Michael J Bernstein
Biographic Data
| ID | 759222 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael J Bernstein |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael J |
| FAMILY NAME | Bernstein |
| SIGNATURE | BERNSTEIN M J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pennsylvania State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8083-9839 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 341 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 53 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Ethical playgrounds
In this article, we present the TechEthos Game: Ages of Technology Impacts , a serious game rooted in the EU-funded Horizon 2020 project TechEthos. This game is built to support public reflection and perspectives on the social and ethical issues of new and emerging technologies, and to surface and collect participants’ awareness, attitudes, and values towards specific technology families. The TechEthos Game offers an immersive exploration of the …
Growing through transformation pains
Current frameworks for sustainability competences give insufficient attention to competencies for holding and processing difficult emotions such as ecological grief and eco-anxiety. This is despite emotional distress caused by environmental crises becoming a rapidly growing field of investigation and the ability to cope with such emotions an increasingly apparent need within sustainability research, education, and practice communities. To effecti…
Reaping what we sow
In many transdisciplinary research settings, a lack of attention to the values underpinning project aims can inhibit stakeholder engagement and ultimately slow or undermine project outcomes. As a research collective (The Careoperative), we have developed a set of four shared values through a facilitated visioning process, as central to the way we work together: care, reflexivity, inclusivity, and collectivity. In this paper, we explore the implic…
Promoting the Emotional Well-Being of Undergraduate Students by Practicing the Examen Meditation
Nonlinear relationships between eye gaze and recognition accuracy for ethnic ingroup and outgroup faces
Researchers have used eye-tracking measures to explore the relationship between face encoding and recognition, including the impact of ethnicity on this relationship. Previous studies offer a variety of conflicting conclusions. This confusion may stem from misestimation of the relationship between encoding and recognition. First, most previous models fail to account for the structure of eye-tracking data, potentially falling prey to Simpson's par…
Black individuals’ suspicion of Whites’ motives negatively predicts expected efficacy with White social partners
Results further suggest suspicion increases expected threat (i.e., anticipated uncertainty/anxiety), which undermines Black individuals' confidence in interactions with White partners. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Governing beyond the project
This article analyses how a recent idiom of innovation governance, 'responsible innovation', is enacted in practice, how this shapes innovation processes, and what aspects of innovation are left untouched. Within this idiom, funders typically focus on one point in an innovation system: researchers in projects. However, the more transformational aspirations of responsible innovation are circumscribed by this context. Adopting a mode of critique th…
From speculation to reality
Various approaches have emerged over the last several decades to meet the challenges and complexities of anticipating and responding to the potential impacts of emerging technologies. Although many of the existing approaches share similarities, they each have shortfalls. This paper takes as the object of its study Anticipatory Ethics for Emerging Technologies (ATE) to technology assessment, given that it was formatted to address many of the priva…
The European Commission’s Green Deal is an opportunity to rethink harmful practices of research and innovation policy
The European Union’s Green Deal and associated policies, aspiring to long-term environmental sustainability, now require economic activities to ‘do no significant harm’ to EU environmental objectives. The way the European Commission is enacting the do no significant harm principle relies on quantitative tools that try to identify harm and adjudicate its significance. A reliance on established technical approaches to assessing such questions ignor…
National identity predicts public health support during a global pandemic
Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and stricter hygiene) and endorsed public policy interventions (e.g., closing bars and restaurants) during …
Facing social exclusion
Social exclusion influences how expressions are perceived and the tendency of the perceiver to mimic them. However, less is known about social exclusion’s effect on one’s own facial expressions. The aim of the present study was to identify the effects of social exclusion on Duchenne smiling behaviour, defined as activity of both zygomaticus major and the orbicularis oculi muscles. Utilising a within-subject’s design, participants took part in the…
Predicting attitudinal and behavioral responses to Covid-19 pandemic using machine learning
At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multi-national data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social…
Challenges in the implementation of responsible research and innovation across Horizon 2020
In the last decade, the European Commission (EC) developed an ambitious strategy to promote RRI across the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (H2020). This effort resulted in a significant number of European-funded projects that substantially expanded the available knowledge of the theory, methods and implementation of RRI. However, various evaluations and studies revealed a limited and diffuse implementation of the conc…
