Joachim I Krueger
Biographic Data
| ID | 1659549 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joachim I Krueger |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joachim I |
| FAMILY NAME | Krueger |
| SIGNATURE | KRUEGER J I |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brown University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9607-1695 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 93 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 318 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 93 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
The Charm of Harm
Earlier in the 21st century, I asked two PhD students, who were defending their work on moral judgment, what their descriptive findings might tell us about normative models of morality. They both dodged the question, seeking shelter behind a veil of ignorance. We don't care, they seemed to say, because we cannot know. Normative morality is the province of the Rawlses and the rabbis of the world. We empirical researchers adhere to the categorical …
Negotiation Games
Negotiation is serious business. The term comes from the Latin phrase denoting the negation (neg) of leisure (otium). Negotiation is hard work and must be taken seriously. The contemporary culture surrounding the study and practice of negotiation is rich and diverse, with coaches, gurus, and “specialists” crowding the field. Some of the most successful negotiators have become stars in the eyes of deep-pocketed businesses and an adoring public. To…
The Search for the Well-Tempered Soul
As my elder daughter and I were heading toward the woods for a walk, I meekly apologized that I was, for reasons beyond my introspective access, in a low mood. My daughter recommended a mood shift so that we might enjoy our time together. Perhaps this was, as she might put it, “a download from the universe,” since by chance (chance!?) I had just started reading Ethan Kross's Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You. I feel good abou…
La Vie en Révolte
Dr. Sunita Sah has a point. Many of us, time and again, find ourselves in a situation in which we feel pressured to perform (or abstain from) a particular action while feeling acute nervous tension because the mandated (in)action runs counter to what we ourselves wish to (not) do (Fischer et al., 2011). In Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes, Dr. Sah suggests that in such situations we often betray our true values and that, with for…
The Hedgehog's Dilemma
Arthur Schopenhauer (1851/2014) may not have been the first, but he was a most astute observer of the tension between the need for personal autonomy and the need for social connection. Schopenhauer, who was a famous misanthrope and loner, recognized that as mammals, humans yearn for a conspecific's warm body—much like the hedgehog or the porcupine—and is eventually repelled by its prickliness. The result is a continual dance of approach and retre…
Gen Dread
Nexed
Idéologie Fixe
Sensation and Sensibility: Simulating Nick Humphrey's Mind
At the core of each discipline lies a concept its practitioners wish they could explain. Most eventually stop trying and turn to more tractable tasks. Others grab the bull by the horns, and of these, most fail heroically. Physicists wonder what matter really is and why there is any at all. Biologists puzzle over the essence of life and its origin. Psychologists try to wrap their heads around the conundrum of consciousness and why we are not zombi…
The Unceremonious Death of Free Will
In 1654, Thomas Hobbes, responding to Bishop Bramhall's orthodox ecclesiastical view of free will, namely the claim that we need free will lest we must cease to punish those whose acts are hateful to us, sent his treatise Of Liberty and Necessity to the Marquess of Newcastle, the moderator of this historic debate, ending his third paragraph with this pithy distillation, which both frames and settles the issue: “The question therefore is not wheth…
Man Meets Machine
Who will stand up to the juggernaut of artificial intelligence (AI) and strike a blow for human intelligence? Gerd Gigerenzer, in How to Stay Smart in a Smart World, rises to the challenge. How is a Streitschrift in the best polemical tradition. It takes aim at the postscientific paradigm of AI and the culture that has grown up around it, critically examines its assumptions and pretensions, asks tough questions about its epistemological, technolo…
Shit Just Got Weirder: The Normalization of the Uncanny
Jung's epigraphic commandment to himself was a rhetorical gambit that reveals a dilemma. On one hand, it would obviously be stupid to declare every inexplicable finding fraudulent. On the other hand, one would not want to embrace all-out gullibility (Krueger, Vogrincic-Haselbacher, & Evans, 2019). Skepticism needs guidelines and principles, lest one end up a cynic or an ingénue. Jung's stature in today's academic psychology would be greater had h…
The Sirens’ Song of Incentives
