Applied Cognitive Psychology最新文献

Previous studies have found a positive link between endorsement of paranormal beliefs and experiencing more “meaningful” coincidences (e.g., thinking of someone and then meeting them unexpectedly) and a stronger repetition avoidance bias. We tested if these effects also apply to pseudoscientific beliefs. Volunteers completed a pseudoscience endorsement scale, reported the frequency and explanations for experienced coincidences, and performed random sequence generation tasks. Higher pseudoscience endorsement was associated with more frequent meaningful coincidences and attributing them to non-chance causes. Believers also avoided consecutive repetitions more often when replicating the tossing of a coin. A regression model suggested that a lower threshold for causally connecting events and a biased representation of randomness independently contribute to pseudoscience endorsement. Our results pave the way for the development of interventions aimed at reducing pseudoscientific beliefs based on improving the interpretation of coincidences and the representation of randomness.

Whether people evaluate a claim as true or false can depend on comparative framing effects. This study examined the influence of comparative language framing (more than vs. less than) and consistency with prior beliefs on engagement with health-related news. Participants (N = 730) first reported their prior beliefs regarding two health-related statements. They then saw two logically equivalent headlines framed as “more than” or “less than” and chose which of them they would they want to read. Results revealed that on average participants wanted to engage more with headlines framed as “more” and were also more likely to engage with headlines that corresponded to their prior beliefs, as predicted by confirmation bias. Our results extend the existing literature to show that comparative language framing can influence behavioral choices. The health news context of the study allows for potentially direct application to real-world scenarios such as the wording in public health campaigns.

Jurors consider eyewitness confidence to judge eyewitness reliability but verbal confidence (as obtained in practice) is inconsistently interpreted and there is no consensus about the extent to which confidence postdicts accuracy in real-world circumstances. Given these caveats, jurors could receive warnings about the confidence-accuracy (CA) relationship and verbal confidence judgments. We tested the extent to which instructional warnings influence mock jurors' perceptions of eyewitness credibility and defendant guilt. Participants read a vignette about an eyewitness's identification decision on three lineups followed by a verbal confidence statement (low, medium, high) after each decision. Prior to rating credibility and likelihood of guilt, participants received either a nonspecific warning, a warning about the CA relationship, or a warning about the CA relationship and variability in interpretations of verbal confidence. Results suggest warnings did not influence jurors' perceptions. Moreover, jurors did not distinguish between low and medium levels of verbal eyewitness confidence.

The link between working memory and academic achievement has been demonstrated across many research studies, with children who have lower working memory capacity typically also having lower levels of achievement in both literacy and numeracy. However, much of this research has been conducted in Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) populations. The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between accuracy and confidence in working memory performance and academic achievement in a sample of 115 Thai school children. We demonstrated that Thai students performed as expected on a working memory assessment, with accuracy and confidence scores decreasing significantly with increased working memory load and both accuracy and confidence predicting academic achievement in the areas of numeracy and literacy. The present results represent the first direct demonstration of the link between working memory confidence and accuracy ratings and academic achievement in Thai students of primary school age.

Mind wandering, where attention drifts from the here-and-now to internal thoughts, is often linked to decreased educational performance. However, its impact on children remains largely unexplored. This study introduces and evaluates a method for measuring mind wandering in classroom environments. A sample of 126 8–9-year-olds participated in a listening activity where they periodically categorized their thoughts before completing immediate and delayed memory tests. Children reported being off-task in 45% of responses, 22% of which were mind wandering and 23% of which were thoughts about distractions. Our findings reveal that classroom mind wandering is common and can adversely affect immediate memory recall. The long-term implications of mind wandering in childhood are still uncertain, highlighting the need for further research. The results demonstrate the feasibility of assessing off-task thought in the classroom using thought probes that differentiate between distractions and mind wandering, which have distinct causes and may require tailored responses.

We examined the familiarity and popularity of epistemically suspect COVID-19 claims and their associations with cognitive, social, and demographic factors in a sample of people living in Finland (N = 1077) during the pandemic (September 2021–January 2022). Endorsement of these claims was associated with pseudoscientific beliefs, less actively open-minded thinking, and preference for anecdotal information. Among social factors, lower trust in governmental institutions, science, and scientists, and reliance on alternative media were linked to higher endorsement. Regarding demographic variables, higher education was associated with lower endorsement, though this effect was fully mediated by cognitive and social factors. Men endorsed epistemically suspect COVID-19 claims more than women, and endorsement decreased with age. These findings highlight the importance of education in fostering critical thinking skills and trust in institutions and science to effectively combat health-related misinformation.

In this study, we combined the perspectives of psychology and political science to study partisan conspiracy beliefs and to examine the predictors of belief in both true and false nonpartisan conspiracies. From political science, we explored the recently investigated variable of antiestablishment attitudes as well as two political attitudes unexplored in research on conspiratorial thinking: utopianism and government credulity. From psychology, we examined variables that have been consistent predictors in previous research on conspiracy belief: actively open-minded thinking, paranormal beliefs, and the Dark Triad. Actively open-minded thinking was a potent predictor of adaptive epistemic outcomes. We also included a scale derived and adapted from previous work on conspiratorial mentality that was designed to measure the broad-based conspiratorial thinking trait that we posit underlies most specific conspiracy beliefs: the Hidden Causal Forces scale. We found that the path model that best explained the observed correlations depends strongly on whether the conspiracy is partisan or nonpartisan and, in the case of nonpartisan conspiracies, whether the model seeks to explain implausible false conspiracy beliefs, true conspiracy beliefs, or the ability to discriminate between true and false conspiracies.