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An associative-learning account of how infants learn about causal action in animates and inanimates: A critical reexamination of four classic studies. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-09-23 Deon T Benton
Considerable research shows that causal perception emerges between 6 and 10 months of age. Yet, because this research tends to use artificial stimuli, it is unanswered how or through what mechanisms of change human infants learn about the causal properties of real-world categories such as animate entities and inanimate objects. One answer to this question is that this knowledge is innate (i.e., unlearned
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The curve of control: Nonmonotonic effects of task difficulty on cognitive control. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-09-19 Miklos Bognar,Mate Gyurkovics,Balazs Aczel,Henk van Steenbergen
The U-shaped curve has long been recognized as a fundamental concept in psychological science, particularly in theories about motivational accounts and cognitive control. In this study (N = 330), we empirically tested the prediction of a nonmonotonic, curvilinear relationship between task difficulty and control adaptation. Drawing from motivational intensity theory and the expected value of control
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No evidence that sound-shape associations influence temporal resolution in humans: Five nonreplications of Parise and Spence (2009) and meta-analyses. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-09-19 Suddha Sourav,Brigitte Röder,Franka Ambsdorf,Andromachi Melissari,Miketa Arvaniti,Argiro Vatakis
Sound-shape associations (e.g., preferentially matching angular shapes with high-pitched sounds and smooth shapes with low-pitched ones) have been almost universally observed in humans. If cross-modally congruent sounds and shapes are more robustly integrated in humans, distinguishing them in time might be hypothetically more challenging compared to incongruent sound-shape pairings. Supporting this
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Reconciling opposing effects of emotion on relational memory: Behavioral, eye-tracking, and brain imaging investigations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-09-19 Paul C Bogdan,Florin Dolcos,Yuta Katsumi,Margaret O'Brien,Alexandru D Iordan,Samantha Iwinski,Simona Buetti,Alejandro Lleras,Kelly Freeman Bost,Sanda Dolcos
The effects of emotion on memory are wide-ranging and powerful, but they are not uniform. Although there is agreement that emotion enhances memory for individual items, how it influences memory for the associated contextual details (relational memory, RM) remains debated. The prevalent view suggests that emotion impairs RM, but there is also evidence that emotion enhances RM. To reconcile these diverging
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Assessing the effects of "native speaker" status on classic findings in speech research. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-09-19 Julia F Strand,Violet A Brown,Katrina Sewell,Yuxin Lin,Emmett Lefkowitz,Caroline G Saksena
It is common practice in speech research to only sample participants who self-report being "native English speakers." Although there is research on differences in language processing between native and nonnative listeners (see Lecumberri et al., 2010, for a review), the majority of speech research that aims to establish general findings (e.g., testing models of spoken word recognition) only includes
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Brilliance as gender deviance: Gender-role incongruity as another barrier to women's success in academic fields Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-17 Boglarka Nyul, Inna Ksenofontov, Alexandra Fleischmann, Rotem Kahalon
“Brilliance,” a state of extreme intellectual ability, is stereotypically associated with men but not women. Research finds that portrayals of brilliance as a prerequisite for success contribute to women's underrepresentation in certain academic fields and high-level positions. In this work, we examined whether gender roles contribute to the perception of women as less brilliant. In four preregistered
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The impact of social identity complexity on intergroup parochial and universal cooperation under different payoff structures and frames Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-13 Feifei Lu, Jin Yang, Xiaoqiang Yao, Yibo Song, Duo Chen, Ting Zhang, Fenghua Zhang
As society evolves, individuals increasingly cooperate with both in-group members and out-group strangers, despite risks such as betrayal. Social identity plays a crucial role in motivating this cooperation, significantly shaping cooperative behavior. This study explores how social identity complexity—arising from the overlapping of multiple social identities—affects intergroup cooperation. Using the
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No evidence for unconscious initiation and following of arithmetic rules: A replication study. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-09-12 Amir Tal,Liad Mudrik
The field of consciousness studies has yielded various-sometimes contradicting-accounts regarding the function of consciousness, ranging from denying it has such function to claiming that any high-level cognitive function requires consciousness. Empirical findings supporting both accounts were reported, yet some of them have been recently revisited based on failures to replicate. Here, we aimed at
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Bless her heart: Gossip phrased with concern provides advantages in female intrasexual competition Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-12 Tania A. Reynolds, Jon K. Maner, Roy F. Baumeister
