Achieving personal growth often requires experiencing discomfort. What if instead of tolerating discomfort (eg. feeling awkward or uncomfortable), people actively sought it out?
Because discomfort is usually experienced immediately and is easy to detect, we suggest that seeking discomfort as a signal of growth can increase motivation.
Five experiments (total n = 2,163 adults) tested this prediction across various areas of personal growth: taking improvisation classes to increase self-confidence, engaging in expressive writing to process difficult emotions, becoming informed about the COVID-19 health crisis, opening oneself to opposing political viewpoints, and learning about gun violence.
Across these areas of personal development, seeking discomfort as a signal of self-growth motivated engagement and increased perceived goal achievement relative to standard instructions.
Consistent with our theorizing, results showed that these effects occurred only in areas of personal growth that cause immediate discomfort.
[Keywords: motivation, self-control, self-growth goals, negative experience, open data, open materials, preregistered]
A wide range of non-human animal species have been shown to be able to respond to human referential signals, such as pointing gestures. The aim of the present study was to replicate previous findings showing cats to be sensitive to human pointing cues (Miklósi et al 2005).
In our study, we presented two types of human pointing gestures—momentary direct pointing and momentary cross-body pointing. We tested nine rescue cats in a two-way object choice task.
On a group level, the success rate of cats was 74.4 percentage. Cats performed significantly above chance level in both the direct pointing and cross-body pointing condition. Trial number, rewarded side and type of gesture did not significantly affect the cats’’ performance in the experiment. On an individual level, 5 out of 7 cats who completed 20 trials, performed significantly above chance level. Two cats only completed 10 trials. One of them succeeded in 8, the other in 6 of these.
The results of our study replicate previous findings of cats being responsive to human direct pointing cues and add additional knowledge about their ability to follow cross-body pointing cues. Our results highlight a domestic species, socialized in a group setting, to possess heterospecific communication skills, however we have to consider parsimonious explanations, such as local and stimulus enhancement.
Humans show aversion toward inequality of social reward, and this aversion plays important roles for the establishment of social cooperation. However, it has remained unknown whether commonly used experimental animals show negative responses to social reward inequality. In this study, we found that rats showed bonding-like behavior to an affiliative human who repeatedly stroked the rats. In addition, these rats emitted distress calls, an index of negative emotion, when an affiliative human stroked another rat in front of them. These distress calls had acoustic characteristics different from those emitted in response to physical stress stimuli such as air-puff. Rats emitted calls with higher frequency (28 kHz) and shorter durations (0.05 sec) in an inequality condition than the frequency and durations of calls emitted when receiving air-puff. Our results suggested that rats exhibited negative emotion with unique distress calls in response to a social inequality condition.
When we attached tiny, backpack-like tracking devices to 5 Australian magpies for a pilot study, we didn’t expect to discover an entirely new social behaviour rarely seen in birds. Our goal was to learn more about the movement and social dynamics of these highly intelligent birds, and to test these new, durable and reusable devices. Instead, the birds outsmarted us.
…A novel aspect of our research was the design of the harness that held the tracker. We devised a method that didn’t require birds to be caught again to download precious data or reuse the small devices. We trained a group of local magpies to come to an outdoor, ground feeding “station” that could either wirelessly charge the battery of the tracker, download data, or release the tracker and harness by using a magnet. The harness was tough, with only one weak point where the magnet could function. To remove the harness, one needed that magnet, or some really good scissors. We were excited by the design, as it opened up many possibilities for efficiency and enabled a lot of data to be collected.
We wanted to see if the new design would work as planned, and discover what kind of data we could gather. How far did magpies go? Did they have patterns or schedules throughout the day in terms of movement, and socialising? How did age, sex or dominance rank affect their activities?
All this could be uncovered using the tiny trackers—weighing less than one gram—we successfully fitted 5 of the magpies with. All we had to do was wait, and watch, and then lure the birds back to the station to gather the valuable data.
…It Was Not To Be: …During our pilot study, we found out how quickly magpies team up to solve a group problem. Within 10 minutes of fitting the final tracker, we witnessed an adult female without a tracker working with her bill to try and remove the harness off a younger bird. Within hours, most of the other trackers had been removed. By day 3, even the dominant male of the group had its tracker successfully dismantled.
We don’t know if it was the same individual helping each other or if they shared duties, but we had never read about any other bird cooperating in this way to remove tracking devices…We never considered the magpies may perceive the tracker as some kind of parasite that requires removal.
Just like magpies, we scientists are always learning to problem solve. Now we need to go back to the drawing board to find ways of collecting more vital behavioural data to help magpies survive in a changing world.
Despite recent progress in reinforcement learning (RL), RL algorithms for exploration still remain an active area of research. Existing methods often focus on state-based metrics, which do not consider the underlying causal structures of the environment, and while recent research has begun to explore RL environments for causal learning, these environments primarily leverage causal information through causal inference or induction rather than exploration. In contrast, human children—some of the most proficient explorers—have been shown to use causal information to great benefit. In this work, we introduce a novel RL environment designed with a controllable causal structure, which allows us to evaluate exploration strategies used by both agents and children in an unified environment. In addition, through experimentation on both computation models and children, we demonstrate that there are statistically-significant differences between information-gain optimal RL exploration in causal environments and the exploration of children in the same environments. We conclude with a discussion of how these findings may inspire new directions of research into efficient exploration and disambiguation of causal structures for RL algorithms.
The “backfire effect” is when a correction increases belief in the very misconception it is attempting to correct, and it is often used as a reason not to correct misinformation.
The current study aimed to test whether correcting misinformation increases belief more than a no-correction control. Furthermore, we aimed to examine whether item-level differences in backfire rates were associated with test-retest reliability or theoretically meaningful factors. These factors included worldview-related attributes, including perceived importance and strength of pre-correction belief, and familiarity-related attributes, including perceived novelty and the illusory truth effect.
In 2 nearly identical experiments, we conducted a longitudinal pre/post design with n = 388 and 532 participants. Participants rated 21 misinformation items and were assigned to a correction condition or test-retest control.
We found that no items backfired more in the correction condition compared to test-retest control or initial belief ratings. Item backfire rates were strongly negatively correlated with item reliability (ρ = −0.61/−.73) and did not correlate with worldview-related attributes. Familiarity-related attributes were statistically-significantly correlated with backfire rate, though they did not consistently account for unique variance beyond reliability. While there have been previous papers highlighting the non-replicable nature of backfire effects, the current findings provide a potential mechanism for this poor replicability.
It is crucial for future research into backfire effects to use reliable measures, report the reliability of their measures, and take reliability into account in analyses. Furthermore, fact-checkers and communicators should not avoid giving corrective information due to backfire concerns.
[Keywords: misinformation, reliability, belief updating, the backfire effect]
…At best, unreliable measures add noise and complicate the interpretation of effects observed. At worst, unreliable measures can produce statistically-significant findings that are spurious artifacts (Loken & Gelman 2017). A major drawback of prior misinformation research is that experiments investigating backfire effects have typically not reported the reliability of their measures (for an exception, see Horne et al 2015). Due to random variation or regression to the mean in a pre/post study, items with low reliability would be more likely to show a backfire effect. In a previous meta-analysis (Swire-Thompson et al 2020), we found preliminary evidence for this reliability-backfire relationship by comparing studies using single-item measures—which typically have poorer reliability (Jacoby 1978; Peter 1979)—with more reliable multi-item measures. Examining 31 studies and 72 dependent measures1, we found that the proportion of backfire effects observed with single item measures was substantially greater than those found in multi-item measures. Notably, when a backfire effect was reported, 81% of these cases were with single-item measures (70% of worldview backfire effects and 100% of familiarity backfire effects), whereas only 19% of cases used multi-item measures. This suggests that measurement error could be a contributing factor, but it is important to more directly measure the contribution of reliability to the backfire effect.
This study examined the prevalence of myths about personality traits as set out in a book (Donnellan & Luca 2021) and beliefs in the predictive validity of personality tests. In all, 616 participants completed a questionnaire in which they rated the extent to which they thought statements/facts about personality traits were true or false, and whether personality test scores could predict behaviours like health, wealth and marital satisfaction.
In total, 12 of these myths were rated as true (definitely or partly) by the majority of the participants, particularly those that implied personality change and instability over time. Only 6 were rated as probably false, 2 as definitely false, and 5 as “Don’t Know” by the majority of respondents. Overall, participants thought tests predicted leadership and depression best, and longevity and future earnings least well. There were a number of systematic individual correlates of these beliefs which indicated that participants’ religious and political beliefs were related to these myths and misconceptions.
Limitations of this, and similar studies, are noted, and implications are discussed.
…Table 1 shows that overall participants believed the majority of people believed 11 the myths to be “definitely or probably true” and around the same number of “be definitely or probably false”. Greatest agreement was with item 14 which suggested that trauma greatly shapes personality; followed by item 6 which suggested personality was difficult, if not impossible to measure. The 2 items (13, 19) that were endorsed by most people as false related to the same issue namely the instability of personality. Overall, 5 items attracted a majority “did not know”, possibly because they required some technical knowledge to understand them. Given the nature of the data there were no obvious ways (like factor analysis) to categorise the statements empirically.
[author commentary] Recent advances in tracking technology have enabled devices such as Global Positioning Systems (GPS) loggers to be used on a wide variety of birds. Although there are established ethical considerations to these processes, different species may react differently to particular devices and attachments. Thus, pilot studies are still of utmost importance in this field.
Here, we describe one such study trialing a novel harness design for GPS tracking devices on Australian magpies (Gymnorhina tibicen).
Despite previous testing demonstrating the strength and durability of the harness, devices were removed within minutes to hours of initial fitting. Notably, removal was observed to involve one bird snapping another bird’s harness at the only weak point, such that the tracker was released.
This behaviour demonstrates both cooperation and a moderate level of problem solving, providing potential further evidence of the cognitive abilities of this species. To our knowledge, this is the first study to report the conspecific removal of GPS trackers, and should be considered when planning future tracking studies especially on highly social species.
…Prosocial behaviour in Australian Magpies: Research into prosocial behaviour in Australian Magpies is limited, so therefore it is not known how common it might be or how it may manifest in this species. The GPS trackers might have presented a challenge similar to ectoparasitism, initiating an allopreening response by either nesting adults or helper individuals within the group. Although stimulus-driven allopreening because of the presence of parasites is not well understood in birds, Rock Doves (Columba livia) appear not to increase allopreening rates with increases in ectoparasite levels (Goodman et al 2020). The prosocial behaviour response that we observed in Magpies could also have been initiated by the conspecific because of increased stress levels (Hammers & Brouwer 2017). Regardless of the stimulus that prompted the helping behaviour, both hypotheses on collaboration and prosocial behaviour (eg. the adaptive cognition hypothesis and the social intelligence hypothesis) could be supported here (Pike et al 2019).
Rescue behaviour is a specific form of cooperative behaviour that involves a helper working to free another individual in distress, with no obvious direct benefit to the rescuing individual (Nowbahari & Hollis 2010). Although rescue behaviour has most commonly been described in ants (Formicidae), there are rare cases in the literature of rescuing in birds (Nowbahari & Hollis 2010). For example, Seychelles Warblers (Acrocephalus sechellensis) have been observed removing sticky ‘bird-catcher tree’ (Pisonia grandis) seeds from the feathers of other individuals (Hammers & Brouwer 2017), a very similar behaviour to what we have described here. It is possible that what we have observed is the first documented case of rescue behaviour in Australian Magpies.
A kiss tells the tale: Young humans are remarkably helpless, relying entirely on the adult humans around them for survival. However, not all adults are as invested in the care of a particular child, and there is benefit in being able to determine from a very young age which relationships are close. Thomas et al 2022 tested young children and infants to determine whether they were able to identify close, or “thick”, relationships based on whether individuals participated in activities that involve sharing saliva, such as eating, kissing, or sharing utensils (see the Perspective by Fawcett [“Kids attend to saliva sharing to infer social relationships”]). The children expected relationships like these to be closer than other relationships, indicating that they can distinguish closeness very early in life.
Across human societies, people form “thick” relationships characterized by strong attachments, obligations, and mutual responsiveness. People in thick relationships share food utensils, kiss, or engage in other distinctive interactions that involve sharing saliva.
We found that children, toddlers, and infants infer that dyads who share saliva (as opposed to other positive social interactions) have a distinct relationship. Children expect saliva sharing to happen in nuclear families. Toddlers and infants expect that people who share saliva will respond to one another in distress. Parents confirm that saliva sharing is a valid cue of relationship thickness in their children’s social environments.
The ability to use distinctive interactions to infer categories of relationships thus emerges early in life, without explicit teaching; this enables young humans to rapidly identify close relationships, both within and beyond families.
Social connection is critical for our mental and physical health yet assessing and measuring connection has been challenging. Here, we demonstrate that a feature intrinsic to conversation itself—the speed with which people respond to each other—is a simple, robust, and sufficient metric of social connection. Strangers and friends feel more connected when their conversation partners respond quickly. Because extremely short response times (<250 ms) preclude conscious control, they provide an honest signal that even eavesdroppers use to judge how well 2 people “click.”
Clicking is one of the most robust metaphors for social connection. But how do we know when 2 people “click”? We asked pairs of friends and strangers to talk with each other and rate their felt connection. For both friends and strangers, speed in response was a robust predictor of feeling connected. Conversations with faster response times felt more connected than conversations with slower response times, and within conversations, connected moments had faster response times than less-connected moments. This effect was determined primarily by partner responsivity: People felt more connected to the degree that their partner responded quickly to them rather than by how quickly they responded to their partner. The temporal scale of these effects (<250 ms) precludes conscious control, thus providing an honest signal of connection. Using a round-robin design in each of 6 closed networks, we show that faster responders evoked greater feelings of connection across partners. Finally, we demonstrate that this signal is used by third-party listeners as a heuristic of how well people are connected: Conversations with faster response times were perceived as more connected than the same conversations with slower response times. Together, these findings suggest that response times comprise a robust and sufficient signal of whether 2 minds “click.”
[Keywords: conversation, social connection, response time, turn taking]
Harrison et al 2021 set out to test the greater male variability hypothesis with respect to personality in non-human animals. Based on the non-statistically-significant results of their meta-analysis, they concluded that there is no evidence to support the hypothesis, and that biological explanations for greater male variability in human psychological traits should be called into question.
Here, we show that these conclusions are unwarranted. Specifically:
in mammals, birds, and reptiles/amphibians, the magnitude of the sex differences in variability found in the meta-analysis is entirely in line with previous findings from both humans and non-human animals;
the generalized lack of statistical-significance does not imply that effect sizes were too small to be considered meaningful, as the study was severely underpowered to detect effect sizes in the plausible range;
the results of the meta-analysis can be expected to underestimate the true magnitude of sex differences in the variability of personality, because the behavioral measures employed in most of the original studies contain large amounts of measurement error; and
variability effect sizes based on personality scores, latencies, and proportions suffer from lack of statistical validity, adding even more noise to the meta-analysis.
In total, Harrison et al 2021’s study does nothing to disprove the greater male variability hypothesis in mammals, let alone in humans. To the extent that they are valid, the data remain compatible with a wide range of plausible scenarios.
The Likert item response format for items is almost ubiquitous in the social sciences and has particular virtues regarding the relative simplicity of item-generation and the efficiency for coding responses. However, in this article, we critique this very common item format, focusing on its affordance for interpretation in terms of internal structure validity evidence.
We suggest an alternative, the Guttman response format, which we see as providing a better approach for gathering and interpreting internal structure validity evidence.
Using a specific survey-based example, we illustrate how items in this alternative format can be developed, exemplify how such items operate, and explore some comparisons between the results from using the 2 formats.
In conclusion, we recommend usage of the Guttman response format for improving the interpretability of the resulting outcomes. Finally, we also note how this approach may be used in tandem with items that use the Likert response format to help balance efficiency with interpretability.
The Likert item response format for items, which features a stem statement, and a series of simple alternatives for the respondent (usually Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree) is almost ubiquitous in the social sciences and has particular virtues regarding the relative simplicity of item-generation and the efficiency for coding responses.
However, in this article, we critique this very common item format, focusing on its affordance for interpretation in terms of internal structure validity evidence, that is, whether there is evidence in the response data that supports the underlying structure of the latent variable being measured.
We suggest an alternative, the Guttman response format, which we see as providing a better approach for gathering and interpreting this internal structure validity evidence. Using a specific survey-based example, we illustrate how items in this alternative format can be developed, exemplify how such items operate, and explore some comparisons between the results from using the 2 formats.
In conclusion, we recommend usage of the Guttman response format for improving the interpretability of the resulting outcomes. Finally, we also note how this approach may be used in tandem with items that use the Likert response format to help balance efficiency with interpretability.
[Keywords: Guttman response format, internal structure validity evidence, Likert response format, Likert scales]
Question: Were sleep gains among adolescents during COVID-19 pandemic high school closures associated with better health-related characteristics?
Findings: In this survey study of 8,972 adolescents from Swiss high schools, during the COVID-19 lockdown, participants slept statistically-significantly longer and had better health-related quality of life and less caffeine and alcohol use than before the pandemic. Longer sleep duration was statistically-significantly associated with better health-related characteristics, although this was offset by an association of depressive symptoms with worse health-related characteristics and increased caffeine consumption.
Meaning: In this study, sleep gains were associated with better health-related characteristics among youths, but depressive symptoms were associated with a worsening of the same health-related characteristics.
Importance: Although negative associations of COVID-19 pandemic high school closures with adolescents’ health have been demonstrated repeatedly, some research has reported a beneficial association of these closures with adolescents’ sleep. The present study was, to our knowledge, the first to combine both perspectives.
Objective: To investigate associations between adolescents’ sleep and health-related characteristics during COVID-19 pandemic school closures in Switzerland.
Design, Setting, & Participants: This survey study used cross-sectional online surveys circulated among the students of 21 public high schools in Zurich, Switzerland. The control sample completed the survey under regular, prepandemic conditions (May to July 2017) and the lockdown sample during school closures (May to June 2020). Survey respondents were included in the study if they provided their sex, age, and school.
Exposures: High school closures during the first COVID-19 pandemic wave in Switzerland (March 13 to June 6, 2020).
Main Outcomes & Measures: Sleep-wake patterns, health-related quality of life (HRQoL, assessed by the KIDSCREEN-10 questionnaire), substance use (caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine), and depressive symptoms (lockdown sample only; assessed using the withdrawn/depressed scale from the Youth Self Report). Multilevel regression models were used to assess sample differences and associations of health-related characteristics with sleep duration and depressive symptoms.
Results: The total sample consisted of 8,972 students, including 5,308 (59.2%) in the control sample (3,454 [65.1%] female) and 3,664 (40.8%) in the lockdown sample (2,429 [66.3%] female); the median age in both samples was 16 years (IQR, 15–17 years). During school closures, the sleep period on scheduled days was 75 minutes longer (semipartial R2 statistic [R2β✱], 0.238; 95% CI, 0.222–0.254; p < 0.001) and the students had better HRQoL (R2β✱, 0.007; 95% CI, 0.004–0.012; p < 0.001) and less consumption of caffeine (R2β✱, 0.010; 95% CI, 0.006–0.015; p < 0.001) and alcohol (R2β✱, 0.014; 95% CI, 0.008–0.022; p < 0.001). Longer sleep duration was associated with better HRQoL (R2β✱, 0.027; 95% CI, 0.020–0.034; p < 0.001) and less caffeine consumption (R2β✱, 0.013; 95% CI, 0.009–0.019; p < 0.001). In the lockdown sample, an inverse association was found between depressive symptoms and HRQoL (R2β✱, 0.285; 95% CI, 0.260–0.0311; p < 0.001) and a positive association was found with caffeine consumption (R2β✱, 0.003; 95% CI, 0.000–0.008; p = 0.01).
Conclusions & Relevance: In this survey study, 2 opposing associations between school closures and adolescents’ health were identified: a negative association with psychological distress and a beneficial association with increased sleep duration. These findings should be considered when evaluating and implementing school closures. Furthermore, the findings provide support for delaying school start times for adolescents.
4 preregistered studies show that beauty increases trust in graphs from scientific papers, news, and social media.
Scientists, policymakers, and the public increasingly rely on data visualizations—such as COVID tracking charts, weather forecast maps, and political polling graphs—to inform important decisions. The aesthetic decisions of graph-makers may produce graphs of varying visual appeal, independent of data quality.
Here we tested whether the beauty of a graph influences how much people trust it. Across 3 studies, we sampled graphs from social media, news reports, and scientific publications, and consistently found that graph beauty predicted trust. In a 4th study, we manipulated both the graph beauty and misleadingness.
We found that beauty, but not actual misleadingness, causally affected trust.
These findings reveal a source of bias in the interpretation of quantitative data and indicate the importance of promoting data literacy in education. [Particularly worrisome given how effective statistics design is ignored by designers optimizing only for beauty.]
[Keywords: aesthetics, beauty-is-good stereotype/halo effect, causal effects, data visualizations, publication bias, public trust]
…Here we test the hypothesis that the beauty of data visualizations influences how much people trust them. We first examined the correlation between perceived beauty and trust in graphs. To maximize the generalizability and external validity of our findings, we systematically sampled graphs (Figure 1) of diverse types and topics (Figure 2) from the real world. These graphs spanned a wide range of domains, including social media (Study 1), news reports (Study 2), and scientific publications (Study 3). We asked participants how beautiful they thought the graphs looked and how much they trusted the graphs. We also measured how much participants found the graphs interesting, understandable, surprising, and negative, to control for potential confounds (Figure 3A). In addition to predicting trust ratings, we also examined whether participants’ beauty ratings predicted real-world impact. We measured impact using indices including the number of comments the graphs received on social media, and the number of citations the graphs’ associated papers had. Finally, we tested the causal effect of graph beauty on trust by generating graphs using arbitrary data (Study 4). We orthogonally manipulated both the beauty and the actual misleadingness of these graphs and measured how these manipulations affected trust.
…Results: Beauty correlates with trust across domains. We found that participants’ trust in graphs was associated with how beautiful participants thought the graphs looked for graphs across all 3 domains (Figure 3B): social media posts on Reddit (Pearson’s r = 0.45, p = 4.15×10−127 in Study 1a; r = 0.41, p = 3.28×10−231 in Study 1b), news reports (r = 0.43, p = 1.14×10−278 in Study 2), and scientific papers (r = 0.41, p = 6.×10−234 in Study 3). These findings indicate that, across diverse contents and sources of the graphs, perceived beauty and trust in graphs are reliably correlated in the minds of perceivers. The association between beauty and trust remained robust when controlling for factors that might influence both perceived beauty and trust, including how much participants thought the graphs were interesting, understandable, surprising, and negative (linear mixed modeling: b = 0.19, standardized 𝛽 = 0.22, p = 1.05×10−30 in Study 1a; b = 0.14, 𝛽 = 0.16, p = 8.81×10−46 in Study 1b; b = 0.14, 𝛽 = 0.15, p = 5.35×10−35 in Study 2; b = 0.10, 𝛽 = 0.12, p = 1.85×10−25 in Study 3; see Figure 1: for the coefficients of covariates). These findings indicate that beautiful visualizations predict increased trust even when controlling for the effects of interesting topics, understandable presentation, confirmation bias, and negativity bias.
Figure 3: Correlations between beauty and trust in Studies 1–3. (A) Participants viewed each graph (top; an example from Study 3) and rated each graph on 6 aspects (bottom; the order was randomized). (B) The frequency of ratings (colored; presented with 2D kernel density) on the beauty and trust of the graphs in Studies 1a, 1b, 2, and 3 (from top to bottom), and univariate correlations between the 2 variables (line for linear regression, text for Pearson’s correlation, asterisks indicate statistical-significance: ✱✱✱ for p < 0.001; n = 2,681 in Study 1a; n = 5,780 in Study 1b; n = 6,204 in Study 2; n = 6,030 in Study 3).
Beauty predicts real-world popularity: We found that the real-world popularity of the graphs was associated with how beautiful participants thought they were. The more beautiful graphs from Reddit were associated with higher numbers of comments in both Study 1a (b = 0.04, 𝛽 = 0.04, p = 0.011) and Study 1b (b = 0.11, 𝛽 = 0.12, p = 2.84×10−22). The more beautiful graphs from scientific journals were associated with papers that had higher numbers of citations in Study 3 (b = 0.07, 𝛽 = 0.05, p = 0.001; but not higher numbers of views, b = 0.03, 𝛽 = 0.02, p = 0.264). The association between the perceived beauty of a paper’s graphs and the paper’s number of citations remained robust when controlling for the paper’s publication date and how much participants thought the graphs were interesting, understandable, surprising, and negative (b = 0.05, 𝛽 = 0.04, p = 0.005). These findings suggest that people’s bias in favor of trusting beautiful graphs has real-world consequences.
Figure 4: Causal effects of beauty on trust in Study 4. (A) Manipulations of an example graph of a specific type and topic in 4 experimental conditions. (B) Manipulation check of beauty. linear mixed model regression of beauty ratings (7-point Likert scale) on beauty manipulations (binary), while controlling for the manipulations of misleadingness and the random effects of participants, graph types, and graph topics (n = 2,574 observations). (C) Causal effects of beauty and misleadingness. Linear mixed model regression of trust ratings (7-point Likert scale) on beauty and misleadingness manipulations (binary), while controlling for the random effects of participants, graph types, and graph topics (n = 2,574 observations).
…Discussion: …A second, non-mutually exclusive, explanation suggests that this apparent bias may be rooted in rational thinking. More beautiful graphs may indicate that the data is of higher quality and that the graph maker is more skillful [Steele & Iliinsky 2010, Beautiful Visualization: Looking at Data through the Eyes of Experts]. However, our results suggest that this reasoning may not be accurate. It does not require sophisticated techniques to make beautiful graphs: we reliably made graphs look more beautiful simply by increasing their resolution and color saturation, and using a legible, professional font (Figure 4A–B). Findings from the real-world graphs (Studies 1–3) also suggest that one could make a very basic graph such as a bar plot look very beautiful (Figure S2F). Visual inspection of the more and less beautiful real-world graphs suggests that people perceive graphs with more colors (eg. rainbow colors), shapes (eg. cartoons, abstract shapes), and meaningful text (eg. a title explaining the meaning of the graph) as more beautiful. It also does not require high quality data to make a beautiful graph either: we generated graphs that were perceived as beautiful using arbitrary data (Figure 4B). Therefore, our findings highlight that the beauty of a graph may not be an informative cue for its quality. Even if beauty was correlated with actual data quality in the real-world, this would be a dangerous and fallible heuristic to rely upon for evaluating research and media.
[cf. concept creep, Levari et al 2018] Recent years have seen debate about whether depictions of inherently evil monster races such as orcs in role playing games or literature/movies such as Lord of the Rings could be considered racist. Although such decisions may be subjective, little data has been produced to inform the debate regarding how critical an issue this is. In particular, does consuming such material relate to racism in the real world, or do a majority of individuals, particularly people of color, consider such depictions racist?
The current study sought to address these issues in a sample of 308 adults (38.2% non-White) a subset of whom (17%) were players of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons.
Playing Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) was not associated with greater ethnocentrism (one facet of racism) attitudes. Only 10.2% found a depiction of orc monsters as inherently evil to be offensive. However, when later asked the blunter question of whether the same depiction was racist, the number jumped to 34.0%, with women particularly inclined to endorse this position.
This suggests asking people about racism may prime them to see racism in material they hadn’t previously found to be offensive. Neither participant race nor history playing the D&D game was associated with perceptions of offensiveness or racism.
The post-truth era has taken many by surprise. Here, we use massive language analysis to demonstrate that the rise of fact-free argumentation may perhaps be understood as part of a deeper change. After the year 1850, the use of sentiment-laden words in Google Books declined systematically, while the use of words associated with fact-based argumentation rose steadily. This pattern reversed in the 1980s, and this change accelerated around 2007, when across languages, the frequency of fact-related words dropped while emotion-laden language surged, a trend paralleled by a shift from collectivistic to individualistic language.
