Maintaining Transient Diversity Is a General Principle for Improving Collective Problem Solving

Humans regularly solve complex problems in cooperative teams. A wide range of mechanisms have been identified that improve the quality of solutions achieved by those teams on reaching consensus. We argue that many of these mechanisms work via increasing the transient diversity of solutions while the group attempts to reach a consensus. These mechanisms can operate at the level of individual psychology (e.g., behavioral inertia), interpersonal communication (e.g., transmission noise), or group structure (e.g., sparse social networks). Transient diversity can be increased by widening the search space of possible solutions or by slowing the diffusion of information and delaying consensus. All of these mechanisms increase the quality of the solution at the cost of increased time to reach it. We review specific mechanisms that facilitate transient diversity and synthesize evidence from both empirical studies and diverse formal models-including multiarmed bandits, NK landscapes, cumulative-innovation models, and evolutionary-transmission models. Apparent exceptions to this principle occur primarily when problems are sufficiently simple that they can be solved by mere trial and error or when the incentives of team members are insufficiently aligned. This work has implications for our understanding of collective intelligence, problem solving, innovation, and cumulative cultural evolution.

Struggling With Change: The Fragile Resilience of Collectives

Collectives form nonequilibrium social structures characterized by volatile dynamics. Individuals join or leave. Social relations change quickly. Therefore, unlike engineered or ecological systems, a resilient reference state cannot be defined. We propose a novel resilience measure combining two dimensions: robustness and adaptivity. We demonstrate how they can be quantified using data from a software-developer collective. Our analysis reveals a resilience life cycle (i.e., stages of increasing resilience are followed by stages of decreasing resilience). We explain the reasons for these observed dynamics and provide a formal model to reproduce them. The resilience life cycle allows distinguishing between short-term resilience, given by a sequence of resilient states, and long-term resilience, which requires collectives to survive through different cycles.

Toward an Integrative Approach to the Study of Positive-Affect-Related Aggression

Research on aggression usually aims at gaining a better understanding of its more negative aspects, such as the role and effects of aversive social interactions, hostile cognitions, or negative affect. However, there are conditions under which an act of aggression can elicit a positive affective response, even among the most nonviolent of individuals. One might experience the "sweetness of revenge" on reacting aggressively to a betrayal or social rejection. A soldier may feel elated after "shooting to kill" in the name of the flag. There are many factors that contribute to the appeal of aggression, but despite growing interest in researching these phenomena, there is still no unitary framework that organizes existing theories and empirical findings and can be applied to a model to generate testable hypotheses. This article presents a narrative review of the literature on positive-affect-related forms of aggression and explores the role of aggression in eliciting positive affect across diverse social situations and relational contexts. An integrative model that unifies existing theories and findings is proposed, with the objective to inspire and inform future research.

Cooperation in the Time of COVID

Humans evolved to be hyper-cooperative, particularly when among people who are well known to them, when relationships involve reciprocal helping opportunities, and when the costs to the helper are substantially less than the benefits to the recipient. Because humans' cooperative nature evolved over many millennia when they lived exclusively in small groups, factors that cause cooperation to break down tend to be those associated with life in large, impersonal, modern societies: when people are not identifiable, when interactions are one-off, when self-interest is not tied to the interests of others, and when people are concerned that others might free ride. From this perspective, it becomes clear that policies for managing pandemics will be most effective when they highlight superordinate goals and connect people or institutions to one another over multiple identifiable interactions. When forging such connections is not possible, policies should mimic critical components of ancestral conditions by providing reputational markers for cooperators and reducing the systemic damage caused by free riding. In this article, we review policies implemented during the pandemic, highlighting spontaneous community efforts that leveraged these aspects of people's evolved psychology, and consider implications for future decision makers.

