In a second project, we found that our collective progress–when presented the right way—can serve to inspire more motivation towards our global goal of fighting climate change. Across 10 studies, we found that framing mitigation efforts as innovative and exciting - as opposed to mundane and rustic - can jumpstart the public into feeling more hopeful about climate change (Neale, Austin, Roe, & Converse, 2023). Accordingly, in these two lines of research we have tapped a new source of motivation in the form of inspirational eco-technologies that can jumpstart people out of climate melancholia without the risk of introducing a motivational pitfall. It seems that our collective progress tends to motivate further collective action, rather than license individuals to prioritize their own convenience over our shared goal.

Gossip can quickly and effectively stabilize cooperative norms in organizations and groups. In most situations, gossip sparks reputation concerns that make people keen to cooperate. But do people care if their rivals gossip about them? Traditionally, the premise of gossip’s key role in cooperation has been tied to reputational concerns, which—in theory—can only function within established ingroups. 

In this work, we found that gossip increases cooperation across group boundaries: people who were interacting with strangers that were not part of their ingroup were more likely to act prosocially if they thought they were going to be gossiped about. Moreover, we found that gossip had no effect on cooperation within ingroup members: people interacting with others who were already part of their established ingroup were no more or less likely to act prosocially in response to the threat of gossip. Accordingly, this work suggests that being part of an established group encourages cooperative norms within the group; but in the absence of shared group identity, gossip serves an alternative social tool for enforcing cooperation and evoking group-iness. 

At the individual level, my research examines how people make decisions about who they should and shouldn’t cooperate with. Redemption can be difficult for past-offenders to earn because the public often infers that they are likely to reoffend and are hesitant to give them a second chance. In this line of research, I have explored how appearances - specifically, incidental changes in appearance - influence moral judgments about transgressors. Across several studies, I investigated how changes in appearance can signal a shift in identity, which in turn shape character judgments about their trustworthiness and moral character. Across several studies, I have found evidence that people consistently infer that past-offenders who look different than they did before have changed for the better, are more remorseful, more kind, and more trustworthy than their unchanged counterparts. This research reveals how discontinuities in identity–even those as superficial as incidental changes in appearance—can prompt perceivers to re-evaluate whether a transgressor should be entrusted with a second chance to cooperate in society.

Interestingly, participants often spontaneously commented that they do not make judgments based on appearance, yet proceeded to do so. Moreover, changes in personality and other characteristics such as career or food preferences did not have the same effect, although changes in personality could arguably be considered more valid information to base judgments on. This suggests that new information can have a stronger influence on perceivers’ impressions if it is information that perceivers do not intentionally incorporate into their judgments. In future work, I intend to investigate how people think about appearances as authentic reflections of essences, or true selves.

Implicit bias can emerge in the form of ​undifferentiated impressions,​ where perceivers’ trait ratings for a target are biased to be strongly correlated with each other (Oh et al., 2020). This happens because the perceivers use one trait cue to infer the rest of the target’s traits. I explore how biases can be revealed in intercorrelation structures of trait impressions.

In one study, I tested intercorrelations of trait impressions for evidence of a gendered-racial bias, where people might perceive Black women as more undifferentiated than White women and Black men. To do so, I used principal component analyses to compare intercorrelations between 14 trait ratings for Black women, Black men, White women and White men. While there were no significant differences in mean trait ratings between targets, analyses revealed that ratings of Black women were more intercorrelated than all other race/gender groups. Moreover, the first principal component for trait ratings for Black women explained more variance than it did for trait ratings for all other race/gender groups. These results suggest that impressions of Black women are more biased than impressions of White women, and that bias that is not revealed in mean trait ratings can be revealed in the form of undifferentiated trait ratings.