The surge of post-truth political argumentation suggests that we are living in a special historical period when it comes to the balance between emotion and reasoning.
To explore if this is indeed the case, we analyze language in millions of books covering the period from 1850 to 2019 represented in Google Ngram data.
We show that the use of words associated with rationality, such as “determine” and “conclusion”, rose systematically after 1850, while words related to human experience such as “feel” and “believe” declined. This pattern reversed over the past decades, paralleled by a shift from a collectivistic to an individualistic focus as reflected, among other things, by the ratio of singular to plural pronouns such as “I”/“we” and “he”/“they.” Interpreting this synchronous sea change in book language remains challenging. However, as we show, the nature of this reversal occurs in fiction as well as nonfiction. Moreover, the pattern of change in the ratio between sentiment and rationality flag words since 1850 also occurs in New York Times articles [see also social justice keywords], suggesting that it is not an artifact of the book corpora we analyzed. Finally, we show that word trends in books parallel trends in corresponding Google search terms, supporting the idea that changes in book language do in part reflect changes in interest.
All in all, our results suggest that over the past decades, there has been a marked shift in public interest from the collective to the individual, and from rationality toward emotion.
Previous studies have proposed that low evidential criteria or proneness to jump to conclusions [“jump-to-conclusions bias”] influences the formation of paranormal beliefs.
We investigated whether the low evidential criteria hypothesis for paranormal beliefs extends to a conceptually distinct type of unwarranted beliefs: those related to pseudoscience.
We presented individuals varying in their endorsement of pseudoscientific beliefs with 2 hypothesis testing tasks. In the beads task, the participants were asked to decide from which of 2 jars containing different proportions of colored beads they were collecting samples. In the mouse trap task, they were asked to guess which rule determined whether a participant-controlled mouse obtained a piece of cheese or was trapped. In both cases, the volunteers were free to decide when to stop collecting evidence before completing the tasks.
Our results indicate that, compared to skeptics, individuals presenting stronger endorsement of pseudoscientific beliefs tend to require less evidence before coming to a conclusion in hypothesis testing situations.
We introduce a theoretical framework distinguishing between anchoring effects, anchoring bias, and judgmental noise: Anchoring effects require anchoring bias, but noise modulates their size. We tested this framework by manipulating stimulus magnitudes. As magnitudes increase, psychophysical noise due to scalar variability widens the perceived range of plausible values for the stimulus. This increased noise, in turn, increases the influence of anchoring bias on judgments. In 11 preregistered experiments (n = 3,552 adults), anchoring effects increased with stimulus magnitude for point estimates of familiar and novel stimuli (eg. reservation prices for hotels and donuts, counts in dot arrays). Comparisons of relevant and irrelevant anchors showed that noise itself did not produce anchoring effects. Noise amplified anchoring bias. Our findings identify a stimulus feature predicting the size and replicability of anchoring effects—stimulus magnitude. More broadly, we show how to use psychophysical noise to test relationships between bias and noise in judgment under uncertainty.
Highly influential “dual-process” accounts of human cognition postulate the coexistence of a slow accurate system with a fast error-prone system. But why would there be just 2 systems rather than, say, one or 93?
Here, we argue that a dual-process architecture might reflect a rational tradeoff between the cognitive flexibility afforded by multiple systems and the time and effort required to choose between them. We investigate what the optimal set and number of cognitive systems would depend on the structure of the environment.
We find that the optimal number of systems depends on the variability of the environment and the difficulty of deciding when which system should be used. Furthermore, we find that there is a plausible range of conditions under which it is optimal to be equipped with a fast system that performs no deliberation (“System 1”) and a slow system that achieves a higher expected accuracy through deliberation (“System 2”).
Our findings thereby suggest a rational reinterpretation of dual-process theories.
…We study this problem in 4 different domains where the dual systems framework has been applied to explain human decision-making: binary choice, planning, strategic interaction, and multi-alternative, multi-attribute risky choice. We investigate how the optimal cognitive architecture for each domain depends on the variability of the environment and the cost of choosing between multiple cognitive systems, which we call metareasoning cost.
Low knowledge diversity is an important issue affecting psychological science.
We propose this issue could be resolved by harnessing contributions from amateurs.
We outline 6 “blind spots”—neglected areas in which amateurs could contribute.
We discuss how amateur contributions could be practically achieved.
Contemporary psychological and behavioral science suffers from a lack of diversity regarding the key intellectual activities that constitute it, including its theorizing, empirical approaches, and topics studied. We refer to this type of diversity as knowledge diversity.
To fix the knowledge diversity problem, scientists have proposed several solutions that would require transforming the field itself—an endeavor that can realistically be realized only in the long term. In this article, we propose that knowledge diversity could also be attained in the short term without transforming the field itself—by harnessing contributions from amateurs who can explore diverse aspects of psychology that are neglected in academia.
We identify 6 such “blind spot” areas within which amateurs could contribute and discuss how this could be practically achieved.
Blind spot
Description
Long-term projects
Projects (eg. theory development, research pursuit) that require dedication over a long period of time with uncertain payoffs.|
Basic observational research
Conducting observational studies that aim to identify new phenomena or characterize the generalizability of already known phenomena.
Speculation
Making speculations that are not limited by current methodological or other practical considerations.|
Interdisciplinary projects
Projects that combine diverse areas of psychology (and potentially other disciplines) and do not involve working within a specific area of expertise or topic.|
Aimless projects
Projects that do not have pre-determined goals or planned outcomes and evolve in any direction in which pursuing psychology-related ideas takes the person.|
Uncommon research areas
Research areas that are neglected by psychological scientists.|
Table 1: Blind spots that are not incentivized in academia and could be addressed by amateur psychologists to increase knowledge diversity in psychological and behavioral science.
We hope that our article will inspire professionals and academic institutions to be more open toward amateur contributions to create a diverse body of knowledge.
Recently, Picho-Kiroga (2021) published a meta-analysis on the effect of stereotype threat on females. Their conclusion was that the average effect size for stereotype threat studies was d = 0.28, but that effects are overstated because the majority of studies on stereotype threat in females include methodological characteristics that inflate the apparent effect size.
In this response, I show that Picho-Kiroga et al 2021 committed fundamental errors in their meta-analysis that undermine confidence in the article and warrant major corrections. But even if the data were not flawed, the conclusion that Picho-Kiroga et al 2021 should have reached is that their results are most consistent with a population effect size of zero. There is no compelling evidence that stereotype threat is a real phenomenon in females.
This article presents a large-scale, empirical evaluation of the psychophysiological correlates of political ideology and, in particular, the claim that conservatives react with higher levels of electrodermal activity to threatening stimuli than liberals.
We (1) conduct 2 large replications of this claim, using locally representative samples of Danes and Americans; (2) reanalyze all published studies and evaluate their reliability and validity; and (3) test several features to enhance the validity of psychophysiological measures and offer a number of recommendations.
Overall, we find little empirical support for the claim. This is caused by large reliability and validity problems related to measuring threat sensitivity using electrodermal activity. When assessed reliably, electrodermal activity in the replications and published studies captures individual differences in the physiological changes associated with attention shifts, which are unrelated to ideology. In contrast to psychophysiological reactions, self-reported emotional reactions to threatening stimuli are reliably associated with ideology.
[Keywords: political ideology, threat sensitivity, electrodermal activity, replication, measurement, psychometrics]
…In the process of revising this article, a preprint of another large-scale replication effort became available. Bakker et al 2019 field 2 conceptual replications, as well a preregistered direct replication of Oxley et al 2008. All of these efforts fail to replicate the results. We encourage readers to consult Bakker et al 2019, which is aligned with and reinforces the conclusions of the present article.
The Implicit Association Test (IAT) has been widely discussed as a potential measure of “implicit bias.” Yet the IAT is controversial; research suggests that it is far from clear precisely what the instrument measures, and it does not appear to be a strong predictor of behavior. The presentation of this topic in Introductory Psychology texts is important as, for many students, it is their first introduction to scientific treatment of such issues. In the present study, we examined twenty current Introductory Psychology texts in terms of their coverage of the controversy and presentation of the strengths and weaknesses of the measure. Of the 17 texts that discussed the IAT, a minority presented any of the concerns including the lack of measurement clarity (29%), an automatic preference for White people among African Americans (12%), lack of predictive validity (12%), and lack of caution about the meaning of a score (0%); most provided students with a link to the Project Implicit website (65%). Overall, 82% of the texts were rated as biased or partially biased on their coverage of the IAT. The implications for the perceptions and self-perceptions of students, particularly when a link to Project Implicit is included, are discussed.
The Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) is a well-known demonstration of the role of motor activity in the comprehension of language. Participants are asked to make sensibility judgments on sentences by producing movements toward the body or away from the body. The ACE is the finding that movements are faster when the direction of the movement (eg. ‘toward’) matches the direction of the action in the to-be-judged sentence (eg. ‘Art gave you the pen’ describes action toward you).
We report on a pre-registered, multi-lab replication of one version of the ACE.
The results show that none of the 18 labs involved in the study observed a reliable ACE, and that the meta-analytic estimate of the size of the ACE was essentially zero.
Figure 6: Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) interaction effects on the logarithm of the lift-off times across all labs.Thick error bars show standard errors from the linear mixed effects model analysis; thin error bars are the corresponding 95% CI. The shaded region represents our pre-registered, predicted conclusions about the ACE: Effects within the lighter shaded region were pre-registered as too small to be consistent with the ACE; effects in the dark gray region were pre-registered as negligibly small. Above the gray region was considered consistent with the extant ACE literature.
Figure 7: Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) interaction effects on the logarithm of the move times across all labs.Thick error bars show standard errors from the linear mixed effects model analysis; thin error bars are the corresponding 95% CI. Asterisks before the names indicate a singular fit due to the random effect variance of items being estimated as 0. For comparability of the effect, we include them here so that all effects presented were estimated using the same model.
When conducting research on large data sets, statistically-significant findings having only trivial interpretive meaning may appear. Little consensus exists whether such small effects can be meaningfully interpreted. The current analysis examines the possibility that trivial effects may emerge in large datasets, but that some such effects may lack interpretive value. When such results match an investigator’s hypothesis, they may be over-interpreted.
The current study examines this issue as related to aggression research in 2 large samples. Specifically, in the first study, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) dataset was used. 15 variables with little theoretical relevance to aggression were selected, then correlated with self-reported delinquency. For the second study, the Understanding Society database was used. As with Study 1, 14 nonsensical variables were correlated with conduct problems.
Many variables achieved “statistical-significance” and some effect-sizes approached or exceeded r = 0.10, despite little theoretical relevance between the variables.
It is recommended that effect sizes below r = 0.10 should not be interpreted as hypothesis supportive.
Table 1: Correlations Between Crud and Delinquency for Study 1
Table 2: Correlations Between Crud and Conduct Problems for Study 2
Video games are a massively popular form of entertainment, socialising, cooperation, and competition. Games’ ubiquity fuels fears that they cause poor mental health, and major health bodies and national governments have made far-reaching policy decisions to address games’ potential risks, despite lacking adequate supporting data. The concern-evidence mismatch underscores that we know too little about games’ impacts on well-being.
We addressed this disconnect by linking 6 weeks of 38,030 players’ objective game-behaviour data, provided by 6 global game publishers, with 3 waves of their self-reported well-being that we collected.
We found little to no evidence for a causal connection between gameplay and well-being. However, results suggested that motivations play a role in players’ well-being.
For good or ill, the average effects of time spent playing video games on players’ well-being are likely very small, and further industry data are required to determine potential risks and supportive factors to health.
…Participants and procedure: We collaborated with game publishers who recruited players with emails to participate in a 3-wave panel study. 7 publishers participated with the following games: Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo of America; n = 13,646), Apex Legends (Electronic Arts; n = 1,158), Eve Online (CCP Games; n = 905), Forza Horizon 4 (Microsoft; n = 1,981), Gran Turismo Sport (Sony Interactive Entertainment; n = 19,258), Outriders (Square Enix; n = 1,530), and The Crew 2 (Ubisoft; n = 457). The emails targeted the general English-speaking player bases of these publishers in Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, United Kingdom, and the United States. Publishers invited active players of the selected game to participate. Active play was defined as having played the respective game in the past 2 weeks to 2 months; variability in this interval between publishers was due to differences in how many players regularly played a given game, so that an adequate sample could be invited.
…The RICLPM included other parameters of subsidiary interest. First, the autocorrelation parameters indicated that affect and life satisfaction were modest predictors of themselves (baffect[t-1] = 0.39 [0.28, 0.52]; blife satisfaction[t-1] = 0.20 [0.11, 0.30]). Second, the covariances of the random intercepts, indicating the extent to which people who tended to play more were also more likely to report higher well-being was statistically-significantly greater than zero only for Animal Crossing and Outriders, for both well-being measures, replicating our previous findings and extending them to the life satisfaction outcome [Johannes et al 2021]. However, it was notable that the positive correlation was not replicated across the other game titles. Third, the within-person gameplay-well-being covariances were overall not statistically-significantly different from zero. See OSM for details on these parameter estimates.
…We also studied the roles of motivational experiences during game play. Conceptually replicating previous crosssectional findings [Johannes et al 2021], we found that intrinsic motivations have a positive effect on well-being whereas extrinsic motivations have a negative effect. The effects of motivations were larger than that of video game play and our analysis suggests we can be confident in the direction of these motivation effects. In absolute terms, the effect of an one-point deviation from a player’s typical intrinsic motivation on affect did not reach the threshold of being subjectively noticeable (0.10 estimate vs. 0.26 threshold). However, we cannot be certain an one-point increase (out of a 7-point scale) is considered a large or a small shift—participants’ average range on the intrinsic motivation scale was 0.36. Until future work determines what constitutes an adequate ‘treatment’, these conclusions regarding motivations remain tentative.
As predicted and consistent with prior findings, the distribution was positively skewed. Most participants lied infrequently and most lies were told by a few prolific liars. ~3⁄4ths of participants were consistently low-frequency liars. Across participants, lying comprised 7% of total communication and almost 90% of all lies were little white lies. About 58% of the variance was explained by stable individual differences with ~42% of the variance attributable to within-person day-to-day variability.
The data were consistent with both the existence of a few prolific liars and good/bad lie days.
[Keywords: deception, lies, lying over time, prevalence, prolific liars, truth-default theory (TDT)]
Some evidence suggests that lay persons are able to perceive sexual orientation from face stimuli above the chance level. A morphometric study of 390 heterosexual and homosexual Canadian people of both sexes reported that facial structure differed depending on the sexual orientation. Gay and heterosexual men differed on 3 metrics as the most robust multivariate predictors, and lesbian and heterosexual women differed on 4 metrics. A later study verified the perceptual validity of these multivariate predictors using artificial 3-dimensional face models created by manipulating the key parameters. Nevertheless, there is evidence of important processing differences between the perception of real faces and the perception of artificial computer-generated faces.
The present study which composed of 2 experiments tested the robustness of the previous findings and extended the research by experimentally manipulating the facial features in face models created from photographs of real people.
Participants of the Experiment 1 achieved an overall accuracy (0.67) statistically-significantly above the chance level (0.50) in a binary hetero/homosexual judgement task, with some important differences between male and female judgements.
On the other hand, results of the Experiment 2 showed that participants rated the apparent sexual orientation of series of face models created from natural photographs as a continuous linear function of the multivariate predictors.
Theoretical implications are discussed.
[Keywords: sexual orientation, facial structure, face models, photographs, homosexuality, perception]
A central paradox in the mental health literature is the tendency for black Americans to report similar or better mental health than white Americans despite experiencing greater stress exposure. However, black Americans’ higher levels of certain coping resources may explain this finding.
Using data from the Nashville Stress and Health Study (n = 1,186), we examine whether black Americans have higher levels of self-esteem, social support, religious attendance, and divine control than white Americans and whether these resources, in turn, explain the black-white paradox in mental health.
In adjusted models, the black-white paradox holds for depressive symptoms and any DSM-IV disorder. Findings indicate that black Americans have higher levels of self-esteem, family social support, and religiosity than white Americans. Causal mediation techniques reveal that self-esteem has the largest effect in explaining black-white differences in depressive symptoms, whereas divine control has the largest effect in explaining differences in disorder.
First study manipulating wine prices using a framed field experiment.
Blind intensity ratings differ for 3 wines of different price and expert rating.
Blind pleasantness ratings do not differ for the same 3 wines.
Pleasantness of the budget wine increased when presented with a fake higher price.
Past experimental laboratory and correlational data from observational research has shown that knowledge of the price of wine influences the consumer’s subjective experience. However, there is limited prior research that has explicitly manipulated price information in a realistic wine tasting setting.
A total of 140 participants tasted 3 different low-priced, mid-priced and high-priced wines with open, deceptive, or no price information and rated them for taste intensity and pleasantness.
In our community sample, intensity of taste ratings for open, deceptive and blind price information reflected retail prices, thus more expensive wines were rated as more intense in taste. However, while pleasantness ratings did not differ for open and no price information, deceptive up-pricing of low-price wine statistically-significantly influenced ratings for pleasantness, whereas deceptive down-pricing of high-price wine had no effect on pleasantness ratings. Thus, pricing information differentially influences the consumer’s subjective experience of wine, with no effects on intensity of taste ratings and no effects on pleasantness ratings with correct or no price information, but increased pleasantness of low-price wine when provided with a deceptive higher price.
Thus, in wine may lay the truth, but its subjective experience may also lie in the price.
[Keywords: wine perception, price information, consumer experience, framed field experiment]
This study indicates that concepts of harm have broadened their meanings and become more prominent in psychology over the past half century. It suggests that similar changes have occurred in the culture at large, and that the respective changes may be dynamically linked. These findings signal that psychology is implicated in an important cultural shift.
Emerging methods for studying cultural dynamics allow researchers to investigate cultural change with newfound rigor. One change that has recently attracted the attention of social commentators is “conceptcreep”, the semantic inflation of harm-related concepts such as trauma, bullying, and prejudice. In theory, concept creep is driven distally by several recent cultural and societal trends, but psychology also plays a proximal role in developing and disseminating expansionary concepts of harm. However, there have been few systematic attempts to document concept creep and none to explore factors that influence it.
The present work reviews concept creep from the perspective of cultural dynamics and lays out a conceptual framework for exploring processes implicated in it. Illustrative analyses are presented that apply computational linguistic methods to very large text corpora, including a new corpus of psychology article abstracts.
They demonstrate that harm has risen steeply in prominence both in psychology and in the wider culture in recent decades, and that harm-related concepts have inflated their meanings over this period. The analyses also provide evidence of dynamic relationships between the prominence and semantic breadth of harm-related concepts, and between psychology and the culture at large.
Implications are drawn for theory and research on concept creep. [see also Scheffer et al 2021]
Degree of energy compensation varied between people of different body composition
Understanding the impacts of activity on energy balance is crucial. Increasing levels of activity may bring diminishing returns in energy expenditure because of compensatory responses in non-activity energy expenditures. This suggestion has profound implications for both the evolution of metabolism and human health. It implies that a long-term increase in activity does not directly translate into an increase in total energy expenditure (TEE) because other components of TEE may decrease in response—energy compensation.
We used the largest dataset compiled on adult TEE and basal energy expenditure (BEE) (n = 1,754) of people living normal lives to find that energy compensation by a typical human averages 28% due to reduced BEE; this suggests that only 72% of the extra calories we burn from additional activity translates into extra calories burned that day. Moreover, the degree of energy compensation varied considerably between people of different body compositions. This association between compensation and adiposity could be due to among-individual differences in compensation: people who compensate more may be more likely to accumulate body fat. Alternatively, the process might occur within individuals: as we get fatter, our body might compensate more strongly for the calories burned during activity, making losing fat progressively more difficult.
Determining the causality of the relationship between energy compensation and adiposity will be key to improving public health strategies regarding obesity.
[Keywords: activity, basal metabolic rate, daily energy expenditure, energy management models, exercise, Homo sapiens, trade-offs, weight loss, energy compensation]
Figure 2: Energy compensation in humans. (A) Total energy expenditure (TEE; MJ∙d−1) and (B) activity energy expenditure (AEE; MJ∙d−1) as a function of basal energy expenditure (BEE; MJ∙d−1) in 1,754 subjects included in this study, controlling for sex, age, and body composition. (A) illustrates how the slope of the TEE-BEE relationship is <1 (compared to the 1:1 dotted line), whereas (B) illustrates the negative relationship between AEE and BEE.
…To further illustrate the compensation occurring at the within-individual level, we ran a second bivariate mixed model with AEE and BEE as the dependent variables. In this model, the within-individual covariance was statistically-significantly negative (Table S2B). The within-individual correlation (±SE) between AEE and BEE was r = −0.58 ± 0.08 (Figure 4B). Hence, during extended periods when the studied cohort expended more energy on activity, they compensated by reducing energy expended on basal processes (but individuals with higher-than-average AEE do not necessarily have a lower-than-average BEE). The within-individual slope in these people indicates particularly strong energy compensation between AEE and BEE (Figure 4B). That is, in this sample of people, the calories they burn during bouts of activity are almost entirely compensated for by reducing energy expended on other processes such that variation in activity had little impact on TEE.
Figure 4: Energy trade-offs within individuals. Residual (A) total energy expenditure (TEE; MJ∙d−1) and (B) activity energy expenditure (AEE; MJ∙d−1) as a function of basal energy expenditure (BEE; MJ∙d−1) in elderly men and women (n = 68) with 2 pairs of TEE-BEE measures each. Within-individual slopes are illustrated by the thin black lines connecting the 2 residual values (gray dots; extracted from the bivariate mixed model; Table S2) for each individual.
Various domains of life are improving over time, meaning the future is filled with exciting advances that people can now look forward to (eg. in technology).
3 preregistered experiments (n = 1,602) suggest that mere awareness of better futures can risk spoiling otherwise enjoyable presents. Across experiments, participants interacted with novel technologies—but, via random assignment, some participants were informed beforehand that even better versions were in the works. Mere awareness of future improvement led participants to experience present versions as less enjoyable—despite being new to them, and despite being identical across conditions. They even bid more money to be able to end their participation early.
Why? Such knowledge led these participants to perceive more flaws in present versions than they would have perceived without such knowledge—as if prompted to infer that there must have been something to improve upon (or else, why was a better one needed in the first place?)—thus creating a less enjoyable experience. Accordingly, these spoiling effects were specific to flaw-relevant stimuli and were attenuated by reminders of past progress already achieved.
All told, the current research highlights important implications for how today’s ever better offerings may be undermining net happiness (despite marking absolute progress). As people continually await exciting things still to come, they may be continually dissatisfied by exciting things already here.
[Keywords: change over time, well-being, enjoyment, technology, contrast effects]
Prior research has described women’s experiences with exercise-induced orgasm (EIO). However, little is known about men’s experiences with EIO, the population prevalence of EIO, or the association of EIO with other kinds of orgasm. Using U.S. probability survey data, the objectives of the present research were to:
describe the lifetime prevalence of exercise-induced orgasm (EIO) and sleep orgasm;
assess respondents’ age at first experience of EIO as well as the type of exercise connected with their first EIO;
examine associations between lifetime EIO experience and orgasm at respondents’ most recent partnered sexual event; and
examine associations between lifetime EIO experience and sleep orgasms.
Data were from the 2014 National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior (1,012 men and 1,083 women, ages 14 years and older).
About 9% of respondents reported having ever experienced exercise-induced orgasm. More men than women reported having experienced orgasm during sleep at least once in their lifetime (66.3% men, 41.8% women). The mean age for women’s first EIO was statistically-significantly older than men (22.8 years women, 16.8 years men). Respondents described a wide range of exercises as associated with their first EIO (ie. climbing ropes, abdominal exercise, yoga). Lifetime EIO experience was associated with lifetime sleep orgasms but not with event-level orgasm during partnered sex.
Implications related to understanding orgasm and recommendations for clinicians and sex educators are discussed.
…Exercise-Induced Orgasm: In their reports of interviews with thousands of people living in the United States, Kinsey et al (1948, 1953) ventured that about 5% of people had experienced orgasms from physical exercise or muscular tension. However, questions about orgasms during exercise were not standardized in their interviews, and thus their estimate was based largely on information volunteered by respondents.
To our knowledge, there has been only one systematic study of exercise-induced orgasm (EIO) (Herbenick & Fortenberry, 2011). That study used an online convenience survey that specifically recruited women who had prior experience with sexual arousal or orgasm from exercise. Thus, the study design was not situated to estimate a population-based prevalence of EIO. Also, the researchers surveyed only women, leaving men’s experience with exercise orgasms unexamined. In their convenience survey, Herbenick and Fortenberry found that women reported an average age of 19 years at first EIO experience and that the kinds of exercise participants recalled as most often associated with their first EIO were traditional abdominal exercises (eg. sit-ups, crunches, Roman’s chair leg raises), climbing ropes or poles, and lifting weights—all of which engage the core musculature as part of strength training or stabilization (eg. Oliva-Lozano & Muyor, 2020). This finding was consistent with descriptions of EIO in popular media, where the term “coregasm” was first coined by editors at Men’s Health magazine to reflect correspondence they had received from their readers about unexpectedly experiencing orgasms during exercises that engage core abdominal musculature, whether for strength or for stability (Men’s Health, 2007).
Most women in the Herbenick and Fortenberry (2011) survey indicated that they didn’t fantasize sexually in connection with experiencing EIO; also, most generally felt happy about their experience. However, the survey did not assess any aspects of respondents’ orgasm experiences outside of the exercise context, even though doing so might have helped to situate EIO within broader experiences of genital response and orgasm. For example, it is not known to what extent EIO is an idiosyncratic experience—a bodily quirk, even—or if it reflects something larger about how a person’s body and orgasmic response are organized. The present research extends the limited literature on EIO by—in a U.S. nationally representative sample—assessing participants’ age at first EIO experience, examining EIO among men as well as adolescents, and exploring relationships between EIO and other kinds or orgasm, including orgasms that occur during sleep.
[Keywords: exercise-induced orgasm, orgasm, sleep orgasm, nocturnal emission, probability sample]
Most research into autism spectrum disorder (ASD) focuses on difficulties and challenges, potentially overlooking intact and even enhanced abilities.
Empirical evidence strongly suggests that individuals with ASD display enhanced rationality: judgments that are more objective and decision-making that is less biased than that of neurotypical individuals.
Enhanced rationality may confer distinct strengths to individuals with ASD and may provide insights into the mechanism or ‘irrationality’ in neurotypical individuals.
Challenges in social cognition and communication are core characteristics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but in some domains, individuals with ASD may display typical abilities and even outperform their neurotypical counterparts.
These enhanced abilities are notable in the domains of reasoning, judgment and decision-making, in which individuals with ASD often show ‘enhanced rationality’ by exhibiting more rational and bias-free decision-making than do neurotypical individuals.
Using administrative data, we test for attribution bias in college major choice.
Students are conditionally randomly assigned to introductory course schedules.
The time at which an introductory course is taken affects subsequent major choices.
Students assigned to a 7:30 AM slot are 10% less likely to choose the related major.
We also find negative effects for a second source of fatigue (back-to-back courses).
Using administrative data, we study the role of attribution bias in a high-stakes, consequential decision: the choice of a college major. Specifically, we examine the influence of fatigue experienced during exposure to a general education course on whether students choose the major corresponding to that course.
To do so, we exploit the conditional random assignment of student course schedules at the United States Military Academy.
We find that students who are assigned to an early morning (7:30 AM) section of a general education course are roughly 10% less likely to major in that subject, relative to students assigned to a later time slot for the course. We find similar effects for fatigue generated by having one or more back-to-back courses immediately prior to a general education course that starts later in the day.
Finally, we demonstrate that the pattern of results is consistent with attribution bias and difficult to reconcile with competing explanations.
