D Vaughn Becker
Biographic Data
| ID | 227752 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D Vaughn Becker |
| GIVEN NAMES | D Vaughn |
| FAMILY NAME | Becker |
| SIGNATURE | BECKER D V |
| AFFILIATIONS | Arizona State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6635-0041 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 142 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Fundamental evolved motives meet environmental threats and opportunities
Extending Affordances with Evolutionary Psychology and Connectionist Models
The smoke-detector principle of pathogen avoidance
Motivations to avoid infectious disease seem to influence prejudice toward some groups, including groups not explicitly associated with infectious disease. The standard explanation for this phenomenon is based on signal detection theory and proposes that some prejudices partially arise from pathogen detection mechanisms that are biased toward making false alarms (false positives) in order to minimize misses (false negatives). Therefore, pathogen …
Responses to political partisans are shaped by a Covid-19-sensitive disease avoidance psychology
How do natural changes in disease avoidance motivation shape thoughts about and behaviors toward ingroup and outgroup members? During the COVID-19 pandemic, political party affiliation has been a strong predictor in the United States of COVID-19-related opinions, attitudes, and behaviors. Using a six-wave longitudinal panel survey of representative Americans (on Prolific, N = 1,124, from April 2020 to February 2021), we explored how naturally occ…
Disgust sensitivity relates to attitudes toward gay men and lesbian women across 31 nations
Previous work has reported a relation between pathogen-avoidance motivations and prejudice toward various social groups, including gay men and lesbian women. It is currently unknown whether this association is present across cultures, or specific to North America. Analyses of survey data from adult heterosexuals ( N = 11,200) from 31 countries showed a small relation between pathogen disgust sensitivity (an individual-difference measure of pathog…
Visual disgust elicitors produce an attentional blink independent of contextual and trait-level pathogen avoidance
Multiple studies report that disgust-eliciting stimuli are perceived as salient and subsequently capture selective attention. In the current study, we aimed to better understand the nature of temporal attentional biases toward disgust-eliciting stimuli and to investigate the extent to which these biases are sensitive to contextual and trait-level pathogen avoidance motives. Participants (N = 116) performed in an emotional attentional blink task i…
Bridging psychology and engineering to make technology work for people
Engineering grand challenges and big ideas not only demand innovative engineering solutions, but also typically involve and affect human thought, behavior, and quality of life. To solve these types of complex problems, multidisciplinary teams must bring together experts in engineering and psychological science, yet fusing these distinct areas can be difficult. This article describes how Human Systems Engineering (HSE) researchers have confronted …
Parasite stress and pathogen avoidance relate to distinct dimensions of political ideology across 30 nations
Significance Pathogens, and antipathogen behavioral strategies, affect myriad aspects of human behavior. Recent findings suggest that antipathogen strategies relate to political attitudes, with more ideologically conservative individuals reporting more disgust toward pathogen cues, and with higher parasite stress nations being, on average, more conservative. However, no research has yet adjudicated between two theoretical accounts proposed to exp…
Evolutionary Social Cognition
It is nearly trite to note that the human social world is complex, dynamic, and rich in information. It is also a well-worn trope in psychology that the human mind lacks the capacity to process all this informa-tion, online or otherwise. So what’s a mind to do? The answer is that the mind attends to some bits of information while ignoring others, uses a variety of mental shortcuts to reduce processing load, and generally engages a wide range of s…
Who expressed what emotion? Men grab anger, women grab happiness
Does greater product information actually inform consumer decisions? The relationship between product information quantity and diversity of consumer decisions
Infection Breeds Reticence
Social living brings humans great rewards, but also associated dangers, such as increased risk of infection from others. Although the body’s immune system is integral to combating disease, it is physiologically costly. Less costly are evolved mechanisms for promoting avoidance of people who are potentially infectious, such as perceiving oneself as less social and increasing the tendency to make avoidant movements. In Experiment 1, exposure to a d…
More Memory Bang for the Attentional Buck
