Steven Neuberg | Arizona State University (original) (raw)

Papers by Steven Neuberg

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015

Significance Ecological features shape people’s goals, strategies, and behaviors. Our research su... more Significance Ecological features shape people’s goals, strategies, and behaviors. Our research suggests that social perceivers possess a lay understanding of ecology’s influence on behavior, resulting in ecology-driven stereotypes. Moreover, because race is confounded with ecology in the United States, Americans’ stereotypes about racial groups may actually reflect their stereotypes about these groups’ presumed home ecologies. In a series of studies, we demonstrate that ( i ) individuals possess ecology-driven stereotypes; ( ii ) these stereotypes are not derivative of race stereotypes; and ( iii ) the application of race stereotypes to targets is greatly diminished when more immediate cues to home ecology are present. These findings have important implications for the conceptualization of race stereotypes, as well as for reducing the application of pernicious stereotypes to individuals.

The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, 2015

From an evolutionary perspective, prejudices, stereotypes, and discriminatory behaviors can be vi... more From an evolutionary perspective, prejudices, stereotypes, and discriminatory behaviors can be viewed as functionally organized strategies designed to manage the threats and opportunities posed by the human forms of sociality. This chapter explores, first, the evolved psychological mechanisms by which individuals (1) identify those who afford fitness threats and opportunities and (2) respond to them in threat-mitigating and opportunity-enhancing ways; these affordance management systems contribute significantly to stigma, prejudices, and discrimination. Second, people create within-group coalitions to counter threats posed by other group members, and the chapter reviews the implications of alliance-based processes for within-coalitional prejudices, group-on-group conflict, and prejudices against foreigners. Last, the chapter discusses the implications of evolutionary approaches for reducing prejudices and intergroup conflict. By identifying new prejudice phenomena and by anticipating undiscovered nuances in known phenomena, the evolutionary approach poses significant challenges to traditional social psychological and sociological approaches. Keywords: prejudice; evolution; threat; coalitional psychology; intergroup conflict

The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, 2015

From an evolutionary perspective, prejudices, stereotypes, and discriminatory behaviors can be vi... more From an evolutionary perspective, prejudices, stereotypes, and discriminatory behaviors can be viewed as functionally organized strategies designed to manage the threats and opportunities posed by the human forms of sociality. This chapter explores, first, the evolved psychological mechanisms by which individuals (1) identify those who afford fitness threats and opportunities and (2) respond to them in threat-mitigating and opportunity-enhancing ways; these affordance management systems contribute significantly to stigma, prejudices, and discrimination. Second, people create within-group coalitions to counter threats posed by other group members, and the chapter reviews the implications of alliance-based processes for within-coalitional prejudices, group-on-group conflict, and prejudices against foreigners. Last, the chapter discusses the implications of evolutionary approaches for reducing prejudices and intergroup conflict. By identifying new prejudice phenomena and by anticipating undiscovered nuances in known phenomena, the evolutionary approach poses significant challenges to traditional social psychological and sociological approaches. Keywords: prejudice; evolution; threat; coalitional psychology; intergroup conflict

The affordance-management approach conceptualizes stereotyping, stereotype content, prejudices, a... more The affordance-management approach conceptualizes stereotyping, stereotype content, prejudices, and discriminatory inclinations as interlinked cognitive, affective, and behavioral tools used to manage the social opportunities and threats afforded by other people. Presenting research from our labs, we show how the affordance management approach enhances understanding of why people are especially likely to categorize others using certain features (rather than alternative features), what the specific contents of our stereotypes are likely to be (and why this content is more nuanced than typically revealed by existing research), and how and why these stereotypes elicit similarly nuanced and functionally-linked prejudices and discrimination. We focus this discussion of stereotypes and stereotyping on the features of sex, age, home ecology, race, sexual orientation, and body size/shape, and we present novel concepts such as “directed” and “within-group” stereotypes. Then, elaborating on t...

