Journal of Experimental Psychology: General最新文献

Individuals often preferentially avoid information that contradicts and seek information that aligns with their prior beliefs-a tendency referred to as "selective exposure." Traditionally, prior research has focused on intrapersonal drivers of selective exposure, including avoidance of cognitive dissonance. We take a complementary approach by investigating the conditions under which interpersonal concerns drive selective exposure. Drawing on a large literature on impression management, we test a social signaling model of selective exposure, which predicts that (a) individuals shift their information selection decisions to signal to observers and (b) observers reward such shifts. We test this model in the domain of partisan politics in the United States across five financially incentivized, preregistered experiments (N = 3,598). Our results extend prior theory by identifying three key contingencies: the type of task on which observers expect to collaborate with actors, alignment of group membership between observers and actors, and the magnitude of demonstrated selective exposure. Overall, we find that tailoring one's information selection decisions can indeed have strategic value-but only under certain theoretically predictable conditions. Our work also identifies an actor-observer misalignment: While observers are sensitive to the type of future interaction with an actor, the actors themselves do not intuit this sensitivity. In the era of social media, when information selection decisions are more public than ever and the spread of misinformation is pervasive, understanding the ways in which reputational considerations shape decision making not only illuminates why selective exposure persists, but also suggests novel mitigation strategies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Humans are particularly sensitive to relationships between parts of objects. It remains unclear why this is. One hypothesis is that relational features are highly diagnostic of object categories and emerge as a result of learning to classify objects. We tested this by analyzing the internal representations of supervised convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained to classify large sets of objects. We found that CNNs do not show the same sensitivity to relational changes as previously observed for human participants. Furthermore, when we precisely controlled the deformations to objects, human behavior was best predicted by the number of relational changes while CNNs were equally sensitive to all changes. Even changing the statistics of the learning environment by making relations uniquely diagnostic did not make networks more sensitive to relations in general. Our results show that learning to classify objects is not sufficient for the emergence of human shape representations. Instead, these results suggest that humans are selectively sensitive to relational changes because they build representations of distal objects from their retinal images and interpret relational changes as changes to these distal objects. This inferential process makes human shape representations qualitatively different from those of artificial neural networks optimized to perform image classification. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Growth mindsets are beliefs that abilities, like intelligence, are mutable. Although most prior work has focused on people's personal mindset beliefs, a burgeoning literature has identified that organizations also vary in the extent to which they communicate and endorse growth mindsets. Organizational growth mindsets have powerful effects on belonging and interest in joining organizations, suggesting that they may be a productive way to intervene to improve individual and societal outcomes. Yet, little is known about for whom organizational mindset interventions might be more or less effective, a critical question for effective implementation and theory. We examine whether people's personal mindset beliefs might determine the effect of organizational growth mindsets, and if so, whether this moderation reflects a matching or mismatching pattern. Three experiments manipulated the espoused mindset of an organization and found that organizational growth mindsets primarily increased belonging and interest in joining among participants who personally endorsed matching growth mindset beliefs. An additional field study provided ecological validity to these findings, replicating them with students' experiences of belonging in classrooms. This study also revealed a divergent mismatching pattern on grades: rather than bolstering the grades of students with growth mindsets, growth mindset classroom contexts primarily enhanced the grades of students with more fixed mindsets. By clarifying for whom organizational growth mindsets are beneficial and in what manner, the current work provides theoretical and practical insight into the psychological dynamics of organizational growth mindsets. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Consistent evidence has established that people avoid cognitively effortful tasks. However, the features that make a task cognitively effortful are still not well understood. Multiple hypotheses have been proposed regarding which task demands underlie cognitive effort costs, such as time-on-task, error likelihood, and the general engagement of cognitive control. In this study, we test the novel hypothesis that tasks requiring behavior according to higher degrees of policy abstraction are experienced as more effortful. Accordingly, policy abstraction, operationalized as the levels of contextual contingency required by task rules, drives task avoidance over and above the effects of task performance, such as time-on-task or error likelihood. To test this hypothesis, we combined two previously established cognitive control tasks that parametrically manipulated policy abstraction with the demand selection task procedure. The design of these tasks allowed us to test whether people avoided tasks with higher order policy abstraction while controlling for the contribution of factors such as time-on-task and expected error rate (ER). Consistent with our hypothesis, we observed that policy abstraction was the strongest predictor of cognitive effort choices, followed by ER. This was evident across both studies and in a within-subject cross-study analysis. These results establish at least one task feature independent of performance, which is predictive of task avoidance behavior. We interpret these results within an opportunity cost framework for understanding aversive experiences of cognitive effort while performing a task. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

