ABSTRACT This paper proposes that environmental pioneers can drive norm change by adopting an ideological minority position that accentuates the group's distinct sustainable identity. We studied 107 Dutch-speaking participants in three online group discussions with a vegan confederate, using a longitudinal design with 4 timepoints. Contrary to prior work suggesting that vegans evoke resistance, our findings demonstrate shifts towards veg*nism in participants' attitudes, behaviors, and biospheric values. Two change trajectories emerged depending on (experimentally manipulated) group value orientation: diversity-valuing groups demonstrated a gradual norm shift through elaboration on the vegan perspective, while similarity-valuing groups shifted faster to a prototypical vegan pioneer. Group dynamics revealed that consensualisation predicted norm perceptions across conditions, while conformity pressure mattered only in similarity-valuing groups.

ABSTRACT Investment decision-making is an important and challenging task faced by people in modern society, and emotions play an important role in the process of investment decision-making. Existing research mostly focuses on predicting the stock market trends based on the sentiment of posts in stock forums, but no research has yet taken an overall perspective to study the emotional tendencies in how people express and focus on information in stock forums. Positivity bias and negativity bias are two opposing theories, under different backgrounds and conditions, people may exhibit either a positivity or negativity bias, but in stock forums, it remains unclear which of these emotional tendencies predominates. This study aims to fill this gap by using big data analysis, dictionary-based natural language processing, and engagement indicators to analyze nearly 1.3 million user posts from East Money Stock Bar, the largest stock forum in China. We calculated the count and intensity of sentiment word usage to explore the phenomenon of emotional bias in stock market discussions. The results indicate that whether expressing or focusing on information, a investors’ emotional performance in stock forums tends to be positivity bias. This finding provides an effective supplement to the positivity bias theory, helping us to gain a deeper understanding of people’s psychological characteristics in the investment decision-making process, and has certain theoretical value; at the same time, this study provides support for investors to analyze market information more scientifically, and has practical significance for using emotions to predict the stock market.

ABSTRACT Value-action gaps may exist when values are endorsed due to external pressures, from low perceived behavioral control, or when values conflict with community norms or one another. In the context of developing healthcare artificial intelligence (AI), prosocial values like fairness and transparency are particularly important, yet they may clash with an instrumental value for profit. We recruited 185 healthcare AI developers (66.49% male, 58.92% White, Mage = 27.56) to examine facilitators and barriers of value-action congruence. Value endorsement, internalization, attitudes, norms, and message frequency were positively linked to behavioral intention to act in line with one’s values, while low perceived control and value tension were negatively associated with it. Findings highlight the need for organizational cultures that emphasize prosocial values.

ABSTRACT During crises like a pandemic, citizens must adapt to disruptive policies. We challenge the view that policy support depends mainly on personal costs and benefits (e.g., health threats) and propose that collective factors, such as ingroup norms and collective efficacy, are equally important. Across three measurement points during Germany’s first COVID-19 wave (March–May 2020, N = 469), we found that both personal and collective factors independently predicted protection behavior and policy acceptance. Additional longitudinal analyses revealed, that for individuals strongly identified with their ingroup, early policy acceptance enhanced collective efficacy and norm perceptions, which subsequently increased later acceptance. These findings highlight collective agency as crucial for coping with crises and provide insights for addressing other global challenges, such as climate change.

ABSTRACT Research shows that preemptively confessing a transgression (stealing thunder) enhances trustworthiness, credibility, or expertise compared to third-party revelations. Recent findings suggest that detailed disclosure about the transgression is key to this effect, yet people often hesitate to share comprehensive details before all facts are known. We propose that sharing information about the confession itself can improve reputation without divulging more about the transgression. Across one main and five supplementary experiments, an integrative data analysis revealed that messages elaborating on why the confession was made (disclosure information) or how the transgressor realized the wrongdoing (identification information) enhanced trustworthiness and credibility, but not expertise, for targets like doctors and politicians. These benefits occurred even without reparative actions.

