Leaders gender and the fight against COVID-19: investigation, replication, and a possible explanation

Objectives To investigate the alleged relationship between leaders gender and COVID-19 related cases and deaths in different countries across the globe. Study design The relationship between leaders gender and percent of women in parliament to COVID-19 cases and death per million was investigated in three time points (10 months) across 180 countries, controlling for possible covariates. Methods Three different types of analyses were run: (1) Six basic t-tests; (2) Two repeated-measure ANOVA tests analyzing change over time; (3) Six stepwise regression analyses for both leaders gender and the percentage of women in parliament. Results Our findings suggest that, contrary to some research and popular media headlines, and in-line with recent academic research, leadership gender is not a significant factor in explaining the variation between countries in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Conclusions We suggest that this alleged relationship may stem from an illusory correlation. We argue that the uncertainty, stress, and anxiety that prevail in these times of global pandemic may be the breeding ground for judgmental biases of this sort.

Snakes vs. Guns: A Systematic Review of Comparisons Between Phylogenetic and Ontogenetic Threats

The potential differences between phylogenetic threats (e.g., snakes) and ontogenetic threats (e.g., guns) can have a wide-ranging impact on a variety of theoretical and practical issues, from etiology of specific phobias to stimulus selection in psychophysiological studies, yet this line of research has not been systematically reviewed. Here, we summarize and synthesize findings from fear conditioning, illusory correlation, attention bias and neuroimaging studies that have compared these two types of threats to human survival. While a few brain imaging studies reveals preliminary evidence for different brain networks involved in the processing of phylogenetic and ontogenetic threats, attention bias studies tentatively show faster reaction time for modern threats, illusory correlation bias is evident for both types of threats, and fear conditioning studies are far from conclusive. The results of behavioral experiments, especially attention bias research, pose a challenge to established theories like biological preparedness and fear module. We discuss the findings in terms of other theories that might explain the same results and conclude with potential future directions.

The Effectiveness of Associative and Rational Statistical Learning in Reducing Children’s Stereotype Formation

A stereotype is a rigid and overgeneralized belief about the characteristics of a social group. Stereotyping is a pervasive phenomenon, and has detrimental effects on children’s development such that it leads to biased information processing and stereotype threat. One of the underlying mechanisms for stereotype formation is illusory correlation, which refers to the erroneous inference about the relationship between two categories of events that in fact are uncorrelated. Given that most of the stereotype reduction training is focused on adults rather than children, this Master’s thesis aimed to examine the effectiveness of two methods that could potentially reduce stereotyping in children. More specifically, this work investigated whether facilitating associative and rational statistical learning could reduce stereotyping in children through inhibiting the formation of illusory correlation. The results showed that 5- to 10-year-old children consistently perceive an illusory correlation between the numerically smaller minority group and the infrequently occurring, negative behaviour. However, the perception of an illusory correlation among 5- to 8-year-olds was significantly reduced through the facilitation of statistical learning, but not associative learning.

The Effectiveness of Associative and Rational Statistical Learning in Reducing Children’s Stereotype Formation

A stereotype is a rigid and overgeneralized belief about the characteristics of a social group. Stereotyping is a pervasive phenomenon, and has detrimental effects on children’s development such that it leads to biased information processing and stereotype threat. One of the underlying mechanisms for stereotype formation is illusory correlation, which refers to the erroneous inference about the relationship between two categories of events that in fact are uncorrelated. Given that most of the stereotype reduction training is focused on adults rather than children, this Master’s thesis aimed to examine the effectiveness of two methods that could potentially reduce stereotyping in children. More specifically, this work investigated whether facilitating associative and rational statistical learning could reduce stereotyping in children through inhibiting the formation of illusory correlation. The results showed that 5- to 10-year-old children consistently perceive an illusory correlation between the numerically smaller minority group and the infrequently occurring, negative behaviour. However, the perception of an illusory correlation among 5- to 8-year-olds was significantly reduced through the facilitation of statistical learning, but not associative learning.

Evidence of probability misconception in engineering students—why even an inaccurate explanation is better than no explanation

Background In the rapidly changing industrial environment and job market, engineering profession requires a vast body of skills, one of them being decision making under uncertainty. Knowing that misunderstanding of probability concepts can lead to wrong decisions, the main objective of this study is to investigate the presence of probability misconceptions among undergraduate students of electrical engineering. Five misconceptions were investigated: insensitivity to sample size, base rate neglected, misconception of chance, illusory correlation, and biases in the evaluation of conjunctive and disjunctive events. The study was conducted with 587 students who attended bachelor schools of electrical engineering at two universities in Serbia. The presence of misconceptions was tested using multiple-choice tasks. This study also introduces a novel perspective, which is reflected in examination of the correlation between students’ explanations of given answers and their test scores. Results The results of this study show that electrical engineering students are, susceptible to misconceptions in probability reasoning. Although future engineers from the sample population were most successful in avoiding misconceptions of chance, only 35% of examinees were able to provide a meaningful explanation. Analysis of students’ explanations, revealed that in many cases majority of students were prone to common misconceptions. Among the sample population, significant percentage of students were unable to justify their own answers even when they selected the correct option. The results also indicate that formal education in probability and statistics did not significantly influence the test score. Conclusions Results of the present study indicate a need for further development of students’ deep understanding of probability concepts, as well as the need for the development of competencies that enable students to validate their answers. The study emphasizes the importance of answer explanations, since they allow us to discover whether students who mark the correct answer have some misconceptions or may be prone to some other kind of error. We found that the examinees who failed to explain their choices had much lower test scores than those who provided some explanation.

