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This research examined how people explain major outcomes of political consequence (e.g., economic growth, rising inequality). We argue that people attribute positive outcomes more and negative outcomes less to their own political party than to an opposing party. We conducted two studies, one before the 2016 U.S. presidential election ( N = 244) and another before the 2020 election ( N = 249 registered voters), that examined attributions across a wide array of outcomes. As predicted, a robust partisan attribution bias emerged in both studies. Although the bias was largely equivalent among Democrats and Republicans, it was magnified among those with more extreme political ideology. Further, the bias predicted unique variance in voting intentions and significantly mediated the link between political ideology and voting. In sum, these data suggest that partisan allegiances systemically bias attributions in a group-favoring direction. We discuss implications of these findings for emerging research on political social cognition.

This article analyses how a recent idiom of innovation governance, 'responsible innovation', is enacted in practice, how this shapes innovation processes, and what aspects of innovation are left untouched. Within this idiom, funders typically focus on one point in an innovation system: researchers in projects. However, the more transformational aspirations of responsible innovation are circumscribed by this context. Adopting a mode of critique that assembles, this article considers some alternative approaches to governing the shared trajectories of science, technology, and society. Using the idea of institutional invention to focus innovation governance on four inflection points—agendas, calls, spaces, evaluation—would allow funding organizations and researchers to look 'beyond the project', developing new methods to unpack and reflect on assumed purposes of science, technology, and innovation, and to potentially reconfigure the institutions that condition scientific practice.

The Cross‐Race Effect (CRE), whereby same‐race faces are recognized more accurately than cross‐race faces, is a well‐replicated psychological phenomenon with clear social consequences. The area in which its influence is most visible is that of eyewitness misidentification. Since the advent of DNA testing, it has been revealed that scores of people have been wrongly imprisoned for crimes that they did not commit, and cross‐race eyewitness misidentifications are a determining factor in a large percentage of these convictions. This article reviews existing perspectives on the causes of the CRE, including new work on the social cognitive underpinnings of the bias. Next, we make recommendations aimed at reducing the cross‐race effect in eyewitness identification, both at the point of witnessing the crime and during the witness lineup. The goal of this work is to encourage policymakers to implement suggestions based on the current understanding of the causes and moderators of the CRE.

Maintaining social relationships with others is essential for survival, but not all relationships are beneficial. Individuals exclude nonbeneficial burdensome group members, those who encumber group success. We investigated whether feeling psychological pain is a mechanism that prompts assessment of social threats―potentially putting the "brakes" on burdensome (nonbeneficial) relationships. Specifically, we investigated if interacting with burdensome individuals caused others to experience psychological pain, negative affect, and to dislike the burdensome individual. Across 5 studies, using 3 different paradigms, we found those who interacted with a burdensome individual experienced psychological pain, which influenced ostracizing (excluding and ignoring) the burdensome group member. In Studies 4 and 5, we found psychological pain mediated the relationship between burdensomeness and ostracism even when we accounted for negative affect and dislike of the burdensome individual. Our results suggest psychological pain can guide social interactions and should be the subject of future research involving social threat.

Many have questioned what Barack Obama's victory in the 2008 presidential election means for prejudice and intergroup relations in the United States. In this study, we examined both explicit and implicit prejudice toward African Americans prior to and immediately following the election of the first African American to the nation's highest office. Results indicated that implicit prejudice (as measured by an IAT) decreased following Obama's victory, though explicit prejudice remained unchanged. The results are discussed in terms of the malleability of implicit attitudes, race relations, and the impact an Obama presidency and other positive exemplars may have on intergroup relations.

The current research was designed to examine how the outcome of the 2008 United States presidential election would affect participants' feelings of being rejected. Specifically, we set out to test whether participants who favored the losing candidate would feel as if they had been personally rejected. Additionally, we were interested in whether these feelings of rejection would be predicted by the extent to which participants included the major party candidates in their own self‐representation, as measured with the Inclusion of Other in the Self (IOS) scale. We find that conservative participants who included John McCain in the self reported feeling less satisfaction of their basic needs (a composite of belonging, self‐esteem, belief in a meaningful existence, and sense of control), compared with conservative participants low in McCain IOS, and these effects are independent of mood. Applied and theoretical implications of these results are discussed.

Presidential elections in the United States pit two (or more) candidates against each other. Voters elect one and reject the others. This work tested the hypothesis that supporters of a losing presidential candidate may experience that defeat as a personal rejection. Before and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, voters reported their current feelings of rejection and social pain, along with potential predictors of these feelings. Relative to Trump supporters, Clinton (losing candidate) supporters reported greater feelings of rejection, lower mood, and reduced fundamental needs post-election, while controlling for pre-election levels of these variables. Moreover, as self–candidate closeness and liberal political orientation increased, so too did feelings of rejection and social pain among Clinton supporters. We discuss the implications of these results for understanding human sensitivity to belonging threats and for the vicarious rejection literature.

Violating one's expectations of inclusion may influence the pain of rejection. This is supported by neurological evidence on expectation violation processing (Somerville, Heatherton, & Kelley, 2006). We asked: Can an expectation of a specific social outcome affect how it feels to be rejected or included? We tested the premise that expectations for the outcome of an interaction are derived from social information. Participants were either liked or disliked following a get-acquainted exercise (Study 1), or were given inclusionary versus exclusionary cues (Study 2) or no social information (Study 3) in an imagined scenario before being rejected or included. Rejection felt worse than inclusion; however, we found rejected individuals felt increasingly worse after receiving inclusionary cues than receiving exclusionary cues. Included individuals felt an increase in need satisfaction and reduced negative affect when they initially expected to be rejected compared to when they expected to be included.

AbstractWhether exclusion hurts or inclusion feels good is debated within social psychology, and research designs often compare people who are excluded from those who are included. Here, we examined how participants differ when they are excluded or included relative to when they are not engaging in social interactions. Participants completed an ecological momentary assessment study (7 days, six measures a day). Participants indicated if they were having a social interaction, whether the interaction was inclusionary or exclusionary, and their mood and basic needs. We found that when people were excluded, relative to no interaction, they had lower basic needs and worsened mood; the reverse was true during inclusion episodes. We also found that the within‐person effect of exclusion was larger than the within‐person effect of inclusion and that exclusion experiences were relatively uncommon (≈10% of all reported social interactions). Future research and the importance of examining within‐person effects are discussed.