This study used canonical correlation to examine the relationship of 11 individual difference variables to two measures of beliefs in conspiracies. Undergraduates were administered a questionnaire that included these two measures (beliefs in specific conspiracies and attitudes toward the existence of conspiracies) and scales assessing the 11 variables. High levels of anomie, authoritarianism, and powerlessness, along with a low level of self-esteem, were related to beliefs in specific conspiracies, whereas high levels of external locus of control and hostility, along with a low level of trust, were related to attitudes toward the existence of conspiracies in general. These findings support the idea that beliefs in conspiracies are related to feelings of alienation, powerlessness, hostility, and being disadvantaged. There was no support for the idea that people believe in conspiracies because they provide simplified explanations of complex events.

No abstract

No abstract

Assumed similarity refers to ascribing similar attributes to the self and others. Because self-other similarity facilitates communion, people who value communion should be prone to assume self-other similarity; but because self-other similarity also evokes obligation, they may be prone to assume similarity only with others with whom they are or would feel comfortable being interconnected. We tested these hypotheses in 5 studies (total N = 1,709). In Study 1, students indicated their political preferences and estimated other students' preferences. In Studies 2-5, students described their personality and the personalities of the following targets: actual or imagined romantic partners in Study 2; ingroup members (students from the respondents' university) and outgroup members (students from a foreign university) in Studies 3-4; and specific liked and disliked others in Study 5. As hypothesized, people with stronger communal values were more likely to assume self-other similarity with liked others, romantic partners, and ingroup members, but not with disliked others and outgroup members. These effects replicated across different cultures (India, Korea, and the United States) and remained significant when controlling for self-esteem, national identification, and attribute desirability. Although people who valued communion tended to depict themselves and liked and ingroup others in relatively normative (typical) ways, which partially explained assumptions of similarity and indicated that those assumptions were to some extent accurate, communal values continued to predict distinctive self-other similarity or "false consensus" even after controlling for the normative prevalence of attributes.

This study examined the effects of task cohesiveness and interpersonal cohesiveness on group performance on a novel group creativity task. S. Zaccaro and M. C. McCoy (1988) suggested that cohesiveness is 2-dimensional and that the effects of task cohesiveness and interpersonal cohesiveness depend on the task type and the way in which performance is evaluated. The creativity task used here was more interactive than classic idea-generation tasks. Three-person groups were asked to draw a single projected image created by superimposing the images from 3 separate overhead projectors. Drawing performance was judged for creativity and technical quality. The predicted interaction between task and interpersonal cohesiveness was found such that groups in the high task-cohesive and high interpersonal-cohesive conditions produced the most creative group drawings for 1 of the 2 objects presented. Also as predicted, high task cohesiveness alone improved technical quality of the drawings.People count on groups in many ways to complete a variety of important tasks. For example, in academic, organizational, and government settings, groups are asked to solve important problems and to make recommendations about important decisions. Although research identifying variables that are important to high-quality group problem solving and decision making is amassing, relatively little is known about another important task type assigned to groups-creativity.Examples of real-world creativity groups are fairly easy to generate, from advertising creativity teams, to groups of imagineers at Disney, to organizational research and development teams. The types of tasks that these groups are asked to perform, however, may only partially overlap with the most common type of laboratory task used to study creativity-idea generation. Furthermore, simple idea-generation tasks do not allow for complex interaction of group members such as would be found in real groups.The purpose of this study was therefore twofold. First, we wanted to introduce a novel