Although many women report being victimized by gossip, fewer report spreading negative gossip. Female gossipers might be unaware they are gossiping if they disclose such statements out of concern for targets. Four studies ( = 1709) investigated whether women believe their gossip is motivated by concern and whether expressing concern for targets insulates female gossipers against social costs, while
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First impressions or good endings? Preferences depend on when you ask. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-09-09 Alyssa H Sinclair,Yuxi C Wang,R Alison Adcock
Rewards often unfold over time; we must summarize events in memory to guide future choices. Do first impressions matter most, or is it better to end on a good note? Across nine studies (N = 569), we tested these competing intuitions and found that preferences depend on when rewards occur and when we are asked to evaluate an experience. In our "garage sale" task, participants opened boxes containing
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Older yet sharp: No general age-related decline in focusing attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-09-05 Alessandra S Souza,Gidon T Frischkorn,Klaus Oberauer
Attention is a multifaceted mechanism operating on space, features, and memory. Previous studies reported both decline and preservation of attention in aging. Yet, it is unclear if healthy aging differentially affects attentional selection in these domains. To address these inconsistencies, we evaluated the ability to focus attention using a battery of 11 tasks in a large sample of younger and older
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Girls persist more but divest less from ineffective teaching than boys. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-09-05 Mia Radovanovic,Ece Yucer,Jessica A Sommerville
Teaching is the primary way children learn about the world. However, successful learning involves recognizing when teaching is ineffective, even in the absence of overt cues, and divesting from ineffective teaching to explore novel solutions. Across three experiments, we investigated 7- to 10-year-old children's ability to recognize ineffective teaching; we tested the hypothesis that girls may be less
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Numerical comparison is spatial-Except when it is not. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-09-05 Fraulein Retanal,Véronic Delage,Evan F Risko,Erin A Maloney
The numerical distance effect (NDE) is an important tool for probing the nature of numerical representation. Across two studies, we assessed the degree to which the NDE relates to one's performance on spatial tasks to investigate the role of spatial processing in numerical comparison and, by extension, numerical cognition. We administered numerical comparison tasks and a variety of tasks thought to
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Revisiting the moral forecasting error – A preregistered replication and extension of “Are we more moral than we think?” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-02 Simen Bø, Hallgeir Sjåstad
Predictions are often inaccurate. Still, the direction of prediction errors may vary. Contrary to research on the intention-behavior gap, where people fail to live up to their ambitions, a study on “moral forecasting” found that people behaved honestly than they predicted. In this registered report, we present two close replication attempts and one conceptual replication attempt of this moral forecasting
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Discrediting health disinformation sources: Advantages of highlighting low expertise. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-09-01 Briony Swire-Thompson,Kristen Kilgallen,Mitch Dobbs,Jacob Bodenger,John Wihbey,Skyler Johnson
Disinformation is false information spread intentionally, and it is particularly harmful for public health. We conducted three preregistered experiments (N = 1,568) investigating how to discredit dubious health sources and disinformation attributed to them. Experiments 1 and 2 used cancer information and recruited representative U.S. samples. Participants read a vignette about a seemingly reputable
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Learning from failure: The roles of self-focused feedback, task expectations, and subsequent instruction. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-09-01 Sebahat Gok,Emily R Fyfe
Previous research indicates that failure feedback leads people to tune out from the task, which is detrimental to their learning (Eskreis-Winkler & Fishbach, 2019; Keith et al., 2022). The current work aims to identify ways to optimize learning from failure feedback. We conducted six preregistered experiments (N = 1,306) to replicate and extend the findings from Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach (2019)
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Theta-band neural oscillations reflect cognitive control during language processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-09-01 Tal Ness,Valerie J Langlois,Jared M Novick,Albert E Kim
As we interpret language moment by moment, we often encounter conflicting cues in the input that create incompatible representations of sentence meaning, which must be promptly resolved. Although ample evidence suggests that cognitive control aids in the resolution of such conflict, the methods commonly used to assess cognitive control's involvement in language comprehension provide limited information
