Threat

The complexity of societal risks such as pandemics, artificial intelligence, and climate change may lead laypeople to rely on experts and authorities when evaluating these threats. While Siegrist and Cvetkovich showed that competence-based trust in authorities correlates with perceived societal risks and benefits only when people feel unknowledgeable, recent research has yielded mixed support for this foundational work. To address this discrepancy, we conducted a direct-replication study (preregistered; 1,070 participants, 33 risks, 35,310 observations). The results contradict the original findings. However, additional non-preregistered analyses indicate an alternative perspective aligning with compensatory control theory and the description-experience framework: experiences with insufficient personal control over a threat may amplify individuals’ dependency on powerful others for risk mitigation. These findings highlight the need to reevaluate how trust shapes risk perceptions. Recent societal and technological shifts might have heightened the desire for control compared to subjective knowledge in why people resort to trust.

Typical climate change imagery falls short in bringing climate change close to the reality of people's lives, oftentimes failing to have an impact on pro-environmental attitudes and behavior. While this highlights the need for innovative approaches to climate change communication, the rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies holds great promise for addressing societal challenges such as climate change. In the present research, we therefore explore how AI image generation can be used as a novel means for climate change communication. Specifically, we focus on humans’ ability to co-create with generative AI in order to produce highly tailored visualizations of climate-change-related consequences in familiar places. Thirteen participants were instructed to choose either a place of personal significance or a neutral place (high vs. low place attachment) and use AI image generation to visualize these places as flooded scenarios. We captured their experiences through in-depth semi-structured interviews while recording their image production process. We analyzed the data using qualitative and quantitative measures. Creating the visualizations elicited multifaceted effects on participants, including emotional arousal, behavioral intentions, and deep contemplation. Our reflexive thematic analysis identified several important psychological concepts that played a central role in shaping these responses: Psychological distance, place attachment, and self-efficacy. The results underscore the extraordinary potential of AI technologies to enhance relevance to individuals by personalizing climate change communication. However, the desired effects of AI image generation have certain limitations, emphasizing the importance of responsible use. Therefore, we present nine recommendations to provide practical guidance and direction for further research in this emerging field.

People are prone to forming false memories for fictitious events described in fake news stories. In this preregistered study, we hypothesized that the formation of false memories may be promoted when the fake news includes stereotypes that reflect positively on one’s own nationality or negatively on another nationality. We exposed German and Irish participants (N = 1,184) to fabricated news stories that were consistent with positive or negative stereotypes about Germany and Ireland. The predicted three-way interaction was not observed. Exploratory follow-up analyses revealed the expected pattern of results for German participants but not for Irish participants, who were more likely to remember positive stories and stories about Ireland. Individual differences in patriotism did not significantly affect false memory rates; however, higher levels of cognitive ability and analytical reasoning decreased false memories and increased participants’ ability to distinguish between true and false news stories. These results demonstrate that stereotypical information pertaining to national identity can influence the formation of false memories for fake news, but variations in cultural context may affect how misinformation is received and processed. We conclude by urging researchers to consider the sociopolitical and media landscape when predicting the consequences of fake news exposure.

Stressors and mortality salience share considerable conceptual overlap. Thus, we examined the impact of a standard mortality salience and a standard stress manipulation on the activation of the sympathetic nervous system and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis via endocrine measures of stress; a neutral control condition completed the design. The results revealed that stress elicits increased salivary α-amylase and salivary cortisol reactions; however, no endocrine reactions were found in the mortality salience and the control conditions. To the contrary, we did not find any differences regarding positive and negative affect between any conditions. Implications for social and health psychology are being discussed.

The neuro-physiological response to stress has far-reaching implications for learning and memory processes. Here, we examined whether and how the stress-induced release of cortisol, following the socially-evaluated cold pressor test, influenced the acquisition of preferences in an evaluative conditioning (EC) procedure. We found that when the stressor preceded the evaluation phase, cortisol responders showed decreased evaluative conditioning effects. By contrast, impairing effects of a stressor-induced cortisol release before encoding were not found. Moreover, explicit memory was not found to be affected by the stressor or its timing. Implications of the timing-dependent effects of stress-induced cortisol release on EC and the relation between stress and associative memory are discussed.

