Polar Express: Polar Question Forms Expressing Bias-Evidence Conflicts in Italian

Past research has concentrated on the use of different forms of polar questions in specific contexts, defined in terms of the relationship between original bias and contextual evidence. It has been showed that, for English and German, people tend to prefer specific forms given the pragmatic context. Based on previous experiments, in this work, we observe that the same tendencies occur in Italian. Also, we adopt a more refined experimental setup with three different tasks and a more natural evaluation scale to better capture nuances in appropriateness evaluations, provided by human subjects, which therefore reflects the more realistic one-to-many relationship among forms and functions. In fact, the results show how specific forms of polar questions are especially typical of situations where the bias has the opposite value with respect to the evidence, i.e., in positive bias versus negative evidence, for which a high negative polar question in the past tense was more frequently selected by the subjects (Note 1).

The Spatial Ingroup Bias: Ingroup Teams Are Positioned Where Writing Starts

In four studies, we test the hypothesis that people, asked to envisage interactions between an ingroup and an outgroup, tend to spatially represent the ingroup where writing starts (e.g., left in Italian) and as acting along script direction. Using soccer as a highly competitive intergroup setting, in Study 1 ( N = 100) Italian soccer fans were found to envisage their team on the left side of a horizontal soccer field, hence playing rightward. Studies 2a and 2b ( N = 219 Italian and N = 200 English speakers) replicate this finding, regardless of whether the own team was stronger or weaker than the rival team. Study 3 ( N = 67 Italian and N = 67 Arabic speakers) illustrates the cultural underpinnings of the Spatial Intergroup Bias, showing a rightward ingroup bias for Italian speakers and a leftward ingroup bias for Arabic speakers. Findings are discussed in relation to how space is deployed to symbolically express ingroup favoritism (Spatial Ingroup Bias) versus shared stereotypes (Spatial Agency Bias).

Phenotype bias determines how RNA structures occupy the morphospace of all possible shapes

The relative prominence of developmental bias versus natural selection is a long standing controversy in evolutionary biology. Here we demonstrate quantitatively that developmental bias is the primary explanation for the occupation of the morphospace of RNA secondary structure (SS) shapes. By using the RNAshapes method to define coarse-grained SS classes, we can directly measure the frequencies that non-coding RNA SS shapes appear in nature. Our main findings are, firstly, that only the most frequent structures appear in nature: The vast majority of possible structures in the morphospace have not yet been explored. Secondly, and perhaps more surprisingly, these frequencies are accurately predicted by the likelihood that structures appear upon uniform random sampling of sequences. The ultimate cause of these patterns is not natural selection, but rather strong phenotype bias in the RNA genotype-phenotype (GP) map, a type of developmental bias that tightly constrains evolutionary dynamics to only act within a reduced subset of structures which are easy to “find”.

Reducing Discrimination: A Bias Versus Noise Perspective

Discrimination can occur when people fail to focus on outcome-relevant information and incorporate irrelevant demographic information into decision-making. The magnitude of discrimination then depends on 1) how many errors are made in judgment and 2) the degree to which errors disproportionately favor one group over another. As a result, discrimination can be reduced through two routes: reducing noise -- lessening the total number of errors but not changing the proportion of remaining errors that favor one group -- or reducing bias -- lessening the proportion of errors that favor one group but not changing the total number of errors made. Eight studies (N = 7,921) investigate how noise and bias rely on distinct psychological mechanisms and are influenced by different interventions. Interventions that removed demographic information not only eliminated bias, but also reduced noise (Studies 1a-1b). Interventions that either decreased (Studies 2a-2c) or increased (Study 3) the time available to evaluators impacted noise but not bias, as did interventions altering motivation to process outcome-relevant information (Study 4). Conversely, an intervention asking participants to avoid favoring a certain group impacted bias but not noise (Study 5). Finally, a novel intervention that both asked participants to avoid favoring a certain group and required them to take more time when making judgments impacted bias and noise simultaneously (Study 5). Efforts to reduce discrimination will be well-served by understanding how interventions impact bias, noise, or both.