Psychological Science最新文献

The prevailing view among scholars has been that the preference for strong leaders is an idiosyncratic feature of right-wing individuals. However, it is unclear whether this inference is accurate given that prior research has largely overlooked the role of ethnicity. We analyzed data from the United States and Western Europe (N = 34,443) and found that ethnic minorities (and right-wing individuals) preferred strong leaders to a greater extent than Whites (and left-wing individuals). Notably, ethnic minorities across diverse ethnic and political backgrounds were closer to right-wing Whites on strong-leader preference than to left-wing Whites. Our work also provides some evidence, using both measurement-of-mediation (Studies 1-4) and experimental mediation (preregistered Studies 5 and 6), that generalized trust helps explain group differences in strong-leader preference. In sum, our research illustrates the unique nature of left-wing Whites' leadership preferences, and highlights the importance of testing social science theories using diverse participant samples.

Four studies (N = 2,524 U.S.-based adults recruited from the University of California, Berkeley, or Amazon Mechanical Turk) provide support for doubling-back aversion, a reluctance to pursue more efficient means to a goal when they entail undoing progress already made. These effects emerged in diverse contexts, both as participants physically navigated a virtual-reality world and as they completed different performance tasks. Doubling back was decomposed into two components: the deletion of progress already made and the addition to the proportion of a task that was left to complete. Each contributed independently to doubling-back aversion. These effects were robustly explained by shifts in subjective construals of both one's past and future efforts that would result from doubling back, not by changes in perceptions of the relative length of different routes to an end state. Participants' aversion to feeling their past efforts were a waste encouraged them to pursue less efficient means. We end by discussing how doubling-back aversion is distinct from established phenomena (e.g., the sunk-cost fallacy).

Perceptual distraction distorts visual working memories. Recent research has shown divergent effects of distraction on memory performance, including attractive biases, impairment of memory precision, and an increase in the guess rate, indicating multiple mechanisms of distraction interference. Here we propose a novel signal-intrusion model based on the TCC (target-confusability-competition) framework to reconcile those discrepant results. We hypothesized that sensory interference is driven by the integration of a target signal and an intrusive distractor signal. Model comparisons showed that this TCC-intrusion model had a superior fit to memory error distributions across three delayed-estimation tasks with distraction (N = 220 adults) compared with other candidate models. According to the model, distractor intrusions decreased along with target-distractor dissimilarity, in accordance with the sensory-recruitment hypothesis. Moreover, TCC-intrusion successfully replicated divergent effects of distraction on memory bias, precision, and guess rate using this one intrusion mechanism. Together, these results suggest that perceptual distractors affect working memories through a unified mechanism of signal intrusion.

Influential campaigns in the United Kingdom and the United States have argued that same-language television subtitles may help children learn to read. In this study, we investigated the extent to which primary-school children pay attention to and read subtitles and whether this is related to their reading proficiency. We tracked the eye movements of 180 British children in Years 1 to 6 who watched videos with and without subtitles. Results showed that attention to subtitles was associated with reading proficiency: Superior readers were more likely to look at subtitles than less proficient readers and spent more time on them. When children looked at words in the subtitles, they showed evidence of reading them. We conclude that some degree of reading fluency may be necessary before children pay attention to subtitles. However, by the third or fourth year of reading instruction, most children read sufficiently quickly to follow same-language subtitles and potentially learn from them.

Awareness of past atrocities is widely seen as critical for restoring justice and building resilient democracies. Going beyond information provision, an increasing number of memorial sites, museums, and historical archives offer opportunities for public participation. Yet little empirical evidence exists on the impact of participation in the collective remembrance of past atrocities. Two experimental studies, a field-in-the-lab study with 552 university students in Germany and an online randomized control trial with 900 digital workers in Germany, showed that participating in a large-scale, digital-history project about Nazi persecution increased peoples' collective-action intentions for further commemoration activities and for activities that strengthen intergroup relations today. These effects persisted for 2 weeks. The findings suggest that digital-history projects can motivate collective action that is critical for symbolic justice and positive intergroup relations, thus contributing to well-functioning, pluralistic democracies.

