Many of the everyday restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., lockdowns, being apart from loved ones) are even worse for those with fewer financial and material resources, but a series of experiments (total N = 1,452) suggests that people think the opposite. Indeed, participants consistently displayed a "thick skin bias," whereby they perceived effects of the pandemic such as sheltering

Testing facilitates subsequent learning of new information, a phenomenon known as the forward testing effect. The effect is often investigated in multilist procedures, where studied lists are followed by a retrieval test, or a control task such as restudying, and learning is compared on the final list. In most studies of the effect, tests include all material from the preceding list. We report four

Hindsight bias not only occurs in individual perception but in written work (e.g., Wikipedia articles) as well. To avoid the possibility that biased written representations of events distort the views of broad audiences, one needs to understand the factors that determine hindsight bias in written work. Therefore, we tested the effect of three potential determinants: the extent to which an event evokes

Effective risk communication about medical procedures is critical to ethical shared decision-making. Here, we explore the potential for development of an evidence-based lexicon for verbal communication of surgical risk. We found that Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) surgeons expressed a preference for communicating such risks using verbal probability expressions (VPEs; e.g., "high risk"). However, there

Predictions pose unique problems. Experts regularly get them wrong, and collective solutions (such as prediction markets and super-forecaster schemes) do better but remain selective and costly. Contrary to the idea that face-to-face discussion hinders collective intelligence, social deliberation improves the resolution of general knowledge problems, with four consensually agreed answers outperforming

In addition to their salaries, employees often receive additional variable compensation (i.e., payouts) based on the sales they generate or manage. For any single transaction, the same payout (e.g., $1,000) may be earned by a relatively high commission rate and a low sales amount (e.g., 10% commission rate on a $10,000 sale) or a relatively low commission rate and a high sales amount (e.g., 1% commission

Do adults think about genetic inheritance as a deterministic or probabilistic process? Do adults display systematic biases when reasoning about genetic inheritance? Knowing how adults think about genetic inheritance is valuable, both for understanding the developmental end point of these concepts and for identifying biases that persist even after formal education. In two studies, we examined adults'

Tolerance of minority beliefs and practices is typically considered a critical ingredient for an equal and diverse society. Psychologically, people can use both intuitive and deliberative cognitive sources to make tolerance judgments. Following dual-process theories, this research uses survey experiments to manipulate intuitive versus deliberative thinking to examine whether deliberative thinking increases

Creativity is vital in the contemporary business world. Drawing on the culture-as-situated-cognition theory, we investigate how language affects divergent thinking. We study multicultural bilinguals (Arabs in Israel) whose two languages reflect contrasting cultural mindsets: individualism (Hebrew) versus collectivism (Arabic). Theoretically, individualism is associated with novel thinking as it encourages

Tillman et al. (2017) used evidence-accumulation modeling to ascertain the effects of a conversation (either with a passenger or on a hands-free cell phone) on a drivers' mental workload. They found that a concurrent conversation increased the response threshold but did not alter the rate of evidence accumulation. However, this earlier research collapsed across speaking and listening components of

Modern media enable rapid reporting that does not refer to facts alone but is often interspersed with unconfirmed speculations. Whereas previous research has concentrated primarily on how unconfirmed contents might propagate, potential memory effects of reporting confirmed facts among speculations have so far been widely disregarded. Across four experiments, we show that the presence of speculative

It is often assumed that if two people work on a failure-detection task one after the other, they will observe more failures than when only one person undertakes the task (4-eyes principle). However, human beings have also been found to exert less effort on tasks that they share responsibility for, a phenomenon called social loafing. In the current research, we assessed the effectiveness of sequential

Despite its popularity, signaling a multicultural approach to racial-ethnic diversity is often faced with both positive and negative reactions. In this article, we sought insights into what may contribute to the mixed reactions and why. Drawing on social categorization theories and mindset research, we proposed that an underexplored factor influencing stakeholders' reactions to organizations' diversity

Extending the body shape literature to the field of product design and marketing, this research explores how anthropomorphic products' humanlike body shapes influence consumer evaluation and purchase intention (PI). Findings in Studies 1-2 indicate that a chubby product shape is more likely to trigger perceptions of Agreeableness, whereas a thin humanized shape is more likely to trigger perceptions