The concept of incentives lies at the heart of the social and human sciences. Why do people do what they do? Let's look at the incentives of their behavior! How can we get people to do what we want them to do? Let's look for the incentives that will work! The latter question is harder than the former because it calls for behavior change. It moves us from explanation to prediction and control (Krueger, 2020). The behavior we are currently seeing i…
Heuristic Business
The Contest of Happiness
Gad Saad has cracked the code of happiness, so says Saad. In The Saad Truth About Happiness, Saad shares what he regards as eight secrets of happiness. Truth is a self-help book, and it seems to help Saad. Readers may approach Truth with the goal of learning about the eight secrets, figuring out why they have lain hidden for so long, and then applying the lessons to their own lives. A barrier to the mastery of the eight secrets is that Saad's nar…
Leadership Without Science
Business schools and the academic departments associated with them have always had to contend with the challenge of relevance. If business is an art and a craft, it must be learned from experience. An able mentor and role model will help, but does a lecture? Does a book? Libraries are full of business books, and here's another one: Barrows and Downing's Twelve Skills: The Guide to Becoming a Stronger Leader and Accelerating Your Career. The title…
Tribal Creatures
Human beings, Aristotle famously observed, are social, or rather political, creatures, which might be the same thing. What this entails has been the object of much study, enough to fill libraries. One branch of psychology, social psychology, is dedicated to finding the right questions to ask and to feeling its way toward answers (see Allport, 1924, for an early mission statement, and Forgas, in press, for later ones). Other social sciences ask si…
A Homecoming for the Wandering Mind
The specter of mindfulness has been haunting psychological science and its self-help applications. Mindfulness, we are to understand, is a special state in which the mind is gathered up into itself, thereby achieving an autonomous state that is potentially pleasant, probably supportive of subjective well-being and health, and possibly conducive to the cultivation of useful life skills (Bishop et al., 2004). The publication of Jon Kabat-Zinn's (19…
Suburban Gloss: Reply to Kenrick and Lundberg-Kenrick
To understand motivation is to understand an essential part of the human soul. The evolutionary model presented by Kenrick and Lundberg-Kenrick is a prominent and influential effort to understand what humans want and what they might do to get it. The goal of my review—besides applauding the effort—was to note that the model itself cannot answer all the questions it raises. Extraneous assumptions are brought to bear, which opens the door for value…
The Desiccated Charm of the Bourgeoisie
The Pleistocene is a time of myth and promise. The era is mythical because we don't really know how humans lived back then (Graeber & Wengrow, 2021); it is promising because we hope that if we knew how human psychology evolved at the time, we would have a better understanding of what ails us now. Narratives about the Pleistocene fall onto a spectrum ranging from a Hobbesian dystopia, where lives were brutish and short, to a Rousseauesque utopia p…
Marvelous Psychology
David G. Myers is one of the legends of psychology and social psychology in particular. When I arrived at the University of Oregon in 1983 for my graduate studies, Myers's social psychology text was already the authoritative resource for undergraduate instruction. Now co-authored with Jean Twenge, this book has reached its 14th edition. Myers's general psychology textbook, now co-authored with Nathan DeWall, is in its 13th edition. Myers has writ…
Big Data, Small Mind
Data are getting bigger, and they encroach ever more on individual and social decision making (Gigerenzer, 2022). This is for the good inasmuch as data carry useful information. Information that is predictive, valid, and free from unwanted biases helps improve human welfare. Big data can reveal truths that challenge compelling intuitions or cherished beliefs. Given that our world is being flooded with petabytes of data, we can now ask what lesson…
Rebellion Management Theory
The sciences, and psychology is no exception, pose questions to nature and seek to move toward increasingly accurate and efficient models of reality (Popper, 1972). Science is fruitful when it offers effective applications. We can use what we have learned to craft interventions to get what we want. Psychological science has made many contributions to human welfare, education, therapy, and the management of people, among other things (Forgas, Cran…
The Role of Certainty in a Two-Person Volunteer’s Dilemma
In the standard volunteer’s dilemma (VoD), a single prosocial act (i.e., volunteering) yields the optimal overall outcome. Whereas the volunteer’s outcome is certain, the defector’s outcome depends on what others do. This research addressed the confounding of prosocial responses with uncertainty avoidance in the standard VoD. In Experiment 1, participants ( N = 102) considered 18 hypothetical one-shot two-person VoD scenarios with certain, risky,…
Nietzsche's Last Will