Journal of personality and social psychology, Jan 9, 2017

The world population has doubled over the last half century. Yet, research on the psychological e... more The world population has doubled over the last half century. Yet, research on the psychological effects of human population density, once a popular topic, has decreased over the past few decades. Applying a fresh perspective to an old topic, we draw upon life history theory to examine the effects of population density. Across nations and across the U.S. states (Studies 1 and 2), we find that dense populations exhibit behaviors corresponding to a slower life history strategy, including greater future-orientation, greater investment in education, more long-term mating orientation, later marriage age, lower fertility, and greater parental investment. In Studies 3 and 4, experimentally manipulating perceptions of high density led individuals to become more future-oriented. Finally, in Studies 5 and 6, experimentally manipulating perceptions of high density seemed to lead to life-stage-specific slower strategies, with college students preferring to invest in fewer rather than more relati...

Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 1990

Journal of personality and social psychology, Jan 14, 2016

For women, forming close, cooperative relationships with other women at once poses important oppo... more For women, forming close, cooperative relationships with other women at once poses important opportunities and possible threats-including to mate retention. To maximize the benefits and minimize the costs of same-sex social relationships, we propose that women's mate guarding is functionally flexible and that women are sensitive to both interpersonal and contextual cues indicating whether other women might be likely and effective mate poachers. Here, we assess one such cue: other women's fertility. Because ovulating (i.e., high-fertility) women are both more attractive to men and also more attracted to (desirable) men, ovulating women may be perceived to pose heightened threats to other women's romantic relationships. Across 4 experiments, partnered women were exposed to photographs of other women taken during either their ovulatory or nonovulatory menstrual-cycle phases, and consistently reported intentions to socially avoid ovulating (but not nonovulating) women-but on...

Psychological Inquiry, 1992

In his elegant and absorbing essay, Fox argues from philosophical and evolutionary underpinnings ... more In his elegant and absorbing essay, Fox argues from philosophical and evolutionary underpinnings that stereotyping is essentially a necessary and adaptive judgment process. Although others have proposed this before (e.g., Allport, 1954; Hamilton, 1979; Lippman, 1922; Tajfel, 1969)-indeed, the social-cognitive "revolution" in social psychology is partially based on such an assumption-Fox travels somewhat beyond this notion to posit that "what we cannot do is change the established, physiological, stereotypical basis of thinking itself. We are locked in stereotypical-prototypical thinking and cannot live outside it." Despite disagreeing with his conclusion, I find portions of his argument quite compelling. Indeed, I applaud the fact that Fox considers our evolutionary history as a relevant determinant of present-day judgment processes. To ignore such a force is to leave our understanding of present human psychology incomplete. Stereotyping is indeed an adaptive process, borne of the need to make rapid survival-relevant judgments. It strikes me, however, that Fox's evolutionary analysis is incomplete, thus (a) producing an underappreciation of the adaptiveness and present-day role of relatively nonstereotypic, or individuating, judgment processes, and (b) spawning his belief that stereotyping as the dominant judgment process shall always be with us.

Personal Relationships, 2004

ABSTRACT

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1993

Self-fulfilling prophecy processes enable people to confirm their negative expectancies for other... more Self-fulfilling prophecy processes enable people to confirm their negative expectancies for others. The perceiver goal of ingratiation was hypothesized to alter this behavioral dynamic and thus lead perceivers to disconfirm their negative expectancies. In an interview setting, we manipulated interviewer Ss' expectancies and interaction goals. As anticipated, "no goal" interviewers were relatively cold and challenging toward their negative-expectancy applicants; as a result, these applicants performed somewhat less favorably, consistent with interviewer expectancies. In contrast, "liking goal" interviewers were relatively warm and unthreatening toward their negative-expectancy applicants; as a result, these applicants performed favorably, disconfirming interviewer expectancies. These data support a framework in which perceiver self-presentation goals are conceptualized to moderate the expectancy-confirmation process.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1989

Investigated the idea that impression formation goals may regulate the impact that perceiver expe... more Investigated the idea that impression formation goals may regulate the impact that perceiver expectancies have on social interactions. In simulated interviews, interviewers Ss were given a negative expectancy about one applicant S and no expectancy about another. Half the interviewers were encouraged to form accurate impressions; the others were not. As predicted, no-goal interviewers exhibited a postinteraction impression bias against the negative-expectancy applicants, whereas the accuracy-goal interviewers did not. Moreover, the ability of the accuracy goal to reduce this bias was apparently mediated by more extensive and less biased interviewer information-gathering, which in turn elicited an improvement in negative-expectancy applicants' performances. These findings stress the theoretical and practical importance of considering the motivational context within which expectancy-tinged social interactions occur.