The social lab as a method for experimental engagement in participatory research
How does the Social Lab methodology support participatory research? This paper provides an evidence-based analysis of experiences of 19 implemented Social Labs applying experiential learning cycles on the question of how to induce Responsible Research and Innovation in the Horizon2020 research funding scheme of the European Commission and beyond. It looks at the potentials of Social Labs to allow participation in research and innovation addressin…
Evaluating the relationships between sexual orientation, weight-related teasing, weight bias internalization, and binge eating
Despite the prevalence and impact of binge eating disorder (BED) symptoms among sexual minority individuals, few studies have examined factors that may be responsible for sexual orientation-based disparities in BED symptoms. We examined the relationship of sexual minority status to BED symptoms. Specifically, we hypothesized an indirect effect of sexual minority status on BED symptoms such that sexual minority individuals experienced more frequen…
The process to find a process for governance
Social exclusion enhances affiliative signaling
Reciprocating smiles is important for maintaining social bonds as it both signals affiliative intent and elicits affiliative responses. Feelings of social exclusion may increase mimicry as a means to regulate affiliative bonds with others. In this study, we examined whether feelings of exclusion lead people to selectively reciprocate the facial expressions of more affiliative-looking people. Participants first wrote about either a time they were …
Within‐person effects of inclusion and exclusion on well‐being in daily life
Whether exclusion hurts or inclusion feels good is debated within social psychology, and research designs often compare people who are excluded from those who are included. Here, we examined how participants differ when they are excluded or included relative to when they are not engaging in social interactions. Participants completed an ecological momentary assessment study (7 days, six measures a day). Participants indicated if they were having …
Creating leadership collectives for sustainability transformations
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-021-00909-y
It’s their fault
This research examined how people explain major outcomes of political consequence (e.g., economic growth, rising inequality). We argue that people attribute positive outcomes more and negative outcomes less to their own political party than to an opposing party. We conducted two studies, one before the 2016 U.S. presidential election ( N = 244) and another before the 2020 election ( N = 249 registered voters), that examined attributions across a …
Motives matter
Whether with hypothetical, past, or present White educators, feeling that instructors have primarily external race-based motives undermined instructor trust and classroom belonging. In all studies, the relationship between PERM and classroom belonging was mediated by instructor (mis)trust. The results provide evidence that motives viewed to be primarily external undermine instructional relationships for SOC. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA…
The future of aging in smart environments
The population of the United States is getting older. Unlike other countries with aging populations, however, the state of aging in the United States is in crisis. Healthcare and social reforms will likely be necessary in the coming decades to address structural issues with retirement, socio-economic inequality, and the high cost of healthcare. In the meantime, AI-enabled smart technologies and environments are being rapidly developed to assist o…
Stress-responses to ostracism
Ostracism is associated with poor outcomes, but it is unclear if online versus in-person ostracism elicits divergent psychological and physiological responses. Participants ( N = 54) were randomly assigned to online or in-person ostracism, and provided pre- and post-ostracism measures of affect, self-esteem, self-feelings, and salivary cortisol. No significant changes in negative affect, self-esteem, or self-feelings emerged, nor were there diffe…
Good Cop, Bad Cop
The current work investigates race-based biases in conceptualization of the facial appearance of police. We employ a reverse correlation procedure to demonstrate that Black Americans, relative to White Americans, conceptualize police officers’ faces as more negative, less positive, and more dominant. We further find that these differential representations have implications for interactions with police. When naïve participants (of various races) v…
The affiliative consequences of same-race and cross-race mimicry
Few studies have replicated and extended the classic mimicry → liking effect. The present research sought to (a) replicate the affiliative consequences of mimicry; (b) test whether the affiliative consequences hold in a context where mimicry may not be normative (i.e., cross-race interactions); and (c) investigate how excluded individuals respond to same- versus cross-race mimicry and non-mimicry. Participants wrote about a control topic or socia…
Investigating Variation in Replicability
Although replication is a central tenet of science, direct replications are rare in psychology. This research tested variation in the replicability of 13 classic and contemporary effects across 36 independent samples totaling 6,344 participants. In the aggregate, 10 effects replicated consistently. One effect – imagined contact reducing prejudice – showed weak support for replicability. And two effects – flag priming influencing conservatism and …
Many Labs 2
We conducted preregistered replications of 28 classic and contemporary published findings, with protocols that were peer reviewed in advance, to examine variation in effect magnitudes across samples and settings. Each protocol was administered to approximately half of 125 samples that comprised 15,305 participants from 36 countries and territories. Using the conventional criterion of statistical significance ( p < .05), we found that 15 (54%) of …
