Journal of personality and social psychology
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This study advanced knowledge on charisma by (a) introducing a new personality-based model to conceptualize and assess charisma and by (b) investigating curvilinear relationships between charismatic personality and leader effectiveness. Moreover, we delved deeper into this curvilinear association by (c) examining moderation by the leader's level of adjustment and by (d) testing a process model through which the effects of charismatic personality on effectiveness are explained with a consideration of specific leader behaviors. Study 1 validated HDS charisma (Hogan Development Survey) as a useful trait-based measure of charisma. ⋯ Nonlinear mediation modeling further confirmed that strategic and operational leader behaviors fully mediate the curvilinear relationship. Leaders low on charisma are less effective because they lack strategic behavior; highly charismatic leaders are less effective because they lack operational behavior. In sum, this work provides insight into the dispositional nature of charisma and uncovers the processes through which and conditions under which leader charisma translates into (in)effectiveness. (PsycINFO Database Record
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People value experiences in part because of the memories they create. Yet, we find that people systematically overestimate how much they will retrospect about their experiences. This overestimation results from people focusing on their desire to retrospect about experiences, while failing to consider the experience's limited enduring accessibility in memory. ⋯ We further observe that the extent to which reported retrospection falls short of forecasted retrospection reliably predicts declining satisfaction with an experience over time. Despite this potential negative consequence of retrospection falling short of expectations, we suggest that the initial overestimation itself may in fact be adaptive. This possibility and other potential implications of this work are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record
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Do claims of "free speech" provide cover for prejudice? We investigate whether this defense of racist or hate speech serves as a justification for prejudice. In a series of 8 studies (N = 1,624), we found that explicit racial prejudice is a reliable predictor of the "free speech defense" of racist expression. Participants endorsed free speech values for singing racists songs or posting racist comments on social media; people high in prejudice endorsed free speech more than people low in prejudice (meta-analytic r = .43). ⋯ Two experiments found evidence that the free speech argument protected participants' own freedom to express their attitudes; the defense of other's racist speech seems motivated more by threats to autonomy than threats to self-regard. These studies serve as an elaboration of the Justification-Suppression Model (Crandall & Eshleman, 2003) of prejudice expression. The justification of racist speech by endorsing fundamental political values can serve to buffer racial and hate speech from normative disapproval. (PsycINFO Database Record
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Although previous research has demonstrated that generosity can lead to status gains, the converse effect of status on generosity has received less attention. This is a significant gap because groups and society at large rely on the beneficence of all members, especially those holding high-status positions. More broadly, research on the psychology of status remains largely unexplored, which is striking in light of the attention given to other forms of social hierarchy, such as power. ⋯ In particular, we hypothesize that status will decrease generosity when the status hierarchy is perceived as legitimate because status can inflate views of one's value to the group and sense of deservingness. In contrast, we hypothesize that status increases generosity when the status hierarchy is perceived as illegitimate, due to efforts to restore equity through one's generosity. Our results support these hypotheses across 6 studies (a field study and 5 experiments) and empirically demonstrate that the effects of status and legitimacy on generosity can be attributed to concerns about equity in status allocation. (PsycINFO Database Record
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We investigated class-based differences in the propensity to seek positions of power. We first proposed that people's lay theories suggest that acquiring power requires playing politics-manipulating one's way through the social world, relying on a pragmatic and Machiavellian approach to impression management and social relationships to get ahead. Then, drawing on empirical work portraying individuals with relatively low social class as more strongly focused on others and less focused on themselves, we hypothesized that these individuals would show less interest in seeking positions of power than their high-class counterparts, because they feel less comfortable engaging in political behavior. ⋯ Consistent with our theorizing, we also found that individuals with relatively low social class intend to seek positions of power as much as their high-class counterparts when they can acquire it through prosocial means (Study 2), and when they reconstrue power as serving a superordinate goal of helping others (Study 4). Moreover, we checked the robustness of our findings by measuring social class in a number of ways within each study, and examined whether our results held across each measure. Together, our findings suggest that the common belief that political behavior is required for advancement may help explain why class inequalities persist and why creating class-based diversity in upper-level positions poses a serious challenge. (PsycINFO Database Record