The Leave campaign in the U.K., which advocated exiting the European Union, emphasized anxiety over immigration and the need to take control of the U.K.'s borders. Citizens who expressed concerns about immigration to the U.K. were more likely to vote to leave. Two correlational studies examined the previously unexplored question of whether the Brexit vote and support for the outcome of the E.U. referendum were linked to individual predictors of prejudice toward foreigners: British collective narcissism (a belief in national greatness), right wing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation. The results converged to indicate that all three variables were independently related to the perceived threat of immigrants and, via this variable, to the Brexit vote and a support for the outcome of the E.U. referendum. These variables explained the variance in the perceived threat of immigrants and support for the Brexit vote over and above other previously examined predictors such as age, education, or ethnicity, as well as, national identification and national attachment.

Ethnographies, histories, and popular culture from many regions around the world suggest that marked moments of love, affection, solidarity, or identification everywhere evoke the same emotion. Based on these observations, we developed the kama muta model, in which we conceptualize what people in English often label being moved as a culturally implemented social-relational emotion responding to and regulating communal sharing relations. We hypothesize that experiencing or observing sudden intensification of communal sharing relationships universally tends to elicit this positive emotion, which we call kama muta. When sufficiently intense, kama muta is often accompanied by tears, goosebumps or chills, and feelings of warmth in the center of the chest. We tested this model in seven samples from the United States, Norway, China, Israel, and Portugal. Participants watched short heartwarming videos, and after each video reported the degree, if any, to which they were “moved,” or a translation of this term, its valence, appraisals, sensations, and communal outcome. We confirmed that in each sample, indicators of increased communal sharing predicted kama muta; tears, goosebumps or chills, and warmth in the chest were associated sensations; and the emotion was experienced as predominantly positive, leading to feeling communal with the characters who evoked it.

Social thermoregulation theory posits that modern human relationships are pleisiomorphically organized around body temperature regulation. In two studies (N = 1755) designed to test the principles from this theory, we used supervised machine learning to identify social and non-social factors that relate to core body temperature. This data-driven analysis found that complex social integration (CSI), defined as the number of high-contact roles one engages in, is a critical predictor of core body temperature. We further used a cross-validation approach to show that colder climates relate to higher levels of CSI, which in turn relates to higher CBT (when climates get colder). These results suggest that despite modern affordances for regulating body temperature, people still rely on social warmth to buffer their bodies against the cold.

Precarious manhood beliefs portray manhood, relative to womanhood, as a social status that is hard to earn, easy to lose, and proven via public action. Here, we present cross-cultural data on a brief measure of precarious manhood beliefs (the Precarious Manhood Beliefs scale [PMB]) that covaries meaningfully with other cross-culturally validated gender ideologies and with country-level indices of gender equality and human development. Using data from university samples in 62 countries across 13 world regions ( N = 33,417), we demonstrate: (1) the psychometric isomorphism of the PMB (i.e., its comparability in meaning and statistical properties across the individual and country levels); (2) the PMB’s distinctness from, and associations with, ambivalent sexism and ambivalence toward men; and (3) associations of the PMB with nation-level gender equality and human development. Findings are discussed in terms of their statistical and theoretical implications for understanding widely-held beliefs about the precariousness of the male gender role.

Humans are social animals, but not everyone will be mindful of others to the same extent. Individual differences have been found, but would social mindfulness also be shaped by one’s location in the world? Expecting cross-national differences to exist, we examined if and how social mindfulness differs across countries. At little to no material cost, social mindfulness typically entails small acts of attention or kindness. Even though fairly common, such low-cost cooperation has received little empirical attention. Measuring social mindfulness across 31 samples from industrialized countries and regions (n = 8,354), we found considerable variation. Among selected country-level variables, greater social mindfulness was most strongly associated with countries’ better general performance on environmental protection. Together, our findings contribute to the literature on prosociality by targeting the kind of everyday cooperation that is more focused on communicating benevolence than on providing material benefits.