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Cross-cultural conceptions of third-party intervention across childhood. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-09-01 Julia Marshall,Kellen Mermin-Bunnell,Anton Gollwitzer,Jan Retelsdorf,Paul Bloom
Third-party intervention is a cornerstone of cooperative societies, yet we know little about how children develop an understanding of this social behavior. The present work generates a cross-cultural and developmental picture of how 6-, 9-, and 12-year-olds (N = 447) across four societies (India, Germany, Uganda, and the United States) reason about third-party intervention. To do so, we measured children's
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Culture shapes moral reasoning about close others. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-09-01 Chayce R Baldwin,Martha K Berg,Jiayin Yuan,Walter J Sowden,Shinobu Kitayama,Ethan Kross
Moral norms balance the needs of the group versus individuals, and societies across the globe vary in terms of the norms they prioritize. Extant research indicates that people from Western cultures consistently choose to protect (vs. punish) close others who commit crimes. Might this differ in cultural contexts that prioritize the self less? Prior research presents two compelling alternatives. On the
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The haves and have-nots: Infants use wealth to guide social behavior and evaluation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-09-01 Arianne E Eason,Elizabeth A Enright,Shimeng Weng,Rachel O Horton,Miranda J Sitch,Jessica A Sommerville
Biases favoring the wealthy are ubiquitous, and they support and bolster vast resource inequalities across individuals and groups; yet, when these biases are acquired remains unknown. In Experiments 1 through 5 (Total N = 232), using multiple methods, we found that 14- to 18-month-old infants track individuals' wealth (Experiments 1-5), prefer and selectively help rich (vs. poor) individuals (Experiments
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What makes working memory work? A multifaceted account of the predictive power of working memory capacity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-09-01 Matthew K Robison,Ashley L Miller,Elizabeth A Wiemers,Derek M Ellis,Nash Unsworth,Thomas S Redick,Gene A Brewer
Working memory capacity (WMC) has received a great deal of attention in cognitive psychology partly because WMC correlates broadly with other abilities (e.g., reading comprehension, second-language proficiency, fluid intelligence) and thus seems to be a critical aspect of cognitive ability. However, it is still rigorously debated why such correlations occur. Some theories posit a single ability (e
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Group-based reputational incentives can blunt sensitivity to societal harms and benefits. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-08-29 Charles A Dorison,Nour S Kteily
People's concern with maintaining their individual reputation powerfully drives judgment and decision making. But humans also identify strongly with groups. Concerns about group-based reputation may similarly shape people's psychology, perhaps especially in contexts where shifts in group reputation can have strategic consequences. Do individuals allow their concern with their group's reputation to
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Political rule (vs. opposition) predicts whether ideological prejudice is stronger in U.S. conservatives or progressives. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-08-29 Johanna Woitzel,Alex Koch
People see societal groups as less moral, warm, and likable if their ideology is more dissimilar to the ideology of the self (i.e., ideological prejudice). We contribute to the debate on whether ideological prejudice in the United States is stronger in conservatives, progressives, or neither. Investigating the American National Election Studies, we found that between 1972 and 2021, ideological prejudice
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Race in the eye of the beholder: Decomposing perceiver- and target-level variation in perceived racial prototypicality Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-08-28 Jasmine B. Norman, Daphne Castro Lingl, Eric Hehman, Jacqueline M. Chen
Perceivers' ability to use multiple sources of information when forming impressions—including top-down, perceiver-level features, and bottom-up, target-level features—is a hallmark of social cognition. We investigate this primary foundation by examining the role of perceiver-level and target-level variation in perceived racial prototypicality in the U.S. In Study 1 (200 unique faces; 2608 raters),
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Exemplar-based ingroup projection: The superordinate national category is associated more strongly with ingroup than outgroup political leaders Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-08-27 Adi Amit, Ido Liviatan, Sari Mentser, Eitan Venzhik, Yuval Karmel, Tal Moran
We studied mental representations of social categories in the context of political groups nested within national identities. Extending previous works derived from the Ingroup Projection Model, which had investigated category representations based on prototypical , we examined category representations based on prototypical , focusing on group leaders. We hypothesized that the mental representation of
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Intergroup bias in perceived trustworthiness among few or many minimal groups Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-08-27 Johanna Woitzel, Moritz Ingendahl, Hans Alves
