Journal of Experimental Psychology: General最新文献

Donating money to worthy social causes is one of the most impactful and efficient forms of altruism, but skepticism often clouds perceptions of donors' motives for giving. We propose a solution that reduces this skepticism: Instead of giving a single large donation, donors can partition their donations into multiple, smaller ones. Ten preregistered studies with 3,816 participants supported this idea. The positive effect of partitioned giving was robust to the number and size of the partitions and the method of displaying the partitions. Moreover, this effect emerged when the actual effort to give in partitions was held constant and donors precommitted to giving in partitions. The effect arose because the number of donations seems to act as a heuristic, signaling that the donor has more frequent impulses to give and a greater desire to be connected to the social cause. Accordingly, the effect was enhanced when donors gave on nonconsecutive days rather than consecutive days and diminished when they gave their multiple donations on a single day compared with on different days. This effect emerged across both joint and separate evaluations of partitioned versus lump-sum giving, indicating that people think donors who give in partitions should be judged more positively than those who give in one lump sum. Overall, this work shows that how donors structure their donations affects judgments of their motives for giving, thereby providing new insights into how people evaluate prosocial behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

There has been a call for a potentially revolutionary change to our existing understanding of the psychological concept of personal identity. Apparently, people can psychologically represent people, including themselves, as multiple individuals at the same time. Here, we ask whether the intransitive judgments found in these studies truly reflect the operation of an intransitive concept of personal identity. We manipulate several factors that arbitrate between transitivity and intransitivity and find most support for transitivity: In contrast to the prior work, most participants do not make intransitive judgments when there is any reason to favor one individual over another. People change which single individual they personally identify with, depending on which individual competes more strongly or weakly for identity, rather than identifying with both individuals. Even when two individuals are identical and therefore both entitled to be the same person, we find that people make more transitive judgments once they understand the practical commitments of their responses (Experiment 4) and report not being able to actually imagine two perspectives simultaneously when reasoning about the scenario (Experiment 5). In short, we suggest that while people may make intransitive judgments, these do not reflect that they psychologically represent identity in an intransitive manner. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

When performing tasks in a social context, individuals tend to report confidence judgments that increasingly align with those of others over time. However, the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon, termed confidence matching, are not fully understood. This study explores two potential drivers of confidence matching behavior: informational factors that cause individuals to genuinely recalibrate their private sense of confidence based on their partner's confidence; and normative factors that lead individuals to adapt the way in which they publicly express their confidence, without changing their private assessment of their own performance. To examine these influences, we conducted two experiments examining the effects of both informational and normative factors on private and public confidence. The results demonstrate that both factors can lead to confidence matching. In a setting devoid of feedback, participants matched their confidence reports with their partner's and modified their information-seeking behavior-a proxy for private confidence-accordingly, pointing toward the role of informational factors. Conversely, in a scenario in which feedback was readily available and a joint decision-making rule was enforced, participants aligned their confidence reports with their partner's but did not adjust their information-seeking behavior, hinting at normative factors influencing the public display of confidence matching. These findings highlight the flexibility and context-sensitivity of confidence, thereby underscoring the importance of factoring in social contexts and the adaptive nature of confidence when studying metacognitive processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Metacognition provides control and oversight to the process of acquiring and using knowledge. Efficient metacognition is essential to many aspects of daily life, from health care to finance and education. Across three experiments, we found a specific form of curiosity in humans about the quality of their own metacognition, using a novel approach that dissociates perceptual from metacognitive information searches. Observers displayed a strategic balance in their curiosity, alternating between a focus on perceptual accuracy and metacognitive performance. Depending on the context, this metacognitive curiosity was modulated by an internal evaluation of metacognition, leading to increased feedback requests when metacognition was likely to be inaccurate. Using an ideal observer model, we describe how this curiosity trade-off can arise naturally from a recursive evaluation and transformation of decisions' evidence. These results show that individuals are inherently curious about their metacognitive abilities and can compare perceptual and metacognitive precision to fine-tune performance monitoring. We propose that this form of curiosity may reflect humans' drive to refine their self-model. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Humans spend much of their lives in conversation, where they tend to hold many simultaneous motives. We examine two fundamental desires: to be responsive to a partner and to disclose about oneself. We introduce one pervasive way people attempt to reconcile these competing goals-boomerasking-a sequence in which individuals first pose a question to their conversation partner ("How was your weekend?"), let their partner answer, and then answer the question themselves ("Mine was amazing!"). The boomerask starts with someone asking a question, but-like a boomerang-the question returns quickly to its source. We document three types of boomerasks: ask-bragging (asking a question followed by disclosing something positive, e.g., an amazing vacation); ask-complaining (asking a question followed by disclosing something negative, e.g., a family funeral); and ask-sharing (asking a question followed by disclosing something neutral, e.g., a weird dream). Though boomeraskers believe they leave positive impressions, in practice, their decision to share their own answer-rather than follow up on their partner's-appears egocentric and disinterested in their partner's perspective. As a result, people perceive boomeraskers as insincere and prefer conversation partners who straightforwardly self-disclose. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

