Benjamin R Meagher
Biographic Data
| ID | 770999 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Benjamin R Meagher |
| GIVEN NAMES | Benjamin R |
| FAMILY NAME | Meagher |
| SIGNATURE | MEAGHER B R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hope College |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1172-404X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Spiritually significant places as adaptive psycho-spatial resources
This study explores how mattering struggles and spiritual ties to place relate to mental well-being in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We used cross-sectional data from a nationally representative sample of US adults ( n = 3640) who reported their experiences of mattering struggles, perceived increase in spiritual ties to place, and perceived change in mental well-being since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Mattering struggles were asso…
A Social Relations Model of Interpersonal Distance Preference
The varieties of spiritual ties to place
Socio-Ecological Attunement
Reuben Baron's ecological approach to social perception simultaneously emphasized both the perceptual nature of social judgment and the social nature of perception. One novel contribution of this work was an expansion of the concept of attunement, arguing that the detection of affordances could be guided not only by physiological constraints, but also by culture, attitudes, motivation, and social roles. In this paper, I provide an empirical demon…
Seeing god in this place
Unlocking Coherence
Mate preference dissimilarity predicts friendship attraction at zero-acquaintance for men, not women
We hypothesized that dissimilar mate preferences would augment friendship attraction in zero-acquaintance interactions whereas similar mate preferences would hinder friendship attraction. Heterosexual participants completed an online survey to assess their mate preferences. They also rated the attractiveness of opposite-sex photos. Next, they attended a 3-hr speed-friending session in which they interacted with same-sex others for 3-min each. Aft…
Be Our Guest
Despite the ubiquity of hosting others in one's home, no validated measure of domestic hospitality currently exists. To address this gap, the current paper presents a set of four studies that develop and validate the Interpersonal Hospitality Scale, which seeks to capture the affective, motivational, and behavioral components of this person-place construct. The 12-item scale assesses three core dimensions: responsibility for guests, welcomingness…
The Nature of Spiritual Ties to Place
How do spiritual ties to place (i.e., place spirituality) contribute to a meaningful spiritual life? Previous work has focused on sacred places, but a proposal is put forward for examining the spiritual connections people develop with many types of places in their search for meaning. The proposed theory examines spiritual ties to place across three dimensions—affective, cognitive, and behavioral—that may be a critical way in which people satisfy …
An Intellectually Humbling Experience
Finding ways to foster intellectual humility (IH)—the willingness to own one’s limitations—is an important goal for facilitating effective learning. We report the results of a longitudinal, quasi-experimental study, conducted across six undergraduate, culturally diverse (58% racial/ethnic minority) introductory philosophy courses, that evaluates how social perceptions and cross-cultural reasoning change following a course on epistemology and soci…
Moral Representativeness and Satisfaction with One’s Religious Community
Belonging to a community of believers represents a basic component of most religions. According to a social-functional account of religion, a primary function of religious belief is to bind individuals to these types of cooperative, moral groups. However, this framework has yet to investigate what factors are associated with being more or less “bound” to a particular community. Although previous research has found that being very representative o…
Judgments of Religiosity following Minimal Interaction
In the current study, unacquainted groups of both religious Christians and nonreligious atheists/agnostics rated themselves and each other on a number of attributes, including religiosity and morality. A Social Relations analysis revealed small, but statistically significant levels of consensus for impressions of religiosity. Subsequent correlations indicated that groups relied on the target's gender and race to reach consensus. Analyses of parti…
Seeking the safety of sociofugal space
Contrasting self-report and consensus ratings of intellectual humility and arrogance
Analyzing the effects of group members’ characteristics
Members enter groups with different characteristics, for example, gender and ethnicity, and the Group Actor–Partner Interdependence Model (GAPIM) systematically tests several different effects of group composition for a given characteristic. By finding submodels of these effects, the GAPIM allows for empirically testing many theoretically meaningful models of differences within groups. Among the models that can be tested are models of diversity, …
Speaking from ignorance
Values-pragmatics theory (Hodges & Geyer, 2006) predicts that people will sometimes disagree with others they believe are correct, for reasons similar to those explaining agreement with incorrect answers in an Asch (1956) situation. In 3 experiments, we found evidence that people in a position of ignorance sometimes do not agree with the correct answers of others in positions of knowledge. Experiments 1a and 1b found this speaking-from-ignorance …
Judge, that ye shall be judged
The Effects of Interpersonal Differences Within Religious Communities
This study examined how the composition of religious communities influences the spiritual outcomes of members. The U.S. Congregational Life Survey was analyzed using the group actor-partner interdependence model, an analysis that assesses how individual-level outcomes are influenced by (a) the actor's characteristics, (b) the characteristics of other congregants, (c) the relational demography of the actor, and (d) the degree that other congregant…
Seeking the safety of sociofugal space
Analyzing the effects of group members’ characteristics
Members enter groups with different characteristics, for example, gender and ethnicity, and the Group Actor–Partner Interdependence Model (GAPIM) systematically tests several different effects of group composition for a given characteristic. By finding submodels of these effects, the GAPIM allows for empirically testing many theoretically meaningful models of differences within groups. Among the models that can be tested are models of diversity, …
Speaking from ignorance
Values-pragmatics theory (Hodges & Geyer, 2006) predicts that people will sometimes disagree with others they believe are correct, for reasons similar to those explaining agreement with incorrect answers in an Asch (1956) situation. In 3 experiments, we found evidence that people in a position of ignorance sometimes do not agree with the correct answers of others in positions of knowledge. Experiments 1a and 1b found this speaking-from-ignorance …
