Psychological Science最新文献

Resource constraints in neural information processing imply that numerical discriminability optimally adapts to the frequency of numerical magnitudes in a decision maker's environment. Here, we tested the economic consequences of efficient numerical range adaptation in representative samples of the United Kingdom and Japan (N = 2,309) and in a replication in Austria and Hungary (N = 607). We exploited natural variation in currency units and combined it with an orthogonal variation in experimental currency units to detect the effect of habitual versus nonhabitual numerical ranges on the incidence of errors in decisions under risk. The results highlight the direct economic importance of numerical adaptation, thus calling into question standard assumptions that choice quantities are perceived without noise.

Languages tend to describe "who is doing what to whom" by placing subjects before objects. This may reflect a bias for agents in event cognition: Agents capture more attention than patients in human adults and infants. We investigated whether this agent preference is shared with nonhuman animals. We presented Guinea baboons (Papio papio; N = 13) with a change-detection paradigm on chasing animations. The baboons were trained to respond to a color change that was applied to either the chaser/agent or the chasee/patient. They were faster to detect a change to the chaser than to the chasee, which could not be explained by low-level features in our stimuli such as the chaser's motion pattern or position. An agent preference may be an evolutionarily old mechanism that is shared between humans and other primates that could have become externalized in language as a tendency to place the subject first.

Humans rely on more knowledgeable individuals to acquire information. But when we are ignorant, how are we to tell who is knowledgeable? We propose that human knowledge is nested: People who know only a few things tend to know very common pieces of information, whereas rare pieces of information are known only by people who know many things, including common things. This leads to the possibility of reliably inferring knowledgeability from minimal cues. In this study (N = 848 U.S. adults recruited online), we show that individuals can accurately gauge others' knowledgeability on the basis of very limited information, relying on their ability to estimate the rarity of different pieces of knowledge and on the fact that knowing a rare piece of information indicates a high likelihood of knowing more information in the same theme. Even participants who are largely ignorant of a theme can infer how knowledgeable other individuals are on the basis of the possession of a single piece of knowledge.

The gambler's fallacy is typically defined as the false belief that a random event is less likely to occur if it has occurred recently. Although forms of this fallacy have been documented numerous times, past work either has not actually measured probabilistic predictions but rather point predictions or used sequences that were not independent. To address these problems, we conducted a series of high-powered, preregistered studies in which we asked 750 adult Amazon Mechanical Turk workers from the United States to report probabilistic predictions for truly independent sequences. In contrast to point predictions, which generated a significant gambler's fallacy, probabilistic predictions were not found to lead to a gambler's fallacy. Moreover, the point predictions could not be reconstructed by sampling from the probability judgments. This suggests that the gambler's fallacy originates at the decision stage rather than in probabilistic reasoning, as posited by several leading theories. New theories of the gambler's fallacy may be needed to explain these findings.

Most people believe in human-caused climate change, yet this public consensus can be collectively underestimated (pluralistic ignorance). Across two studies using primary data (n = 3,653 adult participants; 11 countries) and secondary data (ns = 60,230 and 22,496 adult participants; 55 countries), we tested (a) the generalizability of pluralistic ignorance about climate-change beliefs, (b) the effects of a public-consensus intervention on climate action, and (c) the possibility that cultural tightness-looseness might serve as a country-level predictor of pluralistic ignorance. In Study 1, people across 11 countries underestimated the prevalence of proclimate views by at least 7.5% in Indonesia (90% credible interval, or CrI = [5.0, 10.1]), and up to 20.8% in Brazil (90% CrI = [18.2, 23.4]. Providing information about the actual public consensus on climate change was largely ineffective, except for a slight increase in willingness to express one's proclimate opinion, δ = 0.05 (90% CrI = [-0.02, 0.11]). In Study 2, pluralistic ignorance about willingness to contribute financially to fight climate change was slightly more pronounced in looser than tighter cultures, highlighting the particular need for pluralistic-ignorance research in these countries.

The current study examined bidirectional relationships between well-being and cognitive function using up to 10 annual assessments (M = 5.67, SD = 3.43) of different types of well-being and a comprehensive cognitive battery from a sample of older adults living in the Chicago metropolitan area (N = 1,702; mean age = 81.07 years, SD = 8.04; 75.1% White Americans, 23.9% Black Americans). Bivariate latent growth curve models indicated older adults who started out with better well-being also had better cognitive function, and sharper decreases in well-being were associated with sharper declines in cognitive function. Random-intercept cross-lagged panel models indicated older adults with better well-being on average had better cognitive function on average. Further, well-being change at one time point predicted subsequent cognitive change and vice versa. These findings were stronger for eudaimonic well-being and sense of purpose than for life satisfaction. Findings highlight the role of well-being in the goal to combat cognitive decline, as well as the importance of supporting well-being in individuals experiencing cognitive decline.

Certain emotion-regulation strategies (e.g., reappraisal) are associated with better well-being and are therefore seen as adaptive (health-promoting) strategies. However, it is unlikely that any strategy is adaptive regardless of context. Indeed, reappraisal is associated with positive outcomes in the context of uncontrollable life stress but negative outcomes in the context of controllable life stress. It follows that individuals who have better "strategy-situation fit" (use reappraisal more during uncontrollable vs. controllable situations) should have better well-being beyond their habitual reappraisal use. A previous test of this hypothesis found that strategy-situation fit in daily life was associated with greater well-being (N = 74). We conducted a well-powered preregistered direct replication of this study in 285 U.S. adults. We failed to replicate the original findings and found no evidence for the strategy-situation fit hypothesis, including when accounting for key confounders and moderators. We discuss implications for theory and future research.

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).