When encountering individuals with a potential inclination to harm them, people face a dilemma: Staring at them provides useful information about their intentions but may also be perceived by them as intrusive and challenging—thereby increasing the likelihood of the very threat the people fear. One solution to this dilemma would be an enhanced ability to efficiently encode such individuals—to be able to remember them without spending any addition…
I only have eyes for you
Self-protective biases in group categorization
Across 6 studies, factors signaling potential vulnerability to harm produced a bias toward outgroup categorization--a tendency to categorize unfamiliar others as members of an outgroup rather than as members of one's ingroup. Studies 1 through 4 demonstrated that White participants were more likely to categorize targets as Black (as opposed to White) when those targets displayed cues heuristically associated with threat (masculinity, movement tow…
A pox on the mind
The confounded nature of angry men and happy women
Findings of 7 studies suggested that decisions about the sex of a face and the emotional expressions of anger or happiness are not independent: Participants were faster and more accurate at detecting angry expressions on male faces and at detecting happy expressions on female faces. These findings were robust across different stimulus sets and judgment tasks and indicated bottom-up perceptual processes rather than just top-down conceptually drive…
They All Look the Same to Me (Unless They're Angry)
People often find it more difficult to distinguish ethnic out-group members compared with ethnic in-group members. A functional approach to social cognition suggests that this bias may be eliminated when out-group members display threatening facial expressions. In the present study, 192 White participants viewed Black and White faces displaying either neutral or angry expressions and later attempted to identify previously seen faces. Recognition …
Functional projection
Results from 2 experimental studies suggest that self-protection and mate-search goals lead to the perception of functionally relevant emotional expressions in goal-relevant social targets. Activating a self-protection goal led participants to perceive greater anger in Black male faces (Study 1) and Arab faces (Study 2), both out-groups heuristically associated with physical threat. In Study 2, participants' level of implicit Arab-threat associat…
When the sexes need not differ
This study assessed whether previously reported sex differences in jealousy could be accounted for by other related emotions. Participants were presented with hypothetical scenarios involving both a sexual and an emotional infidelity, then were asked how jealous, angry, hurt, and disgusted they would be (using continuous scales). The results replicate the sex difference in response to sexual and emotional infidelity, demonstrate that it is robust…
Sex differences (and similarities) in jealousy
Sexually Selective Cognition
Across 5 experimental studies, the authors explore selective processing biases for physically attractive others. The findings suggest that (a). both male and female observers selectively attend to physically attractive female targets, (b). limiting the attentional capacity of either gender results in biased frequency estimates of attractive females, (c). although females selectively attend to attractive males, limiting females' attentional capaci…
Functional projection
Results from 2 experimental studies suggest that self-protection and mate-search goals lead to the perception of functionally relevant emotional expressions in goal-relevant social targets. Activating a self-protection goal led participants to perceive greater anger in Black male faces (Study 1) and Arab faces (Study 2), both out-groups heuristically associated with physical threat. In Study 2, participants' level of implicit Arab-threat associat…
Sexually Selective Cognition
Across 5 experimental studies, the authors explore selective processing biases for physically attractive others. The findings suggest that (a). both male and female observers selectively attend to physically attractive female targets, (b). limiting the attentional capacity of either gender results in biased frequency estimates of attractive females, (c). although females selectively attend to attractive males, limiting females' attentional capaci…
Self-protective biases in group categorization
Across 6 studies, factors signaling potential vulnerability to harm produced a bias toward outgroup categorization--a tendency to categorize unfamiliar others as members of an outgroup rather than as members of one's ingroup. Studies 1 through 4 demonstrated that White participants were more likely to categorize targets as Black (as opposed to White) when those targets displayed cues heuristically associated with threat (masculinity, movement tow…
The confounded nature of angry men and happy women