In diversifying societies, people are inevitably exposed to an increasing number of outgroups. As impressions of outgroups are more negative than those of ingroups, this may overall lead to more negative social attitudes and behaviors. In six preregistered experiments ( = 1832) using a minimal group paradigm, we investigated whether the mere number of groups influences the perceived trustworthiness
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The effects of fear appeals on reactance in climate change communication Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-08-22 Laura Bilfinger, Benjamin Brummernhenrich, Regina Jucks
Addressing the existential threat posed by climate change requires urgent actions, both on an individual level and on a policy level. In the present research, we applied an emotion-based persuasion appeal model to climate change mitigation to test the effect of climate mitigation appeals formulated with different levels of threat (high vs. low) and appealing to different types of climate change solutions
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Fast-forward to boredom: How switching behavior on digital media makes people more bored. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-08-19 Katy Y Y Tam,Michael Inzlicht
Boredom is unpleasant, with people going to great lengths to avoid it. One way to escape boredom and increase stimulation is to consume digital media, for example watching short videos on YouTube or TikTok. One common way that people watch these videos is to switch between videos and fast-forward through them, a form of viewing we call digital switching. Here, we hypothesize that people consume media
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Level of decision confidence shapes motor memory Trends Cogn. Sci. (IF 16.7) Pub Date : 2024-08-14 Daichi Nozaki
Decision making is often necessary before performing an action. Traditionally, it has been assumed that decision making and motor control are independent, sequential processes. challenge this view, and demonstrate that the decision-making process significantly impacts on the formation and retrieval of motor memory by tagging it with the level of confidence.
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Beyond discrete-choice options Trends Cogn. Sci. (IF 16.7) Pub Date : 2024-08-12 Amir Hosein Hadian Rasanan, Nathan J. Evans, Laura Fontanesi, Catherine Manning, Cynthia Huang-Pollock, Dora Matzke, Andrew Heathcote, Jörg Rieskamp, Maarten Speekenbrink, Michael J. Frank, Stefano Palminteri, Christopher G. Lucas, Jerome R. Busemeyer, Roger Ratcliff, Jamal Amani Rad
While decision theories have evolved over the past five decades, their focus has largely been on choices among a limited number of discrete options, even though many real-world situations have a continuous-option space. Recently, theories have attempted to address decisions with continuous-option spaces, and several computational models have been proposed within the sequential sampling framework to
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Dissociations between animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization in the context of labor exploitation Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-08-09 Matthew L. Stanley, Aaron C. Kay
Across eight studies (and two additional supplemental studies), we investigate possible bidirectional causal links between dehumanization and exploitation (total = 5923). Participants were less opposed to the exploitation of mechanistically dehumanized workers – i.e., workers perceived to lack traits central to human nature like emotionality and warmth – than other workers (Studies 1–5). The effects
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Watching hands move enhances learning from concrete and dynamic visualizations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-08-08 Icy Yunyi Zhang,Alice Xu,Ji Y Son,James W Stigler
This article explores the role of sensorimotor engagement in students' learning of a challenging science, technology, engineering, and math-related concept. Previous research has failed to distinguish two features commonly associated with embodiment: sensorimotor engagement and visuospatial concreteness. In the current research, we ask whether sensorimotor engagement-operationalized as watching a video
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Why concepts are (probably) vectors Trends Cogn. Sci. (IF 16.7) Pub Date : 2024-08-07 Steven T. Piantadosi, Dyana C.Y. Muller, Joshua S. Rule, Karthikeya Kaushik, Mark Gorenstein, Elena R. Leib, Emily Sanford
For decades, cognitive scientists have debated what kind of representation might characterize human concepts. Whatever the format of the representation, it must allow for the computation of varied properties, including similarities, features, categories, definitions, and relations. It must also support the development of theories, categories, and knowledge of procedures. Here, we discuss why vector-based
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An integrative framework of conflict and control Trends Cogn. Sci. (IF 16.7) Pub Date : 2024-08-06 Daniela Becker, Erik Bijleveld, Senne Braem, Kerstin Fröber, Felix J. Götz, Tali Kleiman, Anita Körner, Roland Pfister, Andrea M.F. Reiter, Blair Saunders, Iris K. Schneider, Alexander Soutschek, Henk van Steenbergen, David Dignath
People regularly encounter various types of conflict. Here, we ask if, and, if so, how, different types of conflict, from lab-based Stroop conflicts to everyday-life self-control or moral conflicts, are related to one other. We present a framework that assumes that action–goal representations are hierarchically organized, ranging from concrete actions to abstract goals. The framework’s key assumption
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Moral decay in investment Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-08-06 Paweł Niszczota, Paul Conway, Michał Białek