[Keywords: attribution bias, misattribution, college major choice]
…In this estimate we find that each immediately preceding course decreases the probability that a student selects a corresponding major by 7.94% or 0.15 percentage points (significant at the 5% level). In each column 2–3 of Panel B we control for unique course fixed effects, additionally including demographic controls in column 3. These specifications control for any classroom-specific variation such as the level of preparation and fatigue of the instructor, the light, smell, and temperature in the room, and the behavior of the students within the class. Both of these specifications provide consistent evidence that increasing the number of back-to-back courses before a class reduces the probability of majoring in a related subject. In column 2 we find that each immediately preceding course decreases the probability that a student chooses a narrowly defined corresponding major by 12.11% or 0.23 percentage points (significant at the 1% level). Adding demographic controls in column 3 does not change our estimates or precision.
[another fun randomization from the underappreciated U.S. military academies!]
[see also “Assessing Human Error Against a Benchmark of Perfection”, Anderson et al 2016] How does artificial intelligence (AI) improve human decision-making? Answering this question is challenging because it is difficult to assess the quality of each decision and to disentangle AI’s influence on decisions. We study professional Go games, which provide an unique opportunity to overcome such challenges.
In 2016 an AI-powered Go program (APG) unexpectedly beat the best human player, surpassing the best human knowledge and skills accumulated over thousands of years. To investigate the impact of APGs, we compare human moves to AI’s superior solutions, before and after the initial public release of an APG [Leela Zero, KataGo, and NHN’s Handol]. Our analysis of 750,990 moves in 25,033 games by 1,242 professional players reveals that APGs noticeably improved the quality of the players’ moves as measured by the changes in winning probability with each move. We also show that the key mechanisms are reductions in the number of human errors and in the magnitude of the most critical mistake during the game. Interestingly, the improvement is most prominent in the early stage of a game when uncertainty is higher. Further, young players—who are more open to and better able to utilize APG—benefit more than senior players, suggesting generational inequality in AI adoption and utilization.
[Keywords: artificial intelligence (AI), technology adoption, decision-making, human capital, professional Go players, AI adoption inequality]
…The historic Go match (AlphaGo vs. Sedol Lee) was held in 2016; in this game, AI beat the best human professional player for the first time and by a large margin. Shortly after this event, the first open APG, Leela, became available to players in February 2017. Our quantitative and qualitative investigation indicates that professional Go players have used APGs heavily in their training since its release.
The great advantage of this context is that it allows us to observe every single decision of professional Go players before and after the public release of APGs; a game’s entire move history is well archived and maintained for all major games. Furthermore, using the APG’s best solution as a benchmark, we can calculate the probability of winning for every move (ie. 750,990 decisions) by 1,242 professional Go players in 25,033 major games held from 2015 through 2019; note that this can be done even for the games played before APG’s release. We then compare the move-level probability of winning to that of APG’s best solution.
The results show that the quality of moves by professional Go players improved substantially following the release of APG. Before the release, the winning probability of each move by professional Go players averaged 2.47 percentage points lower than the moves of APG. This gap decreased by about 0.756 percentage points (or 30.5%) after the release of APG. Additional analyses indicate that the improvement in move quality eventually leads to the final win of the game. Interestingly, this effect is most prominent in the early stage of a game where higher uncertainty is exhibited and there is more opportunity for players to learn from AI. Furthermore, quality improvement is more prominent among young players who are open to and capable of utilizing APGs; this has important implications for digital literacy and inequality in AI utilization.
[Example of an absolute human error rate: from the AI’s perspective, each move a human Go pro makes costs them ~1.2% chance of winning!]
We also explore the mechanisms through which professional players achieve a higher probability of winning. Our mediation analysis reveals that improvements in the quality of moves are driven mainly by reducing the number of errors (moves where the winning probability drops by 10 or more percentage points compared to the immediately preceding move by a focal player) and by reducing the magnitude of the most critical mistake (the biggest drop in winning probability during the game). Specifically, the number of errors per game decreased by 0.15–0.50 and the magnitude of the most critical mistake decreased by 4–7 percentage points.
…3.3.1. Go Games and Players: We collect data on professional Go games held from 2015 through 2019 from the Go4Go database, which has been widely used in studies of Go (eg. Chao et al 2018, Ramon & Struyf 2003, Wu et al 2018). The data contains detailed information on the game, its players, Komi (the number of bonus points given to the second mover), the sequence of all moves, and the game outcome. From Go Ratings we gather additional data on the ages, nationalities (eg. China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and others), genders, and annual rankings of professional players. We multiplied negative one by the ranking and divide it by 1,000 to ease the interpretation of the result; the higher the value, the better the player. To control for the difference in players’ capabilities for each game, we create a variable, Rank difference, as the difference between the raw rankings of 2 players; we divide this difference by 1,000 such that a positive value indicates that the focal player’s ranking is lower than the opponent’s ranking.
…Using 2–8 Nvidia Titan-X GPUs running in parallel, the computational analysis of games took about 3 months.
Figure 2: Effects of APG on average move quality of professional players: Model-free evidence. Note: This figure illustrates the weekly average Move Quality of players from 2015 through 2019. The black solid line represents the raw (unprocessed) weekly average value. The blue solid line and the gray area around it show the local smoothed trend and the 95% confidence interval, respectively. The vertical line on February 2017 represents the first public release of an APG, Leela.
…This analysis is motivated by the norm that, after Go games, players spend substantial time and effort analyzing and evaluating each move—especially if the move was an error or a mistake. In an interview with news media, Jin-seo Shin (who was ranked first in the world in 2020) stated:
Before APG, players and their peers replayed the game and discussed which move was an error and which was a critical mistake. After the public release of APG, this replay and discussion by players became almost meaningless. APG teaches us by showing the accurate winning probability with each move. If the winning probability drops from 60% to 40% after a move, that is an error. If it drops from 80% to 20%, that is a critical mistake. … I have to admit that the APG-based training provides limitless help in developing my Go skills (Sohn 2021).
What explains the acquisition of exceptional human performance? Does a focus on intensive specialized practice facilitate excellence, or is a multidisciplinary practice background better? We investigated this question in sports.
Our meta-analysis involved 51 international study reports with 477 effect sizes from 6,096 athletes, including 772 of the world’s top performers. Predictor variables included starting age, age of reaching defined performance milestones, and amounts of coach-led practice and youth-led play (eg. pickup games) in the athlete’s respective main sport and in other sports.
Analyses revealed that (a) adult world-class athletes engaged in more childhood/adolescent multisport practice, started their main sport later, accumulated less main-sport practice, and initially progressed more slowly than did national-class athletes; (b) higher performing youth athletes started playing their main sport earlier, engaged in more main-sport practice but less other-sports practice, and had faster initial progress than did lower performing youth athletes; and (c) youth-led play in any sport had negligible effects on both youth and adult performance.
We illustrate parallels from science: Nobel laureates had multidisciplinary study/working experience and slower early progress than did national-level award winners. The findings suggest that variable, multidisciplinary practice experiences are associated with gradual initial discipline-specific progress but greater sustainability of long-term development of excellence.
…On the other hand, Sir Chris Hoy, the most successful racing cyclist of all time, did not start track cycling until age 17 and won his first gold medal at age 26 (Mackay, 2017). College basketball player Donald Thomas started practicing the high jump at age 22 and became world champion in the high jump at age 23 (Denman, 2007). Furthermore, athletes widely regarded as the greatest of all time in their sports, Roger Federer, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Michael Phelps, and Sir Chris Hoy, all played a diverse range of sports throughout childhood and adolescence rather than specializing in their main sport at an early age (Epstein 2019; Landers, 2017; Hawkins, 2014; Mackay, 2017; DeHority, 2020).
…This research focused on sports, but analogous findings have been reported for at least one nonathletic domain: science. Graf 2015 [Die Wissenschaftselite Deutschlands: Sozialprofil und Werdegänge zwischen 1945 und 2013] examined the biographies of the 48 German Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry, economy, and medicine/physiology since 1945. 42 had multidisciplinary study and/or working experiences. Compared with winners of the Leibnitz prize—Germany’s highest national science award—Nobel laureates were less likely to have won a scholarship as a student and took statistically-significantly longer to earn full professorships and to achieve their award. Taken together, the observations suggest that early multidisciplinary practice is associated with gradual initial discipline-specific progress but greater sustainability of long-term development of excellence.
We propose 3 interrelated hypotheses.
The first is the sustainability hypothesis: Childhood/adolescent participation in multiple sports is associated with a lower risk of later overuse injury and burnout (for reviews, see Bell et al 2018; Waldron et al 2020).
World-class senior athletes may have reached that level in part because they were less encumbered by injury or burnout (Rugg et al 2018; Wilhelm et al 2017).
The second is the multiple-sampling-and-functional-matching hypothesis: The focus on one main sport emerges from an athlete’s experiences in multiple sports, which increases the odds that an athlete will select a sport at which he or she is particularly talented (Güllich, 2017; Güllich & Emrich, 2014).
Athletes who engage in multiple sports during early athletic development are more likely to find the sport that best matches their talents and preferences. Athletes who discover their optimal sports match are more likely to be world-class athletes than if they select and focus on a less-than-optimal sports match. A minority of athletes became senior world-class athletes despite specializing early. According to this hypothesis, those few successful early-specializing athletes likely either selected their optimal sport without sampling by luck or were talented in multiple sports, one of which was their selected sport.
The third is the transfer-as-preparation-for-future-learning (PFL) hypothesis: More varied earlier learning experiences facilitate later long-term domain-specific skill learning and refinement (Bransford & Schwartz, 1999; Güllich, 2017).
The PFL hypothesis corresponds to central tenets of general learning theory (Bransford & Schwartz, 1999) and of self-organization of complex systems according to ecological-dynamics theory (Araújo et al 2010; Davids et al 2012). The PFL hypothesis rests on 2 premises. One is that amplified variation in learning tasks and situations may facilitate athletes’ ability to adapt their intentions and perceptual and motor actions in learning (eg. Araújo et al 2010; Davids et al 2012). For example, practicing broader ranges of skills and experiencing varied practice drills, conditioned game formats, or varying coach-athlete interaction may provide the learner enhanced opportunities to adapt to different coaching styles, adapt their attentional focus or the intention for specific actions (eg. to dribble, pass, or shoot in game situations). The other premise is that experience of greater variation in learning methodologies may provide an athlete with enhanced opportunities to understand the principles that lead to individually more or less effective learning, which facilitates the development of the elite athlete’s competencies for self-regulation in learning (for review, see Jordet, 2015). At the same time, experience of more varied learning methodologies may also increase the probability of encountering particularly functional individual learning solutions (ie. an intraindividual-selection effect).
Our second and third hypotheses are supported by the fact that multisport coach-led practice but not youth-led play in various sports facilitated long-term senior performance.
In addition, all 3 hypotheses are supported by 2 specific findings from several previous studies (Güllich, 2014a, 2018b; Güllich & Emrich, 2014; Güllich et al 2017, 2019; Hardy et al 2013; Hornig et al 2016; Moesch et al 2011). First, multiple studies suggest a delayed, moderator effect, such that childhood/adolescent other-sports practice facilitates later efficiency of practice in one’s main sport during adulthood—performance improvement per invested practice time. Second, this developmental advantage is not the result of better physical/physiological development but rather improved perceptual-motor learning.
The hypotheses may also explain the converse predictor effects on junior performance. The highest junior-age performers mostly exhibited a highly specialized childhood/adolescent participation pattern that likely compromised the sustainability of their subsequent development into adulthood. They were more likely hampered by later overuse injury or burnout, the choice of their focus sport was more likely suboptimal, and the narrowed range of learning experiences likely limited their opportunities to expand their potential for future learning. This background helps explain why the populations of successful juniors and of successful seniors are not identical but are partly distinct populations: Most successful juniors do not become successful seniors, whereas most of the successful seniors were not as successful in former junior competitions (see Method section). Taken together, an early-specialization pattern may reinforce rapid success through junior age but displays reduced sustainability in that it limits an athlete’s potential for subsequent long-term improvement.
Sex and gender are key to people’s lives, and are the focus of scientific and popular interest and controversy. Sex-related psychological characteristics reflect more than socialization; they are influenced by sex hormones present during sensitive periods of development, particularly androgens that are present prenatally. Studies of females with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) show how prenatal androgens affect behavior across the life span; these hormones have large effects on interest and engagement in gendered activities, moderate effects on spatial abilities, and relatively small (or no) effects on gender identity, gender cognitions, and gendered peer involvement. In addition to showing the complexity of androgens’ effects on gendered behavior, studies of females with CAH provide an opportunity to test theories of gender development, gain insight into how nature and nurture work together, and examine mechanisms of development. The implications of this work have often been misunderstood, so we consider what it means—and does not mean—for biology to influence gender-related behavior.
[blog] In this review, I provide a pessimistic assessment of the indirect measurement of attitudes by highlighting the persisting anomalies in the science of implicit attitudes, focusing on their validity, reliability, predictive power, and causal efficiency, and I draw some conclusions concerning the validity of the implicit bias construct.
…We do not know what indirect measures measure; indirect measures are unreliable at the individual level, and people’s scores vary from occasion to occasion; indirect measures predict behavior poorly, and we do not know in which contexts they could be more predictive; in any case, the hope of measuring broad traits is not fulfilled by the development of indirect measures; and there is still no reason to believe that they measure anything that makes a causal difference.
These issues would not be too concerning for a budding science; they are anomalies for a 30-year-old research tradition that has been extremely successful at selling itself to policy makers and the public at large. So, should social psychologists pack up and move to other research topics or should they stubbornly try to address the anomalies pointed out in this article? It is unwise to predict the future of science, and the issues presented here could well be resolved by the many psychologists working on indirect measures, but it would also be unwise to dismiss them as mere challenges to be addressed in the course of normal science.
A few years ago, the first CNN surpassed human performance on ImageNet. However, it soon became clear that machines lack robustness on more challenging test cases, a major obstacle towards deploying machines “in the wild” and towards obtaining better computational models of human visual perception. Here we ask: Are we making progress in closing the gap between human and machine vision? To answer this question, we tested human observers on a broad range of out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets, adding the “missing human baseline” by recording 85,120 psychophysical trials across 90 participants. We then investigated a range of promising machine learning developments that crucially deviate from standard supervised CNNs along three axes: objective function (self-supervised, adversarially trained, CLIP language-image training), architecture (eg. vision transformers), and dataset size (ranging from 1M to 1B). Our findings are threefold. (1.) The longstanding robustness gap between humans and CNNs is closing, with the best models now matching or exceeding human performance on most OOD datasets. (2.) There is still a substantial image-level consistency gap, meaning that humans make different errors than models. In contrast, most models systematically agree in their categorization errors, even substantially different ones like contrastive self-supervised vs. standard supervised models. (3.) In many cases, human-to-model consistency improves when training dataset size is increased by one to three orders of magnitude. Our results give reason for cautious optimism: While there is still much room for improvement, the behavioural difference between human and machine vision is narrowing. In order to measure future progress, 17 OOD datasets with image-level human behavioural data are provided as a benchmark here: https://github.com/bethgelab/model-vs-human/
Personality traits are associated with memory in older adulthood: Individuals higher in conscientiousness and openness and lower in neuroticism tend to perform better on memory-recall tasks. We conducted a preregistered study to replicate these associations in a large, multinational cohort and test whether the associations varied by national-level socioeconomic indicators (eg. per capita gross domestic product). Multilevel modeling was used to analyze data from 71,566 individuals (age: M = 67.9 years, SD = 9.5; 57% women) across 26 European countries and Israel. Higher conscientiousness, openness, and extraversion and lower neuroticism were associated with better memory performance, even when analyses accounted for risk factors including diabetes, hypertension, obesity, emotional disorders, and sleeping problems. Consistent with the resource-substitution hypothesis, results showed that higher conscientiousness and agreeableness and lower neuroticism were associated with better memory in countries with lower gross domestic product. This pattern suggests that psychological (trait) resources may help compensate for country-specific disadvantaged contexts.
In the late 1940s, the British magician David Berglas started refining a trick that came to be known as “the holy grail of card magic.” To this day, nobody is certain how he did it.
…The trick is a version of a classic plot of magic, called “Any Card at Any Number”. These tricks are called ACAAN in the business. ACAAN has been around since the 1700s, and every iteration unfolds in roughly the same way: A spectator is asked to name any card in a deck—let’s say the 9 of clubs. Another is asked to name any number between one and 52—let’s say 31. The cards are dealt face up, one by one. The 31st card revealed is, of course, the 9 of clubs. Cue the gasps…There are hundreds of ACAAN variations, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a professional card magician without at least one in his or her repertoire…For all their differences, every ACAAN has one feature in common: At some point, the magician touches the cards. The touch might be imperceptible, it might appear entirely innocent. But the cards are always touched. With one exception: David Berglas’s ACAAN. He would place the cards on a table and he didn’t handle them again until after the revelation and during the applause. There was no sleight of hand, no hint of shenanigans. It was both effortless and boggling.
…Further, over the years, a number of magicians have reported private, one-on-one performances of the Berglas Effect that left them stupefied. The magician and mentalist Barrie Richardson, for instance, described a 1977 visit to Mr. Berglas’s home in his book for magicians, “Theater of the Mind.” Asked for a card and a number, Mr. Richardson settled on the 7 of hearts and 42. After that: “He motioned me into his study and pointed to a deck of cards on his desk”, Mr. Richardson wrote. “When I counted down to the 42nd card, I discovered the 7 of hearts. The experience was chilling!”…As the 2 neared the train, Mr. Cohen said that the next time they met, he’d love to see Mr. Berglas’s Any Card at Any Number. With the car parked, Mr. Berglas turned serious. Remember, he told Mr. Cohen, “that you were the one who initiated this—you asked me to show this to you.” He added that Mr. Cohen would remember what was about to happen for the rest of his life. It turned out that the 3 of diamonds, Mr. Cohen’s named card, was at the bottom of a deck that Mr. Cohen was asked to fish out of Mr. Berglas’s jacket, which was draped in the back seat. (Yes, it was the only deck in the jacket.)
…I ran these ideas by Aaron Fisher, a highly regarded American magician who did a commentary in July on his YouTube channel of an old live show by Mr. Berglas. Mr. Fisher said he didn’t know what to make of 43 either. But he noted that Mr. Berglas is not renowned for dazzling sleight of hand. “He messes with minds”, Mr. Fisher said, “not decks.” None of this resolved the stooge question.
Mr. Berglas may have a number of different methods, depending on the circumstances. [see “The Tuned Deck” & the Mechanical Turk] “He never knows what he’s going to do before he does it”, Richard Kaufman writes in The Berglas Effects—note the plural—a lengthy book for magicians that explains every card trick in the Berglas canon, with one very notable exception. The book suggests that Mr. Berglas is nothing if not a masterful improviser and a born gambler. What seems like a cohesive performance is actually a high-wire display of spontaneity with a heavy overlay of psychological manipulation. In hindsight, it seems likely that his anger was part of the show, a framing device. “I don’t need to prove myself” is just a different, more contentious version of “You’ll never forget what is going to happen next.”
[OSF] There is widespread public and academic interest in understanding the uses and effects of digital media. Scholars primarily use self-report measures of the quantity or duration of media use as proxies for more objective measures, but the validity of these self-reports remains unclear. Advancements in data collection techniques have produced a collection of studies indexing both self-reported and log-based measures.
To assess the alignment between these measures, we conducted a pre-registered meta-analysis of this research.
Based on 106 effect sizes, we found that self-reported media use correlates only moderately with logged measurements, that self-reports were rarely an accurate reflection of logged media use and that measures of problematic media use show an even weaker association with usage logs.
These findings raise concerns about the validity of findings relying solely on self-reported measures of media use.
Animals rely on their senses to survive and reproduce. Sensory systems are subject to a trade-off between the advantage of flexibility that often comes with a cost of a prolonged learning period and the advantage of innateness, which is less successful in dealing with altered environments. Most bat species rely on echolocation—emitting sound signals and analyzing the returning echoes. An object’s distance can be assessed using echolocation given a reference to the speed of sound. Since bats experience a range of speeds of sound, we tested whether the encoding of the speed of sound is innate or learned. We found that bats’ reference to the speed of sound is innate and that it is not flexible during adulthood.
Animals must encode fundamental physical relationships in their brains. A heron plunging its head underwater to skewer a fish must correct for light refraction, an archerfish shooting down an insect must “consider” gravity, and an echolocating bat that is attacking prey must account for the speed of sound in order to assess its distance. Do animals learn these relations or are they encoded innately and can they adjust them as adults are all open questions.
We addressed this question by shifting the speed of sound and assessing the sensory behavior of a bat species that naturally experiences different speeds of sound.
We found that both newborn pups and adults are unable to adjust to this shift, suggesting that the speed of sound is innately encoded in the bat brain. Moreover, our results suggest that bats encode the world in terms of time and do not translate time into distance.
Our results shed light on the evolution of innate and flexible sensory perception.
…Translating time into distance relies on a reference of the speed of sound (SOS). This physical characteristic of the environment is not as stable as it may seem. The SOS may change considerably due to various environmental factors such as humidity, altitude, and temperature (22). Bats (Chiroptera) are a specious and widely distributed order of highly mobile and long-lived animals. They therefore experience a range of SOSs (with more than 5% variation, see below) between species, among species, and even within the life of a single individual. We therefore speculated that the reference of the SOS may not be innate to allow for the environmentally dependent SOS experienced by each animal.
To test this, we examined the acquisition of the SOS reference by exposing neonatal bats to an increased SOS environment from birth (Materials and Methods). We reared 2 groups of bats from birth to independent flight in 2 flight chambers: 6 bats in normal air (henceforth: “air pups”) and 5 bats in a helium-enriched air environment (Heliox), where the speed of sound was 15% higher (henceforth: “Heliox pups”). Notably, Heliox pups were never active and did not echolocate in non-Heliox environment (§Materials and Methods). This 15% shift is higher than the ecological range and was chosen because it is high enough to enable us to document behavioral changes but low enough so as to allow the bats to function (that is, to fly despite the change in air density). In order to feed, the bats had to fly to a target positioned 1.3 m away from their wooden slit roost. Once the bats learned to fly to the target independently (after ca. 9 wk), we first documented their echolocation in the environment where they were brought up, and we then moved them to the other treatment for testing (§Materials and Methods). Because bats adjust their echolocation parameters to the distance of the target, before and during flight (23), we used their echolocation to assess the bats’ target range estimates. If the SOS reference is learned based on experience, the bats raised in Heliox should have learned a faster reference, so that when they flew in normal air, they would have perceived the target as farther than it really was. We also ran the same experiments on adult bats to test adult plasticity.
There is ample evidence that attractive individuals, across diverse domains, are judged more favourably. But most research has focused on single/one-shot decisions, where decision-makers receive no feedback following their decisions, and outcomes of their judgements are inconsequential to the self. Would attractive individuals still be judged favourably in experience-based decision-making where people make iterative decisions and receive consequential feedback (money gained/lost) following each decision?
To investigate this question, participants viewed headshots of 4 financial partners presented side-by-side and repeatedly (over 50–100 trials) selected partners that would help maximize their profits. Following every partner-selection, participants received feedback about the net monetary gains/losses the partner had conferred. Unbeknownst to participants, 2 partners (one attractive, one unattractive) were equally advantageous (conferred net-gains overtime) and 2 partners (one attractive and one unattractive) were equally disadvantageous (conferred net-losses overtime).
Even though attractive and unattractive partners were equally profitable and despite receiving feedback, participants selected attractive partners more throughout the task were quicker to reselect them even when they conferred losses and judged them as more helpful. Indeed, attractive-disadvantageous partners were preferred to the same extent (or more) as unattractive-advantageous partners. Importantly, the effect of attractiveness on decision-making was fully explained by the perceived trustworthiness of the financial partners.
[Keywords: experience-based decision-making, facial attractiveness, implicit bias, incidental cues, person perception, social decision-making]
We find that in Alzheimer’s disease and its mouse models, induced expression of Axl and Mer in amyloid plaque-associated microglia was coupled to induced plaque decoration by the TAM ligand Gas6 and its co-ligand phosphatidylserine. In the APP/PS1 mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease, genetic ablation of Axl and Mer resulted in microglia that were unable to normally detect, respond to, organize or phagocytose amyloid-β plaques. These major deficits notwithstanding, TAM-deficient APP/PS1 mice developed fewer dense-core plaques than APP/PS1 mice with normal microglia.
Our findings reveal that the TAM system is an essential mediator of microglial recognition and engulfment of amyloid plaques and that TAM-driven microglial phagocytosis does not inhibit, but rather promotes, dense-core plaque development.
In some scientific fields, it is common to have certain variables of interest that are of particular importance and for which there are many studies indicating a relationship with a different explanatory variable. In such cases, particularly those where no relationships are known among explanatory variables, it is worth asking under what conditions it is possible for all such claimed effects to exist simultaneously. This paper addresses this question by reviewing some theorems from multivariate analysis that show, unless the explanatory variables also have sizable effects on each other, it is impossible to have many such large effects. We also discuss implications for the replication crisis in social science.
…The implication of the claims regarding ovulation and voting, shark attacks and voting, college football and voting, etc., is not merely that some voters are superficial and fickle. No, these papers claim that seemingly trivial or irrelevant factors have large and consistent effects, and this runs into the problem of interactions. For example, the effect on your vote of the local college football team losing could depend crucially on whether there’s been a shark attack lately, or on what’s up with your hormones on election day. Or the effect could be positive in an election with a female candidate and negative in an election with a male candidate. Or the effect could interact with your parents’ socioeconomic status, or whether your child is a boy or a girl, or the latest campaign ad, or any of the many other factors that have been studied in the evolutionary psychology and political psychology literatures. Again, we are not saying that psychological factors have no effect on social, political, or economic decision making; we are only arguing that such effects, if large, will necessarily interact in complex ways. Similar reasoning has been used to argue against naive assumptions of causal identification in economics, where there is a large literature considering rainfall as an instrumental variable, without accounting for the implication that these many hypothesized causal pathways would, if taken seriously, represent violations of the assumption of exclusion restriction (Mellon, 2020).
In this work, we demonstrate that there is an inevitable consequence of having many explanatory variables with large effects: the explanatory variables must have large effects on each other. We call this type of result a “piranha theorem” (Gelman, 2017), the analogy being the folk wisdom that if one has a large number of piranhas (representing large effects) in a single fish tank, then one will soon be left with far fewer piranhas (Anonymous, 2021). If there is some outcome on which a large number of studies demonstrate an effect of a novel explanatory variable, then we can conclude that either some of the claimed effects are smaller than claimed, or some of the explanatory variables are essentially measuring the same phenomenon.
There are a multitude of ways to capture the dependency of random variables, and thus we should expect there to be a correspondingly large collection of piranha theorems. We formalize and prove piranha theorems for correlation, regression, and mutual information in Sections 2 and 3. These theorems illustrate the general phenomena at work in any setting with multiple causal or explanatory variables. In Section 4, we examine typical correlations in a finite sample under a simple probabilistic model.
…For example, an influential experiment from 1996 reported that participants were given a scrambled-sentence task and then were surreptitiously timed when walking away from the lab (Bargh et al 1996). Students whose sentences included elderly-related words such as “worried”, “Florida”, “old”, and “lonely” walked an average of 13% more slowly than students in the control condition, and the difference was statistically-significant.
This experimental claim is of historical interest in psychology in that, despite its implausibility, it was taken seriously for many years (for example, “You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true” (Kahneman, 2011)), but it failed to replicate (Harris et al 2013) and is no longer generally believed to represent a real effect; for background see Wagenmakers et al 2015. Now we understand such apparently statistically-significant findings as the result of selection with many researcher degrees of freedom (Simmons et al 2011).
Here, though, we will take the published claim at face value and also work within its larger theoretical structure, under which weak indirect stimuli can produce large effects.
