Causal theory error in college students’ understanding of science studies

When reasoning about science studies, people often make causal theory errors by inferring or accepting a causal claim based on correlational evidence. While humans naturally think in terms of causal relationships, reasoning about science findings requires understanding how evidence supports—or fails to support—a causal claim. This study investigated college students’ thinking about causal claims presented in brief media reports describing behavioral science findings. How do science students reason about causal claims from correlational evidence? And can their reasoning be improved through instruction clarifying the nature of causal theory error? We examined these questions through a series of written reasoning exercises given to advanced college students over three weeks within a psychology methods course. In a pretest session, students critiqued study quality and support for a causal claim from a brief media report suggesting an association between two variables. Then, they created diagrams depicting possible alternative causal theories. At the beginning of the second session, an instructional intervention introduced students to an extended example of a causal theory error through guided questions about possible alternative causes. Then, they completed the same two tasks with new science reports immediately and again 1 week later. The results show students’ reasoning included fewer causal theory errors after the intervention, and this improvement was maintained a week later. Our findings suggest that interventions aimed at addressing reasoning about causal claims in correlational studies are needed even for advanced science students, and that training on considering alternative causal theories may be successful in reducing casual theory error.

Face mask use in healthcare settings: effects on communication, cognition, listening effort and strategies for amelioration

Aim To investigate mask use and the difficulties it may pose during communication in healthcare settings. Methods A survey utilizing a series of Likert scales was administered. Mask use challenges between clinicians and their patients were examined in the domains of communication, listening effort, cognition, and rehabilitation. Results Across 243 participants, mask use significantly increased listening effort, with hearing loss having an additive effect on listening effort. Listening effort was also significantly associated with more trouble understanding conversation, decreased interest in conversation, more difficulty connecting with patients, changes in cognition for both providers and patients, and changes in the clinical efficiency of providers. Hearing loss had an additive effect for trouble understanding conversations and changes in clinical efficiency. Conclusion These results provide information about the clinical strain introduced from mask use in healthcare settings. Overall, results show that in healthcare settings there is increased cognitive load and listening effort for both patients and providers, as well as changes in clinical efficiency for providers when utilizing masks. These effects are often greater with hearing loss. Results showed that patients reported written and visual instructions would be most beneficial to include in appointments among the other rehabilitative strategies which are discussed.

Beyond the beauty of occlusion: medical masks increase facial attractiveness more than other face coverings

The sanitary-mask effect (Miyazaki and Kawahara in Jpn Psychol Res 58(3):261–272, 2016) is the finding that medical face masks prompt an image of disease and thus result in lower ratings of facial attractiveness of the wearer. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, medical masks have been found to increase attractiveness (Patel et al. in Plast Reconstruct Surg Glob Open 8(8), 2020) although this could have been a general effect of occlusion. To further explore this issue, female participants were presented with a series of male faces of low or high attractiveness that were occluded with a medical mask, cloth mask, book or not occluded and asked to rate them on attractiveness. The results show that faces were considered as most attractive when covered by medical masks and significantly more attractive when occluded with cloth masks than when not occluded. Contrary to expectation, base attractiveness did not interact with the type of occlusion, suggesting that this is not simply due to occlusion of negative features. The present findings are contrary to the sanitary-mask effect and explanations in terms of social desirability, and the association of medical masks with caregiving professions is explored.

Speed versus accuracy instructions in the response time concealed information test

The response time concealed information test (RT-CIT) can reveal that a person recognizes a relevant item (probe) among other, irrelevant items, based on slower responding to the probe compared to the irrelevant items. Thereby, if this person is concealing knowledge about the relevance of this item (e.g., recognizing it as a murder weapon), this deception can be unveiled. In the present paper, we examined the impact of a speed versus accuracy instruction: Examinees (N = 235) were either presented with instructions emphasizing a focus on speed, with instructions emphasizing a focus on accuracy, or with no particular speed or accuracy instructions at all. We found that although participants responded to the probe and the irrelevants marginally faster when they had received instructions emphasizing speed, there was no significant difference between RTs of the different experimental groups and crucially no significant difference between the probe–irrelevant RT differences either. This means that such instructions are unlikely to benefit the RT-CIT, but it also suggests that related deliberate manipulation (focusing on speed on or accuracy) is unlikely to decrease the efficiency of the RT-CIT—contributing further evidence to the RT-CIT’s resistance to faking.

