All content on this site: Copyright © 2026 Elsevier B.V., its licensors, and contributors. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies. For all open access content, the relevant licensing terms apply.

Recently, a lot of attention in the behavioral sciences has been going to how feelings, thoughts, or behaviors overlap, covary, or synchronize across time withi...

Often, causal effects of interest in psychological research involve causes that cannot be randomly assigned. Instrumental-variables (IV) regression, a cornersto...

Converging evidence shows that the cultural importance of romantic love has increased dramatically with societal development; it now serves as a primary criterion for choosing partners, a foundation f...

Abstract This paper reconceptualizes free will as a concept that evolved culturally as a justification for our moral practices. Such a justification becomes relevant when people consider the possibili...

Scarcity is thought to create a tunneling effect, focusing attention on managing scarce resources to the neglect of other useful information. Here the authors reanalyse and report a conceptual replica...

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

We investigate the effectiveness of artificial intelligences (AI)-specifically large language models (LLMs)-relative to human scientists at high-level cognitive tasks in social science such as theory ...

Addressing societal challenges requires goal-directed behavior. To date, research on goal-directed behavior has proceeded along separate tracks emphasizing either self-regulatory processes or social f...

Social media use has the potential to promote misperceptions, but evidence is mixed. Despite social media characteristics that include homophilous social networks, algorithms that can reinforce biases...

On the basis of a within-person model of the relationship between political identity and outgroup dislike, Brandt and Vallabha (2025) suggested that changes in the strength of party identity, but not ...

Synthesis Report - Confronting Misinformation Produced with Generative AI: A Meta-Analysis of Experimental Scientific Evidence

Prejudice and stereotypes are central constructs in social psychology, yet instruments used to measure them vary in conceptual clarity and psychometric evidence. This preregistered systematic review ...

Promoting social norms can be a powerful tool to deal with the intolerance that threatens our societies. This research explores how equality-based respect norms...

Communications Psychology - Mapping the methodological landscape of social media detox intervention through a scoping review of evidence relevant to social media restriction policies

The question of whether self-knowledge is linked to psychological adjustment requires nuanced consideration. Relevant theoretical frameworks pertain to domains ...

Abstract. This paper introduces a framework for understanding the functions of emotion and emotion expression at multiple levels of analysis. The framework

Mediation analysis has been widely used in social psychology to investigate the mechanisms linking independent and dependent variables. However, conducting a proper mediation analysis is challenging, ...

Positivity bias skews the scientific record by favoring positive results. Understanding the drivers and impact of such bias provides a foundation for creating solutions.

Rates, percentages, and proportions are common outcomes in psychology and the social sciences. These outcomes are often analyzed using models that assume normality, but this practice overlooks importa...

This study examined associations between individual differences and construction of mental representations of belief-consistent and belief-inconsistent claims. Individual differences included topic...

This article investigates the relationship between political ideology and the extent to which individuals revise their beliefs when confronted with counter-attitudinal information. Across two preregi...

Background Conspiracy theories about climate change frame the environmental crises as secret plots of powerful and malevolent actors, leading to reduced compliance with climate policies. However, it.....

Health messages can only improve health when audiences engage with them. Yet, receptivity to health messages is not uniform, and unequal engagement may contribute to health disparities. We approach t....

Given the abundance and diversity of information available online, individuals must monitor and control operations on their memories about the various information sources they encounter. The current s...

We examined intellectual humility as a factor related to interpersonal religious or spiritual conflict. Among U.S. adults (N = 459), religious/spiritu…

Community-based fact-checking can reduce the spread of annotated misleading posts, but whether it produces lasting behavioral change among corrected authors remains unclear. Here, we conduct a large-s...

Abstract. Incoherence has long been considered a hallmark of belief in conspiracy theories, though recent research has cast doubt on this claim. We identif

This paper develops a theory of virtue signalling: what it is, how it works, and how to evaluate it. On the margins, should we do more of it or less? Some accounts of virtue signalling hold that pe...

Self-concept clarity, the metacognitive perception of the confidence and coherence of the self, and self-esteem, the evaluation of the positivity of the self, are theoretically distinct yet empiric...

A common critique of qualitative research is that it lacks generalizability, and a common response made by qualitative researchers is that qualitative research ...

In the timeless human quest for meaning and happiness, living a moral life has long been viewed as essential. But how do people determine which action…

Understanding the mechanisms through which behavioral interventions work remains a critical challenge in behavioral science. While randomized controlled trials (RCTs) provide reliable evidence for int...