Mario Gollwitzer

A substantial proportion of gay men report experiencing everyday harassment, raising questions about how observers interpret victimizing situations. Understanding these patterns requires examining how intersecting social categories shape perceptions of vulnerability, and how vulnerability is related to victim blaming. We investigated how minimal behavioural cues of gender conformity and explicitly disclosed sexual orientation jointly influence vulnerability‐related impressions. In Studies 1a/b ( N = 248), gender non‐conforming targets were consistently perceived as more vulnerable and more susceptible to victimization. Studies 2a/b ( N = 452) replicated these effects, while we found no significant effects of explicit sexual orientation on impressions of vulnerability and victimization susceptibility and no significant interactions with gender conformity. These findings highlight the consistent role of behavioural cues of gender conformity in shaping vulnerability‐related impressions when intersecting identity information is available. Moreover, perceived vulnerability was positively associated with both direct and indirect victim blaming, which suggests that vulnerability‐related impressions, rather than identity cues alone, are relevant to blame‐related judgements. Together, the results highlight how different sources of intersecting identity information are weighted when forming impressions of victimization and evaluating victims.

Online behavioral experiments have become increasingly common due to advances in web technologies and the availability of browser-based experimental frameworks. Among these, jsPsych has emerged as a widely used JavaScript library that allows researchers to implement behavioral experiments directly in web browsers. Despite its flexibility and extensive functionality, developing experiments with jsPsych can be challenging for researchers with limited programming experience. This paper introduces a structured workflow for creating online experiments with jsPsych. The workflow decomposes experiment development into four conceptual steps: 1) Defining experimental conditions and their dependencies; 2) Designing the structure of individual trials; 3) Integrating functional elements such as instructions and questionnaires; 4) Assembling the complete experiment timeline. The practical application of the workflow is illustrated through three fully runnable example implementations: a Stroop task, an Eriksen Flanker task, and an Immediate Serial Recall task. The first example closely follows the four-step workflow as presented in this paper, whereas the second and third examples retain the same underlying workflow while adopting a more general and modular code structure that separates reusable functionality from experiment-specific configurations. These examples highlight how structured programming approaches can simplify experiment development and code reusability, thereby contributing to an improvement in code reproducibility by other researchers.

Trust decisions often rely on a partner’s reputation, yet little is known about interindividual differences in how people use such information when deciding whom to trust. Across four pre-registered studies (total N = 1,171), we examined whether associations between trust-related personality traits and trust vary as a function of a trustee’s reputation. We focused on three traits that should differentially interact with reputation information: General Trust—the tendency to believe in the benevolence of others; Victim Sensitivity—the anxious expectation of being exploited by others; and Honesty-Humility—an individual’s dispositional prosociality. In Studies 1–3, participants acted as trustors in peer-to-peer car-sharing scenarios and rated either the trustworthiness of potential renters or their intention to rent out their car. In Study 4, participants made real, incentivized trust decisions in economic trust games with reputation cues based on actual behavior. Across studies, higher reputation consistently increased trust, and General Trust showed a broad positive association with trust. By contrast, Victim Sensitivity and Honesty-Humility showed reputation-contingent associations with trust; however, the specific interaction patterns varied across studies. Overall, trustor personality and trustee reputation jointly shape trust, yet the nature of this interplay differs across personality traits and the motivational tendencies they capture.

A recent preprint (Elson et al., 2026) called for non-anonymized data in metascience as a standard rule, without exceptions. In the current contribution, we argue for a more nuanced approach. We agree that transparency is important and data as well as the analyzed corpus need to be shared. Yet, our arguments for being more cautious with metascientific data are based on (a) a different understanding of what the tasks and limits of metascience are, (b) a pragmatic consideration of the current uptake of open science practices, (c) a greater appreciation for social interaction dynamics in the scientific community, and (d) a more nuanced view regarding the benefits and costs of non-anonymized open data in metascience. We conclude that the sample (e.g., the analyzed original publications) and the data per publication, with an anonymized ID, should always be published. However, we argue that publishing non-anonymized data might pose unjustified harm to original authors. We firmly believe that, in such cases, anonymized data are the better option and non-anonymized data should, if at all, be published in a repository allowing for restricted access for scientists.

Across two preregistered studies, we examined how food systems knowledge relates to children’s evaluations of nonhuman animals. Study 1 included 341 children aged 4–6 years and assessed knowledge about meat origins, moral evaluation, and dehumanization of pigs and chickens. Study 2 included 346 children aged 7–16 years and additionally assessed speciesism and knowledge about pork production. Contrary to expectations, knowledge about meat origins was not associated with more negative evaluations of animals. Greater knowledge about pork production was associated with lower speciesism and greater attribution of emotional capacity. We discuss how these findings inform developmental accounts of speciesism and consider alternative mechanisms, including social learning and the increasing personal responsibility for dietary choices.

The use of journal impact factors and other metric indicators of research productivity, such as the h-index, has been heavily criticized for being invalid for the assessment of individual researchers and for fueling a detrimental "publish or perish" culture. Multiple initiatives call for developing alternatives to existing metrics that better reflect quality (instead of quantity) in research assessment. This report, written by a task force established by the German Psychological Society, proposes how responsible research assessment could be done in the field of psychology. We present four principles of responsible research assessment in hiring and promotion and suggest a two-phase assessment procedure that combines the objectivity and efficiency of indicators with a qualitative, discursive assessment of shortlisted candidates. The main aspects of our proposal are (a) to broaden the range of relevant research contributions to include published data sets and research software, along with research papers, and (b) to place greater emphasis on quality and methodological rigor in research evaluation.

Political campaigns often work with victimhood claims—stories construed around an (alleged) injustice that needs to be redressed or retaliated against. Notably, scholars have argued that victimhood claims have become more important in societal discourses over the last 20 years. In this research, we investigate the prevalence of victimhood claims (and a potential increase) in political election and party programs. More specifically, we analyzed programs from German Federal Parliament Elections between 2002 and 2021. Analyzing 157 documents from 69 parties, we show that (a) the number of victimhood claims has increased in parties represented in the Federal Parliament, and (b) that parties at the left and right fringes of the political spectrum employ victimhood claims more frequently than parties of the political center. We discuss these results with regard to the role that victimhood claims play in political campaigns and what consequences an increased prevalence of victimhood claims entails.

In social dilemmas, individuals’ outcomes are not only contingent on their own, but also on other persons’ actions. Since other persons’ actions are often unpredictable, social dilemmas inherently involve some degree of uncertainty and, thus, imply a loss of control for each actor. This loss of control can be particularly aversive for individuals who harbor a latent fear of being exploited, such as people with a disposition to be “victim-sensitive”, leading to pre-emptively uncooperative behavior in social dilemmas. Recent theorizing and findings by Buchholz and colleagues (2023) suggest that a brief control affirmation manipulation can alleviate the negative correlation between victim sensitivity (VS) and cooperation. In the present research, we aim to replicate and expand on Buchholz et al.’s (2023) study. In two studies ( n ₁ = 336, n ₂ = 385), participants played an online trust game with a fictitious partner. Affirming control did not reduce the negative effect of VS on behavioral trust in both studies. In addition, the manipulation did not work as intended and failed to generate a sense of control. We discuss our findings with regard to their implications for research on victim sensitivity and on compensatory control.