Illusory-Correlation Effects on Implicit and Explicit Evaluation

Research suggests that people sometimes perceive a relationship between stimuli when no such relationship exists (i.e., illusory correlation). Illusory-correlation effects are thought to play a central role in the formation of stereotypes and evaluations of minority versus majority groups, often leading to less favorable impressions of minorities. Extant theories differ in terms of whether they attribute illusory-correlation effects to processes operating during learning (belief formation) or measurement (belief expression), and whether different evaluation measures should be differentially sensitive to illusory-correlation effects. Past research found mixed evidence for dissociative effects of illusory-correlation manipulations on measures of implicit (i.e., automatic) and explicit (i.e., controlled) evaluation. Four high-powered studies obtained illusory-correlation effects on explicit evaluations, but not implicit evaluations probed with an Implicit Association Test, Evaluative Priming Task, and Affect Misattribution Procedure. The results are consistent with theories that attribute illusory-correlation effects to processes during belief expression.

Structural and Functional Disorders in Glaucoma: the Prospects for Preclinical Diagnosis. Part 1. Is the Search for what Comes First Relevant?

The review analyzes the capabilities of modern technologies of structural neuroimaging of the retina, standard perimetry, and studies of ocular blood flow in the early diagnosis and management of glaucoma. The relevance of the search for those structural and functional changes that are primary in the development of glaucomatous optical neuropathy (GON) and the diagnostic method that has the greatest clinical significance is discussed. Progress in understanding the pathogenesis of glaucoma and the expansion of scientific understanding of key risk factors for the development and progression of the disease, including genetic factors, can be crucially important to substantiate new strategies for preclinical diagnosis and the development of radically new approaches to personalized and preventive glaucoma therapy. However, the search for what arises most early with in primary open-angle glaucoma — changes in structure or function — will not have clinical relevance unless you take into account the capabilities of specific methods of structural and functional neuroimaging that represent information at various levels of organization of the visual system. The search for a single primary factor in the pathogenesis of GON can lead to an erroneous exaggeration of the close relationship between the variables being studied, which in reality either does not exist as a causal relationship or is significantly less than what is supposed — the phenomenon called “illusory correlation”. The reliable diagnosis of early changes that occur before the clinical manifestation of glaucoma is most likely to be based on a combination of structural, functional, and hemodynamic indicators, aimed not only to increase the sensitivity of diagnosis in detecting the earliest events in the development of GON, but rather to dramatically improve the understanding and quality of interpretation of those markers that we own.

The effect of shared distinctiveness on source memory: An event-related potential study

An illusory correlation (IC) is the erroneous perception that two actually uncorrelated categories are correlated. The Shared Distinctiveness Approach (SDA) explains ICs with heightened accessibility of distinctive category combinations in episodic memory. However, empirical evidence for this approach is heterogeneous. In the present event-related potential (ERP) study, we exploited the fact that more distinctive items elicit larger P300 responses than less distinctive items, which potentially predict subsequent memory performance differences for such items. Distinctiveness at encoding was created by presenting words that differed from frequently presented, positive words in valence, font color, or both. We hypothesized that shared distinctiveness (deviation in both color and valence) would lead to an enhanced P300 subsequent memory effect (SME), better source memory performance, and an overestimation of the frequency of shared distinctive items. Behavioral results indicated the presence of shared distinctiveness effects on source memory and frequency estimation. Unexpectedly, memory also was enhanced for positive items in the frequent color. This pattern also was reflected in the P300 for highly positive and negative items. However, shared distinctiveness did not modulate the P300 SME, indicating that the processing of distinctive features might only indirectly contribute to better encoding. This study shows that shared distinctiveness indeed is associated with better source memory and ICs. Because effects were observed for the most frequent and the least frequent category combination, our results imply that the processing of distinctiveness might involve attention allocation to diametrical category combinations, thereby accentuating the differences between the categories.

Migration and Security: Implications for Minority Migrant Groups

International migration is a highly contested topic and has become a critical part of the global security agenda due to the growing fear of terrorism notably after 9/11. There is a lack of relevant baselines and a gap in scholarly work that shows the direct connection between migration and security. This paper aims to identify the circumstances under which migration can be considered as a security issue. For this, we conducted an extensive literature review and interviews with policy-makers and staffs from migration regime as well as migrant professionals in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines between May 2018 and March 2019. The concepts of migration and security act as the theoretical standpoint of this paper. The findings show that the formation of an illusory correlation between migration and security has resulted in an extreme act of biasness towards migrant minority groups.