Jon K Maner
Biographic Data
| ID | 209746 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jon K Maner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jon K |
| FAMILY NAME | Maner |
| SIGNATURE | MANER J K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Florida State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6534-3341 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 86 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 648 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 86 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Fundamental evolved motives meet environmental threats and opportunities
Shorter Goals for the Faster Life: Childhood Unpredictability Is Associated With Shorter Motivational Time Horizons
Models of adaptive calibration provide an overarching theoretical framework for understanding the developmental roots of psychological and behavioral outcomes in adulthood. An adaptive calibration framework was used to examine an important dimension of motivation: goal timing. Across two studies, we saw mixed support for the hypothesis that unpredictability experienced in childhood would be negatively associated with the time horizons people use …
The Role of Political Partisanship and Moral Beliefs in Leadership Selection
What roles do political partisanship and moral beliefs play in people’s support for particular leaders? The current studies suggest that people with politically conservative views may support dominant leaders (those who use assertiveness, formal authority, and intimidation to influence others) because such leaders are viewed as likely to share conservatives’ moral priorities. Compared to liberals, conservatives reported higher prioritization of g…
The evolved psychology of mate preferences: Sexual desire underlies the prioritization of attractiveness in long-term partners
Experimentally manipulated anger activates implicit cognitions about social hierarchy
377) provide evidence linking anger to the psychology of social hierarchy. The experiments demonstrate that the experience of anger increases the psychological accessibility of implicit cognitions related to social hierarchy: compared to participants in a control condition, participants in an anger-priming condition completed word stems with significantly more hierarchy-related words. We found little support for sex differences in the effect of a…
Lifting Me Up or Tearing You Down? The Role of Prestige and Dominance in Benign Versus Malicious Envy
Dominance and prestige are two strategies people use to regulate their social rank within group hierarchies. Despite a growing literature on dominance- and prestige-oriented leaders, little is known about how those strategies operate among people lower in social rank. Four studies tested the hypothesis that, among subordinates, dominance and prestige are associated with high levels of malicious and benign envy, respectively. Individual difference…
Individual differences in spite predict costly third‐party punishment
OBJECTIVE: Spiteful behaviors are those aimed at inflicting harm on another person while also incurring a cost to the self. Although spite sometimes reflects destructive and socially undesirable behaviors including aggression, the current work sought to examine a potentially socially beneficial aspect of spite: engagement in costly punishment for selfish behavior. METHOD: Four studies used a costly third-party punishment task and measured individ…
Demographic predictors of internalized weight stigma in a diverse sample of U.S. adults
Mortality risk predicts global, local, and individual patterns of human reproduction
The association between extrinsic mortality risk and reproductive outcomes, suggested by life history theory and previously supported by both animal and human data, is now supported by novel evidence in humans. Social and health policies governing human reproduction, whether they seek to boost or constrain fertility, may benefit from incorporating a focus on mortality risk
Bless her heart: Gossip phrased with concern provides advantages in female intrasexual competition
Sexual Desire is not Partner-Specific: Evidence for a Positive Association Between Desire for One’s Romantic Partner and Desire for Alternative Partners
Life History Strategies, Prestige, and Dominance: An Evolutionary Developmental View of Social Hierarchy
Although evidence documents the use of prestige and dominance for navigating group hierarchies, little is known about factors that explain people’s orientation toward prestige versus dominance. The current research applied a life history perspective to assess the role life history strategies play in prestige and dominance. Four studies document associations between adopting a slow life history strategy and having an orientation toward prestige. W…
Banding together to avoid exploitation: Dominant (but not prestige-based) leaders motivate collective moral opposition from followers
Although dominance is a common strategy for attaining high social rank, it often entails exploitative behavior, bringing leaders into conflict with followers. Anthropological work suggests that a long evolutionary history of such conflict has set the stage for moral systems designed to reduce exploitation from powerful people. Here we establish links between dominance (and prestige) and moral leadership, reporting three studies (total N = 1246) d…