An effect of 13% on walking speed is not in itself huge; the difficulty comes when considering elderly-related words as just one of many potential stimuli. Here are just some of the factors that have been presented in the social priming literature as having large effects on behavior: hormones (male and female), subliminal images, the outcomes of recent football games, irrelevant news events such as shark attacks, a chance encounter with a stranger, parental socioeconomic status, weather, the last digit of one’s age, the sex of a hurricane name, the sexes of siblings, the position in which a person is sitting, and many others. A common feature of these examples is that the stimuli have no clear direct effect on the measured outcomes, and in most cases the experimental subject is not even aware of the manipulation. Based on these examples, one can come up with dozens of other potential stimuli that fit the pattern. For example, in addition to elderly-related words, one could also consider word lengths (with longer words corresponding to slower movement), sounds of words (with smooth sibilance motivating faster walking), subject matter (sports-related words as compared to sedentary words), affect (happy words compared to sad words, or calm compared to angry), words related to travel (inducing faster walking) or invoking adhesives such as tape or glue (inducing slower walking), and so on. Similarly, one can consider many different sorts of incidental events, not just encounters with strangers but also a ringing phone or knocking at the door or the presence of a male or female lab assistant (which could have a main effect or interact with the participant’s sex) or the presence or absence of a newspaper or magazine on a nearby table, ad infinitum.
Now we can invoke the piranha theorem. Suppose we can imagine 100 possible stimuli, each with an effect of 13% on walking speed, all of which could arise in a real-world setting where we encounter many sources of text, news, and internal and external stimuli. If the effects are independent, then at any given time we could expect, on the log scale, a total effect with standard deviation 0.5 × √100 × log(1.13) = 0.61, thus walking speed could easily be multiplied or divided by e0.61 = 1.8 based on a collection of arbitrary stimuli that are imperceptible to the person being affected. And this factor of 1.8 could be made arbitrarily large by simply increasing the number of potential primes.
It is ridiculous to think that walking speed could be randomly doubled or halved based on a random collection of unnoticed stimuli—but that is the implication of the embodied cognition literature. It is basically a Brownian motion model in which the individual inputs are too large to work out.
Cognitive control guides behaviour by controlling what, when, and how information is represented in the brain. For example, attention controls sensory processing; top-down signals from prefrontal and parietal cortex strengthen the representation of task-relevant stimuli. A similar ‘selection’ mechanism is thought to control the representations held ‘in mind’—in working memory. Here we show that shared neural mechanisms underlie the selection of items from working memory and attention to sensory stimuli.
We trained rhesus monkeys to switch between 2 tasks, either selecting one item from a set of items held in working memory or attending to one stimulus from a set of visual stimuli. Neural recordings showed that similar representations in prefrontal cortex encoded the control of both selection and attention, suggesting that prefrontal cortex acts as a domain-general controller. By contrast, both attention and selection were represented independently in parietal and visual cortex. Both selection and attention facilitated behaviour by enhancing and transforming the representation of the selected memory or attended stimulus. Specifically, during the selection task, memory items were initially represented in independent subspaces of neural activity in prefrontal cortex. Selecting an item caused its representation to transform from its own subspace to a new subspace used to guide behaviour. A similar transformation occurred for attention.
Our results suggest that prefrontal cortex controls cognition by dynamically transforming representations to control what and when cognitive computations are engaged.
It was long assumed that only humans can distinguish the living from the dead. Renewed interest in this question over the last decade has led several authors to assert that non-human primates are also aware of death. We investigate this issue by comparing the behaviours of monkeys and great apes toward helpless conspecifics, basing our analysis on published reports.
We first examine the behaviours of mothers towards the body of their dead offspring. They may carry the corpse for days or more before abandoning it. They groom, inspect and protect it, sometimes allowing group members to explore it, and rare cases of cannibalism have been reported. No substantial difference is observed in the way that monkeys and great apes treat the bodies of infants.
We then examine responses to collapsed (still able to move and react) and inanimate (unresponsive or dead) conspecifics. Monkeys and great apes guard, care for and inspect their helpless partners, and also manipulate and mobilize them. Through these actions, individuals may inform themselves about the state of their partners, test their responsiveness and/or attempt to rouse them. It appears that only chimpanzees and gorillas show violent action such as display behaviours and the rough treatment of bodies. They can also make distress calls, and periods of “stunned silence” sometimes occur in chimpanzees, indicating that they are experiencing intense emotion.
Finally, we argue that while both monkeys and great apes detect body dysfunction through the victims’ inability to wake up and move, only great apes can understand that something serious has happened. The signs of emotional disturbance reported in them indicate that they may believe that inanimate conspecifics have entered a state of “dormancy”, meaning that they are unlikely to regain wakefulness. However, there is no evidence that any non-human primates are aware of mortality.
The ability to exert self-control varies within and across taxa. Some species can exert self-control for several seconds whereas others, such as large-brained vertebrates, can tolerate delays of up to several minutes. Advanced self-control has been linked to better performance in cognitive tasks and has been hypothesized to evolve in response to specific socio-ecological pressures. These pressures are difficult to uncouple because previously studied species face similar socio-ecological challenges.
Here, we investigate self-control and learning performance in cuttlefish, an invertebrate that is thought to have evolved under partially different pressures to previously studied vertebrates. To test self-control, cuttlefish were presented with a delay maintenance task, which measures an individual’s ability to forgo immediate gratification and sustain a delay for a better but delayed reward.
Cuttlefish maintained delay durations for up to 50–130s.
To test learning performance, we used a reversal-learning task, whereby cuttlefish were required to learn to associate the reward with one of 2 stimuli and then subsequently learn to associate the reward with the alternative stimulus.
Cuttlefish that delayed gratification for longer had better learning performance.
Our results demonstrate that cuttlefish can tolerate delays to obtain food of higher quality comparable to that of some large-brained vertebrates.
At school entry, girls are rated by teachers as more competent on measures of social skills than boys. It is less clear if this higher rating is stable or grows over time.
To address this question, multiple group curve of factors models investigated gender-specific growth trajectories across 7 waves of measurement in a large, longitudinal sample (n = 1,024, NICHD SECCYD).
The results showed that girls’ social skills were consistently rated higher from kindergarten to 6th grade, and the effect-size was moderate (latent Cohen’s d = 0.37 to 0.62). Boys demonstrated greater heterogeneity in social skills at nearly every grade with the gender difference in variability stable after 2nd grade. An examination of gender differences in growth trajectories showed that boys demonstrated a linear decrease over time, whereas girls’ social skills did not statistically-significantly change over time after accounting for initial level of social skills in kindergarten.
Non-human primates respond to the death of a conspecific in diverse ways, some which may present phylogenetic continuity with human thanatological behaviours. Of these responses, infant corpse carrying by mothers (ICC) is the most-frequently reported. Despite its prevalence, quantitative analyses of this behaviour are scarce and inconclusive.
We compiled a database of 409 published cases across 50 different primate species of mothers’ responses to their infants’ deaths to test hypotheses proposed to explain between-species and within-species variation in corpse carrying. Using Bayesian phylogenetic regressions, we preliminarily identified three factors as possible predictors of ICC occurrence. However, using an information-theoretic approach, no combination of these predictors performed better than the null model, offering no support for any of the hypotheses we tested. In contrast, for those cases where infants’ corpses were carried, infant age affected ICC duration, with longer ICC observed for younger infants. This result may provide support for hypotheses that suggest that ICC is a by-product of a strong mother-infant bond.
The results are discussed in the context of the evolution of emotion and their implications for evolutionary thanatology are considered.
How well one does at school is predictive of a wide range of important cognitive, socioeconomic, and health outcomes. The last few years have shown marked advancement in our understanding of the genetic contributions to, and correlations with, academic attainment. However, there exists a gap in our understanding of the specificity of genetic associations with performance in academic subjects during adolescence, a critical developmental period.
To address this, the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children was used to conduct genome-wide association studies of standardised national English (n = 5,983), maths (n = 6,017) and science (n = 6,089) tests.
High SNP-based heritabilities (h[^2^~SNP~]{.supsub}) for all subjects were found (41–53%). Further, h[^2^~SNP~]{.supsub} for maths and science remained after removing shared variance between subjects or IQ (n = 3,197–5,895). One genome-wide statistically-significant single nucleotide polymorphism (rs952964, p = 4.86 × 10−8) and 4 gene-level associations with science attainment (MEF2C, BRINP1, S100A1 and S100A13) were identified. Rs952964 remained statistically-significant after removing the variance shared between academic subjects.
The findings highlight the benefits of using environmentally homogeneous samples for genetic analyses and indicate that finer-grained phenotyping will help build more specific biological models of variance in learning processes and abilities.
While trigger warnings have garnered significant debate, few studies have investigated how students typically respond to potentially triggering material.
Method :
In this study, three hundred and fifty-five undergraduate students from four universities read a passage describing incidences of both physical and sexual assault. Longitudinal measures of subjective distress, PTSD symptoms, and emotional reactivity were taken.
Results :
Greater than 96% of participants read the triggering passage even when given a non-triggering alternative to read. Of those who read the triggering passage, those with triggering traumas did not report more distress although those with higher PTSD scores did. Two weeks later, those with trigger traumas and/or PTSD did not report an increase in trauma symptoms as a result of reading the triggering passage.
Conclusions :
Students with relevant traumas do not avoid triggering material and the effects appear to be brief. Students with PTSD do not report an exacerbation of symptoms two weeks later as a function of reading the passage.
Deep brain stimulation is a promising treatment for severe depression, but lack of efficacy in randomized trials raises questions regarding anatomical targeting. We implanted multi-site intracranial electrodes in a severely depressed patient and systematically assessed the acute response to focal electrical neuromodulation. We found an elaborate repertoire of distinctive emotional responses that were rapid in onset, reproducible, and context and state dependent. Results provide proof of concept for personalized, circuit-specific medicine in psychiatry.
Entitled individuals experienced, recalled, or imagined bad luck.
They felt angry even though no intentional agent was responsible for their bad luck.
Their heightened anger was specific to personally-experienced bad luck.
Three studies examined the relationship between psychological entitlement and anger in the context of bad luck. Anger is often described as an emotion that arises when a person experiences a negative outcome for which someone else was responsible. Simple bad luck, without an intentional agent clearly responsible for one’s misfortune, should therefore not usually engender anger. However, we predicted that individuals higher in psychological entitlement, with their high expectations for personal outcomes and tendency to moralize them, would be more likely to experience anger after bad luck as compared to individuals lower in psychological entitlement.
We found that psychological entitlement was, indeed, positively correlated with anger after bad luck, and with perceptions of injustice (Study 1). The relationship between entitlement and anger was specific to personally-experienced bad luck; entitlement was not correlated with anger when people recalled an unfair event (Study 2), or when they imagined that bad luck happened to someone else (Study 3).
[Keywords: psychological entitlement, bad luck, anger, injustice]
Although zero-sum relationships are, from a strictly theoretical perspective, symmetrical, we find evidence for asymmetrical zero-sum beliefs: The belief that others gain at one’s own expense, but not vice versa. Across various contexts (international relations, interpersonal negotiations, political partisanship, organizational hierarchies) and research designs (within/between-participant), we find that people are more prone to believe that others’ success comes at their own expense than they are to believe that their own success comes at others’ expense. Moreover, we find that people exhibit asymmetric zero-sum beliefs only when thinking about how their own party relates to other parties but not when thinking about how other parties relate to each other. Finally, we find that this effect is moderated by how threatened people feel by others’ success and that reassuring people about their party’s strengths eliminates asymmetric zero-sum beliefs.
We discuss the theoretical contributions of our findings to research on interpersonal and intergroup zero-sum beliefs and their implications for understanding when and why people view life as zero-sum.
…In 7 studies (including 2 preregistered experiments), we examine the psychology of asymmetric zero-sum beliefs. Studies 1 and 2 examine whether people believe that other countries (Study 1) and people (Study 2) gain at their expense, but not vice versa. Study 3 examines whether asymmetric zero-sum beliefs are unique to contexts that directly involve one’s own party, but not to contexts that involve other parties’ relations to one another. We show that people exhibit asymmetric zero-sum beliefs when considering how their own country’s outcomes relate to another country’s outcomes (ie. U.S.-China relations), but not when thinking about 2 separate countries (ie. Germany-China relations). Study 4 replicates and extends this effect in the domain of political parties and examines the role of threat in asymmetric zero-sum beliefs. We examine whether the degree to which political partisans feel threatened by an opposing party predicts how much they see that party as gaining at their own party’s expense. Finally, Studies 5, 6A, and 6B examine the causal role of threat on asymmetric zero-sum beliefs in both interpersonal and intergroup contexts by manipulating how threatened people feel by an opposing party. We find that people exhibit asymmetric zero-sum beliefs when feeling threatened by others’ success, but not when feeling reassured about their own success.
Emerging evidence suggests interventions can improve childhood self-regulation. One intervention approach that has shown promise is Taekwondo martial arts instruction, though little is known about its acceptability among stakeholders or its mechanisms of effect.
We extend evidence on Taekwondo interventions in 3 ways: (1) testing the efficacy of a standard introductory course of Taekwondo, (2) assessing the acceptability of Taekwondo instruction among school children, and (3) investigating 2 self-regulatory mechanisms by which Taekwondo may operate (executive functions and motivation).
This article reports findings from a randomized control trial implementing a standard 11-week beginners’ course of Taekwondo. Participants were from a mixed-sex, non-selective U.K. primary school (n = 240, age range 7 to 11 years). Measures of self-regulation included teacher-rated effortful control, impulsivity, prosocial behavior, and conduct problems; computer-based assessments of executive functions; and child self-reported expectancies and values to use self-regulation.
Post-intervention, children in the Taekwondo condition were rated by teachers as having fewer symptoms of conduct problems and better effortful control (specifically attentional control), and they also had better executive attention assessed by a flanker task. Effects were not found for teacher-rated inhibitory control, activation control, impulsivity, and prosocial behavior or for assessments of response inhibition, verbal working memory, and switching. Taekwondo was rated very positively by children. Finally, there was evidence that children who completed Taekwondo classes reported higher expectancies and values to use self-regulation and that expectancies and values mediated intervention effects on self-regulation.
We conclude that short standard Taekwondo courses are well received by pupils, improve attentional self-regulation, and reduce symptoms of conduct problems.
[part 2]Given the research that suggests men attend to nipples and that nipple erection is triggered by sexual excitement (among other triggers), we questioned whether men see nipple erection as a sign of sexual interest. Our findings indicate that men (but not women) see women as sexier when they have nipple erection and also see themselves as sexier, supporting the idea that nipple erection is perceived signaling arousal or sexual interest.
To determine whether female nipple erection is perceived as a sign of sexual arousal or interest, male and female participants were asked to rate photos of real women with and without salient nipple erection on a series of 16 emotional and physiological states, including positive, negative, and sexually aroused states. Nipple erection salience was rated by independent raters, and faces in photos were obscured to prevent discerning emotional states from facial cues.
Men clearly projected more sexy and positive emotions onto the stimuli when the stimuli displayed erect nipples. Whereas women did project more positive emotions with erect nipples, they did not differ in their expression of sexy. We also observed that men’s self-ratings of sexy and positive emotions were the same as their ratings of the stimuli. Women, however, reported statistically-significantly less sexy and positive emotions for themselves relative to the stimuli.
[part 1] This study shows that men are more likely to do things for sexualized women, in this case, women with nipple erection. Women, however, would prefer to avoid women with nipple erection socially. This can have implications for sex and dating strategies, and female interaction in social settings.
Previous research has shown that men perceive nipple erection as signaling more sexually receptive states. This study intended to determine if this perception changed male hypothetical behavior. For example, would men be more willing to assist women with nipple erection as opposed to those without?
Participants were asked to rate pictures of women with and without salient nipple erection (faces were obscured to prevent discerning emotional states).
Men perceived women with nipple erection as more deserving of altruism, especially if that altruism involved greater interaction with the woman, and they expected these same women to behave more altruistically toward them. They also believed the women with erect nipples should be included in their social groups. Women, on the other hand, did not perceive them as deserving of greater altruistic behaviors, did not expect greater altruistic behaviors from them, and did not want to include them into their social groups.
Do men and women differ systematically in their cooperation behaviors? Researchers have long grappled with this question, and studies have returned equivocal results. We developed an evolutionary perspective according to which men are characterized by greater intrasex variability in cooperation as a result of sex-differentiated psychological adaptations. We tested our hypothesis in two meta-analyses. The first involved the raw data of 40 samples from 23 social-dilemma studies with 8,123 participants. Findings provided strong support for our perspective. Whereas we found that the two sexes do not differ in average cooperation levels, men are much more likely to behave either selfishly or altruistically, whereas women are more likely to be moderately cooperative. We confirmed our findings in a second meta-analytic study of 28 samples from 23 studies of organizational citizenship behavior with 13,985 participants. Our results highlight the importance of taking intrasex variability into consideration when studying sex differences in cooperation and suggest important future research directions.
Researchers generally receive little training in experimental deception.
Drawing on the field of magic, we present a novel model of effective deception.
First, deception should have many “layers” rather than a single cover story.
Second, these layers should be subtle rather than explicitly stated.
We provide strategies for improving deception and thus the reliability of research.
Social psychologists, placebo scientists, and consumer researchers often require deception in their studies, yet they receive little training on how to deceive effectively. Ineffective deception, however, can lead to suspicion and compromise the validity of research. The field of magic offers a potential solution; magicians have deceived audiences for millennia using a variety of robust techniques. As former professional magicians, we propose the Swiss cheese model of deception and argue that deception should be subtle yet elaborate. Subtle deception involves techniques such as fake mistakes, planted assumptions, and convincers. Elaborate deception involves layering many of these techniques rather than relying on a single cover story. We have demonstrated the potency of these principles by making participants believe implausible ideas, such as that a machine is controlling their mind or that the placebo they consumed was a psychedelic drug. These principles can help researchers reduce demand characteristics, improve blinding, and increase the generalisability of studies that require deception.
1.1: Deceive elaborately with many layers: Co-author A.R. used to perform an act in which he would appear to read the mind of an audience member. The secret was simply that the audience member he selected for the demonstration was a paid confederate; the apparently impromptu mind reading was actually a scripted exchange. In the middle of one show, a man in the theatre stood up and shouted, “I was here last week and he chose the same woman. She’s a stooge!” After some commotion and hesitation, the magician invited the heckler onto the stage and then proceeded to read his mind instead. The act was powerful for the audience and particularly so for the initial confederate. The magician later “confided” to her that he could indeed genuinely read minds, but it was cognitively taxing for him, which is why he hired her as a confederate. The confederate was so impressed that she praised his magical powers in front of friends and colleagues for years after the performance. As it turns out, the heckler was the magician’s uncle—yet another confederate. This additional layer of deception was intended to fool the audience as well as the initial confederate.
Magicians often use such elaborate forms of deception (Kuhn et al 2014; Teller, 2012). Audiences may suspect stooges in a magic show, but they are less likely to suspect one stooge to cover up another. In other cases, magicians may show up at a restaurant hours before a performance to stick playing cards under each of the tables, one of which will be used in a casual magic trick over dinner. Or, the spouse of a magician may pretend to not understand English in order to discreetly eavesdrop and signal information undetected from the audience. Such elaborate acts, requiring considerable time, money, or effort, can be difficult for lay audiences to imagine and are thus particularly deceptive (Teller, 2012).
In research, deception is often confined to a few layers, such as a bogus device or a false explanation of what a task is measuring (Sieber et al 1995), though adding more layers may increase the effectiveness of the deception. In one study (Olson et al 2016), we had to convince educated participants that a (sham) MRI scanner could both read their mind and insert thoughts into their head; we were testing whether the delusion of thought insertion could be reproduced in a non-clinical population. To do so, we used various layers to strengthen the deception. The first 30 min of the protocol included fake MRI safety screenings, a lab technician (surrounded by scientific paraphernalia) describing the complex workings of the machine, and a sham calibration procedure. As in magic, such deception can lead participants down one explanatory path (eg. that a novel technology will control their mind), making them less likely to discover the underlying “secret” (Thomas & Didierjean, 2016). These many layers constitute costly signalling: the effort involved in the procedure was specifically intended to make participants less likely to infer that it was all a sham (Galang, 2018). In a replication, removing one of the key layers of deception made the procedure less convincing (Pailhès, Olson, & Kuhn, in progress). Related studies of machine mind reading and thought insertion that used fewer layers of deception have also resulted in higher rates of suspicion or somewhat weaker effects (Ali et al 2014; Swiney & Sousa, 2013).
Elaborate deceptive methods are occasionally required in placebo research. In a study applying the Swiss cheese model, we used a dozen researchers in lab coats, a security guard, a handful of confederates, sham blood pressure feedback, and fake drug information sheets to convince participants that the placebos they consumed were actually psychedelic drugs (Olson et al 2020). Accordingly, some of the participants reported alterations in consciousness similar to what one would expect from a moderate dose of the actual drug. In a study of placebo alcohol, Bernstein et al (2016) also used various layers of deception: confederates made off-hand comments about friends who got drunk while previously completing the study, the researchers sprayed the room with an alcohol scent, and the (non-alcoholic) drinks had real alcohol rubbed along the rim for subtle taste cues…When guessing three people’s chosen playing cards, they [mentalists] will intentionally get the last one slightly wrong (eg. guessing the Seven of Diamonds rather than the Seven of Hearts) to make the situation appear more plausible and lead people to believe it is telepathy rather than a trick (Burger, 1983). This trickery is effective because it is more difficult for audiences to imagine that such seemingly costly mistakes would be carefully planned to improve the show (Galang, 2018).
People mispredict how task-ordering influences their efficacy.
People prefer to complete tasks in increasing-difficulty order.
But completing tasks in increasing-difficulty order actually decreases efficacy.
People inaccurately simulate their efficacy levels over time.
Achieving competency and autonomy in one’s life—in other words, being efficacious—is a fundamental human need. A commonly endorsed strategy for building efficacy is summarized by a popular quote: “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing.” The current paper tests this “eat-the-frog-first” strategy, examining whether completing tasks in increasing-easiness order builds efficacy more than increasing-difficulty (or randomized) order. We propose that the eat-the-frog-first strategy does indeed enhance efficacy, but also that people will prefer the opposing order (preferring to complete more difficult tasks later) because they inaccurately believe that doing so will enhance their efficacy. Six experiments and one supplemental experiment (n = 2013) support these hypotheses. In Experiments 1a, 2a, and 3a (predicted efficacy experiments), people believed that completing tasks in increasing-difficulty (vs. increasing-easiness) order would enhance their efficacy, and hence preferred to complete tasks in increasing-difficulty order. But in corresponding Experiments 1b, 2b, and 3b (actual efficacy experiments), completing tasks in increasing-difficulty (vs. increasing-easiness or random) order reduced self-efficacy (or did not meaningfully change it; 3b). We provide evidence in a final study (Experiment 4) that this misunderstanding is due to people simulating the beginning of a sequence (eg. the struggle of completing the most difficult task) more than the end (eg. the ease of completing the simplest task). We conclude that people’s tendency to delay the difficult incurs unexpected costs to self-worth. To build efficacy, people should start with their hardest task, even though doing so may violate intuition.
Prior research experience is widely considered by graduate school admissions committees in the United States of America. Here, we use meta‐analytic methods and data from 18 unique samples and a total sample size of 3,525 students to shed light on the validity of prior research experience as a predictor of graduate school performance. Prior research experience was largely unrelated to academic performance (ρ = 0.01, k = 8, n = 1,419), degree attainment (ρ = 0.05, k = 3, n = 140), professional/practice performance (ρ = 0.06, k = 4, n = 1,120), and publication performance (ρ = 0.11, k = 7, n = 1,094). We also discuss whether consideration of prior research experience may unfairly disadvantage the students with lower levels of SES, students with childcare or eldercare responsibilities, and students from institutions at which research opportunities are limited.
Approximately half of the world’s population is bilingual or multilingual. The bilingual advantage theory claims that the constant need to control both known languages, that are always active in the brain, to use the one suitable for each specific context improves cognitive functions and specifically executive functions. However, some authors do not agree on the bilingual effect, given the controversial results of studies on this topic.
This systematic review aims to summarize the results of studies on the relationship between bilingualism and executive functions. The review was conducted according to PRISMA-statement through searches in the scientific database PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, MEDLINE, and PUBMED. Studies included in this review had at least one bilingual and monolingual group, participants aged between 5 and 17 years, and at least one executive function measure. Studies on second language learners, multilingual people, and the clinical population were excluded.
53 studies were included in the systematic review. Evidence supporting the bilingual effect seems to appear when assessing inhibition and cognitive flexibility, but to disappear when working memory is considered. The inconsistent results of the studies do not allow drawing definite conclusions on the bilingual effect.
Further studies are needed; they should consider the role of some moderators (eg. language history and context, methodological differences) on the observed results.
Paranormal beliefs (PBs) are common in adults. There are numerous psychological correlates of PBs and associated theories, yet, we do not know whether such correlates reinforce or result from PBs. To understand causality, we developed an experimental design in which participants experience supposedly paranormal events. Thus, we can test an event’s impact on PBs and PB-associated correlates.
Here, 419 naïve students saw a performer making contact with a confederate’s deceased kin. We tested participants’ opinions and feelings about this performance, and whether these predicted how participants explain the performance. We assessed participants’ PBs and repetition avoidance (PB related cognitive correlate) before and after the performance. Afterwards, participants rated explanations of the event and described their opinions and feelings (open-ended question).
Overall, 65% of participants reported having witnessed a genuine paranormal event. The open-ended question revealed distinct opinion and affect groups, with reactions commonly characterized by doubt and mixed feelings. Importantly, paranormal explanations were more likely when participants reported their feelings than when not reported. Beyond these results, we replicated that 1. higher pre-existing PBs were associated with more psychic explanations (confirmation bias), and 2. PBs and repetition avoidance did not change from before to after the performance. Yet, PBs reminiscent of the actual performance (spiritualism) increased. Results showed that young adults easily endorse PBs and paranormal explanations for events, and that their affective reactions matter. Future studies should use participants’ subjective experiences to target PBs in causal designs (eg. adding control conditions).
Magic performance: The performance closely resembled the performance described in Lesaffre et al (2018; Study 2 and 3). To be as ambiguous as possible about the performer(avoiding the impression of an experienced stage magician or psychic), the performance accentuated the performer’s and the confederate’s discomfort of being on stage, non-professionalism, and affectivity. Specifically, a semi-professional magician (Gregory) performed the event. Gregory is a member of the FISM (International Federation of Magical Society) club of Geneva (www.lecmg.ch). He specializes in mentalism. We did not use magic props, such as cards or coins. The performance consisted of two parts. First, the performer aimed to guess the color a volunteer had selected. The volunteer received a dice with colors on the dice’s sides. Hidden from Gregory, the volunteer turned the dice so that the selected color was shown on top. Due to unexpected technical problems with the dice, this part of the performance was initiated, but not completed. Afterwards, the performer invited a confederate from the audience to join him. This female confederate was asked to think about one of her deceased close family members, in order to get in touch with him or her. The performer, after “having felt” a presence, started to “guess” details about the deceased person. Gregory reported more details about this person’s life as the performance continued. These details were “almost accurate” (eg. Gregory guessed that the family member’s name was Michel, but it was actually Michael). As the performance continued, the confederate became increasingly emotional. The performer finished the performance by telling the young woman that her father loves her, that he was very proud of her, and that he would always look after her.
Self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITBs) are major public health concerns impacting a wide range of individuals and communities. Despite major efforts to develop and refine treatments to reduce SITBs, the efficacy of SITB interventions remains unclear. To provide a comprehensive summary of SITB treatment efficacy, we conducted a meta-analysis of published randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that have attempted to reduce SITBs.
A total of 591 published articles from 1,125 unique RCTs with 3,458 effect sizes from the past 50 years were included. The random-effects meta-analysis yielded surprising findings: The overall intervention effects were small across all SITB outcomes; despite a near-exponential increase in the number of RCTs across five decades, intervention efficacy has not improved; all SITB interventions produced similarly small effects, and no intervention appeared statistically-significantly and consistently stronger than others; the overall small intervention effects were largely maintained at follow-up assessments; efficacy was similar across age groups, though effects were slightly weaker for child/adolescent populations and few studies focused on older adults; and major sample and study characteristics (eg. control group type, treatment target, sample size, intervention length) did not consistently moderate treatment efficacy.
