Rich people inhabit a distinct social category that may elicit universal images or perhaps different perceptions in different cultures. Whereas inequality research has mostly focused on lower socioeconomic classes, the current research investigates cultural variations of prejudices about rich groups, toward understanding societal dynamics. Three studies investigate stereotype content and evaluations of rich people in China and the United States, cultures that might be expected to differ. Consistent with U.S. data from the stereotype content model, Study 1 demonstrates mainland Chinese likewise view the rich in general ambivalently as competent but cold. Examining a more specific level, Study 2 identifies both distinctive and overlapping rich subgroups across the two cultures, but both reporting mixed stereotype content. Study 3 tests whether clearer cultural contrasts might occur in implicit (vs. explicit) stereotypes toward rich people: Both U.S. and Chinese respondents, however, expressed positive implicit stereotypes toward the rich compared with middle class, in contrast with their self-reported explicitly ambivalent (or, rarely, negative) wealth stereotypes. This research is the first to examine stereotype content about rich people on the subgroup level, and both implicit and explicit levels, offering theory-based social structure predictors of this culturally shared but somewhat variable stereotype content.

Generalized attitudes toward authority and justice are often conceptualized as individual differences that are resistant to enduring change. However, across two field experiments with Chinese factory workers and American university staff, small adjustments to people's experience of participation in the workplace shifted these attitudes one month later. Both experiments randomly assigned work groups to a 20-minute participatory meeting once per week for six weeks, in which the supervisor stepped aside and workers discussed problems, ideas, and goals regarding their work (vs. a status quo meeting). Across 97 work groups and 1,924 workers, participatory meetings led workers to be less authoritarian and more critical about societal authority and justice, and to be more willing to participate in political, social, and familial decision-making. These findings provide rare experimental evidence of the theoretical predictions regarding participatory democracy: that local participatory experiences can influence broader democratic attitudes and empowerment.

A pragmatist philosophy of psychological science offers to the direct replication debate concrete recommendations and novel benefits that are not discussed in Zwaan et al. This philosophy guides our work as field experimentalists interested in behavioral measurement. Furthermore, all psychologists can relate to its ultimate aim set out by William James: to study mental processes that provide explanations for why people behave as they do in the world.

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Individuals have the tendency to discount rewards in the future, known as temporal discounting, and we find that sense of power (the felt capacity to influence the thinking and behavior of others) reduces such tendency. In Studies 1 and 2, we used both an experiment and a survey with organizational employees to demonstrate that power reduced temporal discounting. In Study 3, we replicated study 1 while exploring a unique cultural trait of Danbo, or indifference to fame and wealth, across two ethnic groups (Han and Tibetan groups) in China. While power reduces temporal discounting, the relationship between the two may be leveraged by individual differences of optimism, frustration, and Danbo. The results imply a more nuanced interpretation of how individual and situational factors can affect intertemporal choice.