No abstract

Social essentialism—the belief that individuals contain an underlying essence determined by the social categories they belong to—has generally been regarded as a harmful cognitive process that results in prejudice and other forms of injustice at the group level. Trait essentialism, also termed a fixed mindset—the belief that people's trait levels are determined and relatively unchangeable—has been construed as a parallel impediment to self‐improvement at the individual level. However, each of these domains contains findings that do not fit this narrative, suggesting that such essentialized thinking is not always detrimental at either the group or individual level and that its effects may instead depend on motivation and context. Incorporating advances in research on moral judgment and identity allow for a reconciliation of the variable effects of social and trait essentialism. In some instances, essentialism can be a strategy for reducing blame over uncontrollable aspects of individuals and groups and for identity formation.

Performance measurement is considered useful in guiding donations to charities. We investigated whether efficiency rates predominately guide donations relative to available alternatives, or influence donation amounts. Across four studies ( N = 460), participants evaluating charity advertisements saw randomly assigned efficiency rates presented as background information. Participants could pledge a portion of a gift card, offered in return for participation, to their pick of presented charities. Participants were sensitive to relative, but not absolute, efficiency, giving more often to more relatively efficient charities but generally did not pledge them more money. Even providing an explicit standard of efficiency did not create an absolute sensitivity to efficiency, suggesting that efficiency information, steers, rather than encourages, or discourages, donations overall.

There is a vast literature that seeks to uncover features underlying moral judgment by eliciting reactions to hypothetical scenarios such as trolley problems. These thought experiments assume that participants accept the outcomes stipulated in the scenarios. Across seven studies (N = 968), we demonstrate that intuition overrides stipulated outcomes even when participants are explicitly told that an action will result in a particular outcome. Participants instead substitute their own estimates of the probability of outcomes for stipulated outcomes, and these probability estimates in turn influence moral judgments. Our findings demonstrate that intuitive likelihoods are one critical factor in moral judgment, one that is not suspended even in moral dilemmas that explicitly stipulate outcomes. Features thought to underlie moral reasoning, such as intention, may operate, in part, by affecting the intuitive likelihood of outcomes, and, problematically, moral differences between scenarios may be confounded with non-moral intuitive probabilities.

Desire spurs competition; here we explore whether the converse is also true. In one study, female quartets (N ¼ 58) completed anagrams, with the winner to receive compact speakers; controls anagrammed without competition. In the other study, female quartets (N ¼ 74) described their ideal first date to a male judge, who chose the best description; controls read to him others' date descriptions without competition. In both studies, creating competition increased desire and altered how much participants wanted, but not how much they liked, the competed-for thing. Competition may activate a general ''wanting system,'' producing overvaluing in settings from stock markets to partner selection.Given finite resources, and overlapping tastes, competition for desired objects is inevitable, and more desire will likely lead to greater competition. Less apparent, however, is whether more competition will lead to greater desire. That is, will people's evaluations of objects be enhanced if they are caused to compete for them? FINANCIAL COMPETITIONAuctions, which enable the determination of market value for rare and idiosyncratic items, also have the effect of adding competition between interested parties in a way that normal supply-and-demand market pricing does not. Recent examination of auctions suggests that they may change how people regard the bid-for objects. Thaler (1988) referred to this as ''the winner's curse'': that winning bids often exceed the items' estimated value. There is growing evidence that this is directly due to competition. Controlled studies have shown that increasing competition in auctions leads to higher bids and that auctions with greater competition lead to a greater chance of exceeding preset spending limits (Heyman, Orhun, & Ariely, 2004;Ku, Malhotra, & Murnighan, 2005). Furthermore, auctions with lower starting bids actually have higher ending bids, presumably because this allows for more bidders to enter, thereby increasing competition (Ku, Galinsky, & Murnighan, 2006).Auctions, however, vary many factors in addition to competition. The presence of additional bidders, for example, can provide social comparison validation of the value of the item. It is not clear that adding more bidders always adds more competition. In fact, studies have not always manipulated the number of bidders in the same direction. Furthermore, although there is evidence that the number of bidders can influence bid amounts, such findings do not explicitly address whether bidders' appraisals of the item itself have changed. It is possible, for example, as competing and appraising in auctions are intertwined, that bidders are driven by a desire to win the competition rather than a desire to acquire the item. Consistent with this, Malhotra (2010) found that continued bidding on online auctions was mediated by a desire to win rather than changing perceptions of how much the item is worth. COMPETITION FOR SOCIAL OBJECTSDespite the ubiquity of competition, its effects on appraisal have not been explored outside of the financial...