Journal of Experimental Psychology: General最新文献

Humans create artificial intelligence (AI), but can AI help humans create? Numerous studies show how AI enhances productivity; however, little is known about creativity-another aspect of performance that requires higher level problem-solving. To understand how AI affects the creative process, I conducted two experiments by assigning 139 business professionals and 319 working adults to collaborate in varying degrees with ChatGPT on an entrepreneurial challenge. In contrast to the well-documented positive correlation between AI usage and productivity and early studies suggesting the same for creativity, the present research shows a Goldilocks (curvilinear) effect: Moderate (vs. low or high) human-AI collaboration increases creative performance. This effect, holding across general creativity rated by human judges (either the crowdsourced public or specific trained individuals), business values by entrepreneurs, and AI-evaluated creativity, is explained by the generation of new diverse ideas (i.e., knowledge diversity) rather than problem restructuring during the brainstorming stage. I further replicate the Goldilocks phenomenon with multisource-multiwave surveys among workers in the creative industries (N = 188). Overall, these findings provide timely insights to the broader public regarding the effective approach to working with AI tools, such as ChatGPT, in daily and professional life. This research emphasizes the importance of striking the right balance-not too little, not too much-when working with AI technologies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Shame, tonic immobility, and passive reactions to stressful events are phylogenetically conserved, obligatory, submissive defense reactions. Behavior, biology, genetics, evolutionary theories, and theories of humans as ultra-social animals are integrated to expand the understanding of these defense reactions in ways that are missing from current theories. In Study 1, 445 undergraduates selected the event that caused them the most shame, the event that produced their greatest inability to move or speak, and the stressful event that bothered them the most. Event-specific measures included the severity, centrality to identity, and effects of the event. In Study 2, 300 of these participants answered individual-differences measures. In Study 3, 350 Prolific workers rated the same events and the events that produced the most verbal disagreement and the most pride, control events that involved fewer phylogenetically conserved, obligatory, submissive defense reactions. The added events generally produced the lower effects as predicted. Preregistered predictions of a high degree of similarity among shame, tonic immobility, and reactions to stressful events were supported, including similar correlations among event-specific measures in each type of event, between the same event-specific measures across event types, and between event-specific and individual-differences measures. For factors involving shame, tonic immobility, and reactions to stressful events, this framework increases scientific understanding and offers support to individuals who are left to interpret their responses as signs of personal weaknesses. Such factors include sexual assault, genocide, war, race, religion, ethnicity, gender, addiction, poverty, and professional duties. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Allyship-or efforts to support marginalized groups to achieve social equity-can be an important tool for reducing inequity. However, public discourse regarding allyship has increasingly bemoaned performative or inauthentic allyship, highlighting that allies' authenticity (the subjective alignment between their internal beliefs and external states) is important for marginalized groups. How do potential allies view their own authenticity as an ally and with what consequences? We suggest that some individuals who may be potential allies, given their egalitarian values, may not act on said potential due to authenticity concerns; people first want to feel that allyship is consistent with their "true" self. We test whether affirming allies' felt authenticity as an ally may increase allyship by increasing their psychological standing (the subjective experience of legitimacy to perform an action). We test our hypotheses across eight studies (N = 5,515; two in supplement, five preregistered). First, in a pilot field study, we find that felt authenticity as an ally was associated with greater engagement in allyship after the murder of George Floyd (June 2020). Next, we present three experiments that find that increased feelings of authenticity as an ally lead to greater allyship engagement (intentions and behaviors). Finally, two more experiments show that allies' felt authenticity as an ally increases their allyship engagement via psychological standing, by increasing their perceptions of self-relevance and their belief that moral values drive their actions. We discuss implications for efforts to cultivate allies, introducing a simple intervention to affirm allies' authenticity and increase engagement. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Intergroup contact may be the best known tool for reducing prejudice and improving intergroup relations. Yet, challenges inherent to studying and applying it hold the field back from answering basic questions about it definitively and undermine its applied readiness. We propose that using social media to study intergroup contact may help push contact research forward to applied readiness and help us to better understand intergroup contact itself. To do so, we present three studies totaling 4,621 observations from 646 participants and drawing on observations of 193,225 social media users that develop and test a social media-based intergroup contact intervention to reduce prejudice. We found that intergroup contact on social media was associated with less prejudice and more positive intergroup behavior cross-sectionally and longitudinally, but we did not find that manipulating the racial demographics of accounts posting to participants' real Twitter feeds had a causal effect on their intergroup attitudes or behaviors. These results suggest that although social media contexts may be fertile ground for studying and applying intergroup contact, we do not yet have evidence for an effect that is causal in nature. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Visual working memory (VWM) performance fluctuates from moment to moment with occasional failures in maintaining accurate information in mind. While previous research suggests that individuals tend to be overconfident in their VWM performance during these failures, no study to date has examined whether individuals can predict upcoming reductions in VWM performance. To test the accuracy of both prospective and retrospective awareness on VWM performance, we developed a VWM bet task in which participants made trial-by-trial bets on their upcoming VWM performance prior to viewing a memory array of colored squares, followed by color reports paired with confidence ratings at test. Across two experiments (N = 87; N = 85), we demonstrate that retrospective awareness is more sensitive to VWM performance fluctuations than prospective awareness in young adults, though both metacognitive abilities are imperfect. Poor metacognitive abilities reflected a general tendency-particularly among low VWM capacity individuals-to overestimate upcoming VWM performance. When individuals overestimated their upcoming VWM performance (i.e., prospective failures), VWM performance significantly reduced compared to the preceding trials of a prospective failure. Moreover, this reduction in performance significantly lingered into subsequent trials. However, individuals' prospective and retrospective awareness better aligned to VWM performance after a prospective failure. This postfailure calibration occurred even without feedback signaling a prospective failure (Experiment 2), suggesting a metacognitive efficiency in recognizing the initial overestimation. Taken together, our results suggest that individuals, particularly low-capacity individuals, have a limited awareness toward upcoming VWM performance but exhibit metacognitive adjustments immediately following a prospective failure. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).