The past decade has seen rapid growth in research that evaluates methods for reducing prejudice. This essay reviews 418 experiments reported in 309 manuscripts from 2007 to 2019 to assess which approaches work best and why. Our quantitative assessment uses meta-analysis to estimate average effects. Our qualitative assessment calls attention to landmark studies that are noteworthy for sustained interventions, imaginative measurement, and transparency. However, 76% of all studies evaluate light touch interventions, the long-term impact of which remains unclear. The modal intervention uses mentalizing as a salve for prejudice. Although these studies report optimistic conclusions, we identify troubling indications of publication bias that may exaggerate effects. Furthermore, landmark studies often find limited effects, which suggests the need for further theoretical innovation or synergies with other kinds of psychological or structural interventions. We conclude that much research effort is theoretically and empirically ill-suited to provide actionable, evidence-based recommendations for reducing prejudice. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 72 is January 4, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

We test the theory that shame evolved as a defense against being devalued by others. By hypothesis, shame is a neurocomputational program tailored by selection to orchestrate cognition, motivation, physiology, and behavior in the service of: (i) deterring the individual from making choices where the prospective costs of devaluation exceed the benefits, (ii) preventing negative information about the self from reaching others, and (iii) minimizing the adverse effects of devaluation when it occurs. Because the unnecessary activation of a defense is costly, the shame system should estimate the magnitude of the devaluative threat and use those estimates to cost-effectively calibrate its activation: Traits or actions that elicit more negative evaluations from others should elicit more shame. As predicted, shame closely tracks the threat of devaluation in the United States (r = .69), India (r = .79), and Israel (r = .67). Moreover, shame in each country strongly tracks devaluation in the others, suggesting that shame and devaluation are informed by a common species-wide logic of social valuation. The shame-devaluation link is also specific: Sadness and anxietyemotions that coactivate with shame-fail to track devaluation. To our knowledge, this constitutes the first empirical demonstration of a close, specific match between shame and devaluation within and across cultures.shame | emotion | valuation | culture | evolutionary psychology I n all known foraging societies past and present, humans have lived embedded in dense networks of cooperative and competitive interactions, a condition that is believed to have prevailed during the evolution of our species (1-3). Individuals in such social ecologies suffered or prospered depending on the summed effects of the choices of others-such as when and how often to share food, to provide care for another's child, to defer in conflicts, and so on. Ancestrally, the difference between an individual reproducing successfully, struggling, or dying early would have depended (in part) on the degree to which others traded off their own welfare for the welfare of that individual.Over the last fifty years, evolutionary researchers have identified a number of selection pressures that favored the evolution of decision systems that regulate welfare trade-offs between individuals, including kin selection (4), reciprocity/exchange (5, 6), risk-pooling (2), parenting (7), mating (8), externality management (9), and the asymmetric war of attrition (10). These theories, in turn, led to the empirical discovery of various choice architectures that evolved to produce best-bet welfare trade-off decisions given the information available to the actor about a potential recipient [e.g., how to respond to cues of genetic relatedness; how to respond to cues predicting the recipient's ability to effectively assert and defend her or his interests; how to respond to cues indicating a potential partner tends to cheat or free-ride (11-16)].In short, favorable valuation by others was a critical resource for our anc...

We hypothesized that an adaptive form of emotion regulation-cognitive reappraisal-would decrease negative emotion and increase support for conflict-resolution policies. In Study 1, Israeli participants were invited to a laboratory session in which they were randomly assigned to either a cognitive-reappraisal condition or a control condition; they were then presented with anger-inducing information related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Participants in the reappraisal condition were more supportive of conciliatory policies and less supportive of aggressive policies compared with participants in the control condition. In Study 2, we replicated these findings in responses to a real political event (the recent Palestinian bid for United Nations recognition). When assessed 1 week after training, participants trained in cognitive reappraisal showed greater support for conciliatory policies and less support for aggressive policies toward Palestinians compared with participants in a control condition. These effects persisted when participants were reassessed 5 months after training, and at both time points, negative emotion mediated the effects of reappraisal.