Beliefs and ideologies on the one hand, and goals and motivations on the other, are inextricably linked. People’s beliefs and ideologies shape what goals they value and what they do to pursue them. In turn, people’s fundamental motivations cause them to gravitate toward particular beliefs and ideologies. This chapter describes our efforts to unpack these bidirectional links, particularly in the domains of politics and religion. Broadly, we highlight how these links generally cause beliefs and behaviors to be aligned, but we end by considering newer research highlighting instances where beliefs and behaviors become, at least on the surface, inconsistent. We discuss implications for theories about attitude-behavior relations and about cognitive consistency.

Humans err: No one perceives everything accurately or knows all there is to know. Our intellectual limits contribute to a host of problems and cannot be fully overcome, but might there be a more adaptive way of responding to them? This chapter explores one promising approach in the concept of intellectual humility, recognizing the limits of our knowledge and beliefs. I begin by investigating historical roots of the term intellectual humility, examining modern conceptualizations, and reviewing methods for measuring intellectual humility. I then discuss how intellectual humility shapes learning and behavior in polarized contexts, underscoring its relevance for contemporary issues like misinformation and societal division. Finally, I describe evidence-based strategies for fostering intellectual humility.

On the back of concerns that society is entering a post-truth, “anti-enlightenment” phase, the last decade has seen an explosion of research on the psychology of science rejection. Traditional understandings of this phenomenon have relied on so-called deficit models: that rejection of science is underpinned by lack of exposure to information or an inability to process scientific information. In this chapter we discuss two recent approaches that supplement this understanding: (1) the Attitude Roots model, which focuses on the role of ideologies, worldviews, identities, and fears in shaping science beliefs, and (2) the Psychological Distance to Science model, which views science rejection as a downstream consequence of people perceiving science as detached from the self in the here and now. By building bridges across these approaches, we hope to pave the way for future research efforts aimed at uncovering a more complete understanding of the causes of science rejection across domains. This understanding is important for further theory development and is a key ingredient for crafting strategies and interventions to defuse the myriad problems associated with science rejection.

The perception of social categories, emotions, and personality traits from others' faces each have been studied extensively but in relative isolation. We synthesize emerging findings suggesting that, in each of these domains of social perception, both a variety of bottom-up facial features and top-down social cognitive processes play a part in driving initial perceptions. Among such top-down processes, social-conceptual knowledge in particular can have a fundamental structuring role in how we perceive others' faces. Extending the Dynamic Interactive framework (Freeman & Ambady, 2011), we outline a perspective whereby the perception of social categories, emotions, and traits from faces can all be conceived as emerging from an integrated system relying on domain-general cognitive properties. Such an account of social perception would envision perceptions to be a rapid, but gradual, process of negotiation between the variety of visual cues inherent to a person and the social cognitive knowledge an individual perceiver brings to the perceptual process. We describe growing evidence in support of this perspective as well as its theoretical implications for social psychology.

Abstract People tend to like things the way they are. All other things being equal, there is a widespread bias in favor of the status quo . We describe two forms this bias may take: people assume that (1) mere existence makes things good and right (the existence bias ) and (2) the longer something is thought to exist, the better and more right it is judged to be (the longevity bias ). We take care to distinguish existence and longevity biases from other forms of status quo preference. Our research emphasizes people's automatic, heuristic tendency to ascribe existence and longevity to inherent features. We describe how existence and longevity biases contribute to status quo maintenance and political ideology; we also show how these biases provide novel explanatory power for incumbency effects, social norms, and the legitimization of inequality. We conclude with a consideration of exceptions to what appears to be a general rule: people assume that the status quo is good, right, and the way things ought to be.

Abstract We summarize and integrate a large body of research showing that agency and communion constitute two fundamental dimensions of content in social cognition. Agentic content refers to goal-achievement and task functioning (competence, assertiveness, decisiveness), whereas communal content refers to the maintenance of relationships and social functioning (benevolence, trustworthiness, morality). We present a Dual Perspective Model of Agency and Communion (DPM-AC) developed to show that the two dimensions are differently linked to the basic perspectives in social interaction, that is, the actor versus the observer/recipient perspectives. We review numerous research confirming three general hypotheses of the DPM. First, communal content is primary among the fundamental dimensions. Second, in the observer/recipient perspective (perception of others), communal content receives more weight than agentic content. Third, in the actor perspective (self-perception), agentic content receives more weight than communal content. We then discuss the complex issues of relations of agency and communion to valence as well as associations between agency and communion. Although they are logically independent and their inferences are based on different cues, the two content dimensions of meaning frequently function as psychological alternatives in social cognition.

This chapter asks, when does motivation increase as a result of attending to accomplishments and when does it increase as a result of attending to their absence? We propose that attention to accomplishments increases motivation among uncommitted and inexperienced individuals by increasing their goal commitment. In contrast, attention to lack of accomplishments increases motivation among committed and experienced individuals by increasing their perceived need to make progress on a goal. We document parallel influences of attention to completed and missing actions on the pursuit of personal and shared goals, and document similarities between the types of information on completing versus missing actions that individuals include in the feedback they seek and give to each other and how they respond to this information.