How strongly do higher investment premiums tempt people to invest in unethical assets, such as harmful ‘sin stocks’? We present two experimental studies ( = 1260) examining baseline willingness to invest in ‘sin stocks’ (without a premium), changes in investments as premiums increase, and how individual differences in deontological and utilitarian inclinations and dark personality traits impact baseline
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The development of social essentialist reasoning in Iran: Insight into biological perception, cultural input, and motivational factors. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-08-05 Ghazale Shahbazi,Hossein Samani,Tara M Mandalaywala,Khatereh Borhani,Telli Davoodi
People express essentialist beliefs about social categories from an early age, but essentialist beliefs about specific social categories vary over development and in different contexts. Adapting two paradigms used with Western samples to measure social essentialism, we examined the development of essentialist beliefs about seven social categories (gender, race, nationality, religion, socioeconomic
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Scientific identity and STEMM-relevant outcomes: Elaboration moderates use of identity-certainty Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-08-03 Lorena Moreno, Pablo Briñol, Borja Paredes, Richard E. Petty
This research investigates the link between scientific identity and STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine)-related outcomes as a function of identity certainty. Across a pilot study and three additional studies, participants' scientific identity was first measured using different procedures. Then, the certainty with which that identity was held was either measured (pilot
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Malleable national collective memories among Black and White Americans. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-08-01 Travis G Cyr,William Hirst
How do groups remember their shared past? Are there individual differences within a group? How easy is it to change collective memories? The present article addresses these questions by focusing on differences within national subgroups, exploring how national collective memories might differ for Black and White Americans, how individual differences and external influences might moderate or alter any
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Where should I search next? Messages embedded in storybooks influence children's strategic exploration in Turkey and the United States. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-08-01 Julie Vaisarova,Sarah L Kiefer,Hilal Şen,Peter M Todd,Kelsey Lucca
Despite the vital role of curiosity-driven exploration in learning, our understanding of how to enhance children's curiosity remains limited. Here, we tested whether hearing a strategic curiosity story with curiosity-promoting themes (e.g., strategically approaching uncertainty, adapting flexibly to new information) versus a control story with traditional pedagogical themes (e.g., following rules,
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The presence of diversity initiatives leads to increased pro-White hiring decisions among conservatives. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-08-01 Zeinab A Hachem,Tessa L Dover
Despite the push and pull between pro-diversity advocates and conservative resistance, most organizations have implemented diversity initiatives in an effort to promote equitable and fair organizational practices. Past work has shown that these diversity initiatives may not be as effective as expected and may instead result in unintended negative consequences for the very individuals they are meant
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Combining forecasts from advisors: The impact of advice independence and verbal versus numeric format. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-08-01 Jeremy D Strueder,Paul D Windschitl
Past research on advice-taking has suggested that people are often insensitive to the level of advice independence when combining forecasts from advisors. However, this has primarily been tested for cases in which people receive numeric forecasts. Recent work by Mislavsky and Gaertig (2022) shows that people sometimes employ different strategies when combining verbal versus numeric forecasts about
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Feedback exercises boost discernment of misinformation for gamified inoculation interventions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-08-01 Johannes Leder,Lukas Valentin Schellinger,Rakoen Maertens,Sander van der Linden,Breanne Chryst,Jon Roozenbeek
Gamification is a promising approach to reducing misinformation susceptibility. Previous research has found that "inoculation" games such as Bad News and Harmony Square help build cognitive resistance against misinformation. However, recent research has offered two important nuances: a potentially inadvertent impact of such games on people's evaluation of non-misinformation ("real news") and exponential
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The political (a)symmetry of metacognitive insight into detecting misinformation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-08-01 Michael Geers,Helen Fischer,Stephan Lewandowsky,Stefan M Herzog
Political misinformation poses a major threat to democracies worldwide, often inciting intense disputes between opposing political groups. Despite its central role for informed electorates and political decision making, little is known about how aware people are of whether they are right or wrong when distinguishing accurate political information from falsehood. Here, we investigate people's metacognitive