Many Labs 3
Social interactions in daily life
It is well established that individuals who engage in more positive social interactions report a broad array of benefit relative to those with fewer positive social interactions. Yet less is known about how, within individuals, naturally occurring social interactions in daily life relate to momentary indicators of health (e.g., mood, psychological, and physiological stress). The current study used ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to examine …
A preference for genuine smiles following social exclusion
Commentaries and Rejoinder on
While direct replications such as the “Many Labs” project are extremely valuable in testing the reliability of published findings across laboratories, they reflect the common reliance in psychology on single vignettes or stimuli, which limits the scope of the conclusions that can be reached. New experimental tools and statistical techniques make it easier to routinely sample stimuli, and to appropriately treat them as random factors. We encourage…
Creating leadership collectives for sustainability transformations
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-021-00909-y
Is Obama's Win a Gain for Blacks
Many have questioned what Barack Obama's victory in the 2008 presidential election means for prejudice and intergroup relations in the United States. In this study, we examined both explicit and implicit prejudice toward African Americans prior to and immediately following the election of the first African American to the nation's highest office. Results indicated that implicit prejudice (as measured by an IAT) decreased following Obama's victory…
Race-based biases in judgments of social pain
Social cues establish expectations of rejection and affect the response to being rejected
Violating one’s expectations of inclusion may influence the pain of rejection. This is supported by neurological evidence on expectation violation processing (Somerville, Heatherton, & Kelley, 2006). We asked: Can an expectation of a specific social outcome affect how it feels to be rejected or included? We tested the premise that expectations for the outcome of an interaction are derived from social information. Participants were either liked or…
The process to find a process for governance
It’s their fault
This research examined how people explain major outcomes of political consequence (e.g., economic growth, rising inequality). We argue that people attribute positive outcomes more and negative outcomes less to their own political party than to an opposing party. We conducted two studies, one before the 2016 U.S. presidential election ( N = 244) and another before the 2020 election ( N = 249 registered voters), that examined attributions across a …
Social exclusion and stereotyping
Exclusion triggers a desire to re-capture connections with others. To facilitate this goal, excluded individuals typically process social information especially carefully. One implication of this is that exclusion may foster judgments of others that are reliant on a careful consideration of their idiosyncratic behaviors rather than on more superficial features. We predicted, therefore, that excluded individuals should individuate more and stereot…
From speculation to reality
Various approaches have emerged over the last several decades to meet the challenges and complexities of anticipating and responding to the potential impacts of emerging technologies. Although many of the existing approaches share similarities, they each have shortfalls. This paper takes as the object of its study Anticipatory Ethics for Emerging Technologies (ATE) to technology assessment, given that it was formatted to address many of the priva…
You’re such a pain!”
Maintaining social relationships with others is essential for survival, but not all relationships are beneficial. Individuals exclude nonbeneficial burdensome group members, those who encumber group success. We investigated whether feeling psychological pain is a mechanism that prompts assessment of social threats―potentially putting the “brakes” on burdensome (nonbeneficial) relationships. Specifically, we investigated if interacting with burden…
Rejecting another pains the self
Seeing wrath from the top (through stratified lenses)
Black racial phenotypicality shapes social pain and support judgments
Growing through transformation pains
Current frameworks for sustainability competences give insufficient attention to competencies for holding and processing difficult emotions such as ecological grief and eco-anxiety. This is despite emotional distress caused by environmental crises becoming a rapidly growing field of investigation and the ability to cope with such emotions an increasingly apparent need within sustainability research, education, and practice communities. To effecti…
Black individuals’ suspicion of Whites’ motives negatively predicts expected efficacy with White social partners
Results further suggest suspicion increases expected threat (i.e., anticipated uncertainty/anxiety), which undermines Black individuals' confidence in interactions with White partners. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Governing beyond the project
This article analyses how a recent idiom of innovation governance, 'responsible innovation', is enacted in practice, how this shapes innovation processes, and what aspects of innovation are left untouched. Within this idiom, funders typically focus on one point in an innovation system: researchers in projects. However, the more transformational aspirations of responsible innovation are circumscribed by this context. Adopting a mode of critique th…
The European Commission’s Green Deal is an opportunity to rethink harmful practices of research and innovation policy
