Steven Heine

Economic inequality is on the rise in much of the world and has been associated with increased anxiety about one’s position in the social hierarchy (i.e., socioeconomic status; SES) and downstream consequences such as increased competitiveness and antisocial behaviour, decreased trust and well-being and other social ills. High socioeconomic status is characterized by a greater access to valued resources and leads to a heightened sense of power which has also been associated with downstream consequences such as increased unethical behaviour and dominance and decreased empathic accuracy. In this thesis, I aimed to replicate the previously found associations between SES and unethical behaviour, dominance, and empathic accuracy and I extended the research on economic inequality by exploring the relationship between inequality and the same outcome variables. I further built on previous research by bringing these two economic factors, inequality and SES, together and exploring their interactive effects. To the extent that the effects of SES on different outcome variables are mediated through a heightened sense of power caused by a greater access to valued resources by high SES individuals, this sense of power should be increased under conditions of higher economic inequality where the distance between people of high and low SES in the amount of resources they have is further exacerbated. While I did not replicate the previously found association between SES and unethical behaviour (Chapter 2), I found a positive association between SES and dominance expectations (Chapter 3) and a negative association between SES and empathic accuracy (Chapter 4). In line with the hypotheses, there was further largely a positive association between perceived inequality and unethical behaviour and dominance and a negative association between perceived inequality and empathic accuracy, and the effects of SES on dominance and empathic accuracy were most pronounced under conditions of high perceived economic inequality. But there was no interaction between SES and inequality in predicting unethical behaviour. Taken together, these results suggest that the effects of SES may depend on the amount of inequality people perceive. In this thesis, I focused on people’s perceptions of both SES and inequality which I assessed and manipulated.

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Worldwide, support for democracy’s principles has risen in the past half century. Yet democratic citizens do little to reverse global democratic backslides, even cheering on populist leaders who threaten institutions in place to protect them. I ask for whom democracy is a priority; who is disturbed by democratic backslides, and in any what contexts might they actually approve of this troubling trend? Chapters 2 and 3 uncover ideologically-linked dispositions and contexts explaining people’s reactions to democracy’s decline. Pre-registered laboratory experiments combined with analyses of World Values Survey data indicate that overall, liberals are more distressed than conservatives by low democracy. At the same time, the political context matters: This pattern emerges most strongly when the ruling party is conservative and disappears (though it does not flip into its mirror image) when the ruling party is liberal. The results from these chapters contribute to ongoing debates over ideological symmetry and asymmetry. Going beyond ideology, Chapter 4 identifies a broader set of stable dispositions associated with support for democracy. Moreover, similar to Chapter 3, it finds contexts where those associations weaken or disappear. Three pre-registered experiments reveal that those valuing equality are more supportive of democracy’s principles, and authoritarians and elitists are less supportive. At the same time, when it comes to supporting democracy in practice at the expense of other valued goals, these dispositions show only weak associations. Together, these findings suggest possible discrepancies between self-proclaimed values and actual behavior. Chapter 4 also explores potential differences in people’s feelings towards democracy’s multiple facets; civil liberties, the rule of law, and formal democratic procedures. My results contribute to ongoing research of support for democracy during its period of decline, suggesting that, if democracy is worth protecting, not everyone, in all contexts, will feel the urgency.

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Interpersonal judgements regarding other people’s behaviours often involve understanding their underlying causes. People tend to ascribe such causes to some fundamental, vague essence that lies within the individual. The gene has gained prominence in recent decades as a specific instantiation of this essence, although laypeople’s understanding of genetics is often inaccurate and overly simplistic. These inaccurate perceptions lead people to engage in genetic essentialism – the tendency to view genes and their associated attributes in overly deterministic and fatalistic terms. This dissertation discusses eight studies that: a) examine the consequences of genetic essentialism in various domains; b) expand on the existing theoretical framework of genetic essentialism by supplementing it with attribution theory; and c) attempt to find ways that can mitigate the impact of genetic essentialism.

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How do people react when their meaningful worldviews are violated? What does it even mean to experience a lack of meaning? Drawing on work from both social and cognitive psychology, I advance two main hypotheses. First, humans employ a single domain-general process for recognizing and interpreting all violations of meaning and unexpected experiences. Second, as a result of this generality, all violations of meaning can trigger responses that have more to do with this broad process than with the specific problem at hand. Eight studies support these predictions from a number of methodological approaches. Experiences as superficially different as cognitive dissonance, mortality salience, and viewing surreal art all motivate people to affirm important beliefs that are not directly relevant to the experience. Acetaminophen, a drug known to inhibit physical pain and feelings of rejection, also prevents this motivation to affirm following meaning violations. In an ERP paradigm, acetaminophen inhibits activation associated with consciously recognizing that a mistake was made. Finally, these effects appear to occur spontaneously during everyday moments and are not restricted solely to artificial laboratory experiments. These findings speak to a broad process for identifying mismatches between one’s mental model and reality. Discussion focuses on the implications of this process for studying a range of experiences, including uncertainty, meaning, goal frustration, dissonance, and existential anxiety.