Social Cognition, 1988

... Possible mediating mechanisms, and the generalizability of such subliminal priming effects, a... more ... Possible mediating mechanisms, and the generalizability of such subliminal priming effects, are discussed. There is great popular appeal to the notion that people's behavior can be influenced by phenomena or events of which they are unaware. ...

Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 1998

... Self-Fulfilling Prophecies and Inflated Applicant Self-Perceptions T. Nicole Judice and Steve... more ... Self-Fulfilling Prophecies and Inflated Applicant Self-Perceptions T. Nicole Judice and Steven L. Neuberg Department of Psychology Arizona State University ... Applicants, accepting A bare-bones model of the expectation-confirmation process. JUDICE AND NEUBERG Page 3. ...

Journal of Personality and Social …, 1993

... 114 STEVEN L. NEUBERG AND JASON T. NEWSOM ... also a wealth of findings demonstrate structure... more ... 114 STEVEN L. NEUBERG AND JASON T. NEWSOM ... also a wealth of findings demonstrate structure-consistency biases in attention, interpretation, memory, inference, and impression formation and change (for reviews, see Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Higgins & Bargh, 1987; Markus ...

The psychology of prejudice, 1994

... My approach takes as its foundation previous theoretical and empirical investigations of expe... more ... My approach takes as its foundation previous theoretical and empirical investigations of expectancy-confirmation processes, investigations that make salient the cognitive and behavioral biases that can result from possess-ing inaccurate stereotypes and unjustified prejudices. ...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015

Significance Ecological features shape people’s goals, strategies, and behaviors. Our research su... more Significance Ecological features shape people’s goals, strategies, and behaviors. Our research suggests that social perceivers possess a lay understanding of ecology’s influence on behavior, resulting in ecology-driven stereotypes. Moreover, because race is confounded with ecology in the United States, Americans’ stereotypes about racial groups may actually reflect their stereotypes about these groups’ presumed home ecologies. In a series of studies, we demonstrate that ( i ) individuals possess ecology-driven stereotypes; ( ii ) these stereotypes are not derivative of race stereotypes; and ( iii ) the application of race stereotypes to targets is greatly diminished when more immediate cues to home ecology are present. These findings have important implications for the conceptualization of race stereotypes, as well as for reducing the application of pernicious stereotypes to individuals.

The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, 2015

From an evolutionary perspective, prejudices, stereotypes, and discriminatory behaviors can be vi... more From an evolutionary perspective, prejudices, stereotypes, and discriminatory behaviors can be viewed as functionally organized strategies designed to manage the threats and opportunities posed by the human forms of sociality. This chapter explores, first, the evolved psychological mechanisms by which individuals (1) identify those who afford fitness threats and opportunities and (2) respond to them in threat-mitigating and opportunity-enhancing ways; these affordance management systems contribute significantly to stigma, prejudices, and discrimination. Second, people create within-group coalitions to counter threats posed by other group members, and the chapter reviews the implications of alliance-based processes for within-coalitional prejudices, group-on-group conflict, and prejudices against foreigners. Last, the chapter discusses the implications of evolutionary approaches for reducing prejudices and intergroup conflict. By identifying new prejudice phenomena and by anticipating undiscovered nuances in known phenomena, the evolutionary approach poses significant challenges to traditional social psychological and sociological approaches. Keywords: prejudice; evolution; threat; coalitional psychology; intergroup conflict