The European Union’s Green Deal and associated policies, aspiring to long-term environmental sustainability, now require economic activities to ‘do no significant harm’ to EU environmental objectives. The way the European Commission is enacting the do no significant harm principle relies on quantitative tools that try to identify harm and adjudicate its significance. A reliance on established technical approaches to assessing such questions ignor…
Motives matter
Whether with hypothetical, past, or present White educators, feeling that instructors have primarily external race-based motives undermined instructor trust and classroom belonging. In all studies, the relationship between PERM and classroom belonging was mediated by instructor (mis)trust. The results provide evidence that motives viewed to be primarily external undermine instructional relationships for SOC. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA…
The future of aging in smart environments
The population of the United States is getting older. Unlike other countries with aging populations, however, the state of aging in the United States is in crisis. Healthcare and social reforms will likely be necessary in the coming decades to address structural issues with retirement, socio-economic inequality, and the high cost of healthcare. In the meantime, AI-enabled smart technologies and environments are being rapidly developed to assist o…
Experiencing vicarious rejection in the wake of the 2016 presidential election
Presidential elections in the United States pit two (or more) candidates against each other. Voters elect one and reject the others. This work tested the hypothesis that supporters of a losing presidential candidate may experience that defeat as a personal rejection. Before and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, voters reported their current feelings of rejection and social pain, along with potenti…
The Cross-Category Effect
Although the cross-race effect (CRE) is a well-established phenomenon, both perceptual-expertise and social-categorization models have been proposed to explain the effect. The two studies reported here investigated the extent to which categorizing other people as in-group versus out-group members is sufficient to elicit a pattern of face recognition analogous to that of the CRE, even when perceptual expertise with the stimuli is held constant. In…
Adaptive Responses to Social Exclusion
A preference for genuine smiles following social exclusion
The categorization-individuation model
The other-race effect (ORE), or the finding that same-race faces are better recognized than other-race faces, is one of the best replicated phenomena in face recognition. The current article reviews existing evidence and theory and proposes a new theoretical framework for the ORE, which argues that the effect results from a confluence of social categorization, motivated individuation, and perceptual experience. This categorization-individuation m…
Is Obama's Win a Gain for Blacks
Many have questioned what Barack Obama's victory in the 2008 presidential election means for prejudice and intergroup relations in the United States. In this study, we examined both explicit and implicit prejudice toward African Americans prior to and immediately following the election of the first African American to the nation's highest office. Results indicated that implicit prejudice (as measured by an IAT) decreased following Obama's victory…
Easing in
Four experiments demonstrated that perceptual fluency can facilitate categorization of others as ingroup members. In Experiment 1 (replications A, B, and C), White participants were first exposed to a group of White target individuals and later judged whether fluent (repeated) and disfluent (novel) targets were members of a particular ingroup or not. In each replication, fluent targets were categorized as ingroup members more readily than were di…
Seeing wrath from the top (through stratified lenses)
The Cross‐Race Effect and Eyewitness Identification
The Cross‐Race Effect (CRE), whereby same‐race faces are recognized more accurately than cross‐race faces, is a well‐replicated psychological phenomenon with clear social consequences. The area in which its influence is most visible is that of eyewitness misidentification. Since the advent of DNA testing, it has been revealed that scores of people have been wrongly imprisoned for crimes that they did not commit, and cross‐race eyewitness misident…
Rejecting another pains the self
You May Think You’re Right … Young Adults Are More Liberal Than They Realize
Do people have biased perceptions of their political orientation? Based on the link between political conservatism and in-group loyalty, we predicted that people would underestimate their liberalism and that this effect would be more pronounced among political conservatives. Young adults indicated their self-perceived political orientation and completed an objective measure of political orientation, which placed them along a liberal-conservative …
Investigating Variation in Replicability
Although replication is a central tenet of science, direct replications are rare in psychology. This research tested variation in the replicability of 13 classic and contemporary effects across 36 independent samples totaling 6,344 participants. In the aggregate, 10 effects replicated consistently. One effect – imagined contact reducing prejudice – showed weak support for replicability. And two effects – flag priming influencing conservatism and …
Commentaries and Rejoinder on
While direct replications such as the “Many Labs” project are extremely valuable in testing the reliability of published findings across laboratories, they reflect the common reliance in psychology on single vignettes or stimuli, which limits the scope of the conclusions that can be reached. New experimental tools and statistical techniques make it easier to routinely sample stimuli, and to appropriately treat them as random factors. We encourage…
