Identity fusion is a relatively unexplored form of alignment with groups that entails a visceral feeling of oneness with the group. This feeling is associated with unusually porous, highly permeable borders between the personal and social self. These porous borders encourage people to channel their personal agency into group behavior, raising the…

A popular distinction in cognitive and social psychology has been between "intuitive" and "deliberate" judgments. This juxtaposition has aligned in dual-process theories of reasoning associative, unconscious, effortless, heuristic, and suboptimal processes (assumed to foster intuitive judgments) versus rule-based, conscious, effortful, analytic,…

A robust finding in social psychology is that people judge negative events as less likely to happen to themselves than to the average person, a behavior interpreted as showing that people are "unrealistically optimistic" in their judgments of risk concerning future life events. However, we demonstrate how unbiased responses can result in data…

Cultural evolutionary theory is an interdisciplinary field in which human culture is viewed as a Darwinian process of variation, competition, and inheritance, and the tools, methods, and theories developed by evolutionary biologists to study genetic evolution are adapted to study cultural change. It is argued here that an integration of the…

This article introduces a terror management health model (TMHM). The model integrates disparate health and social psychology literatures to elucidate how the conscious and nonconscious awareness of death can influence the motivational orientation that is most operative in the context of health decisions. Three formal propositions are presented.…

An experimental paradigm is proposed for investigating interpersonal conflicts under conditions of intergroup competition. Two alternative models are proposed and their testable implications are derived and discussed. The effects of predecisional communication are examined and several extensions of the basic paradigm are outlined. (Author/LMO)

It is argued that the reduction of cognitive dissonance can be viewed as a constraint satisfaction problem, and a computational model of the process of consonance seeking is proposed. Simulations from this model matched psychological findings from the insufficient justification and free-choice paradigms of cognitive dissonance theory. (SLD)

A framework for understanding involuntary experiences which draws from social, psychological and cognitive perspectives on hypnotic responding is presented. Five reasons are suggested to reject the hypothesis that hypnotic responding is automatic and involuntary. (SLD)

A new theory of social impact is proposed and related to prior work. Social influences result from forces operating in a social force field. Influence by either a majority or a minority is a multiplicative function of the strength, immediacy, and number of its members. Conformity and innovation are compared. (Author/RD)

Biases and models usually offered by cognitive and social psychology and by philosophy to explain causal induction are evaluated with respect to focal sets (contextually determined sets of events over which covariation is computed). A probabilistic contrast model is proposed as underlying covariation computation in natural causal induction. (SLD)

A reflection-construction model of relations between social perception and social reality is presented that explicitly specifies several ways in which social perception may relate to social reality. Evidence supporting this model also supports a weaker version of the social-constructivist view. (SLD)