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Intentional learning establishes multiple attentional sets that simultaneously guide attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-08-01 Sisi Wang,Geoffrey F Woodman
One of the key human cognitive capabilities is to extract regularities from the environment to guide behavior. An attentional set for a target feature can be established through statistical learning of probabilistic target associations; however, whether an array of attentional sets of predictive target features can be established during intentional learning, and how they might guide attention, is not
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When the personal and the collective intersects: Memory, future thinking, and perceived agency during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-07-25 Meymune Nur Topçu,William Hirst
Do collective crises have an impact on the characteristics of mental time travel for individuals and collectives? The COVID-19 pandemic provides a unique context to address this question due to the intersection it created between the personal and the collective domains. In two studies (N = 273), we examined the valence and perceived agency involved in memory and future thinking for personal and collective
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Spontaneous path tracing in task-irrelevant mazes: Spatial affordances trigger dynamic visual routines. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-07-18 Kimberly W Wong,Brian J Scholl
Given a maze (e.g., in a book of puzzles), you might solve it by drawing out paths with your pencil. But even without a pencil, you might naturally find yourself mentally tracing along various paths. This "mental path tracing" may intuitively seem to depend on your (overt, conscious, voluntary) goal of wanting to get out of the maze, but might it also occur spontaneously-as a result of simply seeing
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Choosing not to see: Visual inattention as a method of information avoidance Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-17 Caroline Kjær Børsting, Aleksandr Batuev, Shaul Shalvi, Jacob Lund Orquin
People rely on a number of methods to avoid information that would compel them to change their beliefs or behaviors. However, it remains unclear whether people use visual inattention as a method of information avoidance. In three eye-tracking experiments, we test the hypothesis that people avoid visual information by strategically suppressing and facilitating visual attention depending on where desired
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Giving more or taking more? The dual effect of self-esteem on cooperative behavior in social dilemmas Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-15 Qingzhou Sun, Jingru Huang, Chengming Jiang, Bao Wu, Xiaofen Yu
How does self-esteem influence cooperative behavior in the face of social dilemmas? The findings of previous studies are inconsistent and ignore the distinction between giving and taking dilemmas. This study examined the relationship between self-esteem and cooperative behavior in giving and taking dilemmas. The results revealed that self-esteem positively predicted cooperative behavior in giving dilemmas
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Cognition falters at ~4 Hz in Parkinson’s disease Trends Cogn. Sci. (IF 16.7) Pub Date : 2024-07-12 Nandakumar S. Narayanan, Zahra Jourahmad, Rachel C. Cole, James F. Cavanagh
Cognitive impairments are common in Parkinson’s disease (PD). We have linked this deficit to attenuated midfrontal 1–8-Hz activity that fails to engage cortical cognitive networks. We discuss the consequences of these impairments and how they might be leveraged for PD-specific neurophysiological markers and for novel brain stimulation paradigms.
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Contextual coherence increases perceived numerosity independent of semantic content. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-07-11 Chuyan Qu,Michael F Bonner,Nicholas K DeWind,Elizabeth M Brannon
Number perception emerges from multiple stages of visual processing. Understanding how systematic biases in number perception occur within a hierarchy of increasingly complex feature representations helps uncover the multistage processing underlying our visual number sense. Recent work demonstrated that reducing coherence of low-level visual attributes, such as color and orientation, systematically
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Three roots of online toxicity: disembodiment, accountability, and disinhibition Trends Cogn. Sci. (IF 16.7) Pub Date : 2024-07-08 Swati Pandita, Ketika Garg, Jiajin Zhang, Dean Mobbs
Online communication is central to modern social life, yet it is often linked to toxic manifestations and reduced well-being. How and why online communication enables these toxic social effects remains unanswered. In this opinion, we propose three roots of online toxicity: disembodiment, limited accountability, and disinhibition. We suggest that virtual disembodiment results in a chain of psychological
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Why metacognition matters in politically contested domains Trends Cogn. Sci. (IF 16.7) Pub Date : 2024-07-06 Helen Fischer, Stephen Fleming
Emerging evidence highlights the importance of metacognition – the capacity for insight into the reliability and fallibility of our own knowledge and thought – in politically contested domains. The present synthesis elucidates why metacognition matters in politically charged contexts and its potential impact on how individuals form beliefs, process evidence, and make decisions.