Previous work has shown that talking on a mobile phone leads to an impairment of visual attention. Gunnell et al. (2020) investigated the locus of these dual-task impairments and found that although phone conversations led to cognitive delays in response times, other mechanisms underlying particular selective attention tasks were unaffected. Here, we investigated which attentional networks, if any

From financial improprieties to fraudulent claims, scandals and trust transgressions can incite feelings of betrayal. Can these negative reactions spillover and taint other entities that were not involved in the original transgression? We conducted six studies to investigate this question directly. Results consistently demonstrated that people who had perceived a recent betrayal by a transgressing

Consumers often make trade-offs between experiential and material purchases, a choice which has important implications for consumers as well as marketers. The current research explores the effect of regulatory focus on such trade-offs. We find that promotion-driven individuals have a higher preference for experiential purchases than people with a prevention focus. This effect is demonstrated with a

The World Health Organization established that the risk of suffering severe symptoms from coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is higher for some groups, but this does not mean their chances of infection are higher. However, public health messages often highlight the "increased risk" for these groups such that the risk could be interpreted as being about contracting an infection rather than suffering severe

The number of people witnessing or experiencing gender discrimination at work is still high around the globe. While the existing literature has investigated potential mechanisms underlying gender discrimination and the consequences of experiencing gender discrimination at work, it remains unclear how third-party observers-as opposed to employees or coworkers-react to specific instances of workplace

Decision-makers are regularly faced with more choice information than they can directly gaze at in a limited amount of time. Many theories assume that because decision-makers attend to information sequentially and overtly, that is, with direct gaze, they must respond to information overload by trading off between speed and decision accuracy. By reanalyzing five published studies, we show that participants

Declarative concepts are abstract concepts denoted by key terms and short definitions that can be applied in a variety of scenarios (e.g., positive reinforcement in psychology; Rawson et al., 2015). One common learning goal for declarative concepts is to instill knowledge that students can use to support the application of content in novel scenarios. Given theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence

The head fake in basketball is used to hinder the anticipation performance of an opponent. During a head fake, a player turns the head into one direction, but passes the ball to the opposite direction. Several studies showed that responses to the pass direction are slower when a basketball player applies a head fake, which is known as the head-fake effect. While this effect in general is very robust

Increasing misinformation spread poses a threat to older adults but there is little research on older adults within the fake news literature. Embedded in the Changes in Integration for Social Decisions in Aging (CISDA) model, this study examined the role of (a) analytical reasoning; (b) affect; (c) news consumption frequency, and their interplay with (d) news content on news veracity detection in aging

Forensic feature-comparison examiners compare-or "match"-evidence samples (e.g., fingerprints) to provide judgments about the source of the evidence. Research demonstrates that examiners in select disciplines possess expertise in this task by outperforming novices-yet the psychological mechanisms underpinning this expertise are unclear. This article investigates one implicated mechanism: statistical

The present experimental study compared the impact of a total abstinence from smartphone use and of a reduction of daily smartphone use by 1 hr on well-being and healthy lifestyle. Participants (Ntotal = 619) were smartphone users in Germany. The first experimental group (N = 200) waived smartphone use for 7 days, the second experimental group (N = 226) reduced its daily use by 1 hr, and the control

When deciding whether to eat inside a restaurant or how many health protection items to purchase, individuals in the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) era tend to consider the infection risk of crowds of generalized others. With a field study and four experiments, the present study identifies associations between COVID-19 and friendship (e.g., thinking of a friend while reading COVID-19-related news,

Media articles often communicate the latest scientific findings, and readers must evaluate the evidence and consider its potential implications. Prior work has found that the inclusion of graphs makes messages about scientific data more persuasive (Tal & Wansink, 2016). One explanation for this finding is that such visualizations evoke the notion of "science"; however, results are mixed. In the current

People have limited capacity to process and integrate multiple sources of information, so how do they integrate multiple contextual risk factors for Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) infection? In June 2020, we elicited risk perceptions from a nationally representative sample of the public (N = 800) using three psychologically-distinct tasks. Responses were compared to a sample of medical experts who

In a preregistered experiment, we presented participants with information about the safety of traveling during a deadly pandemic and during a migration trip using five different sources (a news article, a family member, an official organization, someone with personal experience, and the travel organizer) and four different verbal descriptions of the likelihood of safety (very likely, likely, unlikely

Design plays a key role in the interpretability of complex visualizations. Many applied domains utilize large quantities of data to make predictions, ranging from maps showing the spread of infectious disease to line graphs displaying global temperature changes. These visualizations tap into the visual system's ability to extract information from groups of similar objects, a process known as ensemble