A Slim Majority: The Influence of Sex Ratio on Women’s Body Dissatisfaction and Weight Loss Motivations
Actor and partner power are distinct and have differential effects on social behavior
1,787) tested whether actor and partner power independently predicted behavioral inhibition (expressive suppression) and communal behavior (prioritization of partners' needs) within close relationships, including during couples' daily life (Study 1), lab-based social interactions (Studies 1-5; 1,012 dyadic interactions), and general responses during conflict (Studies 5 and 6). Actor power was negatively associated with behavioral inhibition, indi…
Pathogen threat and intergroup prejudice using the minimal group paradigm: Evidence from a registered report
Prevalence and predictors of “nesting”: Solutions to adaptive challenges faced during pregnancy
A qualitative analysis of people’s experiences with weight-based discrimination
OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to describe people's day-to-day experiences with weight-based discrimination and to distill themes that shed new light on this phenomenon. DESIGN: completed a semi-structured interview. RESULTS: Primary types of interpersonal weight-based discrimination included offensive comments, negative assumptions, social rejection, and unwanted attention or bullying. Participants also encountered environmental sources of…
Two Ways to Stay at the Top: Prestige and Dominance Are Both Viable Strategies for Gaining and Maintaining Social Rank Over Time
The dual-strategies theory of social rank proposes that both dominance and prestige are effective strategies for gaining social rank (i.e., the capacity for influence) in groups. However, the only existing longitudinal investigation of these strategies suggests that, among undergraduate students, only prestige allows people to maintain social rank over time. The current study provides a longitudinal test of dominance and prestige in a context whe…
Coping with weight discrimination: Findings from a qualitative study
Abandon Ship or Stay on Board: Threats to Power Influence Group Adherence
How do people respond when their group’s power is threatened? Four studies suggest that threats to group power lead people to adhere to and invest in their group. When a personally important group’s power was threatened, people psychologically adhered to the group (Studies 1a and 1b). This adherence occurred among people who were high (but not low) in group identification (Study 2). Adherence to the group was associated with behaviors aimed at pr…
The behavioral ecology of moral dilemmas: Childhood unpredictability, but not harshness, predicts less deontological and utilitarian responding
1,503) supported the hypothesis that childhood unpredictability, but not harshness, would be associated with fewer decisions to reject harm (consistent with deontological ethics) and to maximize overall outcomes (consistent with utilitarian ethics). These associations were not moderated by perceptions of current environmental unpredictability (Studies 3a and 3b) and were robust to potential confounds (religiosity, political conservativism, Big 5 …
Psychological and social functioning are associated with reports of perceived weight discrimination across eight years
The precautious nature of prestige: When leaders are hypervigilant to subtle signs of social disapproval
Some group leaders exhibit hypervigilance to signs of social disapproval and that vigilance manifests at basic levels of social information processing such as visual attention and face perception. The current research tests hypotheses about when, why, and in whom such vigilance occurs. Across 2 pilot studies and 5 experiments (N = 1,667) we find that, when their social relationships are at stake, prestige-oriented leaders (but not dominance-orien…
Interactive Effects of Tactile Warmth and Ambient Temperature on the Search for Social Affiliation
Laboratory studies have linked variability in temperature to the psychology of social affiliation. In colder ambient environments, for example, people report greater loneliness, and they pursue both physical warmth and social affiliation (i.e., social warmth). Here, a field experiment tested whether tactile warmth eliminates the effect of colder ambient temperatures on desires for social affiliation. Consistent with previous research, people expr…
"Does social exclusion motivate interpersonal reconnection? Resolving the "porcupine problem
Evidence from 6 experiments supports the social reconnection hypothesis, which posits that the experience of social exclusion increases the motivation to forge social bonds with new sources of potential affiliation. Threat of social exclusion led participants to express greater interest in making new friends, to increase their desire to work with others, to form more positive impressions of novel social targets, and to assign greater rewards to n…
Self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source: Willpower is more than a metaphor
The present work suggests that self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source. Laboratory tests of self-control (i.e., the Stroop task, thought suppression, emotion regulation, attention control) and of social behaviors (i.e., helping behavior, coping with thoughts of death, stifling prejudice during an interracial interaction) showed that (a) acts of self-control reduced blood glucose levels, (b) low levels of blood glucose after an i…