Meat consumption is conflicted, because meat provides pleasure to many people, but it also causes animals to suffer. This so-called meat paradox elicits discomfort in meat-eaters and they try to reduce their discomfort, for example, by means of moral disengagement. In the present investigation, we tried to scrutinize this process and examine the boundary conditions that increase moral disengagement. We assumed that, due to a domain general action-oriented state, people tend to resolve the meat paradox via moral disengagement, even if inconsistency is elicited in a different, not food-related domain. Two experiments were conducted, in which we assessed people's moral disengagement efforts via ambivalence measures after we induced inconsistency using different threats in meat-unrelated domains. Supporting our assumptions, people showed reduced ambivalence towards food in affective priming (Experiment 1) and Mouse-Tracker tasks (Experiment 2) after experiencing inconsistency. In fact, plant-based dishes became more positive and meat dishes more negative after inconsistency was induced, indicating that people disguise their endorsement of meat. This provides first convergent evidence that an inconsistency induced action-oriented state may influence cognitions regarding the meat paradox.

In recent years, virtual reality (VR) technology has found its way into nearly all fields of psychology. Previous studies indicated that virtual reality adaptations of the TSST are less potent in stimulating HPA-axis responses, with lower salivary cortisol responses recorded as compared to the in-vivo TSST. (TSST-IV). In the present experiment we tested the stress-induction potential of a refined version of the TSST-VR using a fully orthogonal experimental design in which ninety-three healthy males were either assigned to the TSST condition or a corresponding control condition in a real or virtual environment. We found a significant increase of endocrine, autonomic and self-reported stress markers in both stress conditions. Notably, we found a robust rise in salivary cortisol to the TSST-VR comparable to that observed in the TSST-IV. Despite subtle differences in response between virtual and in vivo settings, we conclude that VR adaptations of in-vivo stressors have the potential to induce real physiological and subjective reactions.

In diesem Kapitel werden die (häufig unzulänglichen) Alltagsvorstellungen von Glück und Lebenszufriedenheit im Hinblick auf die potentiellen Glücksquellen Liebe und Geld auf- gegriffen und mit wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen kontrastiert. Über ein existenzsicherndes Maß hinaus scheint dabei Geld zunächst keinen Beitrag zur Lebenszufriedenheit zu leisten, zumindest dann nicht, wenn materieller Wohlstand nur für den eigenen Konsum verwendet wird. Geld kann aber durchaus zum individuellen Glück beitragen, wenn es prosozialen Zwecken dient. Nicht zuletzt verweisen diese Ergebnisse auf die große Bedeutung zwischenmenschlicher Beziehungen für das individuelle Glück. Neu este Ergebnisse zeigen zudem, dass materialistische Bestrebungen besonders dort gedeihen, wo soziale Bindungen weniger stark ausgeprägt sind.

Why is it that people do not change their behavior in the face of global threats? We hypothesized that when people who have been encouraged to engage in pro-environmental behavior are threatened, they fall back into their (bad) habits instead of exhibiting behavioral change; existential threat may thereby counteract pro-environmental norms. We tested this hypothesis in two field studies in which participants were encouraged to reduce paper use. Although the requests initially resulted in decreased paper use, this pro-environmental behavior ceased when an existential threat was induced. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for social psychology theorizing and behavioral change.

The social nature of multiplayer games provides compelling play experiences that are dynamic, unpredictable, and satisfying; however, playing digital games with others can result in feeling socially excluded. There are several known harmful effects of ostracism, including on cognition and the interpretation of social information. To investigate the effects of social exclusion in the context of a multiplayer game, we developed and validated a social exclusion paradigm that we embedded in an online game. Called Operator Challenge, our paradigm influenced feelings of social exclusion and access to hostile cognitions (measured through a word-completion task). In addition, the degree of experienced belonging predicted player enjoyment, effort, and the number of hostile words completed; however, the experience measures did not mediate the relationship between belonging and access to hostile cognitions. Our work facilitates understanding the causes and effects of exclusion, which is important for the study of player experience in multiplayer games.