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An increasingly influential perspective in the study of pride holds that there are two distinct facets characterized by distinct ways of appraising the causes of achievement. "Authentic Pride" has been characterized as attributing success to one's temporary effort, whereas "Hubristic Pride" purportedly attributes success to one's stable, innate ability. In four studies, we present evidence against both predicted attributional profiles, and demonstrate that the Hubristic Pride Scale does not measure feelings of pride at all, but rather measures acknowledgment that one has displayed pride in an excessive manner. In Studies 1a and 1b,

In order to determine how to act in situations of potential agonistic conflict, individuals must assess multiple features of a prospective foe that contribute to the foe's resource-holding potential, or formidability. Across diverse species, physical size and strength are key determinants of formidability, and the same is often true for humans. However, in many species, formidability is also influenced by other factors, such as sex, coalitional size, and, in humans, access to weaponry. Decision-making involving assessments of multiple features is enhanced by the use of a single summary variable that encapsulates the contributions of these features. Given both a) the phylogenetic antiquity of the importance of size and strength as determinants of formidability, and b) redundant experiences during development that underscore the contributions of size and strength to formidability, we hypothesize that size and strength constitute the conceptual dimensions of a representation used to summarize multiple diverse determinants of a prospective foe's formidability. Here, we test this hypothesis in humans by examining the effects of a potential foe's access to weaponry on estimations of that individual's size and strength. We demonstrate that knowing that an individual possesses a gun or a large kitchen knife leads observers to conceptualize him as taller, and generally larger and more muscular, than individuals who possess only tools or similarly mundane objects. We also document that such patterns are not explicable in terms of any actual correlation between gun ownership and physical size, nor can they be explained in terms of cultural schemas or other background knowledge linking particular objects to individuals of particular size and strength. These findings pave the way for a fuller understanding of the evolution of the cognitive systems whereby humans – and likely many other social vertebrates – navigate social hierarchies.

23 24 25 26 The instruments described in this paper are included in the Supplementary Online Materials, and 27 are also archived at osf.io/qqq82. The complete datasets, lists of variables, and analytic code are 28 archived at osf.io/qqq82 and http://escholarship.org/uc/item/82j5p9r3 29 Accepted for publication in Psychological Science 1 Abstract 30To benefit from information provided by others, people must be somewhat credulous. However, 31 credulity entails risks. The optimal level of credulity depends on the relative costs of believing 32 misinformation versus failing to attend to accurate information. When information concerns 33 hazards, erroneous incredulity is often more costly than erroneous credulity, as disregarding 34 accurate warnings is more harmful than adopting unnecessary precautions. Because no 35 equivalent asymmetry characterizes information concerning benefits, people should generally be 36 more credulous of hazard information than of benefit information. This adaptive negatively-37 biased credulity is linked to negativity bias in general, and is more prominent among those who 38 believe the world to be dangerous. Because both threat sensitivity and dangerous-world beliefs 39 differ between conservatives and liberals, we predicted that conservatism would positively 40 correlate with negatively-biased credulity. Two online studies of Americans support this 41 prediction, potentially illuminating the impact of politicians' alarmist claims on different 42 portions of the electorate. 43 44 Keywords: threat sensitivity; negativity bias; negatively-biased credulity; political orientation 45 2 In 2012, a liberal professor wrote that the Obama Administration was stockpiling 46 ammunition, preparing for totalitarian rule. This idea was ignored by liberals. In 2015, 47 conservative bloggers asserted that a military exercise aimed to occupy Texas and impose 48 martial law. Conservatives became so concerned that the Texas Governor ordered the State 49Guard to monitor the exercise. 50The different fates of these two conspiracy theories might simply reflect their historical 51 particulars. Whereas in 2012 liberal Americans largely approved of the Obama Administration, 52 in 2015 most conservative Americans did not. Perhaps the first theory died while the second 53 prospered simply because the latter resonated with the views of a substantial audience while the 54 former did not. However, two bodies of research suggest that psychological differences related 55 to political orientation may also have been at work. First, a sizeable literature documents that, in 56 the U.S., responsiveness to negative stimuli correlates with political orientation, with 57 conservatives displaying more responsiveness, and liberals displaying less. Second, recent 58 studies indicate that people are more credulous of information concerning hazards than of 59 information concerning benefits -and individuals differ in this regard. Here, we combine these 60 approaches, testing the hypothesis that political orientation is corre...

Synchronized behavior is a common feature of martial drills and military parades in many societies. Hagen and colleagues Hagen & Hammerstein, 2009) hypothesized that the intentional enactment of synchronized behavior evolved as a means of signaling coalitional strength, as individuals who can synchronize are able to act in concert in agonistic contexts. Previous research has explored either the subjective consequences of synchrony for participants in synchronized behaviors or the effect of synchrony on observers' impressions of rapport among the synchronized actors. Critically, left untested is the central tenet that, by communicating that the individuals constitute a coordinated unit, synchronized behaviors signal elevated fighting capacity. We tested this prediction in two studies by asking large U.S. samples to judge the envisioned physical formidability -previously demonstrated to summarize assessments of diverse determinants of fighting capacity -of U.S. soldiers or terrorists on the basis of audio tracks of either synchronous or asynchronous footsteps.Consonant with the agonistic signaling hypothesis, participants judged the synchronized target individuals to be larger and more muscular than the unsynchronized individuals, an effect mediated by their assessment that the former collectively constitute a single unified entity.Although synchronized footsteps also enhanced listeners' perceptions of social bonding among the target individuals, this assessment did not mediate their judgments of elevated formidability, suggesting that synchrony primarily signals fighting capacity via revealed entitativity rather than inferred motivation.Keywords: synchrony; signaling; fighting capacity; entitativity; perceived coalitional quality 2 1.0 Introduction 1.1 Synchronized behavior: theory and prior research. Across widely diverse cultures, and among societies of very different scales, synchronized behavior is a prominent feature of rituals and collective displays. Over the last two decades a growing literature has explored the psychological effects of synchronized movement and synchronized sound production (reviewed in Keller et al., 2014). At an elementary level, the effects of synchrony can be dichotomized into two classes, namely the impact that synchrony has on participants in such activities, and the impact that it has on observers. In a seminal book, McNeill (1995) proposed that synchronized movement enhances social bonding among participants, and that, over the course of human history, this process has played a pivotal role in the rise of cooperation.Pushing the roots of synchrony even farther back in time, Hagen and colleagues Hagen & Hammerstein, 2009) argued that music and dance derive from phylogenetically ancient coordinated territorial defense signals; in humans, these signals were refined to communicate the size, cohesiveness, and capabilities of coalitions, as intentionally enacted synchronized behavior inherently requires both the ability and the motivation to effectively coordinate actions. In b...