Caring About (COVID-19 Related) Social Issues Signals Trustworthiness: Direct and Conceptual Replication of Zlatev (2019)

With three convenient samples (n = 1,087) and one sample representative for the German population in terms of age and gender (n = 210), we replicate research by Zlatev (2019) showing that perceived benevolence-based and perceived integrity-based trustworthiness increase with a target’s level of caring about a social issue. We show that these results generalize to various issues ranging from environmental issues (i.e., installation of wind turbines in the North Sea) to issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic (i.e., online teaching to prevent the spread of the virus). Furthermore, we provide initial behavioral evidence for this effect by showing that transfers in a trust game increase with a target’s caring about a social issue. All results are robust for age, gender, and social issue. To provide best estimates for the effect of a target’s level of caring on perceived trustworthiness, we report results of three mini meta-analyses including our findings as well as the findings of the original research. Policy implications are discussed.

Is Passive Priming Really Impervious to Verb Semantics? A High-Powered Replication of Messenger Et al. (2012)

The aim of the present study was to conduct a particularly stringent pre-registered in-vestigation of the claim that there exists a level of linguistic representation that “includes syntactic category information but not semantic information” (Branigan & Pickering, 2017: 8). As a test case, we focussed on the English passive; a construction for which previous findings have been somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, several studies using different methodologies have found an advantage for theme-experiencer passives (e.g., The girl was shocked by the tiger; and also agent-patient passives; e.g., The girl was hit by the tiger) over experiencer-theme passives (e.g., The girl was ignored by the tiger). On the other hand, Messenger et al. (2012) found no evidence that theme-experiencer and experiencer-theme passives vary in their propensity to prime production of agent-patient passives. We therefore conducted an online replication of Messen-ger et al (2012) with a pre-registered appropriately powered sample (N=240). Although a large and significant priming effect (i.e., an effect of prime sentence type) was ob-served, a Bayesian analysis yielded only weak/anecdotal evidence (BF=2.11) for the crucial interaction of verb type by prime type; a finding that was robust to different coding and exclusion decisions, operationalizations of verb semantics (dichoto-mous/continuous), analysis frameworks (Bayesian/frequentist) and – as per a mixed-effects-multiverse analyses – random effects structures. Nevertheless, these findings do no not provide evidence for the absence of semantic effects (as has been argued for the findings of Messenger et al, 2012). We conclude that these and related findings are best explained by a model that includes both lexical, exemplar-level representations and rep-resentations at multiple higher levels of abstraction.

Leading Us Unto Temptation? No Evidence for an Asymmetry in Automatic Associations Between Goals and Temptations

The asymmetry hypothesis of counteractive control theory suggests that—at least for successful self-regulators—exposure to temptations facilitates the accessibility of goal-related cognitive constructs, whereas exposure to goals inhibits the accessibility of temptation-related cognitive constructs. Using a lexical decision task, Fishbach et al., 2003 (Study 3) found that this asymmetry existed even at an automatic level of processing. In this attempted replication, 221 students completed a lexical decision task that included goal-related and temptation-related stimuli words preceded by either a goal-related prime, a temptation-related prime, or an irrelevant prime. Unlike the original study, we found only significant priming effects, where temptation-primes facilitated the recognition of goal-related words and