Findings of 7 studies suggested that decisions about the sex of a face and the emotional expressions of anger or happiness are not independent: Participants were faster and more accurate at detecting angry expressions on male faces and at detecting happy expressions on female faces. These findings were robust across different stimulus sets and judgment tasks and indicated bottom-up perceptual processes rather than just top-down conceptually drive…
When the sexes need not differ
This study assessed whether previously reported sex differences in jealousy could be accounted for by other related emotions. Participants were presented with hypothetical scenarios involving both a sexual and an emotional infidelity, then were asked how jealous, angry, hurt, and disgusted they would be (using continuous scales). The results replicate the sex difference in response to sexual and emotional infidelity, demonstrate that it is robust…
A pox on the mind
I only have eyes for you
Disgust sensitivity relates to attitudes toward gay men and lesbian women across 31 nations
Previous work has reported a relation between pathogen-avoidance motivations and prejudice toward various social groups, including gay men and lesbian women. It is currently unknown whether this association is present across cultures, or specific to North America. Analyses of survey data from adult heterosexuals ( N = 11,200) from 31 countries showed a small relation between pathogen disgust sensitivity (an individual-difference measure of pathog…
Who expressed what emotion? Men grab anger, women grab happiness
Does greater product information actually inform consumer decisions? The relationship between product information quantity and diversity of consumer decisions
Sex differences (and similarities) in jealousy
Sexually Selective Cognition
Across 5 experimental studies, the authors explore selective processing biases for physically attractive others. The findings suggest that (a). both male and female observers selectively attend to physically attractive female targets, (b). limiting the attentional capacity of either gender results in biased frequency estimates of attractive females, (c). although females selectively attend to attractive males, limiting females' attentional capaci…
When the sexes need not differ
This study assessed whether previously reported sex differences in jealousy could be accounted for by other related emotions. Participants were presented with hypothetical scenarios involving both a sexual and an emotional infidelity, then were asked how jealous, angry, hurt, and disgusted they would be (using continuous scales). The results replicate the sex difference in response to sexual and emotional infidelity, demonstrate that it is robust…
Functional projection
Results from 2 experimental studies suggest that self-protection and mate-search goals lead to the perception of functionally relevant emotional expressions in goal-relevant social targets. Activating a self-protection goal led participants to perceive greater anger in Black male faces (Study 1) and Arab faces (Study 2), both out-groups heuristically associated with physical threat. In Study 2, participants' level of implicit Arab-threat associat…
They All Look the Same to Me (Unless They're Angry)
People often find it more difficult to distinguish ethnic out-group members compared with ethnic in-group members. A functional approach to social cognition suggests that this bias may be eliminated when out-group members display threatening facial expressions. In the present study, 192 White participants viewed Black and White faces displaying either neutral or angry expressions and later attempted to identify previously seen faces. Recognition …
The confounded nature of angry men and happy women
Findings of 7 studies suggested that decisions about the sex of a face and the emotional expressions of anger or happiness are not independent: Participants were faster and more accurate at detecting angry expressions on male faces and at detecting happy expressions on female faces. These findings were robust across different stimulus sets and judgment tasks and indicated bottom-up perceptual processes rather than just top-down conceptually drive…
A pox on the mind
Infection Breeds Reticence
Social living brings humans great rewards, but also associated dangers, such as increased risk of infection from others. Although the body’s immune system is integral to combating disease, it is physiologically costly. Less costly are evolved mechanisms for promoting avoidance of people who are potentially infectious, such as perceiving oneself as less social and increasing the tendency to make avoidant movements. In Experiment 1, exposure to a d…
More Memory Bang for the Attentional Buck
When encountering individuals with a potential inclination to harm them, people face a dilemma: Staring at them provides useful information about their intentions but may also be perceived by them as intrusive and challenging—thereby increasing the likelihood of the very threat the people fear. One solution to this dilemma would be an enhanced ability to efficiently encode such individuals—to be able to remember them without spending any addition…
