Journal of Experimental Psychology: General最新文献

Across six preregistered studies (N = 1,292; recruited from university subject pools and Prolific Academic), we investigate how face perception along the dimensions of gender/sex and race can vary based on immediate contextual information as well as personal experience. In Studies 1a and 1b, we find that when placing stimuli along a continuum from male to female, cisgender participants sort prototypical gender/sex faces in a bimodal fashion and show less consensus and greater error when placing faces of intermediate gender/sex. We replicate and extend these findings to race in Study 2. In Study 3, we test whether sorting patterns can be influenced by preexisting experiences, and find evidence that transgender/nonbinary participants show less error than cisgender heterosexual participants when sorting intermediary faces. Finally, in Studies 4 and 5, we test whether cisgender participants' judgments of intermediary faces along the continuum are influenced by the specific circumstances under which they are asked to sort. Here, we find that changing the sorting framework to include a third category resulted in less error when placing intermediary faces along the continuum than when participants were provided with only two category labels or two categories and a line at the midpoint, suggesting that new perceptual categories introduced with minimal training can be adopted quickly and successfully in a perceptual task. These data suggest that both long-term life experiences and quick experimental interventions can shape how we think about gender/sex and race. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

While the majority of Americans today endorse meritocracy as fair, we suggest that these perceptions can be shaped by whether or not people learn about the presence of socioeconomic advantages and disadvantages in others' lives. Across five studies (N = 3,318), we find that people are able to attach socioeconomic inequalities in applicants' backgrounds to their evaluation of the fairness of specific merit-based selection processes and outcomes. Learning that one applicant grew up advantaged-while the other grew up disadvantaged-leads both liberals and conservatives to believe that otherwise identical merit-based procedures and outcomes are significantly less fair. Importantly, learning about starting inequalities leads to greater support for policies that promote socioeconomic diversity in organizations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Any series of sensorimotor actions shows fluctuations in speed and accuracy from repetition to repetition, even when the sensory input and motor output requirements remain identical over time. Such fluctuations are particularly prominent in reaction time (RT) series from laboratory neurocognitive tasks. Despite their omnipresent nature, trial-to-trial fluctuations remain poorly understood. Here, we systematically analyzed RT series from various neurocognitive tasks, quantifying how much of the total trial-to-trial RT variance can be explained with general linear models (GLMs) by three sources of variability that are frequently investigated in behavioral and neuroscientific research: (1) experimental conditions, employed to induce systematic patterns in variability, (2) short-term temporal dependencies such as the autocorrelation between subsequent trials, and (3) long-term temporal trends over experimental blocks and sessions. Furthermore, we examined to what extent the explained variances by these sources are shared or unique. We analyzed 1913 unique RT series from 30 different cognitive control and perception-based tasks. On average, the three sources together explained ∼8%-17% of the total variance. The experimental conditions explained on average ∼2.5%-3.5% but did not share explained variance with temporal dependencies. Thus, the largest part of the trial-to-trial fluctuations in RT remained unexplained by these three sources. Unexplained fluctuations may take on nonlinear forms that are not picked up by GLMs. They may also be partially attributable to observable endogenous factors, such as fluctuations in brain activity and bodily states. Still, some extent of randomness may be a feature of the neurobiological system rather than just nuisance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The way that societies assign people to racial categories has far-reaching social, economic, and political consequences. One framework for establishing racial boundaries is based on ancestry, which historically has been leveraged to create rigid racial categories, particularly with respect to being categorized as White. A second framework is based on skin tone, which can vary within families and across the lifespan, and is thus more likely to blur racial boundaries. The persistence of these distinct cultural beliefs about race requires that they be transmitted to each new generation, but there have been few cross-cultural studies on their development during childhood. Participants (5- to 12-year-old children, N = 123) were from the United States, in which the ancestry model has been more prevalent, or from Brazil, in which the skin tone model has been more prevalent. In both countries, 5- to 7-year-olds endorsed the belief that skin tone determines race, for example, by assigning biological siblings with differing skin tones to different racial categories. However, racial concepts diverged among the 10- to 12-year-olds, with children from the United States shifting toward a classification based on ancestry and children in Brazil endorsing a classification based on skin tone even more strongly with age. These differing conceptions were especially evident with reference to White racial categorization: Older children from Brazil persisted in classifying lighter skinned people as White when they had African ancestry, unlike older children from the United States. These findings provide important insights into the developmental and cultural influences on racial classification systems. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The standard method for addressing the consequences of misinformation is the provision of a correction in which the misinformation is directly refuted. However, the impact of misinformation may also be successfully addressed by introducing or bolstering alternative beliefs with opposite evaluative implications. Six preregistered experiments clarified important processes influencing the impact of bypassing versus correcting misinformation via negation. First, we find that, following exposure to misinformation, bypassing generally changes people's attitudes and intentions more than correction in the form of a simple negation. Second, this relative advantage is not a function of the depth at which information is processed but rather the degree to which people form attitudes or beliefs when they receive the misinformation. When people form attitudes when they first receive the misinformation, bypassing has no advantage over corrections, likely owing to anchoring. In contrast, when individuals focus on the accuracy of the statements and form beliefs, bypassing is significantly more successful at changing their attitudes because these attitudes are constructed based on expectancy-value principles, while misinformation continues to influence attitudes after correction. Broader implications of this work are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