The Good-Subject Effect: Investigating Participant Demand Characteristics
Although researchers are often concerned with the presence of participant demand, few have directly examined effects of demand on participant behavior. Before beginning the present study, a confederate informed participants (N = 100) of the study's purported hypothesis. Participants then performed a laboratory task designed to evaluate the extent to which they would respond in ways that may confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis of the study. The a…
Functional projection: How fundamental social motives can bias interpersonal perception
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…
Can't take my eyes off you: Attentional adhesion to mates and rivals
In 3 experiments, mating primes interacted with functionally relevant individual differences to guide basic, lower order social perception. A visual cuing method assessed biases in attentional adhesion--a tendency to have one's attention captured by particular social stimuli. Mate-search primes increased attentional adhesion to physically attractive members of the opposite sex (potential mates) among participants with an unrestricted sociosexual …
Social exclusion and early-stage interpersonal perception: Selective attention to signs of acceptance
Social exclusion can thwart people's powerful need for social belonging. Whereas prior studies have focused primarily on how social exclusion influences complex and cognitively downstream social outcomes (e.g., memory, overt social judgments and behavior), the current research examined basic, early-in-the-cognitive-stream consequences of exclusion. Across 4 experiments, the threat of exclusion increased selective attention to smiling faces, refle…
The implicit cognition of relationship maintenance: Inattention to attractive alternatives
Sexually Selective Cognition: Beauty Captures the Mind of the Beholder
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: Threat cues shape the psychological boundary between “us” and “them
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…
Into the wild: Field research can increase both replicability and real-world impact
The essential tension between leadership and power: When leaders sacrifice group goals for the sake of self-interest
Throughout human history, leaders have been responsible for helping groups attain important goals. Ideally, leaders use their power to steer groups toward desired outcomes. However, leaders can also use their power in the service of self-interest rather than effective leadership. Five experiments identified factors within both the person and the social context that determine whether leaders wield their power to promote group goals versus self-int…
Does self-threat promote social connection? The role of self-esteem and contingencies of self-worth
Six studies examined the social motivations of people with high self-esteem (HSE) and low self-esteem (LSE) following a threat to a domain of contingent self-worth. Whether people desired social contact following self-threat depended on an interaction between an individual's trait self-esteem and contingencies of self-worth. HSE participants who strongly based self-worth on appearance sought to connect with close others following a threat to thei…
Intrasexual vigilance: The implicit cognition of romantic rivalry
Four experiments tested the hypothesis that concerns about infidelity would lead people, particularly those displaying high chronic levels of romantic jealousy, to display a functionally coordinated set of implicit cognitive biases aimed at vigilantly processing attractive romantic rivals. Priming concerns about infidelity led people with high levels of chronic jealousy (but not those low in chronic jealousy) to attend vigilantly to physically at…
Warmth, spatial proximity, and social attachment: The embodied perception of a social metaphor
Altruism and egoism: Prosocial motivations for helping depend on relationship context
Findings from the current study suggest that the link between helping and empathic concern—a hypothesized motivator of altruistic behavior—may be more pronounced in the context of kinship relationships than among strangers. Participants expressed their willingness to help a kin‐member or stranger in specific need situations. Putative mediators of helping (empathic concern, general negative affect, perceptions of oneness) were measured. Empathic c…
Male risk-taking as a context-sensitive signaling device
Overperceiving disease cues: The basic cognition of the behavioral immune system
The behavioral immune system is designed to promote the detection and avoidance of potential sources of disease. Whereas previous studies of the behavioral immune system have provided insight into the types of heuristic cues used to identify disease carriers, the present research provides an understanding of the basic psychological processes involved in the detection of those cues. Across 4 studies, feeling vulnerable to disease, whether that fee…
Attentional and evaluative biases help people maintain relationships by avoiding infidelity
