Although culture influences all human beings, there is an assumption in American psychology that culture matters more for members of certain groups. This article identifies and provides evidence of the cultural (mis)attribution bias: a tendency to overemphasize the role of culture in the behavior of racial/ethnic minorities, and to underemphasize it in the behavior of Whites. Two studies investigated the presence of this bias with an examination of a decade of peer reviewed research conducted in the United States (N = 434 articles), and an experiment and a survey with psychology professors in the United States (N = 361 psychologists). Archival analyses revealed differences in the composition of samples used in studies examining cultural or noncultural psychological phenomena. We also find evidence to suggest that psychologists in the United States favor cultural explanations over psychological explanations when considering the behavior and cognition of racial/ethnic minorities, whereas the opposite pattern emerged in reference to Whites. The scientific ramifications of this phenomenon, as well as alternatives to overcome it, are discussed in detail. (PsycINFO Database Record

The average person possesses superficial understanding of complex causal relations and, consequently, tends to overestimate the quality and depth of their explanatory knowledge. In this study, we examined the role of this illusion of explanatory depth (IOED) in politics—inflated confidence in one's causal understanding of political phenomena—for endorsement of conspiracy beliefs. Utilizing a pre‐/post‐election panel design and a large sample of U.S. Citizens (N = 394) recruited in the context of the 2016 presidential election, we provide evidence that political IOED, but not a non‐political IOED, was associated with increased support for general and election‐specific conspiracy beliefs, particularly among political novices and supporters of the losing candidate. We find this pattern of results net the influence of a broad range of variables known to covary with conspiracy beliefs. Implications for theory and the need for future research are discussed.

Conspiracy theories (CTs) about government officials and the institutions they represent are widespread, and span the ideological spectrum. In this study, we test hypotheses suggesting that system identity threat, or a perception that society's fundamental, defining values are under siege due to social change, will predict conspiracy thinking. Across two samples (N = 870, N = 2,702), we found that system identity threat is a strong predictor of a general tendency toward conspiracy thinking and endorsement of both ideological and non‐ideological CTs, even after accounting for numerous covariates. We also found that the relationship between system‐identity threat and conspiracy‐theory endorsement is mediated by conspiracy thinking. These results suggest that conspiracy‐theory endorsement may be a compensatory reaction to perceptions that society's essential character is changing.

A burgeoning line of research examining the relation between personality traits and political variables relies extensively on convenience samples. However, our understanding of the extent to which using convenience samples challenges the generalizability of these findings to target populations remains limited. We address this question by testing whether associations between personality and political characteristics observed in representative samples diverged from those observed in the sub-populations most commonly studied in convenience samples, namely students and internet users. We leverage ten high-quality representative datasets to compare the representative samples with the two subsamples. We did not find any systematic differences in the relationship between personality traits and a broad range of political variables. Instead, results from the sub-samples generalized well to those observed in the broader and more diverse representative sample.

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