Development and Validation of Two Abbreviated Intraminority Gay Community Stress Scales

Social stressors stemming from within the gay community might render gay and bisexual men vulnerable to mental health problems. The 20-item intraminority Gay Community Stress Scale (GCSS) is a reliable measure of gay community stress, but the scale's length limits its widespread use in sexual minority mental health research. Using three independent samples of gay and bisexual men, the present research developed two abbreviated versions of the GCSS using nonparametric item response modeling and validated them. Results indicated that eight items provided maximal information about the gay community stress construct; these items were selected to form the eight-item GCSS. The eight-item GCSS reproduced the factor structure of the parent scale, and gay community stress scores obtained from it correlated with other identity-specific social stress constructs and mental health symptoms. Associations between gay community stress and mental health symptoms remained significant even after controlling for related identity-specific stressors, general life stress, and relevant demographics. A four-item version was also developed and assessed, showing good structural, convergent, criterion, and incremental validity and adequate reliability. The eight- and four-item versions of the GCSS offer efficient measures of gay community stress, an increasingly recognized source of stress for gay and bisexual men.

Citation Metrics in Psychological Science

We present norms for faculty citation counts based on 811 faculty members at 30 PhD-granting psychology departments in the United States across the range of the National Research Council rankings. The metrics were highly skewed, with most scientists having a low to moderate number of citations of their work and a few scientists having extremely high numbers. However, the median per-year citation count was 149, showing widespread scientific contributions across scholars. Some individuals in lower ranked departments are more highly cited than the average scholar in higher ranked departments, with enormous variation in citation counts in both the low- and high-ranking departments. Citation counts overall have risen in recent years, and the citations of early-career scholars are increasing at a faster rate than their senior colleagues did at the same point in their careers. We found that citation counts at the beginning of scientists' careers substantially predict lifetime citation success. Young scholars' citation counts are associated with obtaining positions at higher ranked universities. Finally, we found no significant differences for subfields of psychology. In sum, although a few highly productive scientists have a very large influence, trends reveal that contributions to psychological science are growing over time, widespread, and not limited to a few stars and elite departments.

What to Do? Predicting Coping Strategies Following Ingroup Members' Stereotypical Behaviors in Interracial Interactions

The current studies examine how witnessing stereotype-confirming ingroup behavior affects black Americans' interactions with white Americans. Across three studies, black Americans indicated metaperceptual, emotional, and behavioral responses to witnessing a black person's stereotypically negative, stereotypically positive, or nonstereotypically neutral behavior during an interracial (vs. intraracial) interaction. Following an ingroup member's stereotypically negative (vs. stereotypically positive in Study 1, or nonstereotypically neutral in Studies 2-3) behavior during an interracial interaction, black Americans expressed greater metastereotypes, which increased intergroup anxiety, ultimately eliciting nuanced coping strategies: engagement/overcompensation, antagonism, freezing, or avoidance. Psychological resources attenuated anxiety's effect on engagement/overcompensation (Studies 2-3) and freezing (Study 3). Both patterns were stronger in interracial (vs. intraracial) interactions (Study 3). This research demonstrates the central role of metaperceptions in interracial interactions, highlighting how stereotypically negative behaviors of nearby ingroup members are impactful situational stressors that affect behavioral intentions in intergroup encounters.

Social Allostasis and Social Allostatic Load: A New Model for Research in Social Dynamics, Stress, and Health

Theories such as social baseline theory have argued that social groups serve a regulatory function but have not explored whether this regulatory process carries costs for the group. Allostatic load, the wear and tear on regulatory systems caused by chronic or frequent stress, is marked by diminished stress system flexibility and compromised recovery. We argue that allostatic load may develop within social groups as well and provide a model for how relationship dysfunction operates. Social allostatic load may be characterized by processes such as groups becoming locked into static patterns of interaction and may ultimately lead to up-regulation or down-regulation of a group's set point, or the optimal range of arousal or affect around which the group tends to converge. Many studies of emotional and physiological linkage within groups have reported that highly correlated states of arousal, which may reflect failure to maintain a group-level regulatory baseline, occur in the context of stress, conflict, and relationship distress. Relationship strain may also place greater demands on neurocognitive regulatory processes. Just as allostatic load may be detrimental to individual health, social allostatic load may corrode relationship quality.