ABSTRACT Two lab-based experiments (N = 81 and N = 74) examined effects of co-present mobile phone use (frequently conceptualized as ‘phubbing’) on how individuals experience social interactions. The first experiment was modeled after the original Expectancy Violation Theory experiment by Burgoon and Le Poire (1993). Results showed that phubbing predicted perceptions of expectancy violation. These perceptions mediated the association between phubbing and several indicators of both impression formation as well as interpersonal attraction. The second experiment showed that more intensive phubbing led to poorer ratings of the confederate’s attentiveness, conversation quality, and perceived relationship quality than less intensive phubbing. Together, the two experiments support that phubbing, especially when it is more intensive, can harm relational outcomes.

ABSTRACT The current food environment strongly communicates the normality of consuming unhealthy and unsustainable food products. However, it is unclear whether people truly support this unhealthy and unsustainable social norm, or that they follow the norm (reluctantly) because they believe that other people agree with it, a phenomenon that is generally known as pluralistic ignorance. While previous research has documented the existence of pluralistic ignorance in a variety of settings, it is unknown to what extent it directly influences behavior and which mechanism may account for this influence. The present study examines whether the perception that others seem to agree with unhealthy and unsustainable eating norms acts as a license to not change one’s eating behavior and leads to complacency. We assessed pluralistic ignorance by comparing self- and other-scores on the importance, frequency, normalcy, and intentions dimensions of consuming healthy and sustainable food in a large sample of Dutch participants (N = 415). To investigate the effect of pluralistic ignorance on self-licensing and complacency, we calculated healthy and sustainable ‘misperception scores’ per dimension. Healthy eating misperceptions only marginally predicted self-licensing, but healthy misperceived intentions did predict an increase in complacency. Sustainable eating misperceptions seem more influential because misperceptions on importance and frequency predicted an increase in self-licensing, and sustainable misperceived normalcy predicted a decrease in complacency and intentions predicted an increase in complacency. These findings suggest that pluralistic ignorance may be more influential in sustainable eating since people could be uncertain what appropriate sustainable food choices are. Prospects for future research and suggestions to address pluralistic ignorance to potentially increase healthy and sustainable food choices are discussed.

ABSTRACTThe effect of information sentiment on popularity is meaningful to understand the information content on social media. The present research examined whether emotion values of information could predict the potential of popularity in two psychoinformatic experiments. A prime task was used with popular/unpopular information as prime and high/low sentiment stimuli as targets. In Experiment 1, we observed that unpopular information survived better than popular information. In Experiment 2, the electrophysiological priming effect was observed for unpopular and popular information. According to the findings, sentiment of information on social media plays a key role in information popularity.

ABSTRACTMatland and Murray (2019) reanalyze three of their previous field experiments and fail to reproduce the finding reported in Panagopoulos and van der Linden (2016) that political identity moderates the watchful eye effect on voter mobilization in elections. We highlight several concerns with their empirical approach, including lack of power and between-study differences, that lead us to conclude that the authors offer little evidence against partisan heterogeneity. By contrast, closer inspection and additional analyses of the data reported in Panagopoulos and van der Linden (2016) only reinforce our original conclusion that partisanship moderates voter responsiveness to watchful eyes. Specifically, Republicans appear to be more susceptible to watchful eyes compared to Democrats in the context of voting in elections.

ABSTRACTUsing the lens of Deindividuation Theory, Leon Mann explored the formation of baiting crowds in a small sample of public suicides/suicide attempts. Instead of attempting to prevent the suicide, baiting crowds encourage the victim to jump. Our aim was to replicate Mann's study with a larger more diverse sample of suicide attempts and a broadened theoretical lens (Frustration-Aggression). Using ProQuest, we identified 152 public suicide attempts reported in English language newspapers and failed to replicate Mann’s findings. Rather, baiting crowd formation was associated with variables that increase crowd frustration (e.g., duration of the event, blocked traffic, cordoned off pedestrian walkways). Finally, we failed to find an association between the presence of a baiting crowd and the suicidal individual ultimately jumping.