Journal of Experimental Psychology-Applied最新文献

We used an immersive shooting simulator to examine how race, suspect behavior, and policing scenario shape officers' deadly force decisions. Officers (N = 659) from the Milwaukee Police Department responded to dynamic video scenarios using realistic handgun responses. Mistaken shootings of unarmed Black suspects were more likely than of White suspects, but only when the suspects behaved nonantagonistically. Cognitive modeling showed this race effect arose not from an initial bias to shoot but from differences in evidence accumulation once the object was visible. Scenario and suspect behavior had the largest overall influence, shaping decisions by altering initial proclivity to shoot. Further analysis suggested that suspect behavior within specific scenarios may partially explain observed race effects. These findings provide a process-level account of deadly force decisions, integrating real-world complexity with psychological theory, and offer a framework for improving research and training around police use-of-force. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Trigger warnings and safe space notifications are common in higher education. Although researchers have evaluated these practices as mental health tools, little attention has been paid to the interpersonal signals they send. In this experiment conducted in fall 2024, we examined how trigger warnings and safe space notifications shape students' perceptions of instructors and the classroom environment. We randomly assigned 738 American undergraduate students to view videos of instructors delivering a brief lecture on trauma, preceded by the instructor providing a trigger warning, a safe space notification, both, or neither. Participants rated the instructor's epistemic trustworthiness, concern for student well-being, political orientation, and Left-Wing Authoritarianism scale, as well as their own feelings of psychological safety and willingness to discuss controversial topics in the classroom. Analyses using Bayes Factors provided substantial evidence that trigger warnings had no overall impact on students' perceptions. In contrast, safe space notifications increased students' feelings of psychological safety and willingness to discuss controversial topics. Safe spaces also increased perceptions of instructors as caring and trustworthy but signaled that instructors were liberal and left-wing authoritarian, including the subscale measuring support for top-down censorship. Implications for the use of trigger warnings and safe spaces in educational contexts are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Managing limited natural resources is an important sustainability challenge, requiring efficient conflict resolution among parties in a dynamically changing environment. To address these challenges, humans have developed sequential negotiations-adaptive joint decision-making processes enabling efficient, forward-looking agreements that consider all parties' priorities and the changing value of resources over time. Across three incentivized, face-to-face negotiation experiments (N = 330), we systematically investigate when and why negotiation dyads succeed or fail in reaching efficient agreements in sequential allocation negotiations, thereby leveraging the changing value of resources. Because trust may be an important psychological factor in reaching efficient agreements in such sequential negotiations, we manipulated trust levels (high vs. low) between negotiating pairs and progressively increased its relevance across experiments. Across both distribution (Experiments 1 and 2) and contribution negotiations (Experiment 3) and regardless of trust, dyads consistently prioritized resolving immediate conflicts of interest during the initial negotiation, failing to leverage changes in resource values and limiting their ability to reach efficient agreements over time. Integrating elements from environmental, social, and negotiation psychology, this research highlights challenges in sequential negotiations with dynamic resource values and provides a basis for evidence-based interventions to enhance agreement efficiency. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Over several weeks, 125 young adolescents engaged deeply with the topic of climate change in a discourse-based program designed to build argumentation skills. We put to a test the hypothesis that information on this complex and critical topic is best acquired and made use of in argument if acquiring it is experienced as having purpose and able to fulfill a role in argument. Activities in an experimental condition followed the program's practice of making available topic-related information in the form of brief questions and answers on an as-requested basis. Offered to them as a potential resource in peer dialogs on the topic, throughout the activity participants selected questions they wished answers to, and these were provided. Students in a comparison condition followed the traditional classroom practice of being assigned to read an introductory text as background information on the topic. It contained information identical to that in the questions and answer cards experimental group participants chose to access. Under both conditions, all information remained available once accessed. Both groups benefited in knowledge gain, as well as skill development in coordinating evidence with claims in final essays. However, the experimental group showed greater knowledge as well as skill gain, and a difference we suggest is attributable to the knowledge gained having an anticipated purpose making them more likely to make use of it. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Understanding speech in noisy environments is often challenging but is easier if we are listening to someone familiar-for example, naturally familiar people (e.g., friends, partners) or voices that have been familiarized artificially in the lab. Thus, familiarizing people with voices they regularly encounter (e.g., new friends and colleagues) could improve speech intelligibility in everyday life, which might be particularly useful for people who struggle to comprehend speech in noisy environments, such as older adults. Yet, we do not currently understand whether computer-based voice familiarization is effective when delivered remotely, outside of a lab setting, and whether it is effective for older adults. Here, in an online computer-based study, we examined whether learned voices are more intelligible than unfamiliar voices in 20 older (55-73 years) and 20 younger (18-34 years) adults. Overall, older and younger participants benefited from training, and the magnitude of the intelligibility benefit (approximately 10% improvement in sentence report when the target-to-masker ratio was -6 dB) was similar between groups. These findings demonstrate that older adults can learn new voices as effectively as younger participants for improving speech intelligibility, even given a relatively short (< 1 hr) duration of familiarization that is delivered in the comfort of their own homes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

