Much of the substance of conflict falls under the domain of social psychology, and previous research has made great progress in understanding the processes that underlie intergroup relations. Several high-status researchers have argued for the necessity of social psychological research to augment and inform other theories of violent conflict, mainly those used by political scientists and Intern...

Retest reliability is a better predictor of validity than is internal consistency. One explanation for this is item-specific variance, which distinguishes different nuances of a facet and contributes to retest reliability but not internal consistency. Specific variance at the facet level is temporally stable, consensually validated, and heritable; a consideration of the role of specific varianc...

Previous research has found evidence for a behavioural assimilation effect (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996) where the priming of a social category leads participants to behave in line with the stereotypes or associated traits of that social category. The current study investigated the effect of priming psychology students with the category "neuropsychological patient" on their subsequent executiv...

When I was asked to comment on the benefits and costs of bridging cognitive psychology, my own field of research, with social psychology, I thought this was easy—the more so as I have a social-psychological background myself (Schultz-Gambard, Feierabend, & Hommel, 1988; Schultz-Gambard & Hommel, 1987). However, addressing this issue requires one to define what a cognitive and a social psycholog...

Relationship researchers and evolutionary psychologists have been studying human mating for decades, but research inspired by these two perspectives often yields fundamentally different images of how people mate. Research in the relationship science tradition frequently emphasizes ways in which committed relationship partners are motivated to maintain their relationships (e.g., by cognitively d...

Whatever our specific substantive interests, I think that most of us in and around social psychology are continually intrigued by some of the almost magical phenomena that occur within our theoretical purview. Take " emergence, " for example. It still interests me, and sometimes amazes me, how individual behaviors emerge from the substrate of neurological and cognitive processing; how interpers...

This article provides a review of past and contemporary debates regarding the role of awareness in attitude formation through evaluative conditioning (EC), that is, by repeatedly pairing a stimulus with other stimuli of positive or negative valence. Because EC is considered the most prototypical method to form and change the network of evaluative associations in memory, the role of awareness in...

Earlier research has demonstrated that individuals high in self-esteem tend to integrate positive and negative information about close others whereas those low in self-esteem tend to segregate such information. The present study of roommates replicates this link and extends it by providing evidence that: (a) high self-esteem and integration of roommate views predict less contextdependent satisf...