This meta-analysis suggests that fundamental changes are needed to facilitate progress in SITB intervention efficacy. In particular, powerful interventions target the necessary causes of pathology, but little is known about SITB causes (vs. SITB correlates and risk factors). The field would accordingly benefit from the prioritization of research that aims to identify and target common necessary causes of SITBs.
Sex differences in brain anatomy have been described from early childhood through late adulthood, but without any clear consensus among studies. Here, we applied a machine learning approach to estimate ‘Brain Sex’ using a continuous (rather than binary) classifier in 162 boys and 185 girls aged between 5 and 18 years. Changes in the estimated sex differences over time at different age groups were subsequently calculated using a sliding window approach. We hypothesized that males and females would differ in brain structure already during childhood, but that these differences will become even more pronounced with increasing age, particularly during adolescence. Overall, the classifier achieved a good performance, with an accuracy of 80.4% and an AUC of 0.897 across all age groups. Assessing changes in the estimated sex with age revealed a growing difference between the sexes with increasing age. That is, the very large effect size of d = 1.2 which was already evident during childhood increased even further from age 11 onward, and eventually reached an effect size of d = 1.6 at age 17. Altogether these findings suggest a systematic sex difference in brain structure already during childhood, and a subsequent increase of this difference during adolescence.[Keywords: Adolescence, brain, childhood, development, machine learning, puberty, relevance vector, sex]
Aims: To examine whether moderate adolescent cannabis use has neurocognitive effects that are unexplained by familial confounds, which prior family-controlled studies may not have identified.
Design: A quasi-experimental, sibling-comparison design was applied to a prospective, observational study of adolescents with moderate cannabis use. Participants were recruited from 2001 to 2006 (mean age = 17 years). A second wave of data was collected from 2008 to 2013 (mean age = 24 years).
Setting: Two US metropolitan communities.
Participants: A total of 1192 adolescents from 596 families participated in this study. Participants were primarily male (64%) and racially and ethnically diverse (non-Hispanic white = 45%). A sibling in each family was a clinical proband identified due to delinquent behaviors. Whereas prior family-controlled studies have used samples of primarily infrequent cannabis users (mean = 1–2 days/month), participants here endorsed levels of cannabis use comparable to findings from epidemiological cohort studies (mean = 7–9 days/month).
Measurements: Semi-structured clinical interviews assessed drug use, and a neuropsychological battery assessed cognitive abilities. Covariates included age at assessment, gender and alcohol use.
Findings: After correcting for multiple testing, a greater frequency and earlier onset of regular cannabis use were associated with poorer cognitive performance, specifically on tests of verbal memory. Further, after accounting for familial factors shared by siblings and alcohol use, poorer verbal memory performance was still associated with greater life-time frequency of cannabis use at wave 1 [b = −0.007 (−0.002, −0.012), adjusted p = 0.036]; earlier cannabis use at wave 2 [b = −0.12 (−0.05, −0.19), adjusted p = 0.006; b = −0.14 (−0.06, −0.23), adjusted p = 0.006]; and greater frequency of past 6 months use at wave 2 [b = −0.02 (−0.01, −0.03), adjusted p = 0.002; b = −0.02 (−0.01, −0.03), adjusted p = 0.008].
Conclusions: Moderate adolescent cannabis use may have adverse effects on cognitive functioning, specifically verbal memory, that cannot be explained by familial factors.
Laypersons and scholars often presume that people positively evaluate partners who match their ideal partner preferences: If Faye prefers kindness in a partner and Sonia prefers ambition, Faye should be especially attracted to kind partners and Sonia should be especially attracted to ambitious ones. However, to date, most published tests of this idea are imprecise and permit multiple interpretations of the data.
The current studies improve upon prior tests by (a) having participants self-generate the ideal attributes that matter most to them and (b) using a yoked design to isolate the predictive power of self-generated (vs. other-generated) ideal attributes. Overall, participants were more romantically interested in blind-date partners (Study 1) and acquaintances/friends/romantic partners (Study 2) to the extent that they thought those individuals possessed the ideal attributes. But the positive association of these attributes with romantic interest was identical regardless of whether the attributes represented the participant’s self-generated ideals or someone else’s ideals. We also used a novel coding scheme to organize participants’ 1011 self-generated ideal attributes into 95 different attribute-categories; we then implemented three exclusion strategies (that differed in breadth vs precision) using this scheme in order to maximize idiosyncratic variability between self-generated and other-generated ideals.
All approaches revealed identical conclusions. Focused tests of ideal partner preference-matching may reveal that individual differences in ideal partner preferences poorly correspond to the attributes that uniquely inspire romantic interest.
[Keywords: ideal partner preferences, person perception, relationships, predictive validity, matching]
Noise, defined as an unwanted sound, is one of the most common factors people have to deal with when performing their daily working tasks. Researchers have marginally investigated the effect of noise on software engineers’ performance.
In this paper, we present the results of 2 replicated experiments whose main goal was to increase the body of knowledge, by confirming or not the results of the baseline experiments, on the effect of noise while comprehending functional requirements specifications and fixing faults in source code. The results of the replicated experiments suggest that: (1) noise does not statistically-significantly affect the comprehension of functional requirements specifications and (2) noise statistically-significantly and negatively affects fixing faults if this task lasts 30 minutes, while it does not have a statistically-significant impact if the task lasts 60 minutes.
The results of the replications confirm to a large extent those of the baseline experiments and allow us to postulate, as done for the baseline experiments, that fixing faults is more vulnerable to noise than comprehending the specifications of functional requirements.
Objective:: Efforts to prevent depression, the leading cause of disability worldwide, have focused on a limited number of candidate factors. Using phenotypic and genomic data from over 100,000 UK Biobank participants, the authors sought to systematically screen and validate a wide range of potential modifiable factors for depression.
Methods:: Baseline data were extracted for 106 modifiable factors, including lifestyle (eg. exercise, sleep, media, diet), social (eg. support, engagement), and environmental (eg. green space, pollution) variables. Incident depression was defined as minimal depressive symptoms at baseline and clinically-significant depression at follow-up. At-risk individuals for incident depression were identified by polygenic risk scores or by reported traumatic life events. An exposure-wide association scan was conducted to identify factors associated with incident depression in the full sample and among at-risk individuals. Two-sample Mendelian randomization was then used to validate potentially causal relationships between identified factors and depression.
Results:: Numerous factors across social, sleep, media, dietary, and exercise-related domains were prospectively associated with depression, even among at-risk individuals. However, only a subset of factors was supported by Mendelian randomization evidence, including confiding in others (odds ratio = 0.76, 95% CI = 0.67, 0.86), television watching time (odds ratio = 1.09, 95% CI = 1.05–1.13), and daytime napping (odds ratio = 1.34, 95% CI = 1.17–1.53).
Conclusions:: Using a two-stage approach, this study validates several actionable targets for preventing depression. It also demonstrates that not all factors associated with depression in observational research may translate into robust targets for prevention. A large-scale exposure-wide approach combined with genetically informed methods for causal inference may help prioritize strategies for multimodal prevention in psychiatry.
In two studies we tested the hypothesis that observers can accurately distinguish between convicted criminals and matched controls, merely by scrutinizing facial photographs. Based on the Eudaimonic Activity Model, we further hypothesized that criminals and non-criminals differ in their apparent emotional positivity. Finally, based on honest signaling theory, we hypothesized that such emotionality differences can explain observers’ ability to distinguish criminals and non-criminals.
In Study 1 participants evaluated photos of people later convicted of crimes, and photos of matched controls. In Study 2 participants evaluated photos of Catholic priests later convicted of sexual offenses, and photos of the priests who replaced them at their parishes. All three hypotheses were supported. Furthermore, in Study 2, participants’ own facial photos were rated by assistants. Consistent with honest signal theories, observer’s facial positivity, as well as their self-rated positive affect, predicted their ability to perceive positive emotions in non-criminal faces.
2020-bonetto.pdf: “The paradox of creativity”, Eric Bonetto, Nicolas Pichot, Jean-Baptiste Pavani, Jaïs Adam-Troïan (2020-08-06; similar):
Highlights:
Creative behaviors seem to yield survival and reproductive benefits.
However, to be creative, individuals often have to violate social norms.
This deviance entails consequences detrimental for both survival and reproduction.
We propose to call this paradox the paradox of creativity.
Creativity seems to yield survival and reproductive benefits. Creative behaviors allow individuals to solve problems in new and appropriate ways, and thus to promote their survival. They also facilitate bonding and constitute a signal of one’s fitness, favoring attraction of mates. However, to be creative, individuals often have to violate social norms in order to promote change. So far, this deviance induced by creative behaviors had not been seen as an adaptive disadvantage. This deviance entails negative consequences as social exclusion or ostracism, which are detrimental for both survival (eg. reduced access to resources within the group) and reproduction (reduced reproductive fitness). Thus, the adaptive benefits yielded by creativity have to be nuanced by these potential disadvantages. The paradox of creativity proposes a finer-grained vision of the adaptive reasons why creativity has been maintained within the human species, has evolved, and is collectively regulated. Research perspectives are also proposed.
[Keywords: Evolutionary perspective, creativity, paradox of creativity]
I use a combination of blind and non-blind test scores to show that middle school teachers favor girls in their evaluations. This favoritism, estimated as individual teacher effects, has long-term consequences: as measured by their national evaluations three years later, male students make less progress than their female counterparts. On the other hand, girls who benefit from gender bias in math are more likely to select a science track in high school. Without teachers’ bias in favor of girls, the gender gap in choosing a science track would be 12.5% larger in favor of boys.
“Concept creep” is the gradual semantic expansion of harm-related concepts such as bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, and trauma. This review presents a synopsis of relevant theoretical advances and empirical research findings on the phenomenon.
It addresses 3 fundamental questions. First, it clarifies the characterisation of concept creep by refining its theoretical and historical dimensions and presenting studies investigating the change in harm-related concepts using computational linguistics. Second, it examines factors that have caused concept creep, including cultural shifts in sensitivity to harm, societal changes in the prevalence of harm, and intentional meaning changes engineered for political ends. Third, the paper develops an account of the consequences of concept creep, including social conflict, political polarization, speech restrictions, victim identities, and progressive social change.
This extended analysis of concept creep helps to understand its mixed implications and sets a multi-pronged agenda for future research on the topic.
C. J. Wakslak, Y. Trope, N. Liberman, and R. Alony (2006) examined the effect of manipulating the likelihood of future events on level of construal (ie. mental abstraction). Over 7 experiments, they consistently found that subjectively unlikely (vs. likely) future events were more abstractly (vs. concretely) construed. This well-cited, but understudied finding has had a major influence on the construal level theory (CLT) literature: Likelihood is considered to be 1 of 4 psychological distances assumed to influence mental abstraction in similar ways (Trope & Liberman, 2010). Contrary to the original empirical findings, we present 2 close replication attempts (n = 115 and n = 120; the original studies had n = 20 and n = 34) that failed to find the effect of likelihood on construal level. Bayesian analyses provided diagnostic support for the absence of an effect. In light of the failed replications, we present a meta-analytic summary of the accumulated evidence on the effect. It suggests a strong trend of declining effect sizes as a function of larger samples. These results call into question the previous conclusion that likelihood has a reliable influence on construal level. We discuss the implications of these findings for CLT and advise against treating likelihood as a psychological distance until further tests have established the relationship.
Reports two near-replications of the relationship of mindset to grades across a challenging transition (n = 832)
Growth mindset was studied longitudinally from high school through four years of university
Growth mindset was not associated with grades at any point
Growth mindset was not associated with grades across the challenging transition from high school to university
Growth mindset was not associated with grades even in students for whom university was especially challenging
Mindset theory predicts that whether students believe basic ability is greatly malleable exerts a major influence on their own educational attainment (Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007). We tested this prediction in two near-replication studies (total n = 832). In study 1 we tested the association of mindset with university grades in a cross-sectional design involving self-reported grades for 246 undergraduates. Growth mindset showed no association with grades (β = −0.02 CI95 [−0.16, 0.12], t = −0.26, p = 0.792). In study 2, we implemented a longitudinal design, testing the association of mindset with grade transcript scores across a series of challenging transitions: from high school to university entry, and then across all years of an undergraduate degree (n = 586). Contrary to prediction, mindset was not associated with grades across the challenging transition from high-school to the first year of university (β = −0.05 CI95 [−0.14, 0.05], t = −0.95, p = 0.345). In addition, mindset was unrelated to entry grades (p = 0.808). And no support was found for a predicted interaction of mindset with academic disadvantage across the transition (β = −0.03 CI95 [−0.12, 0.07], t = −0.54, p = 0.592). Follow-up analyses showed no association of mindset with improvement in grades at any subsequent year of the degree (minimum p-value 0.591). Jointly, these two near-replication studies suggest that, even across challenging transitions, growth mindset is either unrelated to educational attainment or has a very small negative influence.
This study examined player reported toxicity incidents in the game World of Tanks.
It is the first to study individual and team-level predictors of toxicity in games using longitudinal behavioral data.
Experienced and skillful players are more likely to commit toxic behaviors than newcomers.
Teams that are losing, or have a high internal skill disparity among their members tend to breed toxicity.
Toxicity is contagious among players, especially toxic behaviors in one’s own teams and in clan battles.
Toxic behaviors are pervasive in online games and can be harmful to building a positive online environment.
Guided by the social identity model of deindividuation, this study represents one of the first efforts to examine the antecedents of toxicity in team-based online games using longitudinal behavioral data. It fills 2 important gaps in existing research, by (1) exploring non-verbal and behavioral dimensions of toxicity, and (2) examining team-level in addition to individual-level predictors.
Employing a large-scale behavioral dataset from the popular game World of Tanks, we found that, in general, experienced and skillful players are more likely to commit toxic behaviors. Teams that are losing, or have a high internal skill disparity among their members tend to breed toxicity. In addition, this study provides empirical evidence that toxicity is contagious among players, especially toxic behaviors in one’s own teams and in clan battles.
[Keywords: toxicity, MMO, online games, contagion, social network]
This study examines the timing of pop-up advertising appearance and its effect on perceived intrusiveness, advertising irritation and advertising avoidance.
Experiment was designed to build a virtual Internet environment (including the main content on the webpage and a pop-up ad) and to manipulate the timing of the pop-up advertising appearance. Participants were invited to participate in two experiments, and then assigned to a specific target browsing task; their advertising browsing activities during the task were measured. In order to measure their cognitive advertising avoidance, an eye-tracking device was utilised to gain objective and accurate psychological information.
Results showed that earlier pop-up advertising appearances are associated with a lower consumer fixation count and fixation length; in contrast, pop-up advertising that appears later is associated with a higher fixation count and fixation length.
This study attempts to gain more objective and accurate psychological data by using an eye-tracking device to collect information about eye movements associated with the appearance of pop-up advertising to better analyse consumer behaviours towards them. These results offer insights to Internet advertisers and Internet platform companies on how to provide more efficient Internet advertising.
Grit has been suggested as a predictor of academic success over and above established constructs like conscientiousness (C) but has only been compared to brief inventories of trait-level C. This study examined the difference between using a brief inventory of C (Big Five Inventory [BFI]) and a facet-level inventory (NEO Personality Inventory-Revised [NEO PI-R]) as controls for grit in an undergraduate sample (n = 1,394). Grit exhibited strong correlations with C, particularly the facets of self-discipline and achievement striving. When BFI was used, both grit and C added small increments in explained variance while controlling for each other. When NEO PI-R was used, grit could not explain any additional variance in university grade and minuscule amounts (4%) in high school grade. Facets of C added moderate amounts (16%–54%) of incremental variance to both university and high school grades when controlling for grit. The results demonstrated that different outcomes are to be expected depending upon the choice of C measure.
Representational measurement theory was proposed initially to solve problems caused by disciplinary aspirations of 19th-century mathematicians, who wanted to construe their subject as independent of its applications in empirical science. Half a century later, S. S. Stevens seized the opportunity provided by representational theory’s reconstruction of measurement as numerical coding to rubber-stamp psychology’s own aspirations to be counted as a quantitative science. Patrick Suppes’ version of representational theory rectified defects in Stevens’ theory, making it explicit that representational theory entails that mathematical structure is already embedded in empirical systems. However, Suppes’ theory neglected the fact that attributes, not objects, are the focus of measurement and when that oversight is corrected, it follows that empirical systems sustaining measurement already instantiate positive real numbers. Thus, in measurement, real numbers are estimated, not assigned from without. Representational theory not only misrepresents measurement; it refutes itself.
People actively select their environments, and the environments they select can alter their psychological characteristics in the moment and over time. Such dynamic person-environment transactions are likely to play out in the context of daily life via the places people spend time in (eg. home, work, or public places like cafes and restaurants). This article investigates personality-place transactions at 3 conceptual levels: stable personality traits, momentary personality states, and short-term personality trait expressions. Three 2-week experience sampling studies (2 exploratory and 1 confirmatory with a total n = 2,350 and more than 63,000 momentary assessments) were used to provide the first large-scale evidence showing that people’s stable Big Five traits are associated with the frequency with which they visit different places on a daily basis. For example, extraverted people reported spending less time at home and more time at cafés, bars, and friends’ houses. The findings also show that spending time in a particular place predicts people’s momentary personality states and their short-term trait expression over time. For example, people reported feeling more extraverted in the moment when spending time at bars/parties, cafés/restaurants, or friends’ houses, compared with when at home. People who showed preferences for spending more time in these places also showed higher levels of short-term trait extraversion over the course of 2 weeks. The findings make theoretical contributions to environmental psychology, personality dynamics, as well as the person-environment transactions literature, and highlight practical implications for a world in which the places people visit can be easily captured via GPS sensors.
Trigger warnings alert trauma survivors about potentially disturbing forthcoming content. However, empirical studies on trigger warnings suggest that they are functionally inert or cause small adverse side effects. We conducted a preregistered replication and extension of a previous experiment. Trauma survivors (n = 451) were randomly assigned to either receive or not to receive trigger warnings before reading passages from world literature. We found no evidence that trigger warnings were helpful for trauma survivors, for participants who self-reported a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnosis, or for participants who qualified for probable PTSD, even when survivors’ trauma matched the passages’ content. We found substantial evidence that trigger warnings counter-therapeutically reinforce survivors’ view of their trauma as central to their identity. Regarding replication hypotheses, the evidence was either ambiguous or substantially favored the hypothesis that trigger warnings have no effect. In summary, we found that trigger warnings are not helpful for trauma survivors.
[Keywords: trigger warning, trauma, PTSD, resilience, replication, open data, open materials, preregistered]
The world spends a remarkable $250 billion a year on lottery tickets. Yet, perplexingly, it has proved difficult for social scientists to show that lottery windfalls actually make people happier. This is the famous and still unresolved paradox due initially to Brickman et al 1978.
Here we describe an underlying weakness that has affected the research area, and explain the concept of lottery-ticket bias (LT bias), which stems from unobservable lottery spending [making players much poorer]. We then collect new data—in the world’s most intense lottery-playing nation, Singapore—on the amount that people spend on lottery tickets (n = 5,626).
We demonstrate that, once we correct for LT bias, a lottery windfall is predictive of a substantial improvement in happiness and well-being.
…Nevertheless, a key problem is the following. If a scientific investigator observed someone who won 1,000 dollars, the scientist would not expect the person to be happier if that individual had already had to spend 1,000 dollars in order to get the lottery tickets. Empirical studies of lotteries have usually been forced to ignore this point, because investigators traditionally have not had data on ticket purchases. Yet, by definition, the way to get lottery wins is to buy tickets, and the greater is the number of tickets, the larger is the expected size of a person’s win. Hence, in situations where information on ticket purchases is not available to the researcher, there will be an innate downward bias in estimates of the happiness from lottery wins. We term this lottery-tickets (LT) bias. The current study attempts to correct for this form of bias (the potential existence of which has been pointed out before in the literature, such as in Apouey & Clark 2015, although the authors were only able to control for fixed effects as a partial fix for the problem).
…Panel B of Table 1 gives further descriptive statistics on the lottery-related variables in the SLP data set. The numbers reveal the extensive use of the lottery in the country of Singapore. ~52% of respondents purchased a lottery ticket at least once in the previous 12 months. Of the respondents who purchased lottery tickets at least once, 45% of them purchased tickets every week. Average annual spending on lottery tickets per player was S$1,687 (US $1,221 or £994 UK sterling). Of those who purchased a lottery ticket at least once in the last 12 months, 43% of them won at least once, with average winnings of ~S$353.5 As would be expected, the data indicate the extent of negative net returns to customers.
In our data set, the minimum and maximum of lottery ticket spending are S$1 and S$72,800. The minimum and maximum of (individual) lottery prizes are S$0 and S$30,000.
Singaporeans are known to be some of the world’s most avid lottery players. According to an annual survey on worldwide lottery sales, Singapore has the world’s largest lottery spending per-capita (Singapore National Council on Problem Gambling 2015). An annual lottery ticket spending of S$1,687 in our data set is a strikingly large amount by the standards of most nations…the top 10% of lottery players spend a remarkable S$9,000 + a year.
In this article, we present a tool and a method for measuring the psychological and cultural distance between societies and creating a distance scale with any population as the point of comparison. Because psychological data are dominated by samples drawn from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) nations, and overwhelmingly, the United States, we focused on distance from the United States. We also present distance from China, the country with the largest population and second largest economy, which is a common cultural comparison. We applied the fixation index (Fst), a meaningful statistic in evolutionary theory, to the World Values Survey of cultural beliefs and behaviors. As the extreme WEIRDness of the literature begins to dissolve, our tool will become more useful for designing, planning, and justifying a wide range of comparative psychological projects. Our code and accompanying online application allow for comparisons between any two countries. Analyses of regional diversity reveal the relative homogeneity of the United States. Cultural distance predicts various psychological outcomes.
[Keywords: WEIRD people, cultural psychology, cultural distance, cross-cultural differences, replication crisis]
[cf. precrastination, willpower / opportunity-cost, ordinary incompetence/local optima] How individuals manage, organize, and complete their tasks is central to operations management. Recent research in operations focuses on how under conditions of increasing workload individuals can decrease their service time, up to a point, to complete work more quickly. As the number of tasks increases, however, workers may also manage their workload by a different process—task selection.
Drawing on research on workload, individual discretion, and behavioral decision making, we theorize and then test that under conditions of increased workload, individuals may choose to complete easier tasks to manage their load. We label this behavior task completion preference (TCP).
Using 6 years of data from a hospital emergency department [n ~ 230,000], we find that physicians engage in TCP, with implications for their performance. Specifically, TCP helps physicians manage variance in service times; however, although it initially appears to improve shift-level throughput volume, after adjusting for the complexity of the work completed, TCP is related to worse throughput. Moreover, we find that engaging in easier tasks compared with hard ones is related to lower learning in service times.
We then turn to the laboratory to replicate conceptually the short-term task selection effect under increased workload and show that it occurs because of both fatigue and the sense of progress individuals get from task completion.
These findings provide another mechanism for the workload-speedup effect from the literature. We also discuss implications for both the research and the practice of operations in building systems to help people succeed.
Little is known about whether people make good choices when facing important decisions. This article reports on a large-scale randomized field experiment in which research subjects having difficulty making a decision flipped a coin to help determine their choice. For important decisions (eg. quitting a job or ending a relationship), individuals who are told by the coin toss to make a change are more likely to make a change, more satisfied with their decisions, and happier six months later than those whose coin toss instructed maintaining the status quo. This finding suggests that people may be excessively cautious when facing life-changing choices.
Does psychopathology develop as a function of the objective or subjective experience of childhood maltreatment? To address this question, we studied an unique cohort of 1,196 children with both objective, court-documented evidence of maltreatment and subjective reports of their childhood maltreatment histories made once they reached adulthood, along with extensive psychiatric assessment. We found that, even for severe cases of childhood maltreatment identified through court records, risk of psychopathology linked to objective measures was minimal in the absence of subjective reports. In contrast, risk of psychopathology linked to subjective reports of childhood maltreatment was high, whether or not the reports were consistent with objective measures. These findings have important implications for how we study the mechanisms through which child maltreatment affects mental health and how we prevent or treat maltreatment-related psychopathology. Interventions for psychopathology associated with childhood maltreatment can benefit from deeper understanding of the subjective experience.
Whether acquiring a second language affords any general advantages to executive function has been a matter of fierce scientific debate for decades. If being bilingual does have benefits over and above the broader social, employment, and lifestyle gains that are available to speakers of a second language, then it should manifest as a cognitive advantage in the general population of bilinguals. We assessed 11,041 participants on a broad battery of 12 executive tasks whose functional and neural properties have been well described. Bilinguals showed an advantage over monolinguals on only one test (whereas monolinguals performed better on four tests), and these effects all disappeared when the groups were matched to remove potentially confounding factors. In any case, the size of the positive bilingual effect in the unmatched groups was so small that it would likely have a negligible impact on the cognitive performance of any individual.
Trigger warnings notify people that content they are about to engage with may result in adverse emotional consequences. An experiment by Bellet, Jones, and McNally (2018) indicated that trigger warnings increased the extent to which trauma-naïve crowd-sourced participants see themselves and others as emotionally vulnerable to potential future traumas but did not have a statistically-significant main effect on anxiety responses to distressing literature passages. However, they did increase anxiety responses for participants who strongly believed that words can harm. In this article, we present a preregistered replication of this study in a college student sample, using Bayesian statistics to estimate the success of each effect’s replication. We found strong evidence that none of the previously statistically-significant effects replicated. However, we found substantial evidence that trigger warnings’ previously nonsignificant main effect of increasing anxiety responses to distressing content was genuine, albeit small. Interpretation of the findings, implications, and future directions are discussed.
Changes in cognitive performance due to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are closely correlated to the brain structure alteration. A univariate and personalized neurodegenerative biomarker with strong statistical power based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) will benefit clinical diagnosis and prognosis of neurodegenerative diseases. However, few biomarkers of this type have been developed, especially those that are robust to image noise and applicable to clinical analyses. In this paper, we introduce a variational framework to compute optimal transportation (OT) on brain structural MRI volumes and develop an univariate neuroimaging index based on OT to quantify neurodegenerative alterations. Specifically, we compute the OT from each image to a template and measure the Wasserstein distance between them. The obtained Wasserstein distance, Wasserstein Index (WI) for short to specify the distance to a template, is concise, informative and robust to random noise. Comparing to the popular linear programming-based OT computation method, our framework makes use of Newton’s method, which makes it possible to compute WI in large-scale datasets. Experimental results, on 314 subjects (140 Aβ + AD and 174 Aβ- normal controls) from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) baseline dataset, provide preliminary evidence that the proposed WI is correlated with a clinical cognitive measure (the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) score), and it is able to identify group difference and achieve a good classification accuracy, outperforming two other popular univariate indices including hippocampal volume and entorhinal cortex thickness. The current pilot work suggests the application of WI as a potential univariate neurodegenerative biomarker.
The Big Five personality traits have been linked with a broad range of consequential life outcomes. The present research systematically tested whether such trait-outcome associations generalize across gender, age, ethnicity, and analytic approaches that control for demographic and personality covariates. Analyses of nationally representative samples from the Life Outcomes of Personality Replication project (n = 6,126) indicated that (a) most trait-outcome associations do generalize across gender, age, and ethnicity; (b) controlling for overlap between personality traits substantially reduces the strength of many associations; and (c) several dozen trait-outcome associations proved highly generalizable across all analyses. These findings have important implications for evaluating the robustness of the personality-outcome literature, updating the canon of established trait-outcome associations, and conducting future research.
We revisited Indian weaving firms nine years after a randomized experiment that changed their management practices. While about half of the practices adopted in the original experimental plants had been dropped, there was still a large and significant gap in practices between the treatment and control plants, suggesting lasting impacts of effective management interventions. Few practices had spread across the firms in the study, but many had spread within firms. Managerial turnover and the lack of director time were two of the most cited reasons for the drop in management practices, highlighting the importance of key employees.
Recent studies have strived to find an association between rapid antidepressant effects and a specific subset of pharmacological targets and molecular pathways. Here, we propose a broader hypothesis of encoding, consolidation, and renormalization in depression (ENCORE-D), which suggests that, fundamentally, rapid and sustained antidepressant effects rely on intrinsic homeostatic mechanisms evoked as a response to the acute pharmacological or physiologic effects triggered by the treatment.
