Steven Neuberg

Selected research

With colleagues Douglas Kenrick, Mark Schaller, D. Vaughn Becker, Jon Maner, and Vladas Griskevicius, Neuberg has developed an evolution-informed framework for understanding how fundamental social goals (e.g., self-protection, disease avoidance, social affiliation, status acquisition, mate acquisition, mate retention, child-rearing) shape social perception, attention, categorization, memory, decision making, and behavior. In addition to generating a wide range of novel empirical findings, this framework has been employed to re-conceive Abraham Maslow's classic hierarchy of needs.

With Catherine Cottrell and others, Neuberg has employed what he labels a 'sociofunctional approach' to explore issues of prejudice and social valuation. This approach builds on the assumption that human social preferences are significantly (but imperfectly) constrained by their evolved nature as ultrasocial animals and, thus, that people value individuals and groups seen as facilitating effective ingroup functioning and stigmatize those seen as threatening it. Consistent with their theorizing, Cottrell and Neuberg found that people hold qualitatively distinct prejudices against different groups (e.g., that the set of emotions elicited by gay men, for instance, are qualitatively different from the set of emotions elicited by African Americans), and that these prejudices are predictability linked to people's perceptions (whether accurate or not) of the different tangible threats posed by different groups (e.g., to health, values, physical safety). A second line of work from the sociofunctional approach shows that, whereas people highly desire those they interact with to possess traits specific to the nature of the relationships (e.g., to highly value intelligence in a project team member or extraversion in member of a social club), people powerfully value trustworthiness in any individuals with whom they are highly interdependent, regardless of the domain of interdependence.

Susan Fiske and Steven Neuberg developed a prominent model of impression formation (The Continuum Model) that articulates the motivational and informational circumstances that determine the extent to which people employ social category stereotypes versus a target person's individuating characteristics to form an impression of that target. As of early 2010, the Continuum Model had been cited nearly 900 times within the scientific literature.

Neuberg also made contributions to the interpersonal self-fulfilling prophecy literature. Interpersonal self-fulfilling prophecies exist when a perceiver's inaccurate expectations for a target lead that perceiver to act in ways that bring about, even unintentionally, target behaviors that objectively support the perceiver's initial erroneous expectations—for instance, when a teacher's inaccurate expectation that a particular student has little potential in math leads that teacher to be less encouraging to that student, thereby leading that student to perform more poorly than she would have otherwise. Neuberg's work showed that such negative expectation effects are moderated by a range of perceiver and target goals: For example, motivating perceivers to be accurate or to be liked, or motivating targets to be self-presentationally assertive, alters the interpersonal dynamics of the perceiver-target interactions and reduces the likelihood of negative self-fulfilling prophecies.

Neuberg and Newsom helped bring to prominence the Personal Need for Structure scale, created by Megan Thompson and her colleagues. The PNS assesses the extent to which people prefer simply structured beliefs and life activities. The relationship between the PNS, Thompson et al.'s Personal Fear of Invalidity scale., and the conceptually and operationally similar Need for Cognitive Closure scale by Webster and Kruglanski, has been explored in depth.