I only have eyes for you
Self-protective biases in group categorization
Across 6 studies, factors signaling potential vulnerability to harm produced a bias toward outgroup categorization--a tendency to categorize unfamiliar others as members of an outgroup rather than as members of one's ingroup. Studies 1 through 4 demonstrated that White participants were more likely to categorize targets as Black (as opposed to White) when those targets displayed cues heuristically associated with threat (masculinity, movement tow…
Who expressed what emotion? Men grab anger, women grab happiness
Does greater product information actually inform consumer decisions? The relationship between product information quantity and diversity of consumer decisions
Evolutionary Social Cognition
It is nearly trite to note that the human social world is complex, dynamic, and rich in information. It is also a well-worn trope in psychology that the human mind lacks the capacity to process all this informa-tion, online or otherwise. So what’s a mind to do? The answer is that the mind attends to some bits of information while ignoring others, uses a variety of mental shortcuts to reduce processing load, and generally engages a wide range of s…
Parasite stress and pathogen avoidance relate to distinct dimensions of political ideology across 30 nations
Significance Pathogens, and antipathogen behavioral strategies, affect myriad aspects of human behavior. Recent findings suggest that antipathogen strategies relate to political attitudes, with more ideologically conservative individuals reporting more disgust toward pathogen cues, and with higher parasite stress nations being, on average, more conservative. However, no research has yet adjudicated between two theoretical accounts proposed to exp…
Bridging psychology and engineering to make technology work for people
Engineering grand challenges and big ideas not only demand innovative engineering solutions, but also typically involve and affect human thought, behavior, and quality of life. To solve these types of complex problems, multidisciplinary teams must bring together experts in engineering and psychological science, yet fusing these distinct areas can be difficult. This article describes how Human Systems Engineering (HSE) researchers have confronted …
Visual disgust elicitors produce an attentional blink independent of contextual and trait-level pathogen avoidance
Multiple studies report that disgust-eliciting stimuli are perceived as salient and subsequently capture selective attention. In the current study, we aimed to better understand the nature of temporal attentional biases toward disgust-eliciting stimuli and to investigate the extent to which these biases are sensitive to contextual and trait-level pathogen avoidance motives. Participants (N = 116) performed in an emotional attentional blink task i…
Disgust sensitivity relates to attitudes toward gay men and lesbian women across 31 nations
Previous work has reported a relation between pathogen-avoidance motivations and prejudice toward various social groups, including gay men and lesbian women. It is currently unknown whether this association is present across cultures, or specific to North America. Analyses of survey data from adult heterosexuals ( N = 11,200) from 31 countries showed a small relation between pathogen disgust sensitivity (an individual-difference measure of pathog…
Responses to political partisans are shaped by a Covid-19-sensitive disease avoidance psychology
How do natural changes in disease avoidance motivation shape thoughts about and behaviors toward ingroup and outgroup members? During the COVID-19 pandemic, political party affiliation has been a strong predictor in the United States of COVID-19-related opinions, attitudes, and behaviors. Using a six-wave longitudinal panel survey of representative Americans (on Prolific, N = 1,124, from April 2020 to February 2021), we explored how naturally occ…
Extending Affordances with Evolutionary Psychology and Connectionist Models
The smoke-detector principle of pathogen avoidance
Motivations to avoid infectious disease seem to influence prejudice toward some groups, including groups not explicitly associated with infectious disease. The standard explanation for this phenomenon is based on signal detection theory and proposes that some prejudices partially arise from pathogen detection mechanisms that are biased toward making false alarms (false positives) in order to minimize misses (false negatives). Therefore, pathogen …
Fundamental evolved motives meet environmental threats and opportunities
Psychology (21 works) · Social Psychology (17 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (16 works) · Developmental psychology (12 works) · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior (11 works) · Cognitive psychology (9 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (7 works) · Anger (6 works) · Cognition (6 works)