The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, 2015

From an evolutionary perspective, prejudices, stereotypes, and discriminatory behaviors can be vi... more From an evolutionary perspective, prejudices, stereotypes, and discriminatory behaviors can be viewed as functionally organized strategies designed to manage the threats and opportunities posed by the human forms of sociality. This chapter explores, first, the evolved psychological mechanisms by which individuals (1) identify those who afford fitness threats and opportunities and (2) respond to them in threat-mitigating and opportunity-enhancing ways; these affordance management systems contribute significantly to stigma, prejudices, and discrimination. Second, people create within-group coalitions to counter threats posed by other group members, and the chapter reviews the implications of alliance-based processes for within-coalitional prejudices, group-on-group conflict, and prejudices against foreigners. Last, the chapter discusses the implications of evolutionary approaches for reducing prejudices and intergroup conflict. By identifying new prejudice phenomena and by anticipating undiscovered nuances in known phenomena, the evolutionary approach poses significant challenges to traditional social psychological and sociological approaches. Keywords: prejudice; evolution; threat; coalitional psychology; intergroup conflict

The affordance-management approach conceptualizes stereotyping, stereotype content, prejudices, a... more The affordance-management approach conceptualizes stereotyping, stereotype content, prejudices, and discriminatory inclinations as interlinked cognitive, affective, and behavioral tools used to manage the social opportunities and threats afforded by other people. Presenting research from our labs, we show how the affordance management approach enhances understanding of why people are especially likely to categorize others using certain features (rather than alternative features), what the specific contents of our stereotypes are likely to be (and why this content is more nuanced than typically revealed by existing research), and how and why these stereotypes elicit similarly nuanced and functionally-linked prejudices and discrimination. We focus this discussion of stereotypes and stereotyping on the features of sex, age, home ecology, race, sexual orientation, and body size/shape, and we present novel concepts such as “directed” and “within-group” stereotypes. Then, elaborating on t...

Journal of personality and social psychology, Jan 9, 2017

The world population has doubled over the last half century. Yet, research on the psychological e... more The world population has doubled over the last half century. Yet, research on the psychological effects of human population density, once a popular topic, has decreased over the past few decades. Applying a fresh perspective to an old topic, we draw upon life history theory to examine the effects of population density. Across nations and across the U.S. states (Studies 1 and 2), we find that dense populations exhibit behaviors corresponding to a slower life history strategy, including greater future-orientation, greater investment in education, more long-term mating orientation, later marriage age, lower fertility, and greater parental investment. In Studies 3 and 4, experimentally manipulating perceptions of high density led individuals to become more future-oriented. Finally, in Studies 5 and 6, experimentally manipulating perceptions of high density seemed to lead to life-stage-specific slower strategies, with college students preferring to invest in fewer rather than more relati...

Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 1990

Journal of personality and social psychology, Jan 14, 2016

For women, forming close, cooperative relationships with other women at once poses important oppo... more For women, forming close, cooperative relationships with other women at once poses important opportunities and possible threats-including to mate retention. To maximize the benefits and minimize the costs of same-sex social relationships, we propose that women's mate guarding is functionally flexible and that women are sensitive to both interpersonal and contextual cues indicating whether other women might be likely and effective mate poachers. Here, we assess one such cue: other women's fertility. Because ovulating (i.e., high-fertility) women are both more attractive to men and also more attracted to (desirable) men, ovulating women may be perceived to pose heightened threats to other women's romantic relationships. Across 4 experiments, partnered women were exposed to photographs of other women taken during either their ovulatory or nonovulatory menstrual-cycle phases, and consistently reported intentions to socially avoid ovulating (but not nonovulating) women-but on...