Moral outrage is the rock on which social psychology is built. Following Gustave Le Bon, early theorists and observers of the human scene warned of the violent potential of crowds. Following Solomon Asch, early experimentalists provoked crises of conscience in the laboratory and showed that many ordinary people obey, conform, or fall into apathy when, morally speaking, they shouldn't. Research on prejudice, selfishness, and (self-)deception explo…
Social Categorization Moderates Social Projection
Developmental expectations for the self and most other people: Age grading in three functions of social comparison
This study focused on beliefs about one's own compared with other people's development in adulthood. Young, middle-aged, and old adults rated person-descriptive attributes with respect to developmental change throughout adulthood for the self and other people, controllability for self and other, desirability, degree of self-descriptiveness, relevance as a developmental goal, and typical age-timing of attribute as developmental goal. Various aspec…
Use of categorical and individuating information in making inferences about personality
In three experiments, we explored the effects of categorical information (stereotypes) and case information (traits or behaviors) on judgments about an individual's characteristics. Subjects judged a target person's aggressiveness on the basis of a description containing both a broad social category and specific case information. In Experiment 1, the description included (a) a category that was either weakly or strongly related to aggressiveness …
Social categorization and the truly false consensus effect
The false consensus effect involves adequate inductive reasoning and egocentric biases. To detect truly false consensus effects (TFCEs), we correlated item endorsements with the differences between estimated and actual consensus within Ss. In Experiment 1, Ss overgeneralized from themselves to gender in-groups and to the overall population, but not to gender out-groups. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated intuitive understanding of consensus bias. A…
Personal beliefs and cultural stereotypes about racial characteristics
Social stereotypes may be expressed as personal beliefs about the characteristics of a group or as beliefs about the predominant cultural view of a group. In a study with a full intergroup design. Black and White participants rated Black and White racial groups. Results supported 3 sets of predictions derived from a projection model of stereotyping. First, participants' personal beliefs predicted their ratings of cultural stereotypes even when th…
Unskilled, unaware, or both? The better-than-average heuristic and statistical regression predict errors in estimates of own performance
People who score low on a performance test overestimate their own performance relative to others, whereas high scorers slightly underestimate their own performance. J. Kruger and D. Dunning (1999) attributed these asymmetric errors to differences in metacognitive skill. A replication study showed no evidence for mediation effects for any of several candidate variables. Asymmetric errors were expected because of statistical regression and the gene…
Two Egocentric Sources of the Decision to Vote: The Voter's Illusion and the Belief in Personal Relevance
The decision to vote in a national election requires a choice between serving a social good and satisfying one's self‐interest. Viewed as a cooperative response in a social dilemma, casting a vote seems irrational because it cannot have a discernible effect on the electoral outcome. The findings of two studies with undergraduate samples suggest that some people vote not because they set aside self‐interest, but because they expect their own behav…
The truly false consensus effect: An ineradicable and egocentric bias in social perception
Consensus bias is the overuse of self-related knowledge in estimating the prevalence of attributes in a population. The bias seems statistically appropriate (Dawes, 1989), but according to the egocentrism hypothesis, it merely mimics normative inductive reasoning. In Experiment 1, Ss made population estimates for agreement with each of 40 personality inventory statements. Even Ss who had been educated about the consensus bias, or had received fee…
Social exclusion and xenophobia: Intolerant attitudes toward ethnic and religious minorities
The present research investigates the effects of social exclusion on attitudes toward ethnic and religious minorities. Native-born German participants who were socially excluded rather than included reported greater approval for stricter legislation regarding the naturalization of immigrants (Study 1), reported greater prejudice against openly observant Muslims (Studies 2 and 3), and stronger agreement with the view that immigrants are financial …
Elements of trust: Risk and perspective-taking
Memory-based judgments about multiple categories: A revision and extension of Tajfel's accentuation theory