Associative inference is an adaptive process of memory that allows people to recombine associated information and make novel inferences. We report two online human-subject experiments investigating an associative inference version in which participants viewed overlapping real-news pairs (AB&BC) that could later be linked to support inferences of misinformation (AC). In each experiment, we examined

How do individuals decide how much private information to share publicly? We explore: (a) What are contemporary attitudes about sharing? (b) How much can an organization influence members' sharing indirectly through targeting attitudes, and/or directly through targeting behaviors? We draw on ambivalence, nudging, and privacy paradox theories to examine these important questions using samples of university

Almost 40% of global mortality is attributable to an unhealthy diet, and adolescents and young adults are particularly affected by growing obesity rates. How do (young) people conceptualize and judge the healthiness of foods and how are the judgments embedded in people's mental representations of the food ecology? We asked respondents to rate a large range of common food products on a diverse set of

The concept of "trauma" was originally used by psychiatrists to describe horrific events such as rape and torture that characteristically provoke extreme emotional distress. Both colloquially and clinically, the concept of psychological trauma has broadened considerably. Although many clinical scientists have expressed concern about the broadening of the concept of trauma, it remains unclear how this

The current research examined whether mindfulness promotes offender apologies. In Study 1, we found a positive relation between trait mindfulness and one's disposition to apologize. In Study 2, we found a positive effect of a mindfulness intervention on state apology for a laboratory-induced transgression. In Study 3, an online mindfulness intervention was found to have a positive effect on apologetic

After cognitively demanding work, individuals tend to be less physically active. However, the psychological mechanisms underlying this effect have not been thoroughly tested. The aim of this article was to experimentally investigate the impact of cognitive work demands on subsequent physical activity behavior. Across two preregistered experiments, participants were exposed to high or low levels of

Ubiquitous Internet access has provided easy access to information and has influenced users' attention and knowledge management. In an online information service context, this research examines how the perception of easy access to information affects strategies to learn two types of information: "what it is" and "how to access it." This study also examines how the learning process is moderated by individual

Do regularly physically active individuals differ in their decision-making from people who are not regularly physically active? Across five studies, we document a novel benefit of being regularly physically active for decisions that require the appropriate weighing of goal-relevant versus goal-irrelevant information. Usually, when faced with a mix of relevant and irrelevant attribute information, decision

The primary aim of this research was to test the relation between wisdom and transgression victims' prosocial (forgiving), neutral (inhibiting), and antisocial (unforgiving) post-transgression responses (PTRs) in applied contexts. In addition, this research tested the role of two boundary conditions, transgressors' intent (Study 1 and 2) and transgression frequency (Study 2), in victims' tailoring

Many randomized controlled experiments in the classroom have found that mathematics learning is improved dramatically when practice problems of one kind are distributed across multiple assignments (spaced) and mixed with other kinds of problems (interleaved). In two studies, we investigated students' knowledge of spacing and interleaving. In Study 1, 193 undergraduates designed learning schedules for

We examined the hidden costs of intermittent multitasking. Participants performed a pursuit-tracking task (Experiment 1) or drove in a high-fidelity driving simulator (Experiment 2) by itself or while concurrently performing an easy or difficult backwards counting task that periodically started and stopped, creating on-task and off-task multitasking epochs. A novel application of the Detection Response

Virtual reality (VR) allows users to walk to explore the virtual environment (VE), but this capability is constrained by real obstacles. Teleporting interfaces overcome this constraint by allowing users to select a position, and sometimes orientation, in the VE before being instantly transported without self-motion cues. This study investigated whether individual differences in navigation performance

The current research investigated the role of transgressors' social power on their motivation to apologize or not. Based on power approach theory (Keltner et al., 2003), we predicted that high-power transgressors would be less motivated to apologize and more motivated to engage in nonapology (e.g., shifting blame, minimizing the transgression) than their low-power counterparts. We further predicted

Recalling details from an experienced event can sometimes exacerbate eyewitnesses' susceptibility to subsequent misinformation. This finding, known as retrieval-enhanced suggestibility (RES), can be eliminated when participants are warned about possible inaccuracies in the misinformation source (Thomas et al., 2010). In three experiments, we investigated whether this warning benefit persists across

