Call for papers: Understanding behavior in real-world contexts

• Dolores Albarracin
• Mandy Hütter
• Zachary A. Niese

Guest editors

• Nick Butrick
• Oliver Sng

Research on beliefs, attitudes, judgments, and behavior has identified many important psychological processes. Yet much of this research isolates these processes from the social and ecological contexts in which they operate or examines outcomes whose connection to consequential real-world behavior is uncertain. A central challenge for the field is therefore to understand psychological processes as they operate in the environments people inhabit and in relation to behavior that matters outside the research setting.

This special section of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition seeks research that advances this goal in either or both of two ways.

First, we invite research examining the effects of environmental properties on psychological processes and behavior. Social psychologists are ideally positioned to study how informational, institutional, interpersonal, cultural, and physical environments influence behavior. Research in this area should make environmental properties central to theorizing, research design, or measurement. Environments and behavioral outcomes may be studied in relation to intervening judgments, beliefs, memory representations, attitudes, or other psychological variables.

Second, we invite research examining the effects of psychological processes on consequential real-world behavior and outcomes. Such work may investigate beliefs, attitudes, judgments, memory representations, or experimentally identified psychological processes as predictors of behavior outside the laboratory.

Research may address either of these directions or their intersection. Particularly informative work may examine person–environment transactions in which psychological processes and environmental features jointly shape consequential behavior. Research that achieves both goals would be of particular interest.

We welcome primary empirical investigations, including multi-study investigations, as well as computational and meta-analytic work that makes a theoretical contribution to the psychology of beliefs, attitudes, judgments, memory, or behavior. An applied research contribution alone is insufficient: all submissions should make a contribution to psychological theory. Suitable research should demonstrate how the field can move from considering analogs of environmental features and behaviors to actual environments and real-world behaviors. Studies using preregistration and transparent research practices, large or diverse samples, longitudinal or intensive repeated-measures designs, field and naturalistic methods, and informative combinations of laboratory and real-world evidence are especially encouraged. We are also interested in research that identifies conditions under which psychological effects emerge, including effects that may be larger under specific conditions.

The special section aims to connect core theoretical questions in social psychology with the contexts in which psychological processes unfold and the consequential behaviors and outcomes those processes are intended to explain. Manuscripts will be processed and published as they are received.

Submissions for this special section should align with the aims and scope of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition and be submitted to the portalopens in new window. Submissions will be handled following the same process as regular submissions to the journal.