White civilians’ implicit danger evaluation of police officers underlies explicit perception of police

The role of implicit processes during police-civilian encounters is well studied from the perspective of the police. Decades of research on the “shooter bias” suggests that implicit Black-danger associations potentiate the perception of threat of Black individuals, leading to a racial bias in the decision to use lethal force. Left understudied are civilians’ possible associations of police with danger and how such associations pervade behavior and explicit views of the police. The current work begins to address this gap. In two within-subjects studies, we separately assess police-threat (i.e., safety/danger) and police-valence (i.e., good/bad) associations as well as their relative influences on explicit perceptions of police. Study 1 revealed that implicit threat evaluations (police-danger associations) more strongly predicted negative explicit views of the police compared to implicit valence evaluations (police-negative associations). Study 2 replicated these findings and suggests that individuals evaluate the police as more dangerous versus negative when each response is pitted against each other within single misattribution procedure trials. The possible implications for explicit attitudes toward police reform and behavior during police-civilian encounters are discussed.

Optimizing song retention through the spacing effect

The spacing effect refers to the improvement in memory retention for materials learned in a series of sessions, as opposed to massing learning in a single session. It has been extensively studied in the domain of verbal learning using word lists. Less evidence is available for connected discourse or tasks requiring the complex coordination of verbal and other domains. In particular, the effect of spacing on the retention of words and music in song has yet to be determined. In this study, university students were taught an unaccompanied two-verse song based on traditional materials to a criterion of 95% correct memory for sung words. Subsequent training sessions were either massed or spaced by two days or one week and tested at a retention interval of three weeks. Performances were evaluated for number of correct and incorrect syllables, number of correctly and incorrectly pitched notes, degree notes were off-pitch, and number of hesitations while singing. The data revealed strong evidence for a spacing effect for song between the massed and spaced conditions at a retention interval of three weeks, and evidence of no difference between the two spaced conditions. These findings suggest that the ongoing cues offered by surface features in the song are strong enough to enable verbatim recall across spaced conditions, as long as the spacing interval reaches a critical threshold.

Incidental exposure to hedonic and healthy food features affects food preferences one day later

Memories acquired incidentally from exposure to food information in the environment may often become active to later affect food preferences. Because conscious use of these memories is not requested or required, these incidental learning effects constitute a form of indirect memory. In an experiment using a novel food preference paradigm (n = 617), we found that brief incidental exposure to hedonic versus healthy food features indirectly affected food preferences a day later, explaining approximately 10% of the variance in preferences for tasty versus healthy foods. It follows that brief incidental exposure to food information can affect food preferences indirectly for at least a day. When hedonic and health exposure were each compared to a no-exposure baseline, a general effect of hedonic exposure emerged across individuals, whereas health exposure only affected food preferences for high-BMI individuals. This pattern suggests that focusing attention on hedonic food features engages common affective processes across the general population, whereas focusing attention on healthy food features engages eating restraint goals associated with high BMI. Additionally, incidental exposure to food features primarily changed preferences for infrequently consumed foods, having less impact on habitually consumed foods. These findings offer insight into how hedonic information in the obesogenic food environment contributes to unhealthy eating behavior that leads to overweight and obesity. These findings further motivate the development of interventions that counteract the effects of exposure to hedonic food information and that broaden the effects of exposure to healthy food information.