In many important search tasks, observers must find what they are looking for using only visual information (e.g., X-ray baggage screening/medical screening). However, numerous other search tasks can only be effectively completed when the searcher uses their hands to find what they are looking for (e.g., "rummage" search). Unfortunately, it is not currently well understood how observers conduct such

In the complex modern world, people's understanding of how things work is often outsourced to other people. We explore how people's perceptions of expert causal understanding of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic predicted their pandemic-related behaviors. As part of a larger longitudinal study, we collected data at four time points that measured participants' perceptions of experts' causal

To reduce the spread of COVID-19, governments around the world have recommended or required minimum physical distancing between individuals, as well as either mandating or recommending the use of face coverings (masks) in certain circumstances. When multiple risk reduction activities can be adopted, people may engage in risk compensation by responding to a reduced (perceived) risk exposure due to one

In three experiments using 977 participants, we investigated whether people would show belief bias by letting their prior beliefs on politically charged topics unduly influence their reasoning when updating beliefs based on evidence. Participants saw data from fictional studies and made judgments of how strongly COVID-19 mitigation measures influenced the number of COVID-19 cases (political problems)

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed our lives to a profound extent. In this research, we examined how the pandemic might have influenced people's general risk attitude in their daily lives. Across four studies (two preregistered) using U.S. online worker and Canadian university student samples, we observed that individuals who were severely affected by the pandemic showed higher risk taking toward a

During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, data regarding new infections were commonly presented and used to guide policy decisions (e.g., whether to close schools) and personal choices (e.g., whether to dine at a restaurant). In this manuscript, we highlight a critical aspect of pandemic data that can pose a challenge for people trying to reason about it. Data on infections-like much

At the onset of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) global pandemic, our interdisciplinary team hypothesized that a mathematical misconception-whole number bias (WNB)-contributed to beliefs that COVID-19 was less fatal than the flu. We created a brief online educational intervention for adults, leveraging evidence-based cognitive science research, to promote accurate understanding of rational numbers

Critical to limiting the spread of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and future pandemics is compliance with behavioral recommendations such as mask wearing and social distancing. Compliance may depend upon understanding the seriousness of the health consequences and the likelihood they will occur. However, the statistics that speak to these issues in an ongoing pandemic are complex and may be misunderstood

Understanding psychosocial correlates of engaging in health-protective behaviors during an infectious disease outbreak can inform targeted intervention strategies. We surveyed a national probability-based sample of 6,514 Americans, with three separate, consecutive representative cohorts between March 18, 2020 and April 18, 2020, as the U.S. COVID-19 epidemic began. Americans adopted many health-protective

After first being declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization [WHO], (2020) in March 2020, coronavirus disease (COVID-19) spread rapidly and in the process altered our very way of life. At the same time, it became increasingly clear that a wide range of new behavioral science research was necessary to understand fully how people comprehend and respond to such an unprecedented and long lasting

Decision-makers frequently use numerical estimates, such as distances, future prices, and the expected timing of events. How do they evaluate these estimates, once they observe the "correct" values? This research finds that when people evaluate estimates for their accuracy, they judge underestimates to be better than overestimates in these comparisons. For instance, if an obtained stock price is $25

Spatial and temporal factors are known to highly influence tactile perception, but their role has been largely unexplored in the case of two-dimensional (2D) pattern recognition. We investigated whether recognition is facilitated by the spatial and/or temporal separation of pattern elements, or by conditions known to favor perceptual integration, such as the ones eliciting apparent movement. 2D vibrotactile

Despite a serious need for sustainable alternative water supplies in many parts of the world, public opposition remains a barrier to implementing solutions such as safe wastewater recycling schemes. Here, we compared two strategies to increase acceptance of recycled water: default nudges and informing choices. Experiment 1 (N = 81) showed that defaults increased acceptance of recycled water. Experiment

The Coronavirus disease; COVID-19 vaccines will not end the pandemic if they stay in freezers. In many countries, such as France, COVID-19 vaccines hesitancy is high. It is crucial that governments make it as easy as possible for people who want to be vaccinated to do so, but also that they devise communication strategies to address the concerns of vaccine hesitant individuals. We introduce and test

Pain affects the lives of many individuals by creating physical, psychological, and economic burdens. A critical psychological factor negatively affected by pain is one's ability to sustain attention. In order to better understand the effect of pain on sustained attention we conducted three experiments utilizing the psychomotor vigilance task, thought probes, and pupillometry. In Experiment 1, participants