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As omnivores, humans benefit from considerable nutritional flexibility. However, this blessing also comes with a curse, as humans also face a higher risk of consuming harmful substances or eating an improperly balanced diet, a phenomenon that Rozin (1976) calls “the omnivore's dilemma.” Previous research has shown that this dilemma is especially pronounced when dealing with meat, but has focused almost exclusively on Western participants, leaving several important questions unanswered. This dissertation extends the literature on the omnivore’s dilemma in three principal ways. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that providing people with visual reminders of the animal origins of meats reduces willingness to eat novel animals, but not willingness to eat commonly consumed animals, across Euro-Canadian, Asian-Canadian, Euro-American and Indian samples. Studies 3 and 4 examine what factors influence people’s decisions to eat animals, within Euro-Canadian, Hong Kong Chinese, Euro-American and Indian cultural contexts. Perceived animal intelligence and appearance were chief predictors of disgust, and reflecting on animals’ psychological attributes increased disgust, especially among Euro-Canadians and Euro-Americans. Concordant with past research, disgust was a major predictor of willingness to eat animals, but social influence (frequency of consumption by friends and family) also emerged as a strong predictor, especially among Hong Kong Chinese and Indians, providing evidence that friends and family have a stronger influence on one’s food choices in collectivistic cultural contexts. Studies 5 and 6 examine differences between vegetarians and omnivores in North American and Indian cultural contexts. In Study 5, we found that Euro-American vegetarians were more concerned with the impact of their food choices on the environment and animal welfare, more concerned with general animal welfare, endorsed universalism more, and Right-Wing Authoritarianism less than omnivores, yet among Indian participants, these differences were not significant. In Study 6, we showed that Indian vegetarians more strongly endorsed the belief that eating meat is spiritually polluting, were more religious, and were more concerned with the domains of Purity and Authority, whereas these differences were largely absent among Euro-Canadians and Euro-Americans. Taken together, this research provides greater insight into how people resolve the omnivore’s dilemma in different cultural contexts.

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Cultural psychology research has cast doubt upon the assumption that self-enhancement motivations are universal – the majority of empirical research finding that those from East Asian cultural backgrounds self-enhance less than those from Western cultural backgrounds. However, measures of implicit self-esteem (ISE) – automatic and unconscious global self evaluations – do not often yield cultural differences. By using a diverse range of approaches, this dissertation seeks to shed light on the question of whether variability exists in implicit self-esteem across individuals from East Asian and Western cultural backgrounds. In Study 1, two different ISE measures provided divergent results regarding possible cultural variability in implicit self-esteem. In search for a valid measure of ISE, Study 2 simultaneously tested the convergent and predictive validity and cultural variation of popular and new ISE and explicit self-esteem measures. Since no single ISE measure in Study 2 was found to have adequate validity, Study 3 attempted to boost the validity of ISE measures. This was done based on the argument that ISE is better defined as a context-dependent/domain specific construct rather than a global self-evaluation, yet did not yield evidence in favour of the validity of any ISE measure. Supplementary analyses for Study 2 and the final two studies took an alternative approach to the problem of this dissertation and found cultural variability in phenomena theoretically connected to implicit self-esteem. In particular, cultural variability was evident in the theoretical correlates of implicit self-esteem from Study 2. Study 4 found evidence that cultural variability in the tendency to value an object after one owns the object (i.e., the endowment effect) is likely due in part to cultural variability in feelings about the self. Study 5 provided evidence that cultural variability exists in the tendency to display in-group favouritism after being arbitrarily assigned to a group (i.e., the minimal group effect), and that this cultural variability is explained in part by self-esteem. Taken together, these studies provide converging evidence that 1) implicit self-esteem measures are currently not a viable option for assessment of cultural variability, and 2) cultural variability in implicit self-esteem is likely.

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Self-signaling theory posits that individuals engage in prosocial behavior in order to gain positive information about the self. Previous self-regulatory approaches to prosocial behavior have primarily focused on helping as means to self-repair (e.g., the negative state relief model), or as a means to stay self-consistent (e.g., self-verification theory), thus overlooking the motivation to obtain self-knowledge. Four studies tested a key prediction of self-signaling theory, that uncertainty about the self as a good and moral person should increase prosocial behavior, while certainty should decrease it. Study one used a correlational design to examine the relationship between personal uncertainty and volunteerism. Study two manipulated uncertainty about a positive moral characteristic and measured subsequent agreement to help. Study three examined the effect of uncertainty about a negative moral trait on helping behavior. Finally, study four manipulated both uncertainty, and the valence of self-information, while measuring charitable donations. All four studies find the hypothesized positive relationship between uncertainty and prosocial behavior. These findings support the idea that individuals help in order to gain information indicating they are good and virtuous, thus decreasing uncertainty about the self. Limitations, implications, and future directions are discussed.

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People everywhere strive for an ideal view of the self, but the conception of “ideal” differs importantly across cultures. In Western societies, the ideal self entails the possession of high self-esteem, whereas in East Asian cultures the ideal self entails maintenance of “face,” or successful performance of social roles and obligations. Within each cultural context, aspirations for an ideal self are facilitated by a network of psychological processes. One such psychological process is approach and avoidance motivations: approach motivation is useful for Westerners’ pursuit of high self-esteem whereas avoidance motivation is useful for East Asians’ concerns for face maintenance. Review of prior research renders support to this theorizing. Because approach and avoidance motivations are fundamental psychological processes, cross-cultural research on this topic is a great venue for investigating the ways in which culture shapes psychological processes. This dissertation examines the implication of cultural differences in approach and avoidance motivations in two domains. Studies 1 and 2 investigated the motivational consequences of a fit between culturally encouraged motivation and focus of self-regulation that a task at hand calls for. In comparisons of Canadians and Japanese, these studies found that individuals’ motivation for a task is enhanced when culturally encouraged motivation matched with focus of self-regulation required for the task. The second set of studies (Study 3 and 4) examined cognitive consequences of approach-avoidance motivation cultural difference. These studies found that a type of information that people are attuned to differs as a function of cultural differences in approach-avoidance motivations. Implications of the findings and future directions are discussed.

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No abstract available.