Psychological Science最新文献

People overaccept information that supports their identity and underaccept information that opposes their identity-a phenomenon known as partisan bias. Although partisan-bias effects in judgments of misinformation are robust and pervasive, there is ongoing debate about whether partisan-bias effects arise from identity-protective motivated reasoning or differential knowledge of identity-congenial versus identity-uncongenial information. Prior empirical work has been unable to differentiate the two accounts because of a reliance on groups with pre-existing differences in knowledge (e.g., Democrats and Republicans). The current research addresses this issue by using randomly assigned rather than pre-existing identities. Across two experiments (N_total = 1,411), adult U.S. Prolific workers showed lower thresholds for accepting information that is congenial versus uncongenial to a randomly assigned identity, despite having no differences in prior knowledge. These results support theories that emphasize identity protection as a factor underlying partisan bias in the acceptance of misinformation, with important practical implications for misinformation interventions.

An inherent feature of any choice is the set size from which that choice is made (i.e., the number of available options in a choice set). Choice set size impacts the likelihood of landing on a more preferred option: Larger sets are more likely to contain an option matching one's preferences. Nevertheless, in six preregistered experiments with 10,092 U.S. adults, we demonstrated that people consistently underestimated the effect of set size when predicting others' liking for a chosen option. We propose this effect arises because, although people recognize that set size predicts liking of a chosen option, they typically fail to attend to it when considering others' choices. Accordingly, this effect was attenuated when attention was drawn to set size, specifically (a) when participants considered multiple set sizes simultaneously, (b) when the decision process was framed as ranking rather than choosing, or (c) when participants were prompted to recall set size before predicting others' preferences.

Americans readily identify with class labels, such as working class and middle class. In turn, these identities affect their social affiliations, cultural values, and physical health. Despite theoretical predictions that class identity can change, little work has empirically examined the long-term malleability of class identity. Here we ask, can class identity change in the long term? And if so, when? We tested this question by examining whether the 2008 Great Recession changed how Americans viewed their social and economic standing in society-that is, their class identity. In three of four data sets (total N = 164,296), we found that the 2008 Great Recession shifted Americans toward identifying as a lower class. We discuss the implications of these results for theories of the formation of class identity and for the political and social development of the United States following 2008.

Context drives our interpretations of music as surprising, frightening, or awe-inspiring. However, it remains unclear how formal musical training affects our ability to hierarchically integrate complex tonal information to efficiently predict, remember, and segment music. We scrambled naturalistic music at multiple timescales to manipulate coherent tonal context while controlling for multiple acoustic cues. Memory (Experiment 1; n = 108, age range = 19-41 years) and prediction (Experiment 2; n = 108, age range = 20-41 years) improved with more intact context for both musicians and nonmusicians. Listeners' event boundaries were influenced by the amount of tonal context but also reflected nested phrase structure, and musicians were more sensitive to longer-timescale "hyperphrase" structure (Experiment 3; n = 95, age range = 20-42 years) and could better identify the amount of scrambling (Experiment 4; n = 108, age range = 19-41 years). These results indicate that listeners integrate tonal context across complex phrases to efficiently encode, predict, and segment naturalistic music and that in general, training has surprisingly little impact on this integration.

Childhood language interventions appear promising for improving children's lives and yielding economic returns. However, few studies have evaluated long-term effects of these interventions. Our study did this using a large, cluster-randomized trial of a preschool intervention for Norwegian children aged 4 to 5 years whose vocabulary was more limited than that of their peers. Results showed that effects on expressive language were maintained at the 7-month follow-up when the children were in first grade and that those with the weakest language skills initially had the largest and most persistent effects. However, 4 years after the intervention, the differences between the intervention and control groups were negligible. Thus, although effects from the preschool language intervention lasted into the first year of elementary school, effects eventually faded and were completely absent in fourth grade. Our findings suggest the need for a sustained approach to language and literacy support, focusing on persistent interventions and high-quality adapted instruction.

Across five studies and one supplementary study (five preregistered; N = 3,215 adults), we found that men, more than women, avoided shared experiences (e.g., going to the movies, sharing food) with individuals of the same gender. Furthermore, persistent societal expectations that men should be unambiguously heterosexual underpinned this pattern: Men felt more apprehensive about signaling same-gender romance in platonic relationships than women did. In turn, romantic prototypicality drove the pattern of men (more than women) avoiding shared activities, above and beyond differences in how hedonic, enjoyable, and feminine the activities were; our findings further suggested that men's reluctance to share these experiences was due to pressure to conform to societal expectations rather than solely a personal preference. This research offers insight into how, despite evolving societal attitudes, heterosexual norms can lead men to make suboptimal consumption decisions and to forgo opportunities to connect with other men, ultimately perpetuating a stigma against intimacy between men.

Can nonnative English accents become barriers to garnering attention in public discourse? The current study examined this question. Analyzing 5,367 TED Talks through computational methodologies such as voice recognition, natural language processing, and vision models, we investigated the relationship between speakers' accents and online engagement. After adjusting for various control variables with a series of robustness checks, we found a sizeable disparity in public discourse: Speakers with nonnative accents received less engagement than speakers with native accents. To complement our findings, we conducted a controlled social-psychological experiment among English-speaking American adults (N = 462) and a direct replication (N = 916) that corroborated our computational analyses and highlighted stereotyping and processing disfluency as key factors driving reduced engagement in accented speakers. Our research highlights the pervasive impact of accent discrimination in global communication and emphasizes the need for strategies to mitigate its detrimental effects on knowledge exchange across cultural and linguistic boundaries.

A fundamental underlying question about the nature of overconfidence has continued to be subject to scholarly dispute: Is overconfidence a genuine psychological trait? To advance this contested research topic, we engaged in an adversarial collaboration in which two research teams agreed upon a set of critical tests and preregistered their analyses and predictions prior to data collection. Our study (N = 942; U.S. adults from CloudConnect) leverages a methodological innovation: To measure trait overconfidence absent task-related confounds, we developed a set of novel tasks in which performance is ostensibly random. When we assess confidence this way, we find robust relationships across tasks as measured by both confirmatory factor analyses and raw correlations. This indicates that some people do believe that they are able to perform relatively well on tasks even when there is little reason for that confidence. Our results support the claim that overconfidence might be a trait.

To navigate the world, our minds must represent not only how things are now (perception) but also how they are about to be (prediction). However, perception and prediction blur together for objects in motion, a classic finding known as "representational momentum." If you glance at a photo of a person diving into a lake, you will tend to remember them closer to the water than they really were. In seven experiments (with adult participants from the United States) we show that this phenomenon transcends motion: Our minds make predictions that distort our memories about changes that involve no motion whatsoever, including changes in brightness, color saturation, and proportion. Additionally, we use representational momentum to map the limits of automatic prediction, showing that there are no analogous effects for changes in hue. Our automatic predictions distort our memories in many domains-not just motion-and the presence or absence of these distortions expose the inner workings of perception, cognition, and memory.

In Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach (2019), failure stymies learning: People learn less from failure than success. The commentary proposes that the failure to learn from failure could be due to a tendency to respond consistently. Although a consistent response pattern explains why people struggle to learn from failure in some paradigms, we argue that it does not explain the results of the original paradigm. Certain consistency mechanisms require that people assume they should be consistent with their initial intuition instead of updating as they learn new information. This assumption does not apply to the original paradigm. We discuss how the commentary helps sharpen the criteria for assessing learning from failure and the role of consistency as one potential barrier to learning.