Human beliefs have remarkable robustness in the face of disconfirmation. This robustness is
often explained as the product of heuristics or motivated reasoning. However, robustness …

A long tradition of psychological research has explored the distinction between
characteristics that are part of the self and those that lie outside of it. Recently, a surge of …

A central tenet of many prominent philosophical and psychological traditions is that personal
authenticity facilitates psychological well-being. This idea, however, is at odds with …

The aim of this chapter is to articulate the state of the art in the moral psychology of personal
identity. It begins by discussing the major philosophical theories of personal identity …

Authenticity has long captured the imagination of literary figures, philosophers and
scientists. The construct originated in Aristotelian thinking and serves as an injunctive …

People sometimes explain behavior by appealing to an essentialist concept of the self, often
referred to as the true self. Existing studies suggest that people tend to believe that the true …

Five studies explore how anticipating different types of personal change affects people's
perceptions of their own self-continuity. The studies find that improvements are seen as less …

Most people want to change some aspects of their personality, but does this phenomenon
extend to moral character and to close others? Targets (n= 800) rated their personality traits …

Why do many people come to believe that they and others have a true self? We
hypothesized that this belief emerges because people routinely rely on essentialist …

Intergroup bias—preference for one's in-group relative to out-groups—is one of the most
robust phenomena in all of psychology. Here we investigate whether a positive bias that …