People can predict their scores on the Implicit Association Test with remarkable accuracy, challenging the traditional notion that implicit attitudes are inaccessible to introspection and suggesting that people might be aware of these attitudes. Yet, major open questions about the mechanism and scope of these predictions remain, making their implications unclear. Notably, people may be inferring their attitudes from externally observable cues (e.g., in the simplest case, their demographic information) rather than accessing them directly. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that, in past work, predictions have been obtained only for a small set of targets, attitudes toward which are demonstrably possible to infer. Here, in an adversarial collaboration with eight preregistered studies (N = 8,011), we interrogate implicit attitude awareness using more stringent tests. We demonstrate that people can predict their implicit attitudes (a) across a broad range of targets (many of which are plausibly difficult to infer without introspection), (b) far more accurately than third-party observers can based on demographic information, and (c) with similar accuracy across two different widely used implicit measures. On the other hand, predictive accuracy (a) varied widely across individuals and attitude targets and (b) was partially explained by inference over nonintrospective cues such as demographic variables and explicit attitudes; moreover, (c) explicit attitudes explained considerably larger portions of variance in predictions than implicit attitudes did. Taken together, these findings suggest that successful predictions of one's implicit attitudes may emerge from multiple mechanisms, including inference over nonintrospective cues and genuine introspective access. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Distractibility determines the propensity to have one's attention captured by irrelevant information; it relies on a balance between voluntary and involuntary attention. We report a cross-sectional study that uses the competitive attention test to characterize patterns of attention across the adult life span from 21 to 86 years old. Several distractibility components were measured in 186 participants distributed within seven age groups. Results indicate that distractibility components follow distinct trajectories with aging: Voluntary orienting remains stable from 21 to 86 years old, sustained attention decreases after 30 years old, distraction progressively increases between 26 and 86 years old, and impulsivity is lower in older compared to younger adults. Increased distractibility in older age thus seems to result from a dominance of involuntary over voluntary attention processes, whose detrimental effect on performance is partly compensated by enhanced motor control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Sensorimotor integration during speech has been investigated by altering the sound of a speaker's voice in real time; in response, the speaker learns to change their production of speech sounds in order to compensate (adaptation). This line of research has however been predominantly limited to very simple speaking contexts, typically involving (a) repetitive production of single words and (b) production of speech while alone, without the usual exposure to other voices. This study investigated adaptation to a real-time perturbation of the first and second formants during production of sentences either in synchrony with a prerecorded voice (synchronous speech group) or alone (solo speech group). Experiment 1 (n = 30) found no significant difference in the average magnitude of compensatory formant changes between the groups; however, synchronous speech resulted in increased between-individual variability in such formant changes. Participants also showed acoustic-phonetic convergence to the voice they were synchronizing with prior to introduction of the feedback alteration. Furthermore, the extent to which the changes required for convergence agreed with those required for adaptation was positively correlated with the magnitude of subsequent adaptation. Experiment 2 tested an additional group with a metronome-timed speech task (n = 15) and found a similar pattern of increased between-participant variability in formant changes. These findings demonstrate that speech motor adaptation can be measured robustly at the group level during performance of more complex speaking tasks; however, further work is needed to resolve whether self-voice adaptation and other-voice convergence reflect additive or interactive effects during sensorimotor control of speech. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Adults in prior work often endorse explanations appealing to purposes (e.g., "pencils exist so people can write with them"), even when these "teleological" explanations are scientifically unwarranted (e.g., "water exists so life can survive on Earth"). We explore teleological endorsement in a novel domain-human purpose-and its relationship to moral judgments. Across studies conducted online with a sample of U.S.-recruited adults, we ask: (a) Do participants believe the human species exists for a purpose? (b) Do these beliefs predict moral condemnation of individuals who fail to fulfill this purpose? And (c) what explains the link between teleological beliefs and moral condemnation? Study 1 found that participants frequently endorsed teleological claims about humans existence (e.g., humans exist to procreate), and these beliefs correlated with moral condemnation of purpose violations (e.g., condemning those who do not procreate). Study 2 found evidence of a bidirectional causal relationship: Stipulating a species' purpose results in moral condemnation of purpose violations, and stipulating that an action is immoral increases endorsement that the species exists for that purpose. Study 3 found evidence that when participants believe a species exists to perform some action, they infer this action is good for the species, and this in turn supports moral condemnation of individuals who choose not to perform the action. Study 4 found evidence that believing an action is good for the species partially mediates the relationship between human purpose beliefs and moral condemnation. These findings shed light on how our descriptive understanding can shape our prescriptive judgments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Over the last decade, robots continue to infiltrate the workforce, permeating occupations that once seemed immune to automation. This process seems to be inevitable because robots have ever-expanding capabilities. However, drawing from theories of cultural evolution and social learning, we propose that robots may have limited influence in domains that require high degrees of "credibility"; here we focus on the automation of religious preachers as one such domain. Using a natural experiment in a recently automated Buddhist temple (Study 1) and a fully randomized experiment in a Taoist temple (Study 2), we consistently show that religious adherents perceive robot preachers-and the institutions which employ them-as less credible than human preachers. This lack of credibility explains reductions in religious commitment after people listen to robot (vs. human) preachers deliver sermons. Study 3 conceptually replicates this finding in an online experiment and suggests that religious elites require perceived minds (agency and patiency) to be credible, which is partly why robot preachers inspire less credibility than humans. Our studies support cultural evolutionary theories of religion and suggest that escalating religious automation may induce religious decline. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

It is generally accepted that a word's emotional valence (i.e., whether a word is perceived as positive, negative, or neutral) influences how it is accessed and remembered. There is also evidence that the affective content of some words is represented in nonarbitrary sound-meaning associations (i.e., emotional sound symbolism). We investigated whether more extensive statistical relationships exist between the surface form properties of English words and ratings of their emotional valence, that is, form typicality. We found significant form typicality for both valence and extremity of valence (the absolute distance from the midpoint of the rating scale, regardless of polarity). Next, using behavioral megastudy data sets, we show that measures of emotional form typicality are significant predictors of lexical access during written and auditory lexical decision and reading aloud tasks in addition to recognition memory performance. These findings show nonarbitrary form-valence mappings in English are accessed automatically during language and verbal memory processing. We discuss how these findings might be incorporated into theoretical accounts that implement Bayesian statistical inference. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).