Steven Neuberg

Steven L. Neuberg is an American experimental social psychologist whose research has contributed to topics pertaining to person perception,[1] impression formation,[2] stereotyping,[3] prejudice,[4] self-fulfilling prophecies,[5] stereotype threat,[6] and prosocial behavior.

[8] Neuberg has published over sixty scholarly articles and chapters, and has co-authored a multi-edition social psychology textbook with his colleagues Douglas Kenrick and Robert Cialdini.

He earned a Ph.D. in 1987 from Carnegie-Mellon University, specializing in social psychology, under the supervision of Susan Fiske.

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.

[11][12] 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.

[13] 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.

[15] 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.

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.

[19][20][21] Neuberg and Newsom[22] helped bring to prominence the Personal Need for Structure scale, created by Megan Thompson and her colleagues.

[23] 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.,[24] and the conceptually and operationally similar Need for Cognitive Closure scale by Webster and Kruglanski,[25] has been explored in depth.

"Target complicity in the confirmation and disconfirmation of erroneous perceiver expectations: Immediate and longer term implications".

"On dimensionality, discriminant validity, and the role of psychometric analyses in personality theory and measurement: Reply to Kruglanski et al.’s (1997) Defense of the Need for Closure Scale".

"A continuum of impression formation, from category-based to individuating processes: Influences of information and motivation on attention and interpretation".

"The goal of forming accurate impressions during social interactions: Attenuating the impact of negative expectancies".

"Motivational influences on impression formation: Outcome dependency, accuracy-driven attention, and individuating processes".