Accentuation theory states that the classification of stimuli produces encoding biases. Contrast effects enhance intercategory differences; assimilation effects enhance intracategory similarities. Do these biases affect the retrieval of stimuli distributed across many categories? The calendar superimposes arbitrary intermonth boundaries on day-to-day variations in temperature. In Experiment 1, Ss estimated the average temperatures of 48 days. Dif…
Contrast and accentuation effects in category learning
This study examines the accentuation of perceived intercategory differences. In Experiment 1, 2 sets of trait adjectives were presented--a neutral set and a set of either favorable traits or unfavorable traits. Ss estimated the mean favorability of each set. The mean favorability of the neutral set was then increased or decreased by adding new traits. As predicted, the estimated mean favorability of the neutral set changed more when the set becam…
Man's best friend: ” How the presence of a dog reduces mental distress after social exclusion
Social perception as induction and inference: An integrative model of intergroup differentiation, ingroup favoritism, and differential accuracy
Three general properties of social stereotypes are the perception of differences between ingroups and outgroups (intergroup differentiation), the perception of ingroups as having more desirable attributes than outgroups (ingroup favoritism), and the greater accuracy of ingroup perceptions (differential accuracy). We present and test an inductive-reasoning model that accounts for all 3 phenomena, and we explicate the relations among them. Based on…
Category learning and change: Differences in sensitivity to information that enhances or reduces intercategory distinctions
We examined the amenability of abstractions of categories to new and relevant information. In Experiment 1, Ss formed impressions of 2 sets of numbers by periodically estimating the cumulative means of each set. During the 1st half of the procedure, the 2 means were mathematically stable. During the 2nd half of the procedure, the mean of 1 set was modified and the mean of the other set remained unchanged. We predicted and found that the resultant…
Idiographic Self-Evaluation and Bias
Perceiving Middle-Aged Adults: Effects of Stereotype-Congruent and Incongruent Information
Normative beliefs about mid-life involve stereotypic expectations about age-appropriate development and behavior. This study examined the effects of violations of the stereotypic clock on interpersonal judgments. Each subject read descriptions of persons who, given their position in life, appeared to be 30, 45, or 60 years old. In the experimental condition but not in the control condition, stereotypic expectations about mid-life were activated b…
The development of trust and altruism during childhood
The First Cut is the Deepest: Effects of Social Projection and Dialectical Bootstrapping on Judgmental Accuracy
As a judgmental heuristic, social projection improves the accuracy of social consensus estimates. Aggregating multiple estimates, even within individuals, also increases accuracy. In the current research we combine these two lines of study and find that, within individuals, second estimates are less projective and less accurate than first estimates. Bootstrapped, or averaged, estimates yield no improvements in correlational measures of accuracy, …
Social Perception of Self-Enhancement Bias and Error
How do social observers perceive and judge individuals who self-enhance (vs. not)? Using a decision-theoretic framework, we distinguish between self-enhancement bias and error, where the former comprises both correct and incorrect self-perceptions of being better than average. The latter occurs when a claim to be better than others is found to be false. In two studies, we find that when judging people's competence, observers are sensitive to the …
Attribution and Categorization Effects in the Representation of Gender Stereotypes
Social stereotypes involve judgments of how typical certain personality traits are of a group. According to the attribution hypothesis, judgments of trait typicality depend on the perceived prevalence of the trait in the target group. According to the categorization hypothesis, such judgments depend on the degree to which a trait is thought to be more or less prevalent in the target group than in a relevant comparison group. A study conducted wit…
Towards a deeper understanding of impression formation—New insights gained from a cognitive-ecological perspective
Impression formation is a basic module of fundamental research in social cognition, with broad implications for applied research on interpersonal relations, social attitudes, employee selection, and person judgments in legal and political context. Drawing on a pool of 28 predominantly positive traits used in Solomon Asch's (1946) seminal impression studies, two research teams have investigated the impact of the number of person traits sampled ran…
More is not less: Greater information quantity does not diminish liking
How does the acquisition of information about a person affect the liking of that person? A recent set of studies suggests that liking decreases as people acquire more information (Norton, Frost, & Ariely, 2007). We test this "less-is-more" hypothesis along with an alternative hypothesis based on information integration theory. According to this alternative, people average available person information in an unbiased manner so that the liking of a …