A growing literature has shown that people tend to make faster decisions when choosing between two high-intensity or high-utility options than when choosing between two less-intensity or low-utility options. However, the underlying cognitive mechanisms of this effect of overall value (OV) on response times (RT) remains controversial, partially due to inconsistent findings of OV effects on accuracy but also due to the lack of process-tracing studies testing this effect. Here, we set out to fill this gap by testing and modeling the influence of OV on choices, RT, and eye movements in both perceptual and preferential decisions in a preregistered eye-tracking experiment (N = 61). Across perceptual and preferential tasks, we observed significant and consistently negative correlations between OV and RT, replicating previous work. Accuracy tended to increase with OV, reaching significance in preferential choices only. Eye-tracking analyses revealed a reduction of different gaze-related effects under high OV: a reduced tendency to choose the longer fixated option in perceptual choice and a reduced tendency to choose the last fixated option in preferential choice. Modeling these data with the attentional drift-diffusion model showed that the nonfixated option value was discounted least in the high-OV condition, confirming that higher OV might mitigate the impact of gaze on choices. Our results suggest that OV jointly affects behavior and gaze influences and offer a mechanistic account for the puzzling phenomenon that decisions between options of higher OV tend to be faster, but not less accurate. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The severity and pervasiveness of anti-fat prejudice and discrimination have led to calls for interventions to address them. However, intervention studies to combat anti-fat prejudice have often been stymied by ineffective approaches, small sample sizes, and the lack of standardization in measurement. To that end, we conducted two mega-experiments totaling 27,726 participants and 50 conditions where we tested five intervention approaches to reduce implicit anti-fat prejudice across five implicit measures. We found that interventions were most effective at reducing implicit weight biases when they instructed people to practice an explicit rule linking fat people with good things and thin people with bad things. Interventions that were more indirect or relied on associative learning tended to be ineffective. We also found that change in implicit bias on one implicit measure often generalized to other implicit measures. However, the Evaluative Priming Task and single-target measures of implicit bias like the Single-Target Implicit Association Test were much less sensitive to change. These findings illuminate promising approaches to combating implicit anti-fat prejudice and advance understanding of how implicit bias change generalizes across measures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Do people change their preferences when they are offered the same risky lotteries at different times (now vs. the future)? Construal level theory (CLT) suggests that people do because our mental representation of events is moderated by how near or distant such events are in time. According to CLT, in the domain of risk preferences, psychological distance causes payoffs and probabilities to be differentially weighted or attended between present and future timepoints: Temporal distance increases the influence of payoffs and decreases the influence of probabilities. Specifically, CLT predicts that high probability/low amount lotteries (i.e., %-lotteries) are preferred in the present, whereas low probability/high amount lotteries (i.e., $-lotteries) are preferred in the future, even when the expected value of these lotteries is identical. We present a functional characterization and systematic investigation of this putative pattern of risk preferences and develop a formal model that incorporates CLT's predictions. In five experiments, we examined several factors that could moderate the effect (e.g., outcome and probability magnitude, lottery presentation format, incentivization procedures). Both our behavioral observations and modeling results suggest the effect is labile, and if it does occur, it is not fully consistent with our formal model of CLT. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The attentional blink (AB) demonstrates that recognizing the second of two targets (T1 and T2) is difficult when they appear in close succession in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream. The AB has been widely accepted as a suppression of T2 processing at the postperceptual stage. The current event-related potential study updates this view by demonstrating the existence of an early perceptual locus of suppression during the AB. Using line drawings of real-life objects as RSVP items, we required participants in Experiment 1 to either discriminate the exact identities or simply classify the object categories of T1 and T2, and in Experiment 2, we instructed participants to discriminate either T1 and T2 identities (dual-target task) or only T2 identity (single-target task) to invalidate the temporal expectation as an alternative account. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the T2-elicited first positive peak (P1) component was consistently decreased at Lag 3 whenever a dual-target, but not single-target, task was required, and the magnitude of this P1 suppression was significantly predictive of the behavioral AB magnitude in each dual-target task. When the RSVP items were substituted by classic but size-matched alphanumeric characters in Experiment 3, no P1 suppression was evident as expected, ruling out the large stimulus size as an alternative interpretation. These findings provide the strongest evidence to date that the AB can begin to suppress T2 processing at a very early perceptual stage, at least when observers encounter RSVP items of real-life objects, which calls for more flexible cognitive models for the AB. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Traditional explanations for stereotypes assume that they result from deficits in humans (ingroup-favoring motives, cognitive biases) or their environments (majority advantages, real group differences). An alternative explanation recently proposed that stereotypes can emerge when exploration is costly. Even optimal decision makers in an ideal environment can inadvertently form incorrect impressions from arbitrary encounters. However, all these existing theories essentially describe shortcuts that fail to explain the multidimensionality of stereotypes. Stereotypes of social groups have a canonical multidimensional structure, organized along dimensions of warmth and competence. We show that these dimensions and the associated stereotypes can result from feature-based exploration: When individuals make self-interested decisions based on past experiences in an environment where exploring new options carries an implicit cost and when these options share similar attributes, they are more likely to separate groups along multiple dimensions. We formalize this theory via the contextual multiarmed bandit problem, use the resulting model to generate testable predictions, and evaluate those predictions against human behavior. We evaluate this process in incentivized decisions involving as many as 20 real jobs and successfully recover the classic dimensions of warmth and competence. Further experiments show that intervening on the cost of exploration effectively mitigates bias, further demonstrating that exploration cost per se is the operating variable. Future diversity interventions may consider how to reduce exploration cost, in ways that parallel our manipulations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).