I would say no.

An ingroup is a social group an individual belongs to, feels associated with, and expresses loyalty to. Common ingroups are people from the same gender, ethnicity, or religion, but also one’s friends, family members, colleagues, or classmates. Ingroups have a large impact on decision-making behavior by the individual: People are inclined to conform to the attitudes and behaviors of ingroup members and tend to privilege ingroup members over outsiders. This effect is strong and even present when an ingroup is artificially created. For instance, the categorization of people into two groups based on a trivial criterion, such as birth date or T-shirt color, is sufficient to establish an ingroup bias in behavior.

Celebrities are not part of our ingroup as they typically belong to a different group than we do. Instead, celebrities are part of a group an individual wants to belong to, a so-called “aspirational group.” They are public figures who, for many, provide a standard of achievement and serve as a role model. Given this, celebrities are of great interest for marketers and they are often used for commercial purposes. Indeed, celebrity endorsement appears to be an effective way to advertise a product, but only if consumers identify the celebrity presenter as having technical knowledge about the advertised product or as being an experienced user of it.

We asked ourselves why fame has such a strong persuasive effect on consumer decision making and measured the brain’s response to celebrity endorsements. Neural activity in a brain region important for positive emotions and the learning of associations indicated that during just one exposure, positive affect was transferred from the celebrity to the product. This positive affect seemed to originate from the retrieval of memories associated with the celebrity. Whether the same mechanism of persuasion underlies the influence of (real) ingroup members on individual behavior is a question we’d like to answer by future research.

Mirre Stallen is a doctoral candidate at the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University.

We assessed respect for older adults as a possible explanation in one of our studies in the United States, but we did not find that people said they should forgive their elders out of respect. Instead, people offered forgiveness for other reasons:

1) They felt they didn’t have much time left with the older adult and wanted to cherish the remaining time together (rather than spend it fighting).
2) They held stereotypes that older adults are forgetful or cannot change, and therefore, they didn’t get upset with them.
3) They had positive expectations that the older adult would act in a kind manner, so they also acted in a forgiving manner toward the older adult.

These findings are consistent with the way Americans think about relationships—we tend to value our own feelings in a personal way rather than relying on formal patterns of behavior, such as respect. In Asian countries, with Confucian ideals, we might expect respect to play a greater role in behaviors toward the elderly.

Karen Fingerman is the Berner-Hanley Professor in Gerontology, Developmental, and Family Studies at Purdue University.

Women are less status and dominance seeking, so they are less in competition, but more social, with others. In competition, you need to be socially cunning and cautious. To socialize, you need to trust. Both are drives: Males have drives for dominance, reward, and competition; females are motivated to bond and socialize (extremely generally speaking).

In our PNAS experiment, we only manipulated the hormone testosterone, and of course, women have less testosterone in their blood and saliva—but perhaps not fundamentally. Women convert most of their testosterone to the female sex hormone estradiol. Now the question is: What does estradiol do to their trust? Soon someone will find out.

Jack van Honk is a professor of psychology at Utrecht University.

Our research indicates that atheists become more zealously atheistic in response to anxious uncertainty threats. It is important to distinguish zeal from other phenomena that have been linked to religious belief, however. Our research focuses on personally empowered religious and idealistic zeal. Some other research indicates that some people do become more deferent to, and paranoid and credulous about, a wide range of religious and supernatural factors when threatened, but those outcomes appear to be driven by different motivational factors that are associated with different personality orientations.

Specifically, in our research, we find that people with overtly confident personalities are the ones who respond to the threats by becoming more zealous about their belief (or atheism). They do not become more paranoid, credulous, or broadly superstitious, however. We have some preliminary evidence that, in contrast, it is the people with overtly meek personalities who respond to threats by becoming more paranoid, credulous, and superstitious.

Ian McGregor is a professor of psychology at York University.