Use of categorical and individuating information in making inferences about personality
In three experiments, we explored the effects of categorical information (stereotypes) and case information (traits or behaviors) on judgments about an individual's characteristics. Subjects judged a target person's aggressiveness on the basis of a description containing both a broad social category and specific case information. In Experiment 1, the description included (a) a category that was either weakly or strongly related to aggressiveness …
Category learning and change: Differences in sensitivity to information that enhances or reduces intercategory distinctions
We examined the amenability of abstractions of categories to new and relevant information. In Experiment 1, Ss formed impressions of 2 sets of numbers by periodically estimating the cumulative means of each set. During the 1st half of the procedure, the 2 means were mathematically stable. During the 2nd half of the procedure, the mean of 1 set was modified and the mean of the other set remained unchanged. We predicted and found that the resultant…
Contrast and accentuation effects in category learning
This study examines the accentuation of perceived intercategory differences. In Experiment 1, 2 sets of trait adjectives were presented--a neutral set and a set of either favorable traits or unfavorable traits. Ss estimated the mean favorability of each set. The mean favorability of the neutral set was then increased or decreased by adding new traits. As predicted, the estimated mean favorability of the neutral set changed more when the set becam…
Accentuation effects and illusory change in exemplar‐based category learning
Examined the hypothesis that information enhancing category differences receives greater weight in estimates of category means than information that reduces such differences. In the first experiment, subjects estimated the cumulative means of test scores of two groups of students. The experimental manipulation involved a gradual shift of the true mean of one group either towards or away from the true mean of the other group. As predicted, changes…
On the Overestimation of Between-group Differences
The overestimation of between-group differences is a central characteristic of social stereotyping. The present review focuses on exemplar-based category learning. Evidence is presented for the assumptions that: (a) contrast effects need to be distinguished from accentuation effects; (b) both effects are general cognitive–perceptual phenomena; and (c) they affect stereotype formation as well as stereotype change. The implications of the overestim…
Developmental expectations for the self and most other people: Age grading in three functions of social comparison
This study focused on beliefs about one's own compared with other people's development in adulthood. Young, middle-aged, and old adults rated person-descriptive attributes with respect to developmental change throughout adulthood for the self and other people, controllability for self and other, desirability, degree of self-descriptiveness, relevance as a developmental goal, and typical age-timing of attribute as developmental goal. Various aspec…
Social categorization and the truly false consensus effect
The false consensus effect involves adequate inductive reasoning and egocentric biases. To detect truly false consensus effects (TFCEs), we correlated item endorsements with the differences between estimated and actual consensus within Ss. In Experiment 1, Ss overgeneralized from themselves to gender in-groups and to the overall population, but not to gender out-groups. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated intuitive understanding of consensus bias. A…
The truly false consensus effect: An ineradicable and egocentric bias in social perception
Consensus bias is the overuse of self-related knowledge in estimating the prevalence of attributes in a population. The bias seems statistically appropriate (Dawes, 1989), but according to the egocentrism hypothesis, it merely mimics normative inductive reasoning. In Experiment 1, Ss made population estimates for agreement with each of 40 personality inventory statements. Even Ss who had been educated about the consensus bias, or had received fee…
Memory-based judgments about multiple categories: A revision and extension of Tajfel's accentuation theory
Accentuation theory states that the classification of stimuli produces encoding biases. Contrast effects enhance intercategory differences; assimilation effects enhance intracategory similarities. Do these biases affect the retrieval of stimuli distributed across many categories? The calendar superimposes arbitrary intermonth boundaries on day-to-day variations in temperature. In Experiment 1, Ss estimated the average temperatures of 48 days. Dif…
Perceiving Middle-Aged Adults: Effects of Stereotype-Congruent and Incongruent Information