We review evidence that supports the notion that various treatments with a rapid onset of action, such as ketamine, electroconvulsive therapy, and sleep deprivation, share the ability to acutely excite cortical networks, which increases synaptic potentiation, alters patterns of functional connectivity, and ameliorates depressive symptoms.
We proceed to examine how the initial effects are short-lived and, as such, require both consolidation during wake and maintenance throughout sleep to remain sustained. Here, we incorporate elements from the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis and theorize that the fundamental mechanisms of synaptic plasticity and sleep, particularly the homeostatic emergence of slow-wave electroencephalogram activity and the renormalization of synaptic strength, are at the center of sustained antidepressant effects.
We conclude by discussing the various implications of the ENCORE-D hypothesis and offer several considerations for future experimental and clinical research.
Significance Statement: Proposed molecular perspectives of rapid antidepressant effects fail to appreciate the temporal distribution of the effects of ketamine on cortical excitation and plasticity as well as the prolonged influence on depressive symptoms. The encoding, consolidation, and renormalization in depression hypothesis proposes that the lasting clinical effects can be best explained by adaptive functional and structural alterations in neural circuits set in motion in response to the acute pharmacological effects of ketamine (ie. changes evoked during the engagement of receptor targets such as N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors) or other putative rapid-acting antidepressants. The present hypothesis opens a completely new avenue for conceptualizing and targeting brain mechanisms that are important for antidepressant effects wherein sleep and synaptic homeostasis are at the center stage.
We study the effect of 18 major life events on wellbeing.
We use a large population-based cohort and fixed-effect regression models.
Effects on affective and cognitive wellbeing are compared.
Effects generally smaller when conditioning on other events.
Events sometimes have different impacts on affective versus cognitive wellbeing.
Major life events affect our wellbeing. However the comparative impact of different events, which often co-occur, has not been systematically evaluated, or studies assumed that the impacts are equivalent in both amplitude and duration, that different wellbeing domains are equally affected, and that individuals exhibit hedonic adaptation.
We evaluated the individual and conditional impact of 18 major life-events, and compared their effects on affective and cognitive wellbeing in a large population-based cohort using fixed-effect regression models assessing within person change. Several commonly cited events had little, if any, independent effect on wellbeing (promotion, being fired, friends passing), whilst others had profound impacts regardless of co-occurring events (eg. financial loss, death of partner, childbirth).
No life events had overall positive effects on both types of wellbeing, but separation, injury/illnesses and monetary losses caused negative impacts on both, which did not display hedonic adaptation. Affective hedonic adaptation to all positive events occurred by 2 years but monetary gains and retirement had ongoing benefits on cognitive wellbeing. Marriage, retirement and childbirth had positive effects on cognitive wellbeing but no overall effect on affective wellbeing, whilst moving home was associated with a negative effect on cognitive wellbeing but no affective wellbeing response.
Describing the independent impact of different life events, and, for some, the differential affective and life satisfaction responses, and lack of hedonic adaptation people display, may help clinicians, economists and policy-makers, but individual’s hopes for happiness from positive events appears misplaced.
[Keywords: life events, affective wellbeing, cognitive wellbeing, hedonic adaptation]
Considerable research has examined human mate preferences across cultures, finding universal sex differences in preferences for attractiveness and resources as well as sources of systematic cultural variation. Two competing perspectives—an evolutionary psychological perspective and a biosocial role perspective—offer alternative explanations for these findings. However, the original data on which each perspective relies are decades old, and the literature is fraught with conflicting methods, analyses, results, and conclusions. Using a new 45-country sample (n = 14,399), we attempted to replicate classic studies and test both the evolutionary and biosocial role perspectives. Support for universal sex differences in preferences remains robust: Men, more than women, prefer attractive, young mates, and women, more than men, prefer older mates with financial prospects. Cross-culturally, both sexes have mates closer to their own ages as gender equality increases. Beyond age of partner, neither pathogen prevalence nor gender equality robustly predicted sex differences or preferences across countries.
[Memoir of by Blair Braverman of participating in wilderness survival show Naked and Afraid, which drops 2 participants in a location such as the African desert, with one tool and no clothes, and tasked with reaching a certain point. Braverman is partnered with a much more experienced survivalist, who helps her a great deal, and they attempt to do things like construct a spear to trick a wild boar into impaling itself. While she does her best, she discovers what it is like to be truly hungry and pushed to her limits; ultimately, she is forced to bail out, when a wound on her cheek began to necrotize, putting her into a coma.]
I’d eaten about 600 calories total in over a week, and all I thought about now was food. Everything seemed holy. Radishes. Swirling tendrils of heavy cream. I eat mostly vegetarian at home, but now the idea of raw meat made my mouth water. I could fantasize for hours, with pornographic clarity, about chopping an onion. The crew members were skilled and friendly, but they could have slipped us a sandwich at any time, and yet they didn’t, and for that I came to hate them. I started to evaluate everything by two criteria: Can I eat it? If so, can I catch it?
Elephants circled us and threw dirt on the camera guy. I froze, thinking about thin-crust cheese pizza, until they left. They were edible but I couldn’t catch them. Next.
Hyenas chased a young leopard into our boma while we carried water. Couldn’t eat them, couldn’t catch them. Next.
At dusk, thousands of tiny birds swept through the air above the riverbed, darkening the sky in waves. The flock was enormous, flowing like water. They sounded like wind, so we called them the wind birds. “Wind birds”, we’d say, looking up. We could eat them, and maybe we could catch them. After their nightly dance, the birds flew into holes in the riverbank. Maybe we could plug the holes with dirt or catch them with our bags when they came out. Therefore, the wind birds were interesting.
I felt, for the first time, that I understood what it was like to be a dog. Or any animal, really, because I was part of it all, because surely the hyenas, the leopards, the lions that roared in the evenings, assessed me in the same way. It was as if the world was gray, and everything edible glowed in color.
People do not realize that failures contain useful information.
Therefore, people undershare failures in and beyond organizations settings.
Highlighting the information in failure makes people more likely to share it.
Failure often contains useful information, yet across 5 studies involving 11 separate samples (N = 1238), people were reluctant to share this information with others. First, using a novel experimental paradigm, we found that participants consistently undershared failure—relative to success and a no-feedback experience—even though failure contained objectively more information than these comparison experiences. Second, this reluctance to share failure generalized to professional experiences. Teachers in the field were less likely to share information gleaned from failure than information gleaned from success, and employees were less likely to share lessons gleaned from failed versus successful attempts to concentrate at work. Why are people reluctant to share failure? Across experimental and professional failures, people did not realize that failure contained useful information. The current investigation illuminates an erroneous belief and the asymmetrical world of information it produces: one where failures are common in private, but hidden in public.
Most adolescents exhibit very late chronotypes and attend school early in the morning, a misalignment that can affect their health and psychological well-being. Here we examine how the interaction between the chronotype and school timing of an individual influences academic performance, studying an unique sample of 753 Argentinian students who were randomly assigned to start school in the morning (07:45), afternoon (12:40) or evening (17:20). Although chronotypes tend to align partially with class time, this effect is insufficient to fully account for the differences with school start time. We show that (1) for morning-attending students, early chronotypes perform better than late chronotypes in all school subjects, an effect that is largest for maths; (2) this effect vanishes for students who attend school in the afternoon; and (3) late chronotypes benefit from evening classes. Together, these results demonstrate that academic performance is improved when school times are better aligned with the biological rhythms of adolescents.
Reaching 95%-ile isn’t very impressive because it’s not that hard to do…most people can become (relatively) good at most things…Personally, in every activity I’ve participated in where it’s possible to get a rough percentile ranking, people who are 95%-ile constantly make mistakes that seem like they should be easy to observe and correct. “Real world” activities typically can’t be reduced to a percentile rating, but achieving what appears to be a similar level of proficiency seems similarly easy. We’ll start by looking at Overwatch (a video game) in detail because it’s an activity I’m familiar with where it’s easy to get ranking information and observe what’s happening, and then we’ll look at some “real world” examples where we can observe the same phenomena, although we won’t be able to get ranking information for real world examples1.
Overwatch: At 90%-ile and 95%-ile ranks in Overwatch, the vast majority of players will pretty much constantly make basic game losing mistakes. These are simple mistakes like standing next to the objective instead of on top of the objective while the match timer runs out, turning a probable victory into a certain defeat. See the attached footnote if you want enough detail about specific mistakes that you can decide for yourself if a mistake is “basic” or not…When I first started playing Overwatch (which is when I did that experiment), I ended up getting rated slightly above 50%-ile…Some things you’ll regularly see at slightly above 50%-ile are:
Supports (healers) will heal someone who’s at full health (which does nothing) while a teammate who’s next to them is dying and then dies
Players will not notice someone who walks directly behind the team and kills people one at a time until the entire team is killed
Players will shoot an enemy until only one more shot is required to kill the enemy and then switch to a different target, letting the 1-health enemy heal back to full health before shooting at that enemy again
After dying, players will not wait for their team to respawn and will, instead, run directly into the enemy team to fight them 1v6. This will repeat for the entire game (the game is designed to be 6v6, but in ranks below 95%-ile, it’s rare to see a 6v6 engagement after one person on one team dies)
Players will clearly have no idea what character abilities do, including for the character they’re playing
Players go for very high risk but low reward plays (for Overwatch players, a classic example of this is Rein going for a meme pin when the game opens on 2CP defense, very common at 50%-ile, rare at 95%-ile since players who think this move is a good idea tend to have generally poor decision making).
People will have terrible aim and will miss four or five shots in a row when all they need to do is hit someone once to kill them
If a single flanking enemy threatens a healer who can’t escape plus a non-healer with an escape ability, the non-healer will probably use their ability to run away, leaving the healer to die, even though they could easily kill the flanker and save their healer if they just attacked while being healed.
Having just one aspect of your gameplay be merely bad instead of atrocious is enough to get to 50%-ile…Another basic situation that the vast majority of 90%-ile to 95%-ile players will get wrong is when you’re on offense, waiting for your team to respawn so you can attack as a group. Even at 90%-ile, maybe 1⁄4 to 1⁄3 of players won’t do this and will just run directly at the enemy team…For anyone who isn’t well into the 99%-ile, reviewing recorded games will reveal game-losing mistakes all the time. For myself, usually ranked 90%-ile or so, watching a recorded game will reveal tens of game losing mistakes in a close game (which is maybe 30% of losses, the other 70% are blowouts where there isn’t a single simple mistake that decides the game).
It’s generally not too hard to fix these since the mistakes are like the example above: simple enough that once you see that you’re making the mistake, the fix is straightforward because the mistake is straightforward…if you look at the median time played at 50%-ile, people who are stably ranked there have put in hundreds of hours (and the median time played at higher ranks is higher). Given how simple the mistakes we’re discussing are, not having put in enough time cannot be the case for most players. A common complaint among low-ranked Overwatch players in Overwatch forums is that they’re just not talented and can never get better. Most people probably don’t have the talent to play in a professional league regardless of their practice regimen, but when you can get to 95%-ile by fixing mistakes like “not realizing that you should stand on the objective”, you don’t really need a lot of talent to get to 95%-ile.
…One thing that’s curious about this is that Overwatch makes it easy to spot basic mistakes (compared to most other activities). After you’re killed, the game shows you how you died from the viewpoint of the player who killed you, allowing you to see what led to your death. Overwatch also records the entire game and lets you watch a replay of the game, allowing you to figure out what happened and why the game was won or lost. In many other games, you’d have to set up recording software to be able to view a replay. If you read Overwatch forums, you’ll see a regular stream of posts that are basically “I’m SOOOOOO FRUSTRATED! I’ve played this game for 1200 hours and I’m still ranked 10%-ile, [some Overwatch specific stuff that will vary from player to player]”. Another user will inevitably respond with something like “we can’t tell what’s wrong from your text, please post a video of your gameplay”. In the cases where the original poster responds with a recording of their play, people will post helpful feedback that will immediately make the player much better if they take it seriously. If you follow these people who ask for help, you’ll often see them ask for feedback at a much higher rank (eg. moving from 10%-ile to 40%-ile) shortly afterwards. It’s nice to see that the advice works, but it’s unfortunate that so many players don’t realize that watching their own recordings or posting recordings for feedback could have saved 1198 hours of frustration.
It appears to be common for Overwatch players (well into 95%-ile and above) to:
Want to improve
Not get feedback
Improve slowly when getting feedback would make improving quickly easy
Overwatch provides the tools to make it relatively easy to get feedback, but people who very strongly express a desire to improve don’t avail themselves of these tools.
Mind-set refers to people’s beliefs about whether attributes are malleable (growth mind-set) or unchangeable (fixed mind-set). Proponents of mind-set theory have made bold claims about mind-set’s importance. For example, one’s mind-set is described as having profound effects on one’s motivation and achievements, creating different psychological worlds for people, and forming the core of people’s meaning systems. We examined the evidentiary strength of six key premises of mind-set theory in 438 participants; we reasoned that strongly worded claims should be supported by equally strong evidence. However, no support was found for most premises. All associations (rs) were significantly weaker than .20. Other achievement-motivation constructs, such as self-efficacy and need for achievement, have been found to correlate much more strongly with presumed associates of mind-set. The strongest association with mind-set (r = −.12) was opposite from the predicted direction. The results suggest that the foundations of mind-set theory are not firm and that bold claims about mind-set appear to be overstated.
We introduce a new resource: the SAYCam corpus. Infants aged 6–32 months wore a head-mounted camera for ~2 hours per week, over the course of ~two and a half years. The result is a large, naturalistic, longitudinal dataset of infant-perspective and child-perspective videos. Transcription efforts are underway, with over 200,000 words of naturalistic dialogue already transcribed. Similarly, the dataset is searchable using a number of criteria (eg. age of participant, location, setting, objects present). The resulting dataset will be of broad use to psychologists, linguists, and computer scientists.
Many social commentators posit that children’s social skills are declining as a result of exposure to technology. But this claim is difficult to assess empirically because it is challenging to measure “social skills” with confidence and because a strong test would employ nationally representative data of multiple cohorts. No scholarship currently meets these criteria. The authors fill that gap by comparing teachers’ and parents’ evaluations of children’s social skills among children in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study 1998 and 2010 cohorts. The authors find no evidence that teachers or parents rate children’s face-to-face social skills as poorer among more recent cohorts, even when accounting for family characteristics, screen time use, and other factors. In addition, within cohorts, children with heavy exposure to screens exhibit similar social skills trajectories compared to children with little exposure to screens. There is a notable exception—social skills are lower for children who access online gaming and social networking many times a day. Overall, however, the results represent a challenge to the dominant narrative that social skills are declining due to technological change.
The role of top or “star” performers was examined in an electronic collaborative creativity task.
Participants worked in dyads on a series of 4 idea generation tasks and then participated in 2 different groups of 4 on 2 new idea generation tasks. The composition of the pairs and groups were changed for each new task.
The top performers from the paired sessions, in terms of number of ideas or novelty, enhanced the number of ideas generated by the other members in the group sessions. The greater the discrepancy in performance of the top performer and the other group members in terms of number of ideas, the greater the positive impact on the other group members.
This research suggests that top performers or “star” team members can have a positive effect on the creative performance of other group members over and above other predictors. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications for including high individual performers in groups.
[Keywords: creativity, group performance, social comparison, top performer, star performer]
Web applications can implement procedures for studying the speed of mental processes (mental chronometry) and can be administered via web browsers on most commodity desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. This approach to conducting mental chronometry offers various opportunities, such as increased scale, ease of data collection, and access to specific samples. However, validity and reliability may be threatened by less accurate timing than specialized software and hardware can offer.
We examined how accurately web applications time stimuli and register response times (RTs) on commodity touchscreen and keyboard devices running a range of popular web browsers. Additionally, we explored the accuracy of a range of technical innovations for timing stimuli, presenting stimuli, and estimating stimulus duration.
The results offer some guidelines as to what methods may be most accurate and what mental chronometry paradigms may suitably be administered via web applications:
In controlled circumstances, as can be realized in a lab setting, very accurate stimulus timing and moderately accurate RT measurements could be achieved on both touchscreen and keyboard devices, though RTs were consistently overestimated.
In uncontrolled circumstances, such as researchers may encounter online, stimulus presentation may be less accurate, especially when brief durations are requested (of up to 100 ms).
Differences in RT overestimation between devices might not substantially affect the reliability with which group differences can be found, but they may affect reliability for individual differences. In the latter case, measurement via absolute RTs can be more affected than measurement via relative RTs (ie. differences in a participant’s RTs between conditions).
Scarcity leads to greater focus and over-borrowing.
No evidence that scarcity on one task leads to cognitive fatigue on subsequent tasks.
Shah et al 2012 examined how different forms of scarcity affect attention and borrowing behavior. Results from a series of lab experiments suggested that (1) various forms of scarcity have similar effects on cognition and behavior, (2) scarcity leads to attentional shifts and greater focus (3) scarcity can lead people to over-borrow, and (4) scarcity can lead to cognitive fatigue. Camerer 2018 recently conducted replications of studies from a set of social science papers, and failed to replicate the result on cognitive fatigue from Shah et al 2012.
In this paper, we present high-powered replications of all studies from Shah et al 2012.
We describe which results appear more robust and which results appear to be less robust.
We conclude with some thoughts on the value of self-replications.
Native advertising is a type of online advertising that matches the form and function of the platform on which it appears. In practice, the choice between display and in-feed native advertising presents brand advertisers and online news publishers with conflicting objectives. Advertisers face a trade-off between ad clicks and brand recognition, whereas publishers need to strike a balance between ad clicks and the platform’s trustworthiness. For policy makers, concerns that native advertising confuses customers prompted the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to issue guidelines for disclosing native ads. This research aims to understand how consumers respond to native ads versus display ads and to different styles of native ad disclosures, using randomized online and field experiments combining behavioral clickstream, eye movement, and survey response data. The results show that when the position of an ad on a news page is controlled for, a native ad generates a higher click-through rate because it better resembles the surrounding editorial content. However, a display ad leads to more visual attention, brand recognition, and trustworthiness for the website than a native ad.
[Keywords: native advertising, public policy, eye-tracking, field experiments, advertising disclosure]
In 5 preregistered studies, we assess people’s tendency to believe “kids these days” are deficient relative to those of previous generations.
Across 3 traits, American adults (n = 3,458; Mage = 33 to 51 years) believe today’s youth are in decline; however, these perceptions are associated with people’s standing on those traits. Authoritarian people especially think youth are less respectful of their elders, intelligent people especially think youth are less intelligent, and well-read people especially think youth enjoy reading less. These beliefs are not predicted by irrelevant traits.
Two mechanisms contribute to humanity’s perennial tendency to denigrate kids: a person-specific tendency to notice the limitations of others where one excels and a memory bias projecting one’s current qualities onto the youth of the past. When observing current children, we compare our biased memory to the present and a decline appears. This may explain why the kids these days effect has been happening for millennia.
…Five studies were designed to examine the occurrence of and mechanisms underpinning people denigrating the youth of the present (herein termed the kids these days effect). Studies 1 to 3 examined the prevalence of the kids these days effect across 3 different traits and the degree to which it is pronounced for people who excel on that trait. Study 1 examined whether the belief that children are less respectful of their elders is magnified for people who are high in authoritarianism. Study 2 investigated whether people who are more intelligent are particularly predisposed to believe that children are becoming less intelligent. Study 3 explored whether well read people are especially likely to think that today’s children no longer like to read. Then, study 4 investigated the mechanisms leading people to perceive kids these days as particularly lacking on those traits on which they themselves excel in a mediation model. Study 5 manipulated people’s beliefs in their standing in one of these domains and showed resulting indirect decreases in the kids these days effect through our proposed mechanisms.
Carelessness in self-report data can be detected with many methods.
Embedding items in a scale with presumed ‘correct’ responses is one of these.
Properties of these items can impact their usefulness.
Individuals can provide valid justification for ‘incorrect’ responses.
Researchers should know their items, and know the risk of not knowing those items.
Participant carelessness is a source of invalidity in psychological data (Huang, Liu, & Bowling, 2015), and many methods have been created to screen for this carelessness (Curran, 2016; Johnson, 2005). These include items that researchers presume thoughtful individuals will answer in a given way (eg. disagreement with “I am paid biweekly by leprechauns”, Meade & Craig, 2012). This paper reports on two samples in which individuals spoke aloud a series of these questions, and found that (a) individuals do occasionally report valid justifications for presumed invalid responses, (b) there is relatively high variance in this behavior over different items, and (c) items developed for this specific purpose tend to work better than those drawn from other sources or created ad-hoc.
“‘Aliens’ is a relative term; I don’t actually know for sure” · “What does that even mean, we’re all aliens if there’s other life out there”
“I am interested in…parabanjology”
“Might be real so don’t want to disagree” · “It sounds like it could be interesting”
“I work twenty-eight hours in a typical work day.”
“It feels like that sometimes”
“I am familiar with geological terms such as jpg and firewall.”
“I know what those are, but don’t know that they’re geological”
“I am fluent in combinatorial English”
“I’m fluent in English”
“I am able to read the minds of others” · “I can see into the future”
“Understand general idea of what others are thinking” · “Close friends know each other” · “Can plan and expect future events”
“I sleep less than one hour per night”
“When I’m pulling an all-nighter I do” · “I sleep very few hours each night”
“All my friends say I would make a great poodle”
“They say I’m like a puppy” · “They say I’d make a great koala” · “Friends say I share dog-like personality” · “Friends have said my hair looks like a poodle” · “Have been told I’d make a good dog” · “Don’t know, I’ve never asked them”
“I eat cement occasionally”
“There was cement in my braces, sure that I ate some” · “There are a lot of things that are in cement in a lot of foods, so maybe eating parts of it”
“Answer with ‘Disagree’ for this item”
“Item doesn’t say how much to disagree (picked ‘Strongly disagree’)”
“I am paid biweekly by leprechauns”
“I am paid biweekly, just not by leprechauns”
“I can run 2 miles in 2 min”
“It doesn’t say run with your feet, can do it in my mind”
“I have been to every country in the world”
“I’ve been to a lot of countries” · “I have probably been to more countries than most people”
“I can teleport across time and space”
“Well, time passes, and I can move places, so that’s sort of true” · “Is walking a type of teleportation?” · “In my dreams I can because one of my life goals is to be the doctor’s companion”
Table 2: Selected examples of valid justifications for ‘incorrect’ answers.
[I strongly disagree with the authors that these justifications are even remotely “valid”: most of these responses are ‘careless’ or ‘insufficient effort’.]
Depression remains one of the most prevalent psychiatric disorders, with many patients not responding adequately to available treatments. Chronic or early-life stress is one of the key risk factors for depression. In addition, a growing body of data implicates chronic inflammation as a major player in depression pathogenesis. More recently, the gut microbiota has emerged as an important regulator of brain and behavior and also has been linked to depression. However, how this holy trinity of risk factors interact to maintain physiological homeostasis in the brain and body is not fully understood. In this review, we integrate the available data from animal and human studies on these three factors in the etiology and progression of depression. We also focus on the processes by which this microbiota-immune-stress matrix may influence centrally mediated events and on possible therapeutic interventions to correct imbalances in this triune.
Language is universal, but it has few indisputably universal characteristics, with cross-linguistic variation being the norm. For example, languages differ greatly in the number of syllables they allow, resulting in large variation in the Shannon information per syllable. Nevertheless, all natural languages allow their speakers to efficiently encode and transmit information. We show here, using quantitative methods on a large cross-linguistic corpus of 17 languages, that the coupling between language-level (information per syllable) and speaker-level (speech rate) properties results in languages encoding similar information rates (~39 bits/s) despite wide differences in each property individually: Languages are more similar in information rates than in Shannon information or speech rate. These findings highlight the intimate feedback loops between languages’ structural properties and their speakers’ neurocognition and biology under communicative pressures. Thus, language is the product of a multiscale communicative niche construction process at the intersection of biology, environment, and culture.
Using a novel technique known as network meta-analysis, we synthesized evidence from 492 studies (87,418 participants) to investigate the effectiveness of procedures in changing implicit measures, which we define as response biases on implicit tasks. We also evaluated these procedures’ effects on explicit and behavioral measures. We found that implicit measures can be changed, but effects are often relatively weak (|ds| < .30). Most studies focused on producing short-term changes with brief, single-session manipulations. Procedures that associate sets of concepts, invoke goals or motivations, or tax mental resources changed implicit measures the most, whereas procedures that induced threat, affirmation, or specific moods/emotions changed implicit measures the least. Bias tests suggested that implicit effects could be inflated relative to their true population values. Procedures changed explicit measures less consistently and to a smaller degree than implicit measures and generally produced trivial changes in behavior. Finally, changes in implicit measures did not mediate changes in explicit measures or behavior. Our findings suggest that changes in implicit measures are possible, but those changes do not necessarily translate into changes in explicit measures or behavior.
Did John Calhoun’s 1960s Mouse Utopia really show that animal (and human) populations will expand to arbitrary densities, creating socially-driven pathology and collapse? Reasons for doubt.
Did John Calhoun’s 1960s Mouse Utopia really show that animal (and human) populations will expand to arbitrary densities, creating socially-driven pathology and collapse? I give reasons for doubt about its replicability, interpretation, and meaningfulness.
One of the most famous experiments in psychology & sociology was John Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia experiments in the 1960s–1970s. In the usual telling, Mouse Utopia created ideal mouse environments in which the mouse population was permitted to increase as much as possible; however, the overcrowding inevitably resulted in extreme levels of physical & social dysfunctionality, and eventually population collapse & even extinction. Looking more closely into it, there are reasons to doubt the replicability of the growth & pathological behavior & collapse of this utopia (“no-place”), and if it does happen, whether it is driven by the social pressures as claimed by Calhoun or by other causal mechanisms at least as consistent with the evidence like disease or mutational meltdown.
A classical approach to collecting and elaborating information to make entrepreneurial decisions combines search heuristics, such as trial and error, effectuation, and confirmatory search. This paper develops a framework for exploring the implications of a more scientific approach to entrepreneurial decision making.
The panel sample of our randomized control trial includes 116 Italian startups and 16 data points over a period of about one year. Both the treatment and control groups receive 10 sessions of general training on how to obtain feedback from the market and gauge the feasibility of their idea. We teach the treated startups to develop frameworks for predicting the performance of their idea and conduct rigorous tests of their hypotheses, much as scientists do in their research. We let the firms in the control group instead follow their intuitions about how to assess their idea, which has typically produced fairly standard search heuristics.
We find that entrepreneurs who behave like scientists perform better, are more likely to pivot to a different idea, and are not more likely to drop out than the control group in the early stages of the startup.
These results are consistent with the main prediction of our theory: a scientific approach improves precision—it reduces the odds of pursuing projects with false positive returns and increases the odds of pursuing projects with false negative returns.
[Keywords: entrepreneurship, decision making, scientific method, startup, randomized control trial]
Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) is valuable to organizations and has become an important focus of employee performance evaluation. Employees’ peers may be particularly well-situated to rate their OCB. We investigated the proportion of variance in peer-rated OCB attributable to the ratee (true score) versus the rater (rater bias). Furthermore, we investigated whether these proportions were affected by the familiarity of the peer with the ratee. We found that high familiarity was associated with a greater proportion of ratee variance (0.43 vs. 0.18), and a lower proportion of rater bias (0.30 vs. 0.51), than was the case with low-to-moderate familiarity. Thus, when choosing peers as raters of OCB, there may be value in carefully considering the peers’ familiarity with the ratees.
The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) is one of psychology’s most famous studies. It has been criticized on many grounds, and yet a majority of textbook authors have ignored these criticisms in their discussions of the SPE, thereby misleading both students and the general public about the study’s questionable scientific validity.