As social interactions increasingly move to digital platforms, communicators confront new factors that enhance or diminish virtual interactions. Texting abbreviations, for instance, are now pervasive in digital communication-but do they enhance or diminish interactions? The present study examines the influence of texting abbreviation usage on interpersonal perceptions. We explore how texting abbreviations affect perceived sender sincerity and the subsequent likelihood that recipients respond. Eight preregistered studies (N = 5,306) using mixed methods (e.g., surveys, field and lab experiments, and archival analysis of Tinder conversations) find that abbreviations make senders seem less sincere and recipients less likely to write back. These negative effects arise because abbreviations signal a lower level of effort from the sender. Communicator familiarity and text exchange length do not attenuate these effects, providing evidence for a robust phenomenon. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

In hybrid foraging, foragers search for multiple targets in multiple patches throughout the foraging session, mimicking a range of real-world scenarios. This research examines outcome uncertainty, the prevalence of different target types, and the reward value of targets in human hybrid foraging. Our empirical findings show a consistent tendency toward risk-averse behavior in hybrid foraging. That is, people display a preference for certainty and actively avoid taking risks. While altering the prevalence or reward value of the risky targets does influence people's aversion to risk, the overall effect of risk remains dominant. Additionally, simulation results suggest that the observed risk-averse strategy is suboptimal in the sense that it prevents foragers from maximizing their overall returns. These results underscore the crucial role of outcome uncertainty in shaping hybrid foraging behavior and shed light on potential theoretical developments bridging theories in decision making and hybrid foraging. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Uncertainty presents a key challenge when learning how best to act to attain a desired outcome. People can report uncertainty in the form of confidence judgments, but how such judgments contribute to learning and subsequent decisions remains unclear. In a series of three experiments employing an operant learning task, we tested the hypothesis that confidence plays a central role in learning by regulating resource allocation to the seeking and processing of feedback. We predicted that, as participants' confidence in their task knowledge grew, they would discount feedback when it was provided and be correspondingly less willing to pay for it when it was costly. Consistent with these predictions, we found that higher confidence was associated with reduced electrophysiological markers of feedback processing and decreased updating of beliefs following feedback receipt. Bayesian modeling suggests that this decrease in processing was due to a drop in the expected informative value of novel information when participants were highly confident. Thus, when choosing whether to pay a fee to receive further feedback, participants' subjective confidence, rather than the objective accuracy of their decisions, guided their choices. Overall, our results suggest that confidence regulates learning and subsequent decision making. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Social interactions can be uncomfortable. The current research focuses on a particularly uneasy interaction that individuals face with their friends and acquaintances: the need to request owed money back. Nine preregistered studies (N = 6,953) show that individuals' approach to resolving interpersonal debt varies based on their closeness with the requestee. Specifically, people prefer communication methods low in social richness (e.g., digital apps) when requesting money back from weak social connections such as distant acquaintances. However, they prefer communication methods high in social richness (e.g., in-person interactions) when requesting money back from strong social connections such as close friends. Process evidence reveals the psychological dynamics at play: (a) people anticipate discomfort when requesting money back from distant acquaintances in person, driving them away from in-person requests and toward digital apps, and (b) people are more averse to appearing impersonal with close friends, driving them away from digital apps and toward in-person requests. In sum, individuals adaptively approach uncomfortable financial interactions based on the relationship dynamics at hand. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Social media use is endemic among emerging adults, raising concerns that this trend may harm users. We tested whether reducing the quantity of social media use, relative to improving the way users engage with social media, benefits psychological well-being. Participants were 393 social media users (ages 17-29) in Canada, with elevated psychopathology symptoms, who perceived social media to negatively impact their life somewhat. They were randomized to either (a) assistance to engage with social media in a way to enhance connectedness (tutorial), (b) encouragement to abstain from social media (abstinence), or (c) no instructions to change behavior (control). Participants' social media behaviors were self-reported and tracked using phone screen time apps while well-being was self-reported, over four timepoints (6 weeks in total). Results suggested that the tutorial and abstinence groups, relative to control, reduced their quantity of social media use and the amount of social comparisons they made on social media, with abstinence being the most effective. Tutorial was the only condition to reduce participants' fear of missing out and loneliness, and abstinence was the only condition to reduce internalizing symptoms, relative to control. No condition differences emerged in eating pathology or the tendency to make social comparisons in an upward direction. Changes in social media behaviors mediated the effects of abstinence (but not of tutorial) on well-being outcomes. Participant engagement and perceptions of helpfulness were acceptable, but the abstinence group possibly perceived the content as less helpful. In conclusion, using social media differently and abstaining from social media may each benefit well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).