Psychological Science最新文献

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.

What are the risky choices people face in our complex and fast-changing world? This article reports on a series of population surveys in Switzerland (N = 4,380) that collected those risky choices that are relevant in people's everyday lives. Using this empirical basis, we developed an inventory consisting of 100 unique real-life choices to address open questions regarding the structure, life domains, and stability of the current ecology of risk. Moreover, a follow-up study (N = 933) indicated some degree of generalizability of the construct of risk preference to the newly identified real-life choices. The five key insights that emerged from our analyses may be useful for researchers studying decision-making under risk and uncertainty (e.g., what criteria to use when developing novel measurement instruments) and policymaking in applied settings (e.g., addressing how swiftly the risks of modern life change).

Recent research suggests that failure undermines learning: People learn less from failure (vs. success) because failure is ego-threatening and causes people to tune out. I argue that the core paradigm (the Script Task) provides a confounded test of that claim. When people do not learn from test feedback, they may give internally consistent answers on a subsequent test. The Script Task's scoring guidelines mark consistent answers as correct following success but incorrect following failure. As a result, differences in performance between conditions may result from equivalent learning combined with consistent responding when people do not learn. A descriptive mathematical model shows that lower performance alone is insufficient to conclude that people learn less. An experiment with U.S. Amazon Mechanical Turk workers demonstrates that a retroactive manipulation without feedback replicates the effect. Because the effect of failure on performance is confounded with consistency, the Script Task is not diagnostic regarding whether people learn less from failure unless consistency is ruled out.

To navigate complex physical environments, animals keep track of the spatial relations among objects using various reference frames, both body-based (e.g., left/right) and environment-based (e.g., east/west), but how these spatial representations interact remains unresolved. Whereas neuroscientific findings show habitual integration across reference frames, psycholinguistic accounts suggest humans use one reference frame at a time, as in speech. This article examines whether people spontaneously use two reference frames in the same action. When placing a single object in a two-dimensional array, adult participants (N = 110) routinely used an environment-based frame to determine the object's left-right position while using a body-based frame to determine its front-back position at the same time. Such hybrid responses were prevalent among both Indigenous Tsimane' and educated U.S. participants, suggesting that people across cultures habitually construct compound cognitive maps to represent the multidimensional spatial relations that compose natural settings.

Recognition memory refers to the process of distinguishing between previously experienced and novel events. Apart from the objective quality of stored memories, recognition depends on the retrieval context produced by all items (foils) presented together with actually memorized targets and causing confusion. Memory models often conceptualize target-foil confusability via distances in psychological spaces where greater confusability originates from shorter interitem distances. We tested whether recognition spaces change when other foils are added to the retrieval context or when target memory strength is changed (N = 1,311 adults). Using signal-detection modeling, we found that separately measured distances, d 's, from each foil to the target provide a good linear prediction of those distances for all foils being presented together against that target. Those predictions stay accurate even when the absolute distances are scaled up or down because of a change in memory strength. This suggests strong metric invariance of spaces used for recognition decisions under variable retrieval contexts.

Assortative mating-the tendency to choose partners similar to oneself-is a ubiquitous phenomenon in mate choice. Despite numerous proposed explanations, a parsimonious mechanism has been overlooked: When individuals choose mates on the basis of heritable traits and preferences, offspring inherit a trait and the corresponding preference from each parent, creating genetic correlations that link having a trait to preferring that same trait. We evaluated this mechanism with an agent-based model simulating 100 generations in which agents, with traits and preferences each uniquely determined by 40 loci, chose reproductive partners based on preferences. Genetic correlations formed between preferences and preferred traits, as well as between partner traits (i.e., assortative mating), demonstrating that heritable variation in preferences and preferred traits is sufficient to drive assortative mating. We presented a toy model here, so we cannot speak to the robustness of such genetic correlations or to the relative explanatory power of this mechanism over others.

Research on interpersonal relationships frequently relies on accurate self-reporting across various relationship facets (e.g., conflict, trust, appreciation). Yet shared method biases-which may greatly inflate associations between measures-are rarely accounted for during measurement validation or hypothesis testing. To examine how method biases can affect relationship research, we embarked on the ironic exploration of a new construct-Pseudo-comprised of irrelevant relationship evaluations (e.g., "My relationship has very good Saturn"). Pseudo was moderately associated with common relationship measures (e.g., satisfaction, commitment) and predicted those measures 3 weeks later. Results of a dyadic longitudinal study suggested that Pseudo taps into method biases, particularly sentiment override (i.e., people's tendency to project their global relationship sentiments onto every relationship evaluation). We conclude that psychometric standards must be sufficiently rigorous to distinguish genuine constructs and associations from methodological artifacts that can otherwise pose a serious validity threat.