Data collected from a thorough investigation of the SPE archives and interviews with 15 of the participants in the experiment further question the study’s scientific merit. These data are not only supportive of previous criticisms of the SPE, such as the presence of demand characteristics, but provide new criticisms of the SPE based on heretofore unknown information. These new criticisms include the biased and incomplete collection of data, the extent to which the SPE drew on a prison experiment devised and conducted by students in one of Zimbardo’s classes 3 months earlier, the fact that the guards received precise instructions regarding the treatment of the prisoners, the fact that the guards were not told they were subjects, and the fact that participants were almost never completely immersed by the situation.
Possible explanations of the inaccurate textbook portrayal and general misperception of the SPE’s scientific validity over the past 5 decades, in spite of its flaws and shortcomings, are discussed.
Although ‘plant neurobiologists’ have claimed that plants possess many of the same mental features as animals, such as consciousness, cognition, intentionality, emotions, and the ability to feel pain, the evidence for these abilities in plants is highly problematical.
Proponents of plant consciousness have consistently glossed over the unique and remarkable degree of structural, organizational, and functional complexity that the animal brain had to evolve before consciousness could emerge.
Recent results of neuroscientist Todd E. Feinberg and evolutionary biologist Jon M. Mallatt on the minimum brain structures and functions required for consciousness in animals have implications for plants.
Their findings make it extremely unlikely that plants, lacking any anatomical structures remotely comparable to the complexity of the threshold brain, possess consciousness.
In claiming that plants have consciousness, ‘plant neurobiologists’ have consistently glossed over the remarkable degree of structural and functional complexity that the brain had to evolve for consciousness to emerge. Here, we outline a new hypothesis proposed by Feinberg and Mallat for the evolution of consciousness in animals. Based on a survey of the brain anatomy, functional complexity, and behaviors of a broad spectrum of animals, criteria were established for the emergence of consciousness. The only animals that satisfied these criteria were the vertebrates (including fish), arthropods (eg. insects, crabs), and cephalopods (eg. octopuses, squids). In light of Feinberg and Mallat’s analysis, we consider the likelihood that plants, with their relative organizational simplicity and lack of neurons and brains, have consciousness to be effectively nil.
Is Bloom’s “Two Sigma” phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it?
Educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom found that one-on-one tutoring using mastery learning led to a two sigma(!) improvement in student performance. The results were replicated. He asks in his paper that identified the “2 Sigma Problem”: how do we achieve these results in conditions more practical (ie. more scalable) than one-to-one tutoring?
In a related vein, this large-scale meta-analysis shows large (>0.5 Cohen’s d) effects from direct instruction using mastery learning. “Yet, despite the very large body of research supporting its effectiveness, DI has not been widely embraced or implemented.”
The literatures examined here are full of small sample, non-randomized trials, and highly heterogeneous results.
Tutoring in general, most likely, does not reach the 2-sigma level that Bloom suggested. Likewise, it’s unlikely that mastery learning provides a 1-sigma improvement.
But high quality tutors, and high quality software are likely able to reach a 2-sigma improvement and beyond.
All the methods (mastery learning, direct instruction, tutoring, software tutoring, deliberate practice, and spaced repetition) studied in this essay are found to work to various degrees, outlined below.
This essay covers many kinds of subjects being taught, and likewise many groups (special education vs regular schools, college vs K-12). The effect sizes reported here are averages that serve as general guidance.
The methods studied tend to be more effective for lower skilled students relative to the rest.
The methods studied work at all levels of education, with the exception of direct instruction: There is no evidence to judge its effectiveness at the college level.
The methods work substantially better when clear objectives and facts to be learned are set. There is little evidence of learning transfer: Practicing or studying X subject does not improve much performance outside of X.
There is some suggestive evidence that the underlying reasons these methods work are increased and repeated exposure to the material, the testing effect, and fine-grained feedback on performance in the case of tutoring.
Long term studies tend to find evidence of a fade-out effect, effect sizes decrease over time. This is likely due to the skills being learned not being practiced.
Bloom noted that mastery learning had an effect size of around 1 (one sigma); while tutoring leads to d = 2. This is mostly an outlier case.
Nonetheless, Bloom was on to something: Tutoring and mastery learning do have a degree of experimental support, and fortunately it seems that carefully designed software systems can completely replace the instructional side of traditional teaching, achieving better results, on par with one to one tutoring. However, designing them is a hard endeavour, and there is a motivational component of teachers that may not be as easily replicable purely by software.
Overall, it’s good news that the effects are present for younger and older students, and across subjects, but the effect sizes of tutoring, mastery learning or DI are not as good as they would seem from Bloom’s paper. That said, it is true that tutoring does have large effect sizes, and that properly designed software does as well. The DARPA case study shows what is possible with software tutoring, in the case the effect sizes went even beyond Bloom’s paper.
Does computer programming teach students how to think? Learning to program computers has gained considerable popularity, and educational systems around the world are encouraging students in schools and even children in kindergartens to engage in programming activities. This popularity is based on the claim that learning computer programming improves cognitive skills, including creativity, reasoning, and mathematical skills.
In this meta-analysis, we tested this claim performing a 3-level, random-effects meta-analysis on a sample of 105 studies and 539 effect sizes. We found evidence for a moderate, overall transfer effect (g = 0.49, 95% CI [0.37, 0.61]) and identified a strong effect for near transfer (g = 0.75, 95% CI [0.39, 1.11]) and a moderate effect for far transfer (g = 0.47, 95% CI [0.35, 0.59]). Positive transfer to situations that required creative thinking, mathematical skills, and metacognition, followed by spatial skills and reasoning existed. School achievement and literacy, however, benefited the least from learning to program. Moderator analyses revealed statistically-significantly larger transfer effects for studies with untreated control groups than those with treated (active) control groups. Moreover, published studies exhibited larger effects than gray literature.
These findings shed light on the cognitive benefits associated with learning computer programming and contribute to the current debate surrounding the conceptualization of computer programming as a form of problem solving.
[Keywords: cognitive skills, computational thinking, computer programming, three-level meta-analysis, transfer of skills, passive control group inflation, publication bias]
Educational Impact and Implications Statement: In this meta-analysis, we tested the claim that learning how to program a computer improves cognitive skills even beyond programming. The results suggested that students who learned computer programming outperformed those who did not in programming skills and other cognitive skills, such as creative thinking, mathematical skills, metacognition, and reasoning. Learning computer programming has certain cognitive benefits for other domains.
Moderators: …Statistically-significantly higher effects occurred for published literature (g = 0.60, 95% CI [0.45, 0.75]) than for gray literature (g = 0.34, 95% CI[0.15, 0.52]; QM[1] = 4.67, p = 0.03).
Besides the publication status, only the type of treatment that control groups received (ie. treated vs. untreated) statistically-significantly explained Level 2 variance, QM(1) = 40.12, p < 0.001, R[^2^~2~]{.supsub} = 16.7%. More specifically, transfer effect sizes were statistically-significantly lower for studies including treated control groups (g = 0.16) than for studies including untreated control groups (g = 0.65). [0.65 / 0.16 = 400% bias].
This paper examines how employees become simultaneously empowered and alienated by detailed, holistic knowledge of the actual operations of their organization, drawing on an inductive analysis of the experiences of employees working on organizational change teams. As employees build and scrutinize process maps of their organization, they develop a new comprehension of the structure and operation of their organization. What they had perceived as purposively designed, relatively stable, and largely external is revealed to be continuously produced through social interaction. I trace how this altered comprehension of the organization’s functioning and logic changes employees’ orientation to and place within the organization. Their central roles are revealed as less efficacious than imagined and, in fact, as reproducing the organization’s inefficiencies. Alienated from their central operational roles, they voluntarily move to peripheral change roles from which they feel empowered to pursue organization-wide change. The paper offers two contributions. First, it identifies a new means through which central actors may become disembedded, that is, detailed comprehensive knowledge of the logic and operations of the surrounding social system. Second, the paper problematizes established insights about the relationship between social position and challenges to the status quo. Rather than a peripheral social location creating a desire to challenge the status quo, a desire to challenge the status quo may encourage central actors to choose a peripheral social location.
…Some held out hope that one or two people at the top knew of these design and operation issues; however, they were often disabused of this optimism. For example, a manager walked the CEO through the map, presenting him with a view he had never seen before and illustrating for him the lack of design and the disconnect between strategy and operations. The CEO, after being walked through the map, sat down, put his head on the table, and said, “This is even more fucked up than I imagined.” The CEO revealed that not only was the operation of his organization out of his control but that his grasp on it was imaginary.
But as the projects ended and the teams disbanded, a puzzle emerged. Some team members returned, as intended by senior management, to their prior roles and careers in the organization. Some, however, chose to leave these careers entirely, abandoning what had been to that point successful and satisfying work to take on organizational change roles elsewhere. Many took new jobs with responsibility for organizational development, Six Sigma, total quality management (TQM), business process re-engineering (BPR), or lean projects. Others assumed temporary contract roles to manage BPR project teams within their own or other organizations.
…Despite being experienced managers, what they learned was eye-opening. One explained that “it was like the sun rose for the first time….I saw the bigger picture.” They had never seen the pieces—the jobs, technologies, tools, and routines—connected in one place, and they realized that their prior view was narrow and fractured. A team member acknowledged, “I only thought of things in the context of my span of control.”…The maps of the organization generated by the project teams also showed that their organizations often lacked a purposeful, integrated design that was centrally monitored and managed. There may originally have been such a design, but as the organization grew, adapted to changing markets, brought on new leadership, added or subtracted divisions, and so on, this animating vision was lost. The original design had been eroded, patched, and overgrown with alternative plans. A manager explained, “Everything I see around here was developed because of specific issues that popped up, and it was all done ad hoc and added onto each other. It certainly wasn’t engineered.” Another manager described how local, off-the-cuff action had contributed to the problems observed at the organizational level:
“They see problems, and the general approach, the human approach, is to try and fix them….Functions have tried to put band-aids on every issue that comes up. It sounds good, but when they are layered one on top of the other they start to choke the organization. But they don’t see that because they are only seeing their own thing.”
Finally, analyzing a particular work process, another manager explained that she had been “assuming that somebody did this [the process] on purpose. And it wasn’t done on purpose. It was just a series of random events that somehow came together.”]
Does growth training help entrepreneurs to scale-up new ventures?
Our field experiment answering this question uses a sample of 181 startup founders from the population of Singapore-based entrepreneurs in 2017.
The treatment consisted of classroom sessions conducted in workshop and lecture formats that provided content in growth-catalyst tools comprising of effective business model design, building effective venture management teams and leveraging personal networks, that help in entrepreneurial resource mobilization. Also, participants received individualized business coaching addressing their venture’s issues and challenges in these domains.
Our results show that entrepreneurs that received training in the 3 growth-catalyst tools achieved higher sales and employee growth for their ventures. In addition, entrepreneurs with higher educational attainment, higher prior work experience and higher growth goals benefited much more from the training intervention.
[Keywords: entrepreneur training, founder effects, field experiment]
People spend much of their time in imaginary worlds, and have beliefs about the events that are likely in those worlds, and the laws that govern them. Such beliefs are likely affected by people’s intuitive theories of the real world. In three studies, people judged the effort required to cast spells that cause physical violations. People ranked the actions of spells congruently with intuitive physics. For example, people judge that it requires more effort to conjure up a frog than to levitate it one foot off the ground. A second study manipulated the target and extent of the spells, and demonstrated with a continuous measure that people are sensitive to this manipulation even between participants. A pre-registered third study replicated the results of Study 2. These results suggest that people’s intuitive theories partly account for how they think about imaginary worlds.
The second point probably deserves more space than I was able to give in the LA Review of Books. Consider, for a moment, the typical schedule of a Beijing teenager:
She will (depending on the length of her morning commute) wake up somewhere between 5:30 and 7:00 AM. She must be in her seat by 7:45, 15 minutes before classes start. With bathroom breaks and gym class excepted, she will not leave that room until the 12:00 lunch hour and will return to the same spot after lunch is ended for another four hours of instruction. Depending on whether she has after-school tests that day, she will be released from her classroom sometime between 4:10 and 4:40. She then has one hour to get a start on her homework, eat, and travel to the evening cram school her parents have enrolled her in. Math, English, Classical Chinese—there are cram schools for every topic on the gaokao. On most days of the week she will be there studying from 6:00 to 9:00 PM (if the family has the money, she will spend another six hours at these after-school schools on Saturday and Sunday mornings). Our teenager will probably arrive home somewhere around 10:00 PM, giving her just enough time to spend two or three hours on that day’s homework before she goes to bed. Rinse and repeat, day in and day out, for six years. The strain does not abate until she has defeated—or has been defeated by—the gaokao.
This is well known, but I think the wrong aspects of this experience are emphasized. Most outsiders look at this and think: see how much pressure these Chinese kids are under. I look and think: how little privacy and independence these Chinese kids are given!
To put this another way: Teenage demands for personal space are hardly unique to China. What makes China distinctive is the difficulty its teenagers have securing this goal. Chinese family life is hemmed in narrow bounds. The urban apartments that even well-off Chinese call their homes are tiny and crowded. Few have more than two bedrooms. Teenagers are often forced to share their bedroom with a grandparent. So small was the apartment of one 16-year-old I interviewed that she slept, without apparent complaint, in the same bed as her parents for her entire first year of high school. Where can a teenager like her go, what door could she slam, when she was angry with her family? Within the walls of her home there was no escape from the parental gaze.
A Chinese teen has few better options outside her home. No middle-class Chinese teenager has a job. None have cars. The few that have boyfriends or girlfriends go about it as discreetly as possible. Apart from the odd music lesson here or there, what Americans call “extra-curricular activities” are unknown. One a recent graduate of a prestigious international high school in Beijing once explained to me the confusion she felt when she was told she would need to excel at an after-school activity to be competitive in American university admissions:
“In tenth grade our home room teacher told us that American universities cared a lot about the things we do outside of school, so from now on we would need to find time to ‘cultivate a hobby.’ I remember right after he left the girl sitting at my right turned to me and whispered, ‘I don’t know how to cultivate a hobby. Do you?’”
Accurate recognition and discrimination of complex visual stimuli is critical to human decision making in medicine, forensic science, aviation, security, and defense. This study highlights the sufficiency of redundant low-spatial and low-dimensional information for visual recognition and visual discrimination of 3 large-scale natural image sets.
Humans can see through the complexity of scenes, faces, and objects by quickly extracting their redundant low-spatial and low-dimensional global properties, or their style. It remains unclear, however, whether semantic coding is necessary, or whether visual stylistic information is sufficient, for people to recognize and discriminate complex images and categories.
In 2 experiments, we systematically reduce the resolution of hundreds of unique paintings, birds, and faces, and test people’s ability to discriminate and recognize them.
We show that the stylistic information retained at extremely low image resolutions is sufficient for visual recognition of images and visual discrimination of categories. Averaging over the 3 domains, people were able to reliably recognize images reduced down to a single pixel, with large differences from chance discriminability across 8 different image resolutions. People were also able to discriminate categories substantially above chance with an image resolution as low as 2×2 pixels.
We situate our findings in the context of contemporary computational accounts of visual recognition and contend that explicit encoding of the local features in the image, or knowledge of the semantic category, is not necessary for recognizing and distinguishing complex visual stimuli.
Figure 2: Panels A, B, and C depict participants’ mean discriminability (A), response bias (b), and rate correct scores (in seconds) recognition memory task as a function of image resolution (x-axes), along with their polynomial trend over pixels at the top of the 3 panels. All plots represent the 50 participants’ responses, collapsing over the 3 domains: paintings, birds, and faces. Panel D shows the receiver operating characteristic curves for the 8 image resolutions, overlaid with the “best-fitting” curve assuming binomial distributions (the dotted line indicates chance performance). Finally, the raincloud plots in Panel E depict a half violin plot of participants’ mean proportion correct scores across the 8 image resolutions overlaid with jittered data points from each individual participant, the mean proportion correct per resolution (the black dot), and standard error of the mean per resolution.
Information about a person’s income can be useful in several business-related contexts, such as personalized advertising or salary negotiations. However, many people consider this information private and are reluctant to share it. In this paper, we show that income is predictable from the digital footprints people leave on Facebook. Applying an established machine learning method to an income-representative sample of 2,623 U.S. Americans, we found that (1) Facebook Likes and Status Updates alone predicted a person’s income with an accuracy of up to r = 0.43, and (2) Facebook Likes and Status Updates added incremental predictive power above and beyond a range of socio-demographic variables (ΔR2 = 6–16%, with a correlation of up to r = 0.49). Our findings highlight both opportunities for businesses and legitimate privacy concerns that such prediction models pose to individuals and society when applied without individual consent.
The aims of this article are: (1) to provide a quantitative overview of sex differences in human psychological attributes; and (2) to consider evidence for their possible evolutionary origins. Sex differences were identified from a systematic literature search of meta-analyses and large-sample studies. These were organized in terms of evolutionary [importance] as follows:
characteristics arising from inter-male competition (within-sex aggression; impulsiveness and sensation-seeking; fearfulness; visuospatial and object-location memory; object-centred orientations);
those concerning social relations that are likely to have arisen from women’s adaptations for small-group interactions and men’s for larger co-operative groups (person-centred orientation and social skills; language; depression and anxiety);
those arising from female choice (sexuality; mate choice; sexual conflict).
There were sex differences in all categories, whose magnitudes ranged from
small (object location memory; negative emotions), to
medium (mental rotation; anxiety disorders; impulsivity; sex drive; interest in casual sex), to
large (social interests and abilities; sociosexuality); and
very large (escalated aggression; systemizing; sexual violence).
Evolutionary explanations were evaluated according to whether:
similar differences occur in other mammals;
there is cross-cultural consistency;
the origin was early in life or at puberty;
there was evidence for hormonal influences; and
where possible, whether there was evidence for evolutionarily derived design features.
The evidence was positive for most features in most categories, suggesting evolutionary origins for a broad range of sex differences. Attributes for which there was no sex difference are also noted. Within-sex variations are discussed as limitations to the emphasis on sex differences.
We investigate a superstition for which adherence is nearly universal.
Using a combination of field interventions that involve unsuspecting participants and a lab-style value elicitation, we measure the strength of peoples’ underlying preferences, and to what extent their behavior is driven by social conformity rather than the superstition itself. Our findings indicate that both mechanisms influence behavior. While a substantial number of people are willing to incur a relatively high individual cost in order to adhere to the superstition, for many, adherence is contingent on the behavior of others.
Our findings suggest that it is the conforming nature of the majority that sustains the false beliefs of the minority.
[Keywords: conformity, field experiment, lab-in-the-field, superstition]
…The Superstition: “Via Sarfatti 25” is the oldest building of classrooms at Bocconi University, and most lectures are held there. The entrance is broad, with 3 adjacent passageways. The middle passageway is separated from the adjacent lateral ones by 2 columns, each of which is fronted by a statue of a lion. A widely known refrain, after which the campus newspaper “Tra i Leoni” is named, has it that “One who passes between the lions, will not graduate at Bocconi”, which is a translation from the Italian original seen above. Accordingly, students almost universally shun the middle passageway, opting instead for one of the 2 lateral passageways. The impact on the flow of students in and out is stark. Fewer than 1 in 20 people entering or exiting the building pass between the lions, and the ones who do are almost invariably faculty or foreign exchange students.
…Study 1 involves a field intervention in which we block off one of the 2 lateral passageways, thereby increasing the cost of indulging the superstition.
Study 2 involves another field intervention, conducted during an evacuation drill. The evacuation drill offered an alternative approach to ruling out the shortest-path confound as the drill imposed considerable waiting cost on those exiting through the lateral passageways. Further, we sent groups of student confederates, with whom we had contracted, to walk through the middle passageway. The purpose was to reduce the cost of walking through the middle passageway for any student affected by explanation 2. We measure the degree to which our intervention caused more students to walk through the middle.
Study 3, which combines lab and field features, quantifies the strength of students’ aversion to walking between the lions, and uses different treatments to further evaluate relevance of explanations 1 and 2. Using a simple and novel adaptation of the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak method (Becker et al 1964), we elicit the students willingness-to-accept money in exchange for agreeing to walk through the lions. Depending on treatment, they were informed either that they would walk “alone” or “together with the others that accept”.
…The results of Study 2 demonstrate that some students who behave in accordance with the superstitious rule will violate it if they observe other students near them doing so. This indicates that for these students, the aversion to walking between the lions is unrelated to a superstitious belief. Furthermore, because these students behaved in accordance with the rule before the intervention despite the cost of waiting, this suggests that conformity, rather than herding, or habit explains their initial choice of the lateral passageway during the evacuation drill.
…The experimenter emphasized that the study was not a simulation, and that there were real monetary consequences to their decisions. In particular, the students were informed that (1) the offers involved a real payment in Euros, (2) their acceptance of an offer was binding, and (3) the only way they could avoid the possibility of accepting was to circling item C, or to decline to participate by leaving the question blank. In order to increase the credibility and salience of the potentially large payments, the experimenter held up, for the students to see, the 3,000 Euros in cash that was available, and then informed them that some of the envelopes contained offers in the hundreds of Euros. The amount in the envelope varied between 5 Euros and 150 Euros. We attempted to improve the credibility of the payment and the study in 2 ways: (1) we prominently displayed euro bills in the thousands that could be gained, (2) we emphasized the seriousness of the study and the fact that student responses were to be taken as commitments.
…Nearly half of students will accept any offer in the alone treatment, whereas a minority 11% of students will reject any offer…he economics students appear to be more inclined to accept any offer, with a 12.5% higher rate of accepting any offer…The law students appear to be more inclined to reject any offer with a 11.2% higher rate of rejecting any offer.
Figure 5: The cumulative distribution function of the willingness-to-accept (WTA) by treatment.
Recent research used machine learning methods to predict a person’s sexual orientation from their photograph (Wang & Kosinski 2017). To verify this result, two of these models are replicated, one based on a deep neural network (DNN) and one on facial morphology (FM). Using a new dataset of 20,910 photographs from dating websites, the ability to predict sexual orientation is confirmed (DNN accuracy male 68%, female 77%, FM male 62%, female 72%). To investigate whether facial features such as brightness or predominant colours are predictive of sexual orientation, a new model based on highly blurred facial images was created. This model was also able to predict sexual orientation (male 63%, female 72%). The tested models are invariant to intentional changes to a subject’s makeup, eyewear, facial hair and head pose (angle that the photograph is taken at). It is shown that the head pose is not correlated with sexual orientation. While demonstrating that dating profile images carry rich information about sexual orientation these results leave open the question of how much is determined by facial morphology and how much by differences in grooming, presentation and lifestyle. The advent of new technology that is able to detect sexual orientation in this way may have serious implications for the privacy and safety of gay men and women.
The study of rare families with inherited pain insensitivity can identify new human-validated analgesic drug targets. Here, a 66-yr-old female presented with nil requirement for postoperative analgesia after a normally painful orthopaedic hand surgery (trapeziectomy). Further investigations revealed a lifelong history of painless injuries, such as frequent cuts and burns, which were observed to heal quickly. We report the causative mutations for this new pain insensitivity disorder: the co-inheritance of (1) a microdeletion in dorsal root ganglia and brain-expressed pseudogene, FAAH-OUT, which we cloned from the fatty-acid amide hydrolase (FAAH) chromosomal region; and (2) a common functional single-nucleotide polymorphism in FAAH conferring reduced expression and activity. Circulating concentrations of anandamide and related fatty-acid amides (palmitoylethanolamide and oleoylethanolamine) that are all normally degraded by FAAH were statistically-significantly elevated in peripheral blood compared with normal control carriers of the hypomorphic single-nucleotide polymorphism. The genetic findings and elevated circulating fatty-acid amides are consistent with a phenotype resulting from enhanced endocannabinoid signalling and a loss of function of FAAH. Our results highlight previously unknown complexity at the FAAH genomic locus involving the expression of FAAH-OUT, a novel pseudogene and long non-coding RNA. These data suggest new routes to develop FAAH-based analgesia by targeting of FAAH-OUT, which could substantially improve the treatment of postoperative pain and potentially chronic pain and anxiety disorders.
Leprechaun hunting the origins of the famous skeptical observation that because millions of events are constantly happening, ‘miracles’ happen once a month; it was actually coined by Freeman Dyson.
I try to trace back “Littlewood’s Law of Miracles” to its supposed source in Littlewood’s A Mathematician’s Miscellany. It does not appear in that book, making it a leprechaun, and further investigation indicates that Littlewood did not come up with it but that Freeman Dyson coined it in 2004, probably based on the earlier “Law of Truly Large Numbers” coined by Diaconis & Mosteller 1989, in a case of Stigler’s law.
Bifactor and other hierarchical models [in factor analysis] have become central to representing and explaining observations in psychopathology, health, and other areas of clinical science, as well as in the behavioral sciences more broadly. This prominence comes after a relatively rapid period of rediscovery, however, and certain features remain poorly understood.
Here, hierarchical models are compared and contrasted with other models of superordinate structure, with a focus on implications for model comparisons and interpretation. Issues pertaining to the specification and estimation of bifactor and other hierarchical models are reviewed in exploratory as well as confirmatory modeling scenarios, as are emerging findings about model fit and selection.
Bifactor and other hierarchical models provide a powerful mechanism for parsing shared and unique components of variance, but care is required in specifying and making inferences about them.
[Keywords: hierarchical model, higher order, bifactor, model equivalence, model complexity]
Figure 1: Hierarchical and related models. (a) Spearman’s (1904a, 1904b) 2-factor model, a precursor to hierarchical and bifactor models. The 2-factor model includes a general factor (G) as well as systematic specific factors (S) and random error factors (e). As originally formulated, Spearman’s 2-factor model cannot be estimated, but it established the idea of a superordinate general factor plus subordinate specific factors that account for systematic residual influences not accounted for by the general factor. (b) The hierarchical or bifactor model, which includes superordinate general factors (G) as well as subordinate specific factors (S); error factors are not shown. Bifactor models are a subtype of hierarchical model with one superordinate factor and multiple subordinate factors. The 2-factor model and hierarchical model are examples of top-down models, in that subordinate factors instantiate residual effects that are unexplained by the superordinate factor.
Although bifactor and other hierarchical models are now commonplace, this was not always so. Their current ubiquity follows a long period of relative neglect (Reise 2012), having been derived in the early 20th century (Holzinger & Harman 1938, Holzinger & Swineford 1937) before being somewhat overlooked for a number of decades and then being rediscovered more recently. Bifactor models were mistakenly dismissed as equivalent to and redundant with other superordinate structural models (eg. Adcock 1964, Humphreys 1981, Wherry 1959, Reise 2012, Yung et al 1999); as differences between bifactor models and other types of superordinate structural models became more recognized (Yung et al 1999), interest in bifactor models reemerged.
…Summary Points:
Bifactor and other hierarchical models represent superordinate structure in terms of orthogonal general and specific factors representing distinct, non-nested components of shared variance among indicators. This contrasts with higher-order models, which represent superordinate structure in terms of specific factors that are nested in general factors, and correlated-factors models, which represent superordinate structure in terms of correlations among subordinate factors.
Higher-order models can be approached as a constrained form of hierarchical models, in which direct relationships between superordinate factors and observed variables in the hierarchical model are constrained to equal the products of superordinate-subordinate paths and subordinate-observed variable paths.
Multiple exploratory factor analytic approaches to the delineation of hierarchical structure are available, including rank-deficient transformations, analytic rotations, and targeted rotations. Among other things, these transformations and rotations differ in the number of factors being rotated, the nature of those factors, and how superordinate factor structures are approximated.
Misspecification or under-specification of confirmatory bifactor and hierarchical models can occur for multiple reasons. Problems with model identification may occur (1) with specific patterns of homogeneity in estimated or observed covariances, (2) if factors are allowed to correlate in inadmissible ways, or (3) if covariate paths imply inadmissible correlations. Signs of model misspecification may be evident in anomalous estimates, such as loading estimates near boundaries, or estimates that are suggestive of other types of models.
Common model fit statistics can overstate the fit of bifactor models due to the tendency of bifactor and other hierarchical models to overfit to data in general, regardless of plausibility or population structure. Hierarchical models are similar to exploratory factor models in their expansiveness of fit, and, in general, they are more expansive in fit than other confirmatory models.