Gaze following in infancy allows triadic social interactions and a comprehension of other individuals and their surroundings. Despite its importance for early development, its ontology is debated, with theories suggesting that gaze following is either a universal core capacity or an experience-dependent learned behavior. A critical test of these theories among 809 nine-month-olds from Africa (Uganda and Zimbabwe), Europe (Sweden), and Asia (Bhutan) demonstrated that infants follow gaze to a similar degree regardless of environmental factors such as culture, maternal well-being (postpartum depression, well-being), or traumatic family events (related to war and/or climate change). These findings suggest that gaze following may be a universal, experience-expectant process that is resilient to adversity and similar across a wide range of human experiences-a core foundation for social development.

Knowing the similarities among others is critical for navigating our social environments and building relationships. However, people can evaluate the similarity among others using two perspectives: other-to-other differences (allocentric similarity) or self-to-other differences (egocentric similarity). Here, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test whether the similarity of brain-response patterns when thinking of others and the self is predicted by behavioral models of allocentric and egocentric similarity in the representations of acquainted peers from 20 independent groups of adults (total N = 108; within-subjects design). Results show that both allocentric and egocentric similarity during person representation are reflected in brain-response similarity patterns when thinking of others, but they do so differentially and in nonoverlapping brain systems. These results suggest that the brain independently processes both allocentric and egocentric reference frames to encode trait information about conspecifics that we use to represent person knowledge about others within real-world social networks.

How do people remember when something occurred? One obvious possibility is that, in the absence of explicit cues, people remember on the basis of memory strength. If a memory is fuzzy, it likely occurred longer ago than a memory that is vivid. Here, we demonstrate a robust illusion of time that stands in stark contrast with this prediction. In six experiments testing adults via an online research platform, we show that experiences that are repeated (and, consequently, better remembered) are counterintuitively remembered as having initially occurred further back in time. This illusion is robust (amounting to as much as a 25% distortion in perceived time), consistent (exhibited by the vast majority of participants tested), and applicable at the scale of ordinary day-to-day experience (occurring even when tested over one full week). We argue that this may be one of the key mechanisms underlying why people's sense of time often deviates from reality.

In face-to-face conversation, people use speech and gesture to convey meaning. Seeing gestures alongside speech facilitates comprehenders' language processing, but crucially, the mechanisms underlying this facilitation remain unclear. We investigated whether comprehenders use the semantic information in gestures, typically preceding related speech, to predict upcoming meaning. Dutch adults listened to questions asked by a virtual avatar. Questions were accompanied by an iconic gesture (e.g., typing) or meaningless control movement (e.g., arm scratch) followed by a short pause and target word (e.g., "type"). A Cloze experiment showed that gestures improved explicit predictions of upcoming target words. Moreover, an EEG experiment showed that gestures reduced alpha and beta power during the pause, indicating anticipation, and reduced N400 amplitudes, demonstrating facilitated semantic processing. Thus, comprehenders use iconic gestures to predict upcoming meaning. Theories of linguistic prediction should incorporate communicative bodily signals as predictive cues to capture how language is processed in face-to-face interaction.

Recently, it has been demonstrated that taking a disagreeing perspective increases the accuracy of inner crowds by enhancing estimation diversity. An insightful commentary reanalyzed the data using maximal random structure models and found no increase in accuracy when taking a disagreeing perspective. These findings present a curious challenge for inner-crowd research and hint at the importance of question variability. Here, we present the results of three preregistered experiments (total N = 2,884, with online adult participants from the United States and the United Kingdom) that reconcile these findings by discerning between the ease and difficulty of questions. The results support the notion that taking a disagreeing perspective is beneficial for difficult questions, yet harmful for easier questions. We emphasize that question difficulty is a key factor to consider when evaluating the effectiveness of any intervention designed to improve the accuracy of aggregate estimates through the enhancement of diversity.