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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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),

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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:

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

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

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

People tend to underestimate how much income inequality exists. Much research has attributed this widespread underestimation to differential access to information, variance in exposure to inequality, or motivated attention to different aspects of inequality. In our research, we suggest that the motivation to believe that the current socioeconomic system is fair and legitimate (i.e., system justification)

The brain exhibits a remarkable ability to learn and execute context-appropriate behaviors. How it achieves such flexibility, without sacrificing learning efficiency, is an important open question. Neuroscience, psychology, and engineering suggest that reusing and repurposing computations are part of the answer. Here, we review evidence that thalamocortical architectures may have evolved to facilitate

Ethical behavior within groups is shaped by various situational and social factors, including hierarchy and power asymmetries. We present three preregistered studies ( = 1253) examining the social dynamics that affect ethical decision-making in hierarchical dyads, employing two novel collaborative cheating tasks. In the first two studies, we find evidence that individuals mutually influenced each other's

Disputes between rival theories of consciousness have often centered on whether perceptual contents can be decoded from the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Failures to decode from the PFC are taken to challenge ‘cognitive’ theories of consciousness such as the global workspace theory and higher-order monitoring theories, and decoding successes have been taken to confirm these theories. However, PFC decoding

Individuals tend to follow choices and behaviors that are common among others, indicating majority influence. Nevertheless, majority behaviors that appear to be consistent can be generated by different factors during the decision-making process; hence, the current study addressed whether people consider the source of majority behavior and follow the majority differently when that behavior is formed

In daily life, various activities are undertaken either alone or with companions, and some of these activities involve a degree of risk. Beyond our concern for our own safety, we also care about other's safety. The current research investigates the influence of self-presence on how we perceive risk for the other. Across six studies (including two preregistered studies), we consistently found that when

Creativity often entails gaining a novel perspective, yet it remains uncertain how this is accomplished. Atypical salience processing may foster creative thinking by prioritizing putatively irrelevant information, thereby broadening the material accessible for idea generation and inhibiting attentional fixedness; in essence, motivating creative individuals to incorporate information that others overlook

The physical world provides humans with continuous streams of experience in both space and time. The human mind, however, can parse and organize this continuous input into discrete, individual units. In the current work, we characterize the representational signatures of basic units of human experience across the spatial (object) and temporal (event) domains. We propose that there are three shared