British journal of psychology最新文献

This study examines the cyclical relationship between social norms, personal costs of action and pro-environmental behaviour, using a novel dynamic path model to analyse temporal and feedback effects. Recognizing that environmental action often involves a trade-off between individual costs and social expectations, we explore how perceptions of social norms influence environmental decisions and, conversely, how individual behaviours shape norm perceptions. We investigate the roles of social norm misperceptions, where individuals misjudge the environmental commitment of peers, and normative feedback, designed to correct these misestimations, in motivating or demotivating sustainable behaviours. Through a controlled experimental design involving sequential tasks and feedback interventions, we capture how normative feedback impacts pro-environmental choices over time. Results indicate that, when normative feedback reduces the perception of social isolation around sustainable actions, pro-environmental behaviour is sustained, albeit contingent on environmental attitudes. These findings advance our understanding of normative interventions and the complex dynamics underlying environmental decision-making.

Individuals with attachment insecurities, particularly attachment anxiety, often report subjective working memory deficits (SWMD). However, the psychological mechanisms underlying this relationship remain poorly understood. In this project, we propose that borderline personality disorder (BPD) features help explain this link. We tested this model across three studies, including one preregistered study, conducted with Russian, Turkish, and Polish samples. In Study 1, both attachment anxiety and avoidance predicted SWMD, with the former effect being stronger than the latter. The indirect effects of attachment anxiety and avoidance on SWMD via BPD were significant, with the former effect being stronger as the latter. Study 2 introduced gaze anxiety as an additional mediator, revealing that attachment avoidance had stronger indirect effects via gaze anxiety, a potential pre-emptive strategy, while attachment anxiety's effect was stronger via BPD, a potential post-emptive pathway. In preregistered Study 3, reflective functioning mediated the associations between attachment insecurities and SWMD, contrary to our moderation hypothesis. Importantly, relationships between attachment anxiety and SWMD remained robust after controlling for personality traits and personality disorders. Results are consistent with the role of different regulatory strategies in explaining how attachment insecurities contribute to subjective cognitive difficulties.

While irrational beliefs cluster together, their content differs widely, from beliefs about collective memories shaping biological properties (pseudoscientific) to those about premonition (extrasensory). This difference might extend further-they might reflect a similar information processing style but be differently embedded in worldviews; for example, pseudoscientific beliefs are typically endorsed by conservatives. Across three studies (two preregistered) in two post-conflict countries (total N = 1042), followed by an internal meta-analysis, we investigated whether pseudoscientific and extrasensory perception beliefs (1) are related to a less analytical but more intuitive thinking style, prone to contradictions and fatalistic thinking, but (2) are differentially linked to a conservative, authoritarian and ethnocentric worldview, and (3) are differentially related to past use of non-evidence-based practices, extrasensory perception experiences and civic activism. As expected, both beliefs were similarly predicted by information processing style. However, they were also similarly predicted by authoritarian and, to a lesser extent, ethnocentric views. Moreover, both beliefs were tied to similar behavioural patterns. We argue that the relationship among a conservative worldview, irrational beliefs and socially relevant behaviours is important for understanding how public policies get politicized.

Parenting styles are widely recognized as influencing academic achievement; however, the mechanisms underlying this relationship remain inadequately understood. Drawing on the dynamic systems theory and the family systems theory, the present study recruited 481 children (222 boys, Mage = 9.90 ± 0.69 years old) to investigate the longitudinal associations between positive/negative parenting styles and academic achievement and to further explore how learning anxiety and learning engagement may mediate these relationships. Results indicated that (1) negative parenting, but not positive parenting, had a negative direct effect on academic achievement; (2) both positive and negative parenting predicted higher academic achievement through increased learning engagement, but not through learning anxiety; and (3) learning anxiety and learning engagement acted as sequential mediators in the link between positive parenting styles and academic achievement. Overall, these findings highlight how parenting approaches shape children's learning and academic results by influencing their emotional and motivational characteristics from a developmental perspective.

With the advances in AI technology, comparison studies between humans and AI can not only enhance our understanding of information processing mechanisms underlying human cognition but also facilitate our understanding of AI systems' behaviour and interactions with humans. In particular, explainable AI (XAI) methods, including both computational and experimental methods, can be used to reveal the mechanisms underlying AI's behaviour and its interactions with humans. This information can be used (1) as computational models to study human behaviour, (2) for updating users' beliefs about AI during the interactions, and (3) for evaluation purposes to examine potential ethical issues associated with AI adoption. Different AI systems may require different XAI methods to accurately reveal their underlying mechanisms to facilitate the comparisons with humans. Thus, an important future research direction is to develop task-specific XAI methods through interdisciplinary approaches across psychology and AI to benefit both psychological research and the development of ethical AI.

