Journal of Experimental Psychology: General最新文献

Recent widespread social movements (e.g., Occupy) stress the importance of dismantling societal privilege-group-based advantages such as White privilege or class privilege. Although research shows that recognizing privilege can increase advantaged group members' support for equality between groups, such recognition is often avoided (Knowles et al., 2014; Shuman et al., 2025), and it is unclear whether there is even consensus about what privilege "is." We test how lay people define privilege (i.e., lay beliefs of privilege) across 12 studies, using both qualitative and experimental methods. We find substantial variance in people's lay beliefs of privilege and, furthermore, that these variations are related to support for equality-enhancing action. Specifically, lay beliefs encompassing the structural and pervasive nature of privilege are associated with greater recognition of privilege and support for equality-enhancing action, whereas conceptualizations emphasizing invisibility and controllability can impede recognition. Overall, results suggest that privilege discourse ought to consider people's underlying lay beliefs of privilege, which can affect support for equality-enhancing efforts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Perspective taking (PT) is the ability to imagine viewpoints different from our own. However, the nature of PT as a construct and its underlying cognitive mechanisms are not well established. Some researchers propose that understanding what others believe (cognitive PT), feel (affective PT), and see (spatial PT) forms a single behavioral dimension, relying on the orienting of attention between competing frame-of-reference representations. Others propose that PT mechanisms are dissociable, although there are three different proposals about such dissociations. The present study examined behavioral associations among measures of spatial, cognitive, and affective PT and attentional control in neurotypical young adults. There was a lack of convergent validity for measures of cognitive and affective PT, pointing to the need for more psychometric work on these dimensions. Much better convergence was found for spatial PT measures. There was little to no behavioral association between spatial PT and either social form of PT (cognitive or affective) or attentional control measures. This pattern suggests support for a dissociated model in which spatial PT is a distinct cognitive construct. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Common ground is crucial to ensure the effectiveness and harmony of a dialogue. However, even if the information forming the common ground is, by its very nature, shared between two collaborating partners, biases related to individual processes (production and emotional effects) may shape its accessibility in memory for each partner. The aim of this work was to examine the respective roles of individual and collective processes in dialogue memory by showing that they are implemented differently at the beginning versus the end of the grounding process. Using an adapted referential communication task, we developed three complementary studies to investigate memory for the content (i.e., what was said) and source (i.e., who said it) of information through the study of repeated reference to a set of referents. The results confirmed that individual processes impact memory for information provided at the beginning of the interaction, whereas no significant effect was observed for information provided at the end of the interaction. In contrast, the role of each partner (director vs. matcher) in the collaborative task appears to have an influence on memory, as the director enjoyed greater conceptual pact accessibility and better source memory, highlighting the collective processes at play. Taken together, these results enhance current understanding of the dynamic by which collective and individual processes contribute to common ground construction during dialogue. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Repeated exposure to information increases the credibility of this information, a well-studied phenomenon called the truth effect. While this phenomenon has been studied extensively by passively exposing people to preselected information pieces, in real-world contexts, people often sample information actively (e.g., by clicking on a headline on social media). In the present research, we propose and demonstrate in eight preregistered experiments (N = 953) that such active sampling of information increases the truth effect, leading to an enhanced belief in information one had initially been exposed to following one's active choice. We further test both stimulus-based explanations (i.e., people are more likely to sample information that is perceived to be more plausible) and processing-based explanations (i.e., sampling information boosts cognitive processes that also increase the truth effect), with evidence favoring the latter account. Overall, our findings imply that repeated exposure to information has a more profound influence on people's beliefs in settings where people actively choose which information they are exposed to. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

People are lazy. According to the law of least effort, people generally prefer to exert less rather than more effort to achieve the same reward. However, this research often isolates individuals from social influences, overlooking the fact that we are inherently social beings whose behavior is shaped by the norms and information we gather from others. Here, we examine whether individuals conform to both high-effort and low-effort norms equally or whether the strength of normative influence on effort choices depends on the direction of the norm. Across 12 studies (N = 1,957), participants completed a demand selection task where they repeatedly chose between a hard or easy task. While people generally avoid effort, results revealed that participants exerted significantly more effort after learning that previous participants consistently chose the harder task, compared to a control group who received no information about others' choices. Participants who were informed that others typically opted for the easier task, however, did not exert less effort than the control group and in fact exerted more effort. Even after increasing the acceptability of low effort-by enhancing the value of low effort and the psychological closeness to past participants-individuals still opposed the low-effort norm, exerting no less effort than the control group. These findings suggest that while others' behavior can inspire us to work harder, individuals show resistance to lowering their effort below what they would typically exert. While we consistently found conformity to high-effort norms, effort preferences were not influenced when hearing about others completing an unrelated task, pointing to a possible boundary condition for norm effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).