Enhancing the Effectiveness of Work Groups and Teams: A Reflection

Teamwork has been at the core of human accomplishment across the millennia, and it was a focus of social psychological inquiry on small group behavior for nearly half a century. However, as organizations world-wide reorganized work around teams over the past two decades, the nature of teamwork and factors influencing it became a central focus of research in organizational psychology and management. In this article, I reflect on the impetus, strategy, key features, and scientific contribution of "Enhancing the Effectiveness of Work Groups and Teams," by Kozlowski and Ilgen, a review monograph published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest in 2006.

Social Climate Science: A New Vista for Psychological Science

The recent Paris Agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions, adopted by 195 nations at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, signaled unprecedented commitment by world leaders to address the human social aspects of climate change. Indeed, climate change increasingly is recognized by scientists and policymakers as a social issue requiring social solutions. However, whereas psychological research on intrapersonal and some group-level processes (e.g., political polarization of climate beliefs) has flourished, research into other social processes-such as an understanding of how nonpartisan social identities, cultural ideologies, and group hierarchies shape public engagement on climate change-has received substantially less attention. In this article, we take stock of current psychological approaches to the study of climate change to explore what is "social" about climate change from the perspective of psychology. Drawing from current interdisciplinary perspectives and emerging empirical findings within psychology, we identify four distinct features of climate change and three sets of psychological processes evoked by these features that are fundamentally social and shape both individual and group responses to climate change. Finally, we consider how a more nuanced understanding of the social underpinnings of climate change can stimulate new questions and advance theory within psychology.

Collective Psychological Ownership and Intergroup Relations

Whereas much social psychological research has studied the in-group and out-group implications of social categorization and collective identity ("we"), little research has examined the nature and relevance of collective psychological ownership ("ours") for intergroup relations. We make a case for considering collective psychological ownership as an important source of intergroup tensions. We do so by integrating theory and research from various social sciences, and we draw out implications for future social psychological research on intergroup relations. We discuss collective psychological ownership in relation to the psychology of possessions, marking behavior, intergroup threats, outgroup exclusion, and in-group responsibility. We suggest that the social psychological processes discussed apply to a range of ownership objects (territory, buildings, cultural artifacts) and various intergroup settings, including international, national, and local contexts, and in organizations and communities. We conclude by providing directions for future research in different intergroup contexts.

Indigenous identity transformations: The pivotal role of student-to-student abuse in Indian Residential Schools

Embracing a shared social identity typically serves to protect group members in the face of threats. However, under some conditions, intragroup dynamics are diverted so that instead, they contribute to disturbances in collective well-being. The present analysis applies a social identity framework to understand how intragroup processes elicited in Indian Residential Schools (IRS) altered the capacity of Indigenous peoples to overcome damage to their identity and collective functioning. With the alleged goal of assimilating the Indigenous population, residential schools in Canada entailed the forced removal of Indigenous children from their communities. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission established in 2008 confirmed the extensive abuse perpetrated by IRS staff, but also raised awareness of the pervasiveness of student-to-student abuse. Supported by qualitative analyses of the reports of social service providers working with IRS survivors (N =  43), it is argued that a key part of the dynamics in the IRSs was the subversion of intragroup processes among Indigenous children in attendance. Understanding intragroup dynamics provides a basis for recognizing the persistent effects of IRSs, and for identifying strategies to heal and reclaim a positive collective identity.

From Mindless Masses to Small Groups: Conceptualizing Collective Behavior in Crowd Modeling

Computer simulations are increasingly used to monitor and predict behavior at large crowd events, such as mass gatherings, festivals and evacuations. We critically examine the crowd modeling literature and call for future simulations of crowd behavior to be based more closely on findings from current social psychological research. A systematic review was conducted on the crowd modeling literature (N = 140 articles) to identify the assumptions about crowd behavior that modelers use in their simulations. Articles were coded according to the way in which crowd structure was modeled. It was found that 2 broad types are used: mass approaches and small group approaches. However, neither the mass nor the small group approaches can accurately simulate the large collective behavior that has been found in extensive empirical research on crowd events. We argue that to model crowd behavior realistically, simulations must use methods which allow crowd members to identify with each other, as suggested by self-categorization theory.