Two longitudinal studies of 233 newlywed couples suggest that automatic attentional and evaluative biases regarding attractive relationship alternatives can help people maintain relationships by avoiding infidelity. Both studies assessed participants' tendency to automatically disengage attention from photos of attractive, opposite sex individuals; one study assessed participants' tendency to devalue those individuals by comparing their attractiv…
Competitive reputation manipulation: Women strategically transmit social information about romantic rivals
Divide and conquer: When and why leaders undermine the cohesive fabric of their group
Cohesion, cooperation, and the formation of positive bonds among group members are key processes that facilitate effective group functioning. Consequently, group leaders usually work to enhance the positive social bonds among group members to facilitate cooperation and group cohesion. The present research suggests, however, that leaders sometimes are motivated to generate divisions--not cooperation--among their subordinates. Although such divisio…
Sexual overperception: Power, mating motives, and biases in social judgment
Results from 4 experiments suggest that power motivates heightened perceptions and expectations of sexual interest from subordinates. Having power over a member of the opposite sex activated sexual concepts that persisted across a temporal delay, indicating the activation of a mating goal (Study 1). Having power increased participants' expectations of sexual interest from a subordinate (Study 2) but only when a mating goal was attainable (i.e., w…
You do not only hurt the one you love: Self-protective responses to attractive relationship alternatives
On keeping your enemies close: Powerful leaders seek proximity to ingroup power threats
Throughout history, humans have had to detect and deflect myriad threats from their social and physical environment in order to survive and flourish. When people detect a threat, the most common response is avoidance. In the present research, the authors provide evidence that ingroup power threats elicit a very different response. Three experiments supported the hypothesis that dominant leaders seek proximity to ingroup members who pose a threat …
Embodiment, evolution, and social cognition: An integrative framework
This paper integrates concepts from evolutionary and embodied approaches to psychology to generate a theoretical framework for understanding social cognition. We begin with the claim that cognition evolved to facilitate the ability to plan and execute action in the world. This evolution was shaped by the adaptive challenges faced by humans throughout their evolutionary history (e.g., self protection, mate selection, navigating status hierarchies,…
Differentiating the effects of self-control and self-esteem on reactions to mortality salience
The Effects of Perspective Taking on Motivations for Helping: Still No Evidence for Altruism
To investigate the existence of true altruism, the authors assessed the link between empathic concern and helping by (a) employing an experimental perspective-taking paradigm used previously to demonstrate empathy-associated helping and (b) assessing the empathy-helping relationship while controlling for a range of relevant, well-measured nonaltruistic motivations. Consistent with previous research, the authors found a significant zero-order rela…
Sexually Selective Cognition: Beauty Captures the Mind of the Beholder
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: How fundamental social motives can bias interpersonal perception
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): From Out-Group Homogeneity to Out-Group Heterogeneity
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 …
Differentiating the effects of self-control and self-esteem on reactions to mortality salience
Adaptive attentional attunement: Evidence for mating-related perceptual bias
Altruism and egoism: Prosocial motivations for helping depend on relationship context
Findings from the current study suggest that the link between helping and empathic concern—a hypothesized motivator of altruistic behavior—may be more pronounced in the context of kinship relationships than among strangers. Participants expressed their willingness to help a kin‐member or stranger in specific need situations. Putative mediators of helping (empathic concern, general negative affect, perceptions of oneness) were measured. Empathic c…
Self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source: Willpower is more than a metaphor
The present work suggests that self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source. Laboratory tests of self-control (i.e., the Stroop task, thought suppression, emotion regulation, attention control) and of social behaviors (i.e., helping behavior, coping with thoughts of death, stifling prejudice during an interracial interaction) showed that (a) acts of self-control reduced blood glucose levels, (b) low levels of blood glucose after an i…
Can't take my eyes off you: Attentional adhesion to mates and rivals
In 3 experiments, mating primes interacted with functionally relevant individual differences to guide basic, lower order social perception. A visual cuing method assessed biases in attentional adhesion--a tendency to have one's attention captured by particular social stimuli. Mate-search primes increased attentional adhesion to physically attractive members of the opposite sex (potential mates) among participants with an unrestricted sociosexual …
"Does social exclusion motivate interpersonal reconnection? Resolving the "porcupine problem