Social exclusion and stereotyping
Exclusion triggers a desire to re-capture connections with others. To facilitate this goal, excluded individuals typically process social information especially carefully. One implication of this is that exclusion may foster judgments of others that are reliant on a careful consideration of their idiosyncratic behaviors rather than on more superficial features. We predicted, therefore, that excluded individuals should individuate more and stereot…
Ingroups and Outgroups
Humans benefit from living in groups, and this results in social organization consisting of ingroups and outgroups. Ingroups are the groups to which individuals both belong and psychologically identify, while outgroups are those to which individuals do not belong or identify. Categorizations based on ingroup–outgroup distinctions have a profound impact on social interactions, including aspects of prejudice, reward allocation, stereotyping, and gr…
Social cues establish expectations of rejection and affect the response to being rejected
Violating one’s expectations of inclusion may influence the pain of rejection. This is supported by neurological evidence on expectation violation processing (Somerville, Heatherton, & Kelley, 2006). We asked: Can an expectation of a specific social outcome affect how it feels to be rejected or included? We tested the premise that expectations for the outcome of an interaction are derived from social information. Participants were either liked or…
Towards an alignment of activities, aspirations and stakeholders for responsible innovation
Governance of technological innovation remains challenged by the dilemma of control. Two divergent responses seek to meet this challenge. The first regulates negative impacts once evidence is gathered. The second precludes dissemination of technologies until enough is known about outcomes. Recognizing limitations of each response, scholars are increasingly exploring responsible innovation (RI), a concept that revolves around dimensions of anticip…
Observe, hypothesize, test, repeat
Many Labs 3
The Face of Suspicion
Because Whites use positivity to conceal bias, people of color may question whether Whites’ positivity is genuine. We predicted that those suspicious of Whites’ motives may mentally represent Whites as less trustworthy and more hostile than those low in suspicion. We tested these predictions using reverse correlation. First, we examined high- and low-suspicion Black participants’ mental representations of Whites using neutrally expressed (Study 1…
The self as a central tenet of our psychology
The self is fundamental to psychology and yet it is as broad as it is foundational. Numerous concepts fall into the examination of the self and has resulted in many reviews of those individual aspects but few of the self as a whole. In this special issue, we offer an avenue for authors to engage in reviews of those such individual aspects to try to draw attention to new and novel approaches to what is an integral component of our psychology
Many Labs 2
We conducted preregistered replications of 28 classic and contemporary published findings, with protocols that were peer reviewed in advance, to examine variation in effect magnitudes across samples and settings. Each protocol was administered to approximately half of 125 samples that comprised 15,305 participants from 36 countries and territories. Using the conventional criterion of statistical significance ( p < .05), we found that 15 (54%) of …
Experiencing vicarious rejection in the wake of the 2016 presidential election
Presidential elections in the United States pit two (or more) candidates against each other. Voters elect one and reject the others. This work tested the hypothesis that supporters of a losing presidential candidate may experience that defeat as a personal rejection. Before and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, voters reported their current feelings of rejection and social pain, along with potenti…
Social interactions in daily life
It is well established that individuals who engage in more positive social interactions report a broad array of benefit relative to those with fewer positive social interactions. Yet less is known about how, within individuals, naturally occurring social interactions in daily life relate to momentary indicators of health (e.g., mood, psychological, and physiological stress). The current study used ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to examine …
Childhood Trauma Affects Stress-Related Interoceptive Accuracy
Early life adversity (ELA) may cause permanent disturbances in brain-body signaling. These disturbances are thought to contribute to physical symptoms and emotional dysregulation in adulthood. The current study investigated the effects of childhood trauma on young adults' interoceptive accuracy as an indicator of brain-body communication that may be dysregulated by ELA. Sixty-six participants completed an online questionnaire followed by a labora…
Mapping Ostrom’s common-pool resource systems coding handbook to the coupled infrastructure systems framework to enable comparative research
In the study of common-pool resource (CPR) governance, frame- works provide a metatheoretical language to describe system states, dynamics, elements, and relationships. The coding manuals which accompany CPR frame- works–in addition to providing guidelines for connecting empirical case work to conceptual variables–define a vocabulary of coding questions. For empirical work, connecting variables and coding questions with framework elements con- tr…
Psychology (40 works) · Social Psychology (35 works) · Social Psychology (24 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (18 works) · Developmental psychology (15 works) · Political science (15 works) · Death Anxiety and Social Exclusion (14 works) · Cognitive psychology (11 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Sociology (11 works)