The worldwide spread of a new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) since December 2019 has posed a severe threat to individuals’ well-being. While the world at large is waiting that the released vaccines immunize most citizens, public health experts suggest that, in the meantime, it is only through behavior change that the spread of COVID-19 can be controlled. Importantly, the required behaviors are aimed not only at safeguarding one’s own health. Instead, individuals are asked to adapt their behaviors to protect the community at large. This raises the question of which social concerns and moral principles make people willing to do so. We considered in 23 countries (N = 6948) individuals’ willingness to engage in prescribed and discretionary behaviors, as well as country-level and individual-level factors that might drive such behavioral intentions. Results from multilevel multiple regressions, with country as the nesting variable, showed that publicized number of infections were not significantly related to individual intentions to comply with the prescribed measures and intentions to engage in discretionary prosocial behaviors. Instead, psychological differences in terms of trust in government, citizens, and in particular toward science predicted individuals’ behavioral intentions across countries. The more people endorsed moral principles of fairness and care (vs. loyalty and authority), the more they were inclined to report trust in science, which, in turn, statistically predicted prescribed and discretionary behavioral intentions. Results have implications for the type of intervention and public communication strategies that should be most effective to induce the behavioral changes that are needed to control the COVID-19 outbreak.

Six studies (N = 491) investigated the inductive potential of nouns versus adjectives in person perception. In the first 5 studies, targets were either described by an adjective (e.g., Mark is homosexual) or by the corresponding noun (e.g., Mark is a homosexual) or by both (Study 3). The authors predicted and found that nouns, more so than adjectives, (a) facilitate descriptor-congruent inferences but inhibit incongruent inferences (Studies 1-3), (b) inhibit alternative classifications (Study 4), and (c) imply essentialism of congruent but not of incongruent preferences (Study 5). This was supported for different group memberships and inclinations (athletics, arts, religion, sexual preference, drinking behavior, etc.), languages (Italian and German), and response formats, suggesting that despite the surface similarity of nouns and adjectives, nouns have a more powerful impact on person perception. Study 6 investigated the inverse relationship, showing that more essentialist beliefs (in terms of a genetic predisposition rather than training) lead speakers to use more nouns and fewer adjectives. Possible extensions of G. R. Semin and K. Fiedler's (1988) linguistic category model and potential applications for language use in intergroup contexts are discussed.

The ingroup projection model posits that group members project ingroup features onto a superordinate category. The present research aimed at isolating the cognitive underpinnings of this process. If ingroup projection is a spontaneous cognitive process, a superordinate category prime should facilitate the processing of the ingroup prototype rather than the outgroup prototype. Three studies support this hypothesis by comparing subliminal semantic priming in two different populations, an intra- versus intergroup situation, and with an ingroup prototype manipulated by changing the intergroup context. Results indicated that the superordinate category prime facilitated the processing of ingroup rather than outgroup traits (Experiment 1) and that these traits depended on the particular content of the ingroup prototype made salient by different contexts (Experiments 2 and 3). The findings indicate that the cognitive representation of the superordinate category is based on ingroup traits and that this representation is context dependent.

Individuals perceive their own group to be more typical of a shared superordinate identity than other groups are. This in-group projection process has been demonstrated with both self-report and indirect measures. The two studies reported here extend this research to the visual level, specifically, within the domain of faces. Using an innovative reverse-correlation approach, we found that German and Portuguese participants' visual representations of European faces resembled the appearance typical for their own national identity. This effect was found even among participants who explicitly denied that one nation was more typical of Europe than the other (Study 1). Moreover, Study 2 provides experimental evidence that in-group projection is restricted to inclusive superordinate groups, as the effect was not observed for visual representations of a category ("Australian") that did not include participants' in-group. Implications for the in-group projection model, as well as for the applicability of reverse-correlation paradigms, are discussed.

Four studies analyzed how sexual orientation (heterosexual vs. gay) and age categories (young vs. elderly) referring to men are cognitively combined. In Study 1, young gay men were judged as more prototypical of gay men than adult or elderly gay men, while young, adult, and elderly heterosexual men were perceived as equally prototypical of heterosexual men. In Study 2, gay men were stereotyped more by young rather than elderly stereotypical traits, while heterosexual men were not stereotyped in terms of age. In Study 3, elderly men were stereotyped more by heterosexual than gay-stereotypical traits, while young men were not stereotyped in terms of sexual orientation. In Study 4, gay men were judged to be young rather than elderly, while elderly men were judged to be heterosexual rather than gay. Overall, elderly gay men were overlooked when processing their constituent categories, “gay” and “elderly” men. Implications for models of intersectionality are discussed.