Evidence from 6 experiments supports the social reconnection hypothesis, which posits that the experience of social exclusion increases the motivation to forge social bonds with new sources of potential affiliation. Threat of social exclusion led participants to express greater interest in making new friends, to increase their desire to work with others, to form more positive impressions of novel social targets, and to assign greater rewards to n…
Automatic inattention to attractive alternatives: The evolved psychology of relationship maintenance
Risk-taking as a situationally sensitive male mating strategy
Mortality Salience Increases Adherence to Salient Norms and Values
Four studies indicate that mortality salience increases adherence to social norms and values, but only when cultural norms and values are salient. In Study 1, mortality salience coupled with a reminder about cultural values of egalitarianism reduced prejudice toward Blacks among non-Black participants. In Studies 2 through 4, a mortality salience induction (e.g., walking through a cemetery) increased self-reported and actual helping behavior only…
Depletion Makes the Heart Grow Less Helpful: Helping as a Function of Self-Regulatory Energy and Genetic Relatedness
Often people are faced with conflict between prosocial motivations for helping and selfish impulses that favor not helping. Three studies tested the hypothesis that self-regulation is useful for managing such motivational conflicts. In each study, depleted self-regulatory energy reduced willingness to help others. Participants who broke a habit, relative to participants who followed a habit, later reported reduced willingness to help in hypotheti…
The Good-Subject Effect: Investigating Participant Demand Characteristics
Although researchers are often concerned with the presence of participant demand, few have directly examined effects of demand on participant behavior. Before beginning the present study, a confederate informed participants (N = 100) of the study's purported hypothesis. Participants then performed a laboratory task designed to evaluate the extent to which they would respond in ways that may confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis of the study. The a…
The implicit cognition of relationship maintenance: Inattention to attractive alternatives
A sharp eye for her SOI: Perception and misperception of female sociosexuality at zero acquaintance
Embodied social cognition: Bodies, emotions, and blackberries
Embodiment, evolution, and social cognition: An integrative framework
This paper integrates concepts from evolutionary and embodied approaches to psychology to generate a theoretical framework for understanding social cognition. We begin with the claim that cognition evolved to facilitate the ability to plan and execute action in the world. This evolution was shaped by the adaptive challenges faced by humans throughout their evolutionary history (e.g., self protection, mate selection, navigating status hierarchies,…
Male risk-taking as a context-sensitive signaling device
Intrasexual vigilance: The implicit cognition of romantic rivalry
Four experiments tested the hypothesis that concerns about infidelity would lead people, particularly those displaying high chronic levels of romantic jealousy, to display a functionally coordinated set of implicit cognitive biases aimed at vigilantly processing attractive romantic rivals. Priming concerns about infidelity led people with high levels of chronic jealousy (but not those low in chronic jealousy) to attend vigilantly to physically at…
Does self-threat promote social connection? The role of self-esteem and contingencies of self-worth
Six studies examined the social motivations of people with high self-esteem (HSE) and low self-esteem (LSE) following a threat to a domain of contingent self-worth. Whether people desired social contact following self-threat depended on an interaction between an individual's trait self-esteem and contingencies of self-worth. HSE participants who strongly based self-worth on appearance sought to connect with close others following a threat to thei…
Social exclusion and early-stage interpersonal perception: Selective attention to signs of acceptance
Social exclusion can thwart people's powerful need for social belonging. Whereas prior studies have focused primarily on how social exclusion influences complex and cognitively downstream social outcomes (e.g., memory, overt social judgments and behavior), the current research examined basic, early-in-the-cognitive-stream consequences of exclusion. Across 4 experiments, the threat of exclusion increased selective attention to smiling faces, refle…
A thin slice of violence: Distinguishing violent from nonviolent sex offenders at a glance
More Memory Bang for the Attentional Buck: Self-Protection Goals Enhance Encoding Efficiency for Potentially Threatening Males
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…
Psychology (83 works) · Social Psychology (75 works) · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior (46 works) · Developmental psychology (41 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (31 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (23 works) · Social Psychology (22 works) · Cognitive psychology (21 works) · Cognition (20 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (18 works)