0000000000627909
AUTHOR
Mario Messer
In search of Experimental Evidence for Secondary Antisemitism

 
 
 In 1955, Adorno attributed antisemitic sentiments voiced by Germans to a paradox projection: The only latently experienced feelings of guilt were warded off by antisemitic defense mecha- nisms. Similar predictions of increases in antisemitic prejudice in response to increased Holo- caust salience follow from other theoretical apparatuses (e.g., social identity theory as well as just-world theory). Based on the – to the best of our knowledge – only experimental evidence for such an effect (published in Psychological Science in 2009), the present research reports a series of studies originally conducted to better understand the contribution of the different assumed mechan…
Temperature Cues Bias the Memory of Trustworthiness of Faces
Humans rely on temperature cues to navigate and make sense of their social world. In two experiments we find that part of this process can be detected in the perception and memory of faces. We conducted two studies to find this effect through a method called “reverse correlation”, where we average a face over a large amount of trials. For participants who experienced physical warmth (vs. cold) at the initial confrontation with a face we found that the average of the trials displayed a psychologically warmer face (judged by independent raters). Excluding the possibility of a “carry-over” effect, in Study 2 we replicated the Study 1 effect, but only if physical warmth (vs. cold) preceded the …