Normative beliefs about mid-life involve stereotypic expectations about age-appropriate development and behavior. This study examined the effects of violations of the stereotypic clock on interpersonal judgments. Each subject read descriptions of persons who, given their position in life, appeared to be 30, 45, or 60 years old. In the experimental condition but not in the control condition, stereotypic expectations about mid-life were activated b…
Probabilistic National Stereotypes
A stereotype of a group can be expressed by the estimated percentage of members that possess certain personality attributes (Brigham, 1971). In a multi-group design, the properties of the percentage measure were examined, and three common assumptions about stereotypes were supported. First, there was high consensus among American and Italian raters regarding the attributes of Americans, Italians, English, and Germans. Second, the perceived typica…
Personal beliefs and cultural stereotypes about racial characteristics
Social stereotypes may be expressed as personal beliefs about the characteristics of a group or as beliefs about the predominant cultural view of a group. In a study with a full intergroup design. Black and White participants rated Black and White racial groups. Results supported 3 sets of predictions derived from a projection model of stereotyping. First, participants' personal beliefs predicted their ratings of cultural stereotypes even when th…
On the Perception of Social Consensus
Enhancement Bias in Descriptions of Self and Others
Self-enhancement bias is the tendency to describe oneself more positively than a normative criterion would predict. This article reviews the common-rater and common-target paradigms for the assessment of enhancement bias and proposes a social-normative paradigm as an alternative. In this paradigm, enhancement bias is conceptualized as an egocentric pattern of discrepancies between self-ratings and relevant social norms. Correlations between a per…
Idiographic Self-Evaluation and Bias
Liking persons versus liking groups: A dual-process hypothesis
Most research on liking of persons and groups has been conducted within separate paradigms, but the implicit assumption has been that the same processes govern judgments of liking or disliking regardless of the nature of the target. Departing from this assumption, we suggest a dual-process hypothesis according to which people base their liking of a target person primarily on the desirability of the person's characteristics, whereas they base thei…
Null hypothesis significance testing: On the survival of a flawed method
Null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) is the researcher's workhorse for making inductive inferences. This method has often been challenged, has occasionally been defended, and has persistently been used through most of the history of scientific psychology. This article reviews both the criticisms of NHST and the arguments brought to its defense. The review shows that the criticisms address the logical validity of inferences arising from NHS…
Bayes rules
Postmodern parlor games
Bayes rules
Postmodern parlor games
Social Categorization Moderates Social Projection
Unskilled, unaware, or both? The better-than-average heuristic and statistical regression predict errors in estimates of own performance
People who score low on a performance test overestimate their own performance relative to others, whereas high scorers slightly underestimate their own performance. J. Kruger and D. Dunning (1999) attributed these asymmetric errors to differences in metacognitive skill. A replication study showed no evidence for mediation effects for any of several candidate variables. Asymmetric errors were expected because of statistical regression and the gene…
Does High Self-Esteem Cause Better Performance, Interpersonal Success, Happiness, or Healthier Lifestyles?
Self-esteem has become a household word. Teachers, parents, therapists, and others have focused efforts on boosting self-esteem, on the assumption that high self-esteem will cause many positive outcomes and benefits—an assumption that is critically evaluated in this review. Appraisal of the effects of self-esteem is complicated by several factors. Because many people with high self-esteem exaggerate their successes and good traits, we emphasize o…
Two Egocentric Sources of the Decision to Vote: The Voter's Illusion and the Belief in Personal Relevance
The decision to vote in a national election requires a choice between serving a social good and satisfying one's self‐interest. Viewed as a cooperative response in a social dilemma, casting a vote seems irrational because it cannot have a discernible effect on the electoral outcome. The findings of two studies with undergraduate samples suggest that some people vote not because they set aside self‐interest, but because they expect their own behav…
Psychology (76 works) · Social Psychology (44 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (36 works) · Cognitive psychology (26 works) · Computer Science (23 works) · Social Psychology (22 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Perception (16 works) · Psychoanalysis (16 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (15 works)