Journal of Experimental Psychology: General最新文献

When distributing resources, people often experience a conflict between two fundamental moral principles: The equality principle prescribes that all recipients receive the same, while the proportionality principle prescribes that allocations should be in proportion to the contribution of each recipient. We propose that if people consider recipient units of distributions in hierarchies as categories, rather than individuals, seeking categorical equality leads to individual inequality, because in most hierarchical groups there are fewer higher ranked (e.g., management) than lower ranked members (e.g., workers). Ten preregistered experiments conducted in the United States and China (N = 4,902) confirm this idea and show that participants who focus on categorical (vs. individual) recipients perceive unequal distributions as fairer (Experiment 1) and create more unequal distributions (Experiments 2a-2d), even when this reduces their own payoffs (Experiment 3). This effect occurs because when construing recipient units as categories (vs. individuals), people seek equality at a categorical level, without sufficiently correcting for differences in group size. Supporting this theoretical explanation, this effect is eliminated when thinking of individual-level equality (Experiments 4a-4b). Furthermore, this effect exists only when the higher ranked group is smaller sized, as is often the case in hierarchies (Experiment 5), and only when inequality is consistent with proportionality (Experiment 6). Combined, our results show that when people perceive a hierarchy in categorical (rather than individual) terms, this increases distributive inequality between its higher and lower ranked members. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Proportional information is important for a range of everyday actions, from infants' and toddler's probabilistic inferences to adults' medical and financial decisions. Unfortunately, children and adults frequently make systematic errors in some proportional reasoning contexts. For example, people tend to focus more on the numerators, rather than the proportional relations, when proportions are discrete (i.e., with enumerable units) or when the subcomponents are spatially separated. Importantly, it is not that people cannot reason proportionally, as they do not make these same errors with continuous proportions presented as part of a single coherent whole. Although format-dependent variation has been shown across many studies with both children and adults, no work has systematically manipulated multiple aspects of visual, nonsymbolic proportional stimuli simultaneously to better understand which spatial factors impact proportional reasoning, and how. Here, we manipulate proportional stimuli in three ways: the availability of enumerable units (i.e., discreteness), predictability of the proportional information, and spatial separateness of the proportion subcomponents. We also formalize competing strategy explanations using mathematical models to infer people's strategies. Overall, we find that discreteness, predictability, and spatial separateness (as operationalized here) significantly impact adults' performance and strategies. Furthermore, all features interact with each other, and qualitative patterns suggest that spatial separateness and predictability may be particularly important, despite being less well-studied. By systematically varying the spatial features of proportions, we provide insight into the mechanisms that underlie proportional reasoning and highlight important interactions between spatial, numerical, and relational information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Does what we see depend on what we know? Many findings suggest that top-down factors such as emotions, desires, and categorical knowledge affect perception. However, these findings have been met with considerable criticism due to a variety of methodological flaws, replication failures, and extremely small effect sizes. Here, we focus on one specific case in which top-down knowledge has been claimed to affect perception: memory color. Specifically, we describe a novel variant of the memory color effect that was purposefully designed to avoid these common criticisms and serves as a clear example of a top-down factor affecting perception. Specifically, we theorized that under ambiguous viewing conditions, top-down knowledge is more likely to impact perception because that knowledge will be used to disambiguate underdetermined sensory input. To test this hypothesis, we showed observers' printouts of completely desaturated objects in an ambiguous viewing condition: extremely dim light. As predicted, we found a strong, subjectively appreciable memory color effect under dim, ambiguous light, but not under bright, unambiguous light. In addition, a series of control experiments demonstrated that these effects could not simply be attributed to experimental demand characteristics. These results demonstrate that in certain situations, top-down factors can directly affect perceptual experience and appreciably alter how items appear. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).