Systemic racism: individuals and interactions, institutions and society

Systemic racism is a scientifically tractable phenomenon, urgent for cognitive scientists to address. This tutorial reviews the built-in systems that undermine life opportunities and outcomes by racial category, with a focus on challenges to Black Americans. From American colonial history, explicit practices and policies reinforced disadvantage across all domains of life, beginning with slavery, and continuing with vastly subordinated status. Racially segregated housing creates racial isolation, with disproportionate costs to Black Americans’ opportunities, networks, education, wealth, health, and legal treatment. These institutional and societal systems build-in individual bias and racialized interactions, resulting in systemic racism. Unconscious inferences, empirically established from perceptions onward, demonstrate non-Black Americans’ inbuilt associations: pairing Black Americans with negative valences, criminal stereotypes, and low status, including animal rather than human. Implicit racial biases (improving only slightly over time) imbed within non-Black individuals’ systems of racialized beliefs, judgments, and affect that predict racialized behavior. Interracial interactions likewise convey disrespect and distrust. These systematic individual and interpersonal patterns continue partly due to non-Black people’s inexperience with Black Americans and reliance on societal caricatures. Despite systemic challenges, Black Americans are more diverse now than ever, due to resilience (many succeeding against the odds), immigration (producing varied backgrounds), and intermarriage (increasing the multiracial proportion of the population). Intergroup contact can foreground Black diversity, resisting systemic racism, but White advantages persist in all economic, political, and social domains. Cognitive science has an opportunity: to include in its study of the mind the distortions of reality about individual humans and their social groups.

Correction format has a limited role when debunking misinformation

Given that being misinformed can have negative ramifications, finding optimal corrective techniques has become a key focus of research. In recent years, several divergent correction formats have been proposed as superior based on distinct theoretical frameworks. However, these correction formats have not been compared in controlled settings, so the suggested superiority of each format remains speculative. Across four experiments, the current paper investigated how altering the format of corrections influences people’s subsequent reliance on misinformation. We examined whether myth-first, fact-first, fact-only, or myth-only correction formats were most effective, using a range of different materials and participant pools. Experiments 1 and 2 focused on climate change misconceptions; participants were Qualtrics online panel members and students taking part in a massive open online course, respectively. Experiments 3 and 4 used misconceptions from a diverse set of topics, with Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdworkers and university student participants. We found that the impact of a correction on beliefs and inferential reasoning was largely independent of the specific format used. The clearest evidence for any potential relative superiority emerged in Experiment 4, which found that the myth-first format was more effective at myth correction than the fact-first format after a delayed retention interval. However, in general it appeared that as long as the key ingredients of a correction were presented, format did not make a considerable difference. This suggests that simply providing corrective information, regardless of format, is far more important than how the correction is presented.

Self-protecting motivation, indexed by self-threat, modifies retrieval-induced-forgetting and confidence in employment decision bias against out-group targets

Human memory is malleable by both social and motivational factors and holds information relevant to workplace decisions. Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) describes a phenomenon where retrieval practice impairs subsequent memory for related (unpracticed) information. We report two RIF experiments. Chinese participants received a mild self-threat manipulation (Experiment 2) or not (Experiment 1) before an ethnicity-RIF task that involved practicing negative traits of either in-group (Chinese) or an out-group (Japanese) target. After a subsequent memory test, participants selected their preferred applicant for employment. RIF scores correspond to forgetting of unpracticed positive traits of one target (Rp−) relative to the recall of practiced negative traits of the other target (Rp+). Enhanced forgetting of positive traits was found in both experiments for both targets. Across experiments, a significant target by threat interaction showed that target ethnicity modified RIF (an ethnicity-RIF effect). Inducing a self-protecting motivation enhanced RIF effects for the out-group (Japanese) target. In a subsequent employment decision, there was a strong bias to select the in-group target, with the confidence in these decisions being associated with RIF scores. This study suggests that rehearsing negative traits of minority applicants can affect metacognitive aspects of employment decisions, possibly by shaping the schemas available to the majority (in-group) employer. To disrupt systemic racism, recruitment practices should aim to offset a human motivation to protect one-self, when exposed to a relatively mild threat to self-esteem. Discussing the negative traits of minority applicants is a critical, and sensitive, aspect of decision-making that warrants careful practice. These data suggest that recruiting individuals should be reminded of their personal strengths in this context, not their vulnerabilities, to secure their decision-making for fairer recruitment practice.