Effects of cognitive strategies on behavioral intentions towards strangers: A conceptual replication of Shimizu, Nakashima, and Morinaga (2016)

Shimizu, Nakashima, and Morinaga (2016) reported that tendencies consistent with defensive pessimism (DP) are positively associated with considerate and respectful behavioral intentions toward strangers. However, two limitations hinder the generalizability of their findings: (1) their participants were exclusively female students of a women’s junior college, and (2) the cognitive strategy scale used in their study did not take all four types of cognitive strategy; i.e., DP, strategic optimism (SO), realistic pessimism (RP), and unjustified optimism (UO), into consideration. We replicated Shimizu et al. (2016) with adult respondents and used a different scale to enhance the generalizability of the results. Japanese adults (N=337) participated in an online survey. Path analysis of their responses indicated that a relationship exists between DP and behavioral intentions, which was consistent with the findings reported by Shimizu et al. (2016). The study also produced exploratory evidence that individuals that exhibit UO show less considerate and respectful behavioral intentions in interpersonal contexts than those who display SO or RP.