This research examines biases in judgments about currency exchange rates and presents two types of biases that are caused by ignorance of the nonlinearity between the exchange rate and the amount of base currency. First, the average exchange rate of multiple exchange transactions is overestimated. Second, the impact of a change in one currency's value on the counterpart currency is underestimated, when the change is a decrease but overestimated when the change is an increase. This research also demonstrates that these biases lead individuals to make suboptimal decisions, causing economic losses. Furthermore, this research examines the role of how exchange rate information is presented in reducing bias. Specifically, overestimation of the average exchange rate can be reduced by presenting the exchange rate in terms of the base currency instead of the quote currency. Bias in the judgment of the impact of exchange rate changes diminishes, when the focal currency to be judged is presented as the quote currency of the exchange rate. Last, this research shows that biases in currency exchange rates differ from biases in other types of ratios (e.g., velocity or fuel efficiency) because of the difference in the degree of fungibility. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Diagnostic aids can assist human operators in everyday and high-stakes decision tasks, but performance typically falls short of best possible levels, reflecting a tendency toward disuse. To mitigate disuse, it is important to understand how task context influences aid dependence. The present study tested the prediction that aid use will become less efficient either as the aid becomes more reliable or the decision maker's task becomes more difficult. Participants (N = 127; data collected in 2023) performed a signal detection task with and without support from a diagnostic aid, where task difficulty and aid reliability varied between subjects. Analyses compared observed levels of aided performance with the predictions of an optimal strategy. Aided performance was consistently suboptimal but fell furthest from optimal when the aid was most reliable and when the task was most difficult. Costs of disuse to decision accuracy were substantial. Findings replicate and extend earlier patterns of suboptimal use, indicating that a mechanism of disuse is a failure to increase aid dependence appropriately in response to increases in aid quality or task demand. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

The strategy of presenting students with questions that they mostly cannot answer before they read a text has been shown to improve learning and it is known as prequestions. This prequestion effect has been attributed to focusing of attention as well as to additional benefits of answering attempts. However, in most studies, the control group just reads the text, which limits both theoretical and practical implications. In two preregistered experiments conducted between 2022 and 2024, we included learning objectives as an additional educationally relevant control condition that, like prequestions, should help focus learners' attention, but unlike prequestions, not prompt answering attempts. Participants were presented with open-ended questions or with learning objectives before reading a textbook excerpt or just read the text. In the final test, they answered multiple-choice questions related to the prequestions or learning objectives (old questions) as well as new questions. Bayesian evidence indicates small to medium-sized effects in favor of prequestions compared with reading only and reading with learning objectives in both experiments. Significant differences in frequentist testing were obtained in Experiment 2 and in a joint analysis of both experiments. Overall, the findings indicate that there is indeed a benefit of prequestions over and above focusing of attention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

When an eyewitness is presented with multiple lineups, each containing the same suspect but entirely new fillers, this increases the risk that an eyewitness will identify the suspect-whether that suspect is innocent or guilty (called the repeated-suspect effect). There are several mechanisms that can lead to repeated-suspect effects, some based in memory processes and others based in social influence processes. Across two in-person experiments, we examined conditions that might exacerbate the repeated-suspect effect. In Experiment 1 (N = 316, collected in 2019), we showed that a previous lineup that is biased toward the innocent suspect exacerbates the repeated-suspect effect but found no evidence that participants' memory for the true culprit was affected. In Experiment 2 (N = 303, collected in 2020), additional intervening lineups increased the risk to innocent suspects. Experiment 2 also highlighted the role of social influence in eyewitness errors. We found that the physical presence of the experimenter during the task influenced their choice to identify the repeated person, especially after a biased lineup. Thus, we show evidence for the role of memory and social influence mechanisms in repeated-suspect effects as well as dramatic increases in the risk to innocent suspects when intervening lineup procedures make the suspect more salient to the viewer. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

As a global community, humankind stands before a monumental challenge: to change our behavioral habits toward a more sustainable way of life. There are multiple paths toward that challenge, one of which is motivating citizens to engage in more pro-environmental behavior in everyday life. In this series of experiments (N = 521 participants), we pioneer a new paradigm that simulates everyday decision making via narrative-interactive choice elements to evaluate motivating strategies with a specific focus on sense of agency (SoA), that is, perceived control. To this end, we first characterize different individual motivators in fostering pro-environmental behavior. Further, in an experimental approach, we implement prompt variants into the narrative-interactive choice elements paradigm (color coding of choices vs. information on choice consequences) aligned with different aspects of SoA formation to test how SoA might facilitate pro-environmental decisions. Our results demonstrate that increased SoA is associated with pro-environmental behavior and showcase how prompt variants during decision making may affect pro-environmental behavior. Moreover, our results demonstrate a strong association of the participants' attitude toward environmental protection with SoA and pro-environmental behavior. SoA has been identified as a crucial aspect of action motivation; the present study provides compelling evidence that optimizing SoA may provide a much-needed strategy in fostering sustainability behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).