Future Issues:
Research is needed to determine how to best account for the flexibility of hierarchical models when comparing models and evaluating model fit, given that the relative flexibility of hierarchical models can only partly be accounted for by the number of parameters. Approaches based on minimum description length and related paradigms, such as Bayesian inference with reference priors, are promising in this regard.
More research is needed to clarify the properties of hierarchical structures when they are embedded in longitudinal models and models with covariates. As with challenges of multicollinearity in regression, parsing unique general and specific factor components of explanatory paths may be inferentially challenging in the presence of strongly related predictors, covariates, and outcomes.
More can be learned about the specification and identification of hierarchical models and the relationships between hierarchical models and other types of models, such as exploratory factor models. Similarities in overfitting patterns between exploratory and hierarchical models, approaches to hierarchical structure through bifactor rotations, and patterns of anomalous estimates that are sometimes obtained with hierarchical models, point to important relationships between exploratory and hierarchical models. Further explication of model specification principles with hierarchical models would also help clarify the appropriate structures to consider when evaluating models.
In recent decades, a burgeoning literature has documented the cultural transmission of behavior through social learning in numerous vertebrate and invertebrate species. One meaning of “cultural evolution in animals” refers to these discoveries, and I present an overview of key findings. I then address the other meaning of the term focused on cultural changes within a lineage. Such changes in humans, described as “cumulative cultural evolution”, have been spectacular, but relatively little attention has yet been paid to the topic in nonhuman animals, other than asserting that the process is unique to humans. A variety of evidence including both controlled experiments and field observations has begun to challenge this view, and in some behavioral domains, notably birdsong, cultural evolution has been studied for many years. In this review, I dissect concepts of cultural evolution and cumulative culture and appraise the accumulating evidence bearing on their nature and significance for evolutionary biology at large.
The relationship between nonverbal communication and deception continues to attract much interest, but there are many misconceptions about it. In this review, we present a scientific view on this relationship. We describe theories explaining why liars would behave differently from truth tellers, followed by research on how liars actually behave and individuals’ ability to detect lies. We show that the nonverbal cues to deceit discovered to date are faint and unreliable and that people are mediocre lie catchers when they pay attention to behavior. We also discuss why individuals hold misbeliefs about the relationship between nonverbal behavior and deception—beliefs that appear very hard to debunk. We further discuss the ways in which researchers could improve the state of affairs by examining nonverbal behaviors in different ways and in different settings than they currently do.
Bilingualism was once thought to result in cognitive disadvantages, but research in recent decades has demonstrated that experience with two (or more) languages confers a bilingual advantage in executive functions and may delay the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease. However, conflicting evidence has emerged leading to questions concerning the robustness of the bilingual advantage for both executive functions and dementia incidence. Some investigators have failed to find evidence of a bilingual advantage; others have suggested that bilingual advantages may be entirely spurious, while proponents of the advantage case have continued to defend it. A heated debate has ensued, and the field has now reached an impasse.
This review critically examines evidence for and against the bilingual advantage in executive functions, cognitive aging, and brain plasticity, before outlining how future research could shed light on this debate and advance knowledge of how experience with multiple languages affects cognition and the brain.
The stereotype threat literature primarily comprises lab studies, many of which involve features that would not be present in high-stakes testing settings. We meta-analyze the effect of stereotype threat on cognitive ability tests, focusing on both laboratory and operational studies with features likely to be present in high stakes settings. First, we examine the features of cognitive ability test metric, stereotype threat cue activation strength, and type of non-threat control group, and conduct a focal analysis removing conditions that would not be present in high stakes settings. We also take into account a previously unrecognized methodological error in how data are analyzed in studies that control for scores on a prior cognitive ability test, which resulted in a biased estimate of stereotype threat. The focal sample, restricting the database to samples utilizing operational testing-relevant conditions, displayed a threat effect of d = −0.14 (k = 45, n = 3,532, SDδ = 0.31). Second, we present a comprehensive meta-analysis of stereotype threat. Third, we examine a small subset of studies in operational test settings and studies utilizing motivational incentives, which yielded d-values ranging from 0.00 to −0.14. Fourth, the meta-analytic database is subjected to tests of publication bias, finding nontrivial evidence for publication bias. Overall, results indicate that the size of the stereotype threat effect that can be experienced on tests of cognitive ability in operational scenarios such as college admissions tests and employment testing may range from negligible to small.
Selection effects in media become increasingly strong as populations and media increase, meaning that rare datapoints driven by unusual processes such as the mentally ill or hoaxers are increasingly unreliable as evidence of anything at all and must be ignored. At scale, anything that can happen will happen a small but nonzero times.
Online & mainstream media and social networking have become increasingly misleading as to the state of the world by focusing on ‘stories’ and ‘events’ rather than trends and averages. This is because as the global population increases and the scope of media increases, media’s urge for narrative focuses on the most extreme outlier datapoints—but such datapoints are, at a global scale, deeply misleading as they are driven by unusual processes such as the mentally ill or hoaxers.
At a global scale, anything that can happen will happen a small but nonzero times: this has been epitomized as “Littlewood’s Law: in the course of any normal person’s life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month.” This must now be extended to a global scale for a hyper-networked global media covering anomalies from 8 billion people—all coincidences, hoaxes, mental illnesses, psychological oddities, extremes of continuums, mistakes, misunderstandings, terrorism, unexplained phenomena etc. Hence, there will be enough ‘miracles’ that all media coverage of events can potentially be composed of nothing but extreme outliers, even though it would seem like an ‘extraordinary’ claim to say that all media-reported events may be flukes.
This creates an epistemic environment deeply hostile to understanding reality, one which is dedicated to finding arbitrary amounts of and amplifying the least representative datapoints.
Given this, it is important to maintain extreme skepticism of any individual anecdotes or stories which are selectively reported but still claimed (often implicitly) to be representative of a general trend or fact about the world. Standard techniques like critical thinking, emphasizing trends & averages, and demanding original sources can help fight the biasing effect of news.
We investigated the self-regulatory strategies people spontaneously use in their everyday lives to regulate their persistence during aversive activities. In pilot studies (pooled n = 794), we identified self-regulatory strategies from self-reports and generated hypotheses about individual differences in trait self-control predicting their use. Next, deploying ambulatory assessment (n = 264, 1940 reports of aversive/challenging activities), we investigated predictors of the strategies’ self-reported use and effectiveness (trait self-control and demand types). The popularity of strategies varied across demands. In addition, people higher in trait self-control were more likely to focus on the positive consequences of a given activity, set goals, and use emotion regulation. Focusing on positive consequences, focusing on negative consequences (of not performing the activity), thinking of the near finish, and emotion regulation increased perceived self-regulatory success across demands, whereas distracting oneself from the aversive activity decreased it. None of these strategies, however, accounted for the beneficial effects of trait self-control on perceived self-regulatory success. Hence, trait self-control and strategy use appear to represent separate routes to good self-regulation. By considering trait-approaches and process-approaches these findings promote a more comprehensive understanding of self-regulatory success and failure during people’s daily attempts to regulate their persistence.
Markets/evolution as backstops/ground truths for reinforcement learning/optimization: on some connections between Coase’s theory of the firm/linear optimization/DRL/evolution/multicellular life/pain/Internet communities as multi-level optimization problems.
One defense of free markets notes the inability of non-market mechanisms to solve planning & optimization problems. This has difficulty with Coase’s paradox of the firm, and I note that the difficulty is increased by the fact that with improvements in computers, algorithms, and data, ever larger planning problems are solved. Expanding on some Cosma Shalizi comments, I suggest interpreting phenomenon as multi-level nested optimization paradigm: many systems can be usefully described as having two (or more) levels where a slow sample-inefficient but ground-truth ‘outer’ loss such as death, bankruptcy, or reproductive fitness, trains & constrains a fast sample-efficient but possibly misguided ‘inner’ loss which is used by learned mechanisms such as neural networks or linear programming group selection perspective. So, one reason for free-market or evolutionary or Bayesian methods in general is that while poorer at planning/optimization in the short run, they have the advantage of simplicity and operating on ground-truth values, and serve as a constraint on the more sophisticated non-market mechanisms. I illustrate by discussing corporations, multicellular life, reinforcement learning & meta-learning in AI, and pain in humans. This view suggests that are inherent balances between market/non-market mechanisms which reflect the relative advantages between a slow unbiased method and faster but potentially arbitrarily biased methods.
Benjamin Franklin, magnetic trees, and erotically-charged séances— Urte Laukaityte on how a craze for sessions of “animal magnetism” in late 18th-century Paris led to the randomised placebo-controlled and double-blind clinical trials we know and love today…By a lucky coincidence, Benjamin Franklin was in France as the first US ambassador with a mission to ensure an official alliance against its arch nemesis, the British. On account of his fame as a great man of science in general and his experiments on one such invisible force—electricity—in particular, Franklin was appointed as head of the royal commission. The investigating team also included the chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly, and the doctor Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. It is a curious fact of history that both Lavoisier and Bailly were later executed by the guillotine—the device attributed to their fellow commissioner. The revolution also, of course, brought the same fate to King Louis XVI and his Mesmer-supporting wife Marie Antoinette. In a stroke of insight, the commissioners figured that the cures might be affected by one of two possible mechanisms: psychological suggestion (what they refer to as “imagination”) or some actual physical magnetic action. Mesmer and his followers claimed it was the magnetic fluid, so that served as the experimental condition if you like. Continuing with the modern analogies, suggestion would then represent a rudimentary placebo control condition. So to test animal magnetism, they came up with two kinds of trials to try and separate the two possibilities: either the research subject is being magnetised but does not know it (magnetism without imagination) or the subject is not being magnetised but thinks that they are (imagination without magnetism). The fact that the trials were blind, or in other words, the patients did not know when the magnetic operation was being performed, marks the commission’s most innovative contribution to science…Whatever the moral case may be, the report paved the way for the modern empirical approach in more ways than one. Stephen Jay Gould called the work “a masterpiece of the genre, an enduring testimony to the power and beauty of reason” that “should be rescued from its current obscurity, translated into all languages”. Just to mention a few further insights, the commissioners were patently aware of psychological phenomena like the experimenter effect, concerned as they were that some patients might report certain sensations because they thought that is what the eminent men of science wanted to hear. That seems to be what propelled them to make the study placebo-controlled and single-blind. Other phenomena reminiscent of the modern-day notion of priming, and the role of expectations more generally, are pointed out throughout the document. The report also contains a detailed account of how self-directed attention can generate what are known today as psychosomatic symptoms. Relatedly, there is an incredibly lucid discussion of mass psychogenic illness, and mass hysteria more generally, including in cases of war and political upheaval. Just 5 years later, France would descend into the chaos of a violent revolution.
We present first-grade, second-grade, and third-grade impacts for a first-grade intervention targeting the conceptual and procedural bases that support arithmetic. At-risk students (average age at pretest = 6.5) were randomly assigned to three conditions: a control group (n = 224) and two variants of the intervention (same conceptual instruction but different forms of practice: speeded [n = 211] vs. nonspeeded [n = 204]). Impacts on all first-grade content outcomes were statistically-significant and positive, but no follow-up impacts were statistically-significant. Many intervention children achieved average mathematics achievement at the end of third grade, and prior math and reading assessment performance predicted which students will require sustained intervention. Finally, projecting impacts 2 years later based on nonexperimental estimates of effects of first-grade math skills overestimates long-term intervention effects.
This study examines how social comparison information provided by video game leaderboards may influence players’ retrospective judgments of autonomy, competence, and relatedness need fulfillment.
Participants played a video game and were randomly assigned to receive no postgame feedback or were shown a leaderboard that placed them in the top or bottom quartile of players.
Results: indicate downward social comparisons increase enjoyment by increasing competence and relatedness perceptions. However, upward comparisons did not have an opposite effect, nor did either type of social comparison influence players’ autonomy perceptions.
Implications for applying Self-Determination Theory to video game enjoyment in the context of social comparison feedback is discussed.
[Keywords: enjoyment, self-determination theory, social comparison theory, video games]
Does selfishness pay in the long term? Previous research has indicated that being prosocial (or otherish) rather than selfish has positive consequences for psychological well-being, physical health, and relationships. Here we instead examine the consequences for individuals’ incomes and number of children, as these are the currencies that matter most in theories that emphasize the power of self-interest, namely economics and evolutionary thinking.
Drawing on both cross-sectional (Studies 1 [GSS] and 2 [ESS]) and panel data (Studies 3 [UKHLS] and 4 [PSID]), we find that prosocial individuals tend to have more children and higher income than selfish individuals. An additional survey (Study 5) of lay beliefs about how self-interest impacts income and fertility suggests one reason selfish people may persist in their behavior even though it leads to poorer outcomes: people generally expect selfish individuals to have higher incomes.
Our findings have implications for lay decisions about the allocation of scarce resources, as well as for economic and evolutionary theories of human behavior.
[Keywords: selfishness, altruism, folk psychology, fertility, income]
…In Study 5 we examined whether a sample of Americans were aware of the negative effects of selfishness. For the most part, they turned out to have accurate intuitions—especially about the negative associations that selfishness has with social relations, psychological well-being, and number of children. Thus, whereas Crocker et al 2017 (p. 315) call the finding that selfishness does not promote well-being paradoxical, our study indicates that laypeople do not view it as such. Instead, the empirical finding that runs counter to lay intuitions is that selfishness is not associated with the highest incomes. Given people’s expectations, this finding is the real paradox of self-interested behavior. If people understood that prosociality pays, then selfish people might engage in more prosociality for selfish reasons. Under their incorrect beliefs, however, it is rational for selfish people to act selfishly.
Perceived mental health from men’s facial appearance reflected actual mental health.
Results held for subclinical autistic quotient, depressive symptoms, and schizotypy.
Accuracy was not explained by attractiveness or other appearance variables.
Mental health vulnerability could lead to negative social evaluation.
Previous work shows that mental health can be evident from neutral facial appearance. We assessed the accuracy of mental health perceptions from facial appearance, and how perceived mental health related to other appearance cues, specifically attractiveness, perceived physical health, and masculinity.
We constructed composite images from men scoring high and low on autistic quotient, depressive symptoms, and schizotypy inventories, and asked observers to rate these images for mental health. We found perceived mental health reflected actual mental health in all cases. Furthermore, the accuracy of mental health inference was not fully explained by other appearance cues.
We consider implications of accurate mental health detection from appearance, and the possibility that appearance could be a risk factor for mental health issues.
An annotated fulltext bibliography of publications on the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), a longitudinal study of high-IQ youth.
SMPY (Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth) is a long-running longitudinal survey of extremely mathematically-talented or intelligent youth, which has been following high-IQ cohorts since the 1970s. It has provided the largest and most concrete findings about the correlates and predictive power of screening extremely intelligent children, and revolutionized gifted & talented educational practices.
Because it has been running for over 40 years, SMPY-related publications are difficult to find; many early papers were published only in long-out-of-print books and are not available in any other way. Others are digitized and more accessible, but one must already know they exist. Between these barriers, SMPY information is less widely available & used than it should be given its importance.
To fix this, I have been gradually going through all SMPY citations and making fulltext copies available online with occasional commentary.
Some people hear what they see: car indicator lights, flashing neon shop signs, and people’s movements as they walk may all trigger an auditory sensation, which we call the visual-evoked auditory response (vEAR or ‘visual ear’). We have conducted the first large-scale online survey (n > 4000) of this little-known phenomenon. We analysed the prevalence of vEAR, what induces it, and what other traits are associated with it.
We assessed prevalence by asking whether respondents had previously experienced vEAR. Participants then rated silent videos for vividness of evoked auditory sensations, and answered additional trait questions.
Prevalence appeared higher relative to other typical synaesthesias. Prior awareness and video ratings were associated with greater frequency of other synaesthesias, including flashes evoked by sounds, and musical imagery. Higher-rated videos often depicted meaningful events that predicted sounds (eg. collisions). However, even videos containing abstract flickering or moving patterns could also elicit higher ratings, despite having no predictable association with sounds. Such videos had higher levels of raw ‘motion energy’ (ME), which we quantified using a simple computational model of motion processing in early visual cortex. Critically, only respondents reporting prior awareness of vEAR tended to show a positive correlation between video ratings and ME.
This specific sensitivity to ME suggests that in vEAR, signals from visual motion processing may affect audition relatively directly without requiring higher-level interpretative processes. Our other findings challenge the popular assumption that individuals with synaesthesia are rare and have ideosyncratic patterns of brain hyper-connectivity. Instead, our findings of apparently high prevalence and broad associations with other synaesthesias and traits are jointly consistent with a common dependence on normal variations in physiological mechanisms of disinhibition or excitability of sensory brain areas and their functional connectivity. The prevalence of vEAR makes it easier to test such hypotheses further, and makes the results more relevant to understanding not only synaesthetic anomalies but also normal perception.
A randomized control trial with 432 small and medium enterprises in Mexico shows positive impact of access to 1 year of management consulting services on total factor productivity and return on assets. Owners also had an increase in “entrepreneurial spirit” (an index that measures entrepreneurial confidence and goal setting). Using Mexican social security data, we find a persistent large increase (about 50%) in the number of employees and total wage bill even 5 years after the program. We document large heterogeneity in the specific managerial practices that improved as a result of the consulting, with the most prominent being marketing, financial accounting, and long-term business planning.
Theory of mind (ToM; Premack & Woodruff, 1978) broadly refers to humans’ ability to represent the mental states of others, including their desires, beliefs, and intentions. We propose to train a machine to build such models too. We design a Theory of Mind neural network—a ToMnet—which uses meta-learning to build models of the agents it encounters, from observations of their behaviour alone. Through this process, it acquires a strong prior model for agents’ behaviour, as well as the ability to bootstrap to richer predictions about agents’ characteristics and mental states using only a small number of behavioural observations. We apply the ToMnet to agents behaving in simple gridworld environments, showing that it learns to model random, algorithmic, and deep reinforcement learning agents from varied populations, and that it passes classic ToM tasks such as the “Sally-Anne” test (Wimmer & Perner, 1983; Baron-Cohen et al 1985) of recognising that others can hold false beliefs about the world. We argue that this system—which autonomously learns how to model other agents in its world—is an important step forward for developing multi-agent AI systems, for building intermediating technology for machine-human interaction, and for advancing the progress on interpretable AI.
Humans vary substantially in their willingness to take risks. In a combined sample of over one million individuals, we conducted genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of general risk tolerance, adventurousness, and risky behaviors in the driving, drinking, smoking, and sexual domains. We identified 611 ~independent genetic loci associated with at least one of our phenotypes, including 124 with general risk tolerance. We report evidence of substantial shared genetic influences across general risk tolerance and risky behaviors: 72 of the 124 general risk tolerance loci contain a lead SNP for at least one of our other GWAS, and general risk tolerance is moderately to strongly genetically correlated (|̂rg| ~ 0.25–0.50) with a range of risky behaviors. Bioinformatics analyses imply that genes near general-risk-tolerance-associated SNPs are highly expressed in brain tissues and point to a role for glutamatergic and GABAergic neurotransmission. We find no evidence of enrichment for genes previously hypothesized to relate to risk tolerance.
Serendipity can come in different forms and come about in a variety of ways.
The Merton archives were used as a starting point for gathering literature and examples.
We identify 4 types of serendipity together with 4 mechanisms of serendipity.
Policy and theory implications vary by type and mechanism of serendipity.
Serendipity does not necessarily strengthen basic research rationales.
Serendipity does not necessarily weaken rationales for targeted research.
Serendipity, the notion of researchers making unexpected and beneficial discoveries, has played an important role in debates about the feasibility and desirability of targeting public R&D investments. The purpose of this paper is to show that serendipity can come in different forms and come about in a variety of ways. The archives of Robert K. Merton, who introduced the term to the social sciences, were used as a starting point for gathering literature and examples. I identify 4 types of serendipity (Walpolian, Mertonian, Bushian, Stephanian) together with 4 mechanisms of serendipity (Theory-led, Observer-led, Error-borne, Network-emergent). I also discuss implications of the different types and mechanisms for theory and policy.
We replicated and extended Shoda et al 1990’s famous marshmallow study, which showed strong bivariate correlations between a child’s ability to delay gratification just before entering school and both adolescent achievement and socioemotional behaviors.
Concentrating on children whose mothers had not completed college, we found that an additional minute waited at age 4 predicted a gain of ~1⁄10th of a standard deviation in achievement at age 15. But this bivariate correlation was only half the size of those reported in the original studies and was reduced by two thirds in the presence of controls for family background, early cognitive ability, and the home environment.
Most of the variation in adolescent achievement came from being able to wait at least 20s. Associations between delay time and measures of behavioral outcomes at age 15 were much smaller and rarely statistically-significant.
Personal experience and surveys on running out of socks; discussion of socks as small example of human procrastination and irrationality, caused by lack of explicit deliberative thought where no natural triggers or habits exist.
After running out of socks one day, I reflected on how ordinary tasks get neglected. Anecdotally and in 3 online surveys, people report often not having enough socks, a problem which correlates with rarity of sock purchases and demographic variables, consistent with a neglect/procrastination interpretation: because there is no specific time or triggering factor to replenish a shrinking sock stockpile, it is easy to run out.
This reminds me of akrasia on minor tasks, ‘yak shaving’, and the nature of disaster in complex systems: lack of hard rules lets errors accumulate, without any ‘global’ understanding of the drift into disaster (or at least inefficiency). Humans on a smaller scale also ‘drift’ when they engage in System I reactive thinking & action for too long, resulting in cognitive biases. An example of drift is the generalized human failure to explore/experiment adequately, resulting in overly greedy exploitative behavior of the current local optimum. Grocery shopping provides a case study: despite large gains, most people do not explore, perhaps because there is no established routine or practice involving experimentation. Fixes for these things can be seen as ensuring that System II deliberative cognition is periodically invoked to review things at a global level, such as developing a habit of maximum exploration at first purchase of a food product, or annually reviewing possessions to note problems like a lack of socks.
While socks may be small things, they may reflect big things.
A high-concept Batman short story in the style of a 1980s comic book script about the Scarecrow and the gifts no one appreciates: pain/guilt/fear/anxiety.
A high-concept Batman short story in the style of a 1980s comic book script about the Scarecrow and the gifts no one appreciates: pain/guilt/fear/anxiety.
Does creativity, on average, increase or decrease during bereavement?
Dates of death of relatives and close friends of 33 French artists and 15 American artists were gathered from electronic sources and biographies, and information on over 15,000 paintings was collected from the Blouin Art Sales Index and the online collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Musée d’Orsay, including more than 12,000 observations on price.
An event study indicates that there is no evidence that the death of a friend or relative makes an artist more creative, and there is some evidence that prices of paintings are statistically-significantly lower during the first year following the year of death of a friend or relative. Furthermore, paintings that were created during this bereavement period are less likely to be included in a major museum’s collection.
[Keywords: creativity, death, artist, art auctions, bereavement]
Are some management practices akin to a technology that can explain firm and national productivity, or do they simply reflect contingent management styles?
We collect data on core management practices from over 11,000 firms in 34 countries.
We find large cross-country differences in the adoption of management practices, with the US having the highest size-weighted average management score.
We present a formal model of “Management as a Technology”, and structurally estimate it using panel data to recover parameters including the depreciation rate and adjustment costs of managerial capital (both found to be larger than for tangible non-managerial capital). Our model also predicts (1) a positive impact of management on firm performance; (2) a positive relationship between product market competition and average management quality (part of which stems from the larger covariance between management with firm size as competition strengthens); and (3) a rise in the level and a fall in the dispersion of management with firm age.
We find strong empirical support for all of these predictions in our data.
Finally, building on our model, we find that differences in management practices account for about 30% of total factor productivity differences both between countries and within countries across firms.
Dissatisfaction in social relationships is reported widely across many psychiatric conditions. We investigated the genetic architecture of family relationship satisfaction and friendship satisfaction in the UK Biobank. We leveraged the high genetic correlation between the two phenotypes (rg = 0.87±0.03; p < 2.2×10−16) to conduct multi-trait analysis of Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS) (Neffective family = 164,112; Neffective friendship = 158,116). We identified two genome-wide statistically-significant associations for both the phenotypes: rs1483617 on chromosome 3 and rs2189373 on chromosome 6, a region previously implicated in schizophrenia. eQTL and chromosome conformation capture in neural tissues prioritizes several genes including NLGN1. Gene-based association studies identified several significant genes, with highest expression in brain tissues. Genetic correlation analysis identified significant negative correlations for multiple psychiatric conditions including highly significant negative correlation with cross-psychiatric disorder GWAS, underscoring the central role of social relationship dissatisfaction in psychiatric diagnosis. The two phenotypes were enriched for genes that are loss of function intolerant. Both phenotypes had modest, significant additive SNP heritability of ~6%. Our results underscore the central role of social relationship satisfaction in mental health and identify genes and tissues associated with it.
Especial skills are skills that are distinctive by virtue of massive practice within the narrow contexts in which they are expressed. In the first demonstration of especial skills, Keetch et al 2005 showed that experienced basketball players are better at shooting baskets from the foul line, where they had massive amounts of practice, than would expected from their success at other locations closer to or farther from the basket. Similar results were obtained for baseball throwing.
The authors asked whether especial skills hold in archery, a sport requiring less movement. If the emergence of especial skills depends on large-scale movement, one would expect archery to escape so-called especialism. But if the emergence of especial skills reflects a more general tendency for highly specific learning, experienced archers should show especial skills.
The authors obtained evidence consistent with the latter prediction. The expert archers did much better at their most highly practiced distance than would be expected by looking at the overall function relating shooting score to distance. We offer a mathematical model to account for this result.
The findings attest to the generality of the especial skills phenomenon.
A long tradition of scholarship, from ancient Greece to Marxism or some contemporary social psychology, portrays humans as strongly gullible—wont to accept harmful messages by being unduly deferent. However, if humans are reasonably well adapted, they should not be strongly gullible: they should be vigilant toward communicated information. Evidence from experimental psychology reveals that humans are equipped with well-functioning mechanisms of epistemic vigilance. They check the plausibility of messages against their background beliefs, calibrate their trust as a function of the source’s competence and benevolence, and critically evaluate arguments offered to them. Even if humans are equipped with well-functioning mechanisms of epistemic vigilance, an adaptive lag might render them gullible in the face of new challenges, from clever marketing to omnipresent propaganda. I review evidence from different cultural domains often taken as proof of strong gullibility: religion, demagoguery, propaganda, political campaigns, advertising, erroneous medical beliefs, and rumors. Converging evidence reveals that communication is much less influential than often believed—that religious proselytizing, propaganda, advertising, and so forth are generally not very effective at changing people’s minds. Beliefs that lead to costly behavior are even less likely to be accepted. Finally, it is also argued that most cases of acceptance of misguided communicated information do not stem from undue deference, but from a fit between the communicated information and the audience’s preexisting beliefs.
Rescue behaviour is a special form of cooperation in which a rescuer exhibits behaviours directed towards averting a threat to an endangered individual, thereby potentially putting itself at risk. Although rescue behaviour has been well-documented in experimental studies on rats and ants, published cases in other non-human animals are rare.
Here, we report observations of rescue behaviour in the cooperatively breeding Seychelles warbler (Acrocephalus sechellensis). In this species, individuals sometimes become entangled in seed clusters of ‘bird-catcher trees’ (Pisonia grandis). Just one or a few of these sticky seeds can prevent Seychelles warblers flying and may lead to mortality.
In 4 cases, individuals were observed displaying behaviour aimed at removing sticky seeds from the feathers of an entangled individual belonging to their group. Intriguingly, the rescuing individuals engaged in this behaviour despite potentially risking entanglement.
To our knowledge, this is the first recorded case of rescue behaviour in birds.
Animals execute sensorimotor sequences to optimize performance of complex actions series. However, the sensory aspects of these sequences and their dynamic control are often poorly understood.
We trained bats to fly to targets at different distances, and analysed their sensory behavior before and during flight to test whether they assess target distance before flight and how they adapt sensory acquisition in different situations.