Mate preference dissimilarity predicts friendship attraction at zero-acquaintance for men, not women
We hypothesized that dissimilar mate preferences would augment friendship attraction in zero-acquaintance interactions whereas similar mate preferences would hinder friendship attraction. Heterosexual participants completed an online survey to assess their mate preferences. They also rated the attractiveness of opposite-sex photos. Next, they attended a 3-hr speed-friending session in which they interacted with same-sex others for 3-min each. Aft…
Moral Representativeness and Satisfaction with One’s Religious Community
Belonging to a community of believers represents a basic component of most religions. According to a social-functional account of religion, a primary function of religious belief is to bind individuals to these types of cooperative, moral groups. However, this framework has yet to investigate what factors are associated with being more or less “bound” to a particular community. Although previous research has found that being very representative o…
Contrasting self-report and consensus ratings of intellectual humility and arrogance
Judge, that ye shall be judged
The Effects of Interpersonal Differences Within Religious Communities
This study examined how the composition of religious communities influences the spiritual outcomes of members. The U.S. Congregational Life Survey was analyzed using the group actor-partner interdependence model, an analysis that assesses how individual-level outcomes are influenced by (a) the actor's characteristics, (b) the characteristics of other congregants, (c) the relational demography of the actor, and (d) the degree that other congregant…
Analyzing the effects of group members’ characteristics
Members enter groups with different characteristics, for example, gender and ethnicity, and the Group Actor–Partner Interdependence Model (GAPIM) systematically tests several different effects of group composition for a given characteristic. By finding submodels of these effects, the GAPIM allows for empirically testing many theoretically meaningful models of differences within groups. Among the models that can be tested are models of diversity, …
Speaking from ignorance
Values-pragmatics theory (Hodges & Geyer, 2006) predicts that people will sometimes disagree with others they believe are correct, for reasons similar to those explaining agreement with incorrect answers in an Asch (1956) situation. In 3 experiments, we found evidence that people in a position of ignorance sometimes do not agree with the correct answers of others in positions of knowledge. Experiments 1a and 1b found this speaking-from-ignorance …
Contrasting self-report and consensus ratings of intellectual humility and arrogance
Judgments of Religiosity following Minimal Interaction
In the current study, unacquainted groups of both religious Christians and nonreligious atheists/agnostics rated themselves and each other on a number of attributes, including religiosity and morality. A Social Relations analysis revealed small, but statistically significant levels of consensus for impressions of religiosity. Subsequent correlations indicated that groups relied on the target's gender and race to reach consensus. Analyses of parti…
Seeking the safety of sociofugal space
Moral Representativeness and Satisfaction with One’s Religious Community
Belonging to a community of believers represents a basic component of most religions. According to a social-functional account of religion, a primary function of religious belief is to bind individuals to these types of cooperative, moral groups. However, this framework has yet to investigate what factors are associated with being more or less “bound” to a particular community. Although previous research has found that being very representative o…
An Intellectually Humbling Experience
Finding ways to foster intellectual humility (IH)—the willingness to own one’s limitations—is an important goal for facilitating effective learning. We report the results of a longitudinal, quasi-experimental study, conducted across six undergraduate, culturally diverse (58% racial/ethnic minority) introductory philosophy courses, that evaluates how social perceptions and cross-cultural reasoning change following a course on epistemology and soci…
Be Our Guest
Despite the ubiquity of hosting others in one's home, no validated measure of domestic hospitality currently exists. To address this gap, the current paper presents a set of four studies that develop and validate the Interpersonal Hospitality Scale, which seeks to capture the affective, motivational, and behavioral components of this person-place construct. The 12-item scale assesses three core dimensions: responsibility for guests, welcomingness…
The Nature of Spiritual Ties to Place
How do spiritual ties to place (i.e., place spirituality) contribute to a meaningful spiritual life? Previous work has focused on sacred places, but a proposal is put forward for examining the spiritual connections people develop with many types of places in their search for meaning. The proposed theory examines spiritual ties to place across three dimensions—affective, cognitive, and behavioral—that may be a critical way in which people satisfy …
Seeing god in this place
Unlocking Coherence
Mate preference dissimilarity predicts friendship attraction at zero-acquaintance for men, not women
We hypothesized that dissimilar mate preferences would augment friendship attraction in zero-acquaintance interactions whereas similar mate preferences would hinder friendship attraction. Heterosexual participants completed an online survey to assess their mate preferences. They also rated the attractiveness of opposite-sex photos. Next, they attended a 3-hr speed-friending session in which they interacted with same-sex others for 3-min each. Aft…
A Social Relations Model of Interpersonal Distance Preference
The varieties of spiritual ties to place
Socio-Ecological Attunement
Reuben Baron's ecological approach to social perception simultaneously emphasized both the perceptual nature of social judgment and the social nature of perception. One novel contribution of this work was an expansion of the concept of attunement, arguing that the detection of affordances could be guided not only by physiological constraints, but also by culture, attitudes, motivation, and social roles. In this paper, I provide an empirical demon…
Spiritually significant places as adaptive psycho-spatial resources
This study explores how mattering struggles and spiritual ties to place relate to mental well-being in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We used cross-sectional data from a nationally representative sample of US adults ( n = 3640) who reported their experiences of mattering struggles, perceived increase in spiritual ties to place, and perceived change in mental well-being since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Mattering struggles were asso…
Psychology (17 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology (6 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (5 works) · Interpersonal communication (5 works) · Mathematics (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Statistics (5 works)