irvine. Fewer than 100 people with HSAM have been identified worldwide based on extensive testing of the accuracy of verifiable autobiographical and public memories. Our study included 33 of these individuals who had been pretested and shown to have HSAM. This gave us an additional, novel way to find out if people with a firm grasp on the facts about political events are also more accurate at remembering how those events made them feel.

What did we find? Despite the different political events, countries, and historical backgrounds, the results of our two studies were strikingly similar. Overall, people were pretty good at remembering how they felt.

Nevertheless, when we looked at the difference between people’s initial and remembered emotions, we found some consistent memory biases. People exaggerated when remembering how angry they had felt about the political events but underestimated their feelings of happiness and fear. These biases effectively stripped nuance from their memories of their past emotional experience. People with more accurate memories of the facts concerning political events were just as susceptible to these biases in remembering their feelings.

Even People With Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory

Not surprisingly, people with HSAM remembered facts about the 2016 election significantly better than other participants. But when it came to remembering how Trump’s victory made them feel, they were just as prone to memory bias as other participants! So, greater accuracy in remembering events did not make people better at remembering emotions, either for the main group of participants or for those with an extraordinary ability to recall autobiographical events.

We also found that accuracy in remembering facts versus feelings stems from different sources. People who followed media reports more closely, and those who talked more with others about political events, had better memory for facts. The repetition of details in media reports and conversations—as long as the details provided are correct—helps people retain accurate factual memories.

But to remember how they felt, people can only rely on their own experience. We saw evidence of this when people remembered how they felt about Trump’s victory or about the repeal of Ireland’s highly restrictive law on abortion. We compared people’s current feelings and views about these events days, versus six months, after they happened. The more consistent people’s feelings and views stayed over time, the more accurately they remembered how they had initially felt. The more their feelings and views changed over time, the less accurately they remembered their feelings. So, people tend to misremember how they truly felt about events in the past if they have competing feelings and beliefs about those events in the present.

Memory Reconstruction

Memory reconstruction—updating our memories of the past to reflect our current feelings and beliefs—serves important functions. It lets us correct past misunderstandings and retain what we learn.

But amidst increasing political polarization, misremembering emotion can be harmful. Norms of tolerance and moderation are eroding in many societies worldwide. People’s tendency to exaggerate their past feelings of anger is worrisome because research shows that anger leads people to downplay risks, overlook commonalities between groups, and seek out confrontation. This makes the current political context even more toxic. In short, misremembering emotion can both stem from and stoke animosity, contributing to a destructive cycle of political polarization.


For Further Reading

Levine, L.J., Murphy, G., Lench, H.C., Greene, C.M., Loftus, E.F., Tinti, C., Schmidt, S., Muzzulini, B., Grady, R.H., Stark, S.M., & Stark, C.E. (2021). Remembering facts versus feelings in the wake of political events. Cognition and Emotion, 35(5), 936-955. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2021.1910496

LePort, A. K., Mattfeld, A. T., Dickinson-Anson, H., Fallon, J. H., Stark, C. E., Kruggel, F., Cahill, L., & McGaugh, J. L. (2012). Behavioral and neuroanatomical investigation of highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM). Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 98(1), 78-92. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nlm.2012.05.002

Levine, L. J. (1997). Reconstructing memory for emotions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 126(2), 165-177. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.126.2.165

 

Linda J. Levine is a Professor of Psychological Science at the University of California, Irvine. She studies how people’s emotions affect their memories, how anticipating future emotion guides people’s decisions, and the ways people regulate emotion.

 

When Do People Reject an Identity That Was Once Important to Them?

Each of us can place ourselves into various categories based on characteristics like our gender, religion, occupation, age, and so forth. But only some of these groups are particularly important to how we see ourselves. When belonging to a group shapes our self-concept, social psychologists call this a social identity. Not everyone embraces particular social identities to the same degree, however. Sometimes people may even reject a social identity that was once important to them. People are especially likely to abandon an identity once considered important when that identity becomes “socially problematic.” For example, when an identity becomes associated with groups that are low in status, groups that have beliefs that are taboo, or groups that engage in harmful behavior, individuals are likely to want to distance themselves from such groups.

One example of a social identity that some people have come to view as undesirable is the sense of attachment some White people have with their racial group. For many White Americans, a strong racial identity may seem natural and normal. Research I conducted with Nathan Kalmoe and Kimberly Gross finds that at many points in time over the past decade, between 30 and 40 percent of White people have reported on national public opinion surveys that their racial identity is very or extremely important to them.

Across many years of public opinion survey data, these levels of racial identity among the White American population did not change very much. At least that was the case until immediately after the 2016 presidential election, when there was a considerable decline in the percentage of White people who reported strongly identifying with their racial group. This decline ranged from 8 to 17 percentage points across the surveys we examined.

The Need For Positive Self-Regard

Often we think of social identities as being long-held and resistant to change. But according to psychological theories about social identities (like social identity theory), group identities can also be incredibly dynamic—fluctuating in response to how they are viewed in the current political or social environment. Because social identities fulfill a need for us to see ourselves positively, people want to be associated with groups that they view favorably and that they believe are viewed favorably by others. When perceptions of public opinion about the group appear to change, individuals’ commitment to their group may decline. So what changed in the political environment to cause some White people to abandon their racial identity?

How Disgust Can Influence the Importance of a Social Identity

Over the course of the 2016 presidential campaign, media attention around White racial identity grew considerably. Much of this coverage associated White identity politics with racial prejudice, White nationalism, and White supremacy. White identity and each of these troubling phenomena were also strongly tied to Donald Trump. We speculated that these associations, and in particular the strong negative emotional reactions some White people had toward Trump, may have led some White people to try to distance themselves from their racial identity.

There are a number of negative emotional reactions that individuals may have had toward Donald Trump, but we focused in particular on disgust. Disgust, which literally means “bad taste,” is a negative emotion like anger, sadness, or anxiety. But it is also a unique emotion in that it is associated with withdrawal and revulsion, which means that it may play a unique role in weakening group attachments. That is, when someone feels disgusted by something that is strongly associated with a group identity, they may be especially inclined to distance themselves from that identity.

Disgust can be evoked by physical experiences (“physical disgust”) or by situations, moral offenses, and injustices (“social disgust”). Trump’s value violations during the 2016 campaign may have elicited disgust among many Americans. Trump was credibly accused of sexual misconduct, he made offensive statements regarding religions, disabled people, prisoners of war, and of people of color. All of these behaviors may have generated feelings of disgust toward Trump. As a result, many White people who felt disgust may have chosen to distance themselves with a racial identity strongly associated with the object of their disgust.

Using national panel survey data, in which the same individuals were surveyed twice—once before the 2016 presidential election and once after—we were able to examine which factors were associated with some White people’s decision to disavow their racial identity. We found that relative to any other emotional reaction a person had toward Trump, the most important factor in whether a person reported lower levels of White identity after the election was the whether the person felt disgusted with Trump.

Our findings provide important evidence that individuals possessing strong social identities may respond to social and political contexts by becoming less attached to a group identity when that identity loses social value. Importantly, our work highlights the especially unique role of disgust, which may be particularly effective at pushing people away from their social identities.


For Further Reading

Jardina, A., Kalmoe, N. P., & Gross, K. (2020). Disavowing white identity: How social distancing can change social identities. Political Psychology, 42(4), 619–636. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12717

Jardina, A. (2019). White identity politics. Cambridge University Press.

 

Ashley Jardina is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University. She studies racial attitudes, group identities, and their political consequences.