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Correction to "The interpersonal costs of dishonesty: How dishonest behavior reduces individuals' ability to read others' emotions" by Lee et al. (2019). Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-07-01 Julia J Lee,Ashley E Hardin,Bidhan Parmar,Francesca Gino
Reports an error in "The interpersonal costs of dishonesty: How dishonest behavior reduces individuals' ability to read others' emotions" by Julia J. Lee, Ashley E. Hardin, Bidhan Parmar, and Francesca Gino (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2019[Sep], Vol 148[9], 1557-1574). Concerns were raised regarding the findings reported in Study 3 related to data exclusions that may have affected
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Correction to "When fairness is not enough: The disproportionate contributions of the poor in a collective action problem" by Malthouse et al. (2023). Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-07-01 Eugene Malthouse,Charlie Pilgrim,Daniel Sgroi,Thomas T Hills
Reports an error in "When fairness is not enough: The disproportionate contributions of the poor in a collective action problem" by Eugene Malthouse, Charlie Pilgrim, Daniel Sgroi and Thomas T. Hills (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2023[Nov], Vol 152[11], 3229-3242). The third and final research question in The Collective-Risk Social Dilemma section now appears as follows: 3. If what
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Independent influences of movement distance and visual distance on Fitts' law. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (IF 3.7) Pub Date : 2024-06-27 Naser Al-Fawakhiri,Samuel D McDougle
Fitts' Law is one among a small number of psychophysical laws. However, a fundamental variable in Fitts' Law-the movement distance, D-confounds two quantities: The physical distance the effector has to move to reach a goal, and the visually perceived distance to that goal. While these two quantities are functionally equivalent in everyday motor behavior, decoupling them might improve our understanding
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Face masks facilitate discrimination of genuine and fake smiles – But people believe the opposite Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-06-26 Haotian Zhou, Meiying Wang, Yu Yang, Elizabeth A. Majka
It seems a foregone conclusion that face mask-wearing hinders the interpretation of facial expressions, increasing the risk of interpersonal miscommunication. This research identifies a notable counter-case to this apparent truism. In multiple experiments, perceivers were more accurate distinguishing between genuine and fake smiles when the mouth region was concealed under a mask versus exposed. Masks
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Gossip, power, and advice: Gossipers are conferred less expert power Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-06-26 Alexis D. Gordon, Maurice E. Schweitzer
Gossip harms power. Across 6 pre-registered primary studies and 7 pre-registered supplemental studies, we demonstrate that a reputation for engaging in negative gossip (sharing negatively-valanced information about an absent target) reduces expert power (power derived from being regarded as a superior source of expertise). A reputation for engaging in negative gossip harms expert power in two ways:
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Group-bounded indirect reciprocity and intergroup gossip Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-06-25 Hirotaka Imada, Nobuhiro Mifune, Hannah Zibell
Gossip, the exchange of information about absent others, is ingrained in the system of indirect reciprocity, in which participating members selectively interact and cooperate with others with a good reputation. Previous psychological theorizing suggests that indirect reciprocity is perceived to be bounded by group membership. We aimed to examine whether the group-bounded indirect reciprocity perspective
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Whispered words and organizational dynamics: The nuanced evaluation of gossipers' personality and its effect on workplace advice seeking Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-06-21 Lijun (Shirley) Zhang, Nahid Ibrahim, Shankha Basu
Prior research has extensively studied workplace group dynamics within the gossip triad (i.e., sender, receiver, and target). This research shifts the focus to third-party observers outside the gossip triad, examining how they evaluate gossipers and non-gossipers, and whom they turn to for advice. Across five pre-registered experiments ( = 1400), the present work builds on an integrative definition
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A trust inoculation to protect public support of governmentally mandated actions to mitigate climate change Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2024-06-20 Tobia Spampatti, Tobias Brosch, Evelina Trutnevyte, Ulf J.J. Hahnel
In a world barreling down into a worsening climate crisis, negative persuasive attacks to necessary climate policies are major threats to the public's support of governmental mandates to mitigate climate change. To protect against such attacks, here we introduce and investigate the effect and the treatment heterogeneity of the trust inoculation, a psychological inoculation strategy designed around