When competing for resources, people appear particularly sensitive to social cues of threat, tending to submissively cede resources to more (vs. less) threatening-looking others. This tendency appears especially pronounced among those that are physically weaker and thus more vulnerable to harm. One phase of adult life during which humans are particularly vulnerable is the perinatal period, the months leading up to and immediately after parturition (giving birth). Previous evidence and models of parental care and motivation suggest that individuals would be especially sensitive to threats during this phase. Accordingly, here we tested for the first time the preregistered prediction that perinatal (vs. non-perinatal) women would submissively cede more to threatening-looking others when competing over resources. Contrary to these predictions, results showed that women in this phase (n = 86, tested at ~29 weeks gestation and 1-month postpartum) were less sensitive to social threat than were non-perinatal women (n = 53), dominantly protecting rather than submissively ceding resources against threatening-looking male strangers. These findings suggest that pregnancy may affect social and economic decision-making by reducing (rather than increasing) submissiveness to threat, consistent with a 'maternal aggression' response documented in many non-human mammals.

When people see another person's face, they can quickly infer traits and make social evaluations from them, a process known as social perception of faces. Previous studies have investigated the effects of emotion on social evaluations but have mainly focused on single expressions. The present study examined how intra-individual emotional variability across multiple faces affects judgements of warmth and competence. In Experiment 1, mixed-valence sets containing both happy and angry faces were used, and emotional variability was manipulated by varying the emotional distance of faces. Results showed that the positive warmth and competence words were perceived as more appropriate to describe faces with low variability compared with high variability (Exp1a). This low-variability advantage persisted after controlling for extreme expressions and generalized to additional warm and competent traits (Exp1b). Experiments 2a and 2b tested the variability effects across happy-only, angry-only, and mixed-valence sets. Positive sets received the highest ratings, mixed-valence sets intermediate, and negative sets the lowest on both dimensions. Importantly, a significant main effect of variability emerged only for competence ratings, with low-variability faces rated higher than high-variability faces. In summary, our study indicates that low emotional variability has an advantage in social evaluations over high emotional variability.

Climate misinformation reduces public acceptance of climate change and undermines support for mitigation policies. This study explored the impact of different types of climate misinformation, examining through content-based and logic-based frameworks. The content-based framework was based on a taxonomy of contrarian claims consisting of five categories-it's not real, it's not us, it's not bad, climate solutions won't work and scientists are not reliable. The logic-based framework examined six rhetorical techniques used in science denial arguments-misrepresentation, false equivalence, oversimplification, red herring, cherry picking and slothful induction. We experimentally tested 30 misinformation examples, crossing five content categories with six fallacies. Participants rated the perceived veracity of misinformation as well as the likelihood of interacting with it. We found no main effect of fallacy on perceived veracity or likelihood to interact but did find a main effect of content category, with the fourth category (climate solutions won't work) perceived as most veracious. We also found that content categories interacted with political ideology, replicating past research into the polarizing effect of climate misinformation. Specifically, the most polarizing categories of misinformation were those targeting climate solutions or attacking climate scientists. Our results highlight the need to prioritize combatting misinformation that targets solutions and scientists.

Economic inequality was found to be positively related to unethical behaviours, but the underlying psychological mechanisms have not been well studied. Through five studies, this research explored the psychological mechanisms and boundary conditions between economic inequality and unethical behaviour. Study 1 (N = 165,622) provided primary evidence for the relationship between inequality and unethical behaviour based on large-scale publicly available databases. Using well-established questionnaires, Study 2 (N = 394) indicated that economic inequality positively predicted immoral and competitive normative climates, which positively predicted unethical behaviour. Study 3 (N = 160) and Study 4 (N = 188) provided causal evidence for the effect of economic inequality and repeatedly verified the mediating roles of immoral and competitive normative climates. Study 5 (N = 300) indicated that income level moderated the effect of economic inequality on unethical behaviour by moderating the mediating effect of immoral and competitive normative climates. In societies with high inequality, participants in low-income groups perceived stronger immoral and competitive normative climates, thereby engaging in more unethical behaviours. This research offers explanations for the prevalence of unethical behaviours in unequal societies, contributing to extend the emerging literature in social-ecological psychology that explores how macro-social-ecological factors impact micro-behaviours.

Trust involves making oneself vulnerable by relying on the expectation that others will reciprocate and act in a trustworthy manner, leading to mutual benefit. In behavioural economics and psychology, the Trust Game (TG) is a widely used paradigm to measure trust. The repeated TG is a modified version of the TG in which participants encounter the same partner(s) multiple times, allowing for reputation and trust learning. The aim of the present meta-analysis was to identify features of the repeated TG, participant characteristics, and manipulations of partner trustworthiness that affect trust learning. This is the first meta-analytic study to specifically assess trust learning in the repeated TG and included 404 effect sizes from over 8000 participants from 68 studies. Our findings indicate that the partners' behavioural trustworthiness, in the form of their reciprocation rate, is by far the most influential factor in participant trust learning (β = 3.0). Furthermore, the results reveal that manipulating prior information about partners can have an effect on the amount of learning, but only for manipulations of trustworthiness/morality. Notably, in ingroup-outgroup studies, participants learn from their partners' trustworthiness and it is not affected by their partners' group membership.