Koehn. M.A., Jonason, P.K., & Davis, M.D. (2019). A person-centered view of prejudice: The Big Five, Dark Triad, and prejudice. Personality and Individual Differences, 139, 313-316. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2018.11.038

While contextual factors are important in understanding prejudice, person-centered factors matter as well. In a sample of American students and MTurk workers (N = 473), we assessed the correlations between personality traits and two forms of prejudice; cognitive and affective prejudice. People who were low in agreeableness and openness, and high in neuroticism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism held more overall prejudicial attitudes. The Dark Triad traits accounted for 2% additional variance towards explaining individual differences in prejudice above that associated with the Big Five traits for cognitive prejudice, but the same cannot be said for individual differences in affective prejudice. This highlights the importance of both discerning the type of discrimination and of the Dark Triad traits to be used in parallel with the Big Five traits when understanding prejudice. Adopting a person-centered approach to prejudice provides inference of the within-person factors that affect social attitudes.

Koehn M.A., Jonason P.K. (2018) Costs of Short-Term Mating for Women. In: Shackelford T., Weekes-Shackelford V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham.  https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3662-1  [PDF]

The term “short-term mating” typically describes a sexual relationship that is casual in nature, mostly focused on sexual pleasure, lacking commitment or longevity, and characterized by little emotional connection (Jonason 2013; Jonason and Balzarini 2016). The term “casual sex” is used as a catchall to refer to all kinds of short-term relationships, but these relationships can encompass one-night stands, booty-call relationships, hook-ups, and friends with benefits. While all of these relationships have their unique features, they share a common theme of creating a context where individuals have sex without any formal commitment.

Jones, B. C., DeBruine, L. M., Flake, J. K., Aczel, B., Adamkovic, M., Alaei, R., … Chartier, C. R. (2018, May 21). Social perception of faces around the world: How well does the valence-dominance model generalize across world regions? (Registered Report Stage 1). https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/N26DY

https://osf.io/dby5j/ 

Over the last ten years, Oosterhof and Todorov’s valence-dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgments of faces. To which world regions this model applies is a critical, yet unanswered, question. We will address this question by replicating Oosterhof and Todorov’s methodology across multiple world regions.

Moshontz, H., Campbell, L., Ebersole, C. R., IJzerman, H., Urry, H. L.,... Chartier, C. R. (2018, April 3). The Psychological Science Accelerator: Advancing Psychology through a Distributed Collaborative Network. http://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/785QU   https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2515245918797607

https://osf.io/c7rby/

Concerns about the veracity of psychological research have been growing. Many findings in psychological science are based on studies with insufficient statistical power and nonrepresentative samples, or may otherwise be limited to specific, ungeneralizable settings or populations. Crowd-sourced research, a type of large-scale collaboration in which one or more research projects are conducted across multiple lab sites, offers a pragmatic solution to these and other current methodological challenges. The Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA) is a distributed network of laboratories designed to enable and support crowdsourced research projects. These projects can focus on novel research questions or replicate prior research in large, diverse samples. The PSA’s mission is to accelerate the accumulation of reliable and generalizable evidence in psychological science. Here, we describe the background, structure, principles, procedures, benefits, and challenges of the PSA. In contrast to other crowdsourced research networks, the PSA is ongoing (as opposed to time limited), efficient (in that structures and principles are reused for different projects), decentralized, diverse (in both subjects and researchers), and inclusive (of proposals, contributions, and other relevant input from anyone inside or outside the network). The PSA and other approaches to crowdsourced psychological science will advance understanding of mental processes and behaviors by enabling rigorous research and systematic examination of its generalizability.

Koehn, M. A, Okan, C., & Jonason, P.K. (2019). A primer on the Dark Triad traits. Australian Journal of Psychology, 71, 7-15.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ajpy.12198  [PDF]

In this review, we detail three personality traits (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) that have gained popularity in the last decade as the ‘Dark Triad’. These traits are useful to augment research on personality, like the Big Five traits, as they capture individual differences in ‘darker’ aspects of personality more fully. We briefly review the body of work surrounding these traits, how they are measured, how they can be understood through the exploration of their nomological network, and the role each trait plays in various domains like organisational psychology and interpersonal relationships. We then detail how an evolutionary paradigm can provide a novel and powerful way of understanding these traits. Finally, we explore broad‐spectrum concerns about the research and thoughts on how one might think about these issues.

Jonason, P. K., Koehn, M. A., Okan, C., & O'Connor, P. J. (2018). The role of personality in individual differences in yearly earnings. Personality and Individual Differences, 121, 170-172. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2017.09.038   [PDF]

We examined the role of personality in accounting for sex differences in yearly earnings among Australians (N = 533). Men reported they earned modestly more money than women did, as did married and fully employed people, but these three factors did not interact. Narcissism, psychopathy, extraversion, conscientiousness, and limited neuroticism predicted self-reported higher earnings; associations that differed little by participant's sex, although a slight pattern suggests women may pay a higher pay penalty for neuroticism but benefit more from conscientiousness than men do. Narcissism and neuroticism mediated sex differences in self-reported income suggesting men who were more narcissistic and women who were less neurotic reported more yearly earnings. The results are discussed in terms of how individual differences may play a role in apparent sex differences in earnings.