The Journal of Experimental Psychology: General® publishes articles describing empirical work that is of broad interest or bridges the traditional interests of two or more communities of psychology. The work may touch on issues dealt with in JEP: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, JEP: Human Perception and Performance, JEP: Animal Behavior Processes, or JEP: Applied, but may also concern issues in other subdisciplines of psychology, including social processes, developmental processes, mental illness, neuroscience, or computational modeling. Articles in JEP: General may be longer than the usual journal publication if necessary.
Five preregistered experiments with 3,272 US participants found that people with a stake in an issue read genuinely middle-ground positions as belonging to their opponents. The pattern held only where the issue was moralized and the other side felt threatening, and it did not appear when the moderate was described as rejecting both sides rather than accepting both.