Psychological Inquiry, 1992

In his elegant and absorbing essay, Fox argues from philosophical and evolutionary underpinnings ... more In his elegant and absorbing essay, Fox argues from philosophical and evolutionary underpinnings that stereotyping is essentially a necessary and adaptive judgment process. Although others have proposed this before (e.g., Allport, 1954; Hamilton, 1979; Lippman, 1922; Tajfel, 1969)-indeed, the social-cognitive "revolution" in social psychology is partially based on such an assumption-Fox travels somewhat beyond this notion to posit that "what we cannot do is change the established, physiological, stereotypical basis of thinking itself. We are locked in stereotypical-prototypical thinking and cannot live outside it." Despite disagreeing with his conclusion, I find portions of his argument quite compelling. Indeed, I applaud the fact that Fox considers our evolutionary history as a relevant determinant of present-day judgment processes. To ignore such a force is to leave our understanding of present human psychology incomplete. Stereotyping is indeed an adaptive process, borne of the need to make rapid survival-relevant judgments. It strikes me, however, that Fox's evolutionary analysis is incomplete, thus (a) producing an underappreciation of the adaptiveness and present-day role of relatively nonstereotypic, or individuating, judgment processes, and (b) spawning his belief that stereotyping as the dominant judgment process shall always be with us.

Personal Relationships, 2004

ABSTRACT

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1993

Self-fulfilling prophecy processes enable people to confirm their negative expectancies for other... more Self-fulfilling prophecy processes enable people to confirm their negative expectancies for others. The perceiver goal of ingratiation was hypothesized to alter this behavioral dynamic and thus lead perceivers to disconfirm their negative expectancies. In an interview setting, we manipulated interviewer Ss' expectancies and interaction goals. As anticipated, "no goal" interviewers were relatively cold and challenging toward their negative-expectancy applicants; as a result, these applicants performed somewhat less favorably, consistent with interviewer expectancies. In contrast, "liking goal" interviewers were relatively warm and unthreatening toward their negative-expectancy applicants; as a result, these applicants performed favorably, disconfirming interviewer expectancies. These data support a framework in which perceiver self-presentation goals are conceptualized to moderate the expectancy-confirmation process.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1989

Investigated the idea that impression formation goals may regulate the impact that perceiver expe... more Investigated the idea that impression formation goals may regulate the impact that perceiver expectancies have on social interactions. In simulated interviews, interviewers Ss were given a negative expectancy about one applicant S and no expectancy about another. Half the interviewers were encouraged to form accurate impressions; the others were not. As predicted, no-goal interviewers exhibited a postinteraction impression bias against the negative-expectancy applicants, whereas the accuracy-goal interviewers did not. Moreover, the ability of the accuracy goal to reduce this bias was apparently mediated by more extensive and less biased interviewer information-gathering, which in turn elicited an improvement in negative-expectancy applicants' performances. These findings stress the theoretical and practical importance of considering the motivational context within which expectancy-tinged social interactions occur.

Social Cognition, 1988

... Possible mediating mechanisms, and the generalizability of such subliminal priming effects, a... more ... Possible mediating mechanisms, and the generalizability of such subliminal priming effects, are discussed. There is great popular appeal to the notion that people's behavior can be influenced by phenomena or events of which they are unaware. ...

Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 1998

... Self-Fulfilling Prophecies and Inflated Applicant Self-Perceptions T. Nicole Judice and Steve... more ... Self-Fulfilling Prophecies and Inflated Applicant Self-Perceptions T. Nicole Judice and Steven L. Neuberg Department of Psychology Arizona State University ... Applicants, accepting A bare-bones model of the expectation-confirmation process. JUDICE AND NEUBERG Page 3. ...

Journal of Personality and Social …, 1993

... 114 STEVEN L. NEUBERG AND JASON T. NEWSOM ... also a wealth of findings demonstrate structure... more ... 114 STEVEN L. NEUBERG AND JASON T. NEWSOM ... also a wealth of findings demonstrate structure-consistency biases in attention, interpretation, memory, inference, and impression formation and change (for reviews, see Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Higgins & Bargh, 1987; Markus ...

The psychology of prejudice, 1994

... My approach takes as its foundation previous theoretical and empirical investigations of expe... more ... My approach takes as its foundation previous theoretical and empirical investigations of expectancy-confirmation processes, investigations that make salient the cognitive and behavioral biases that can result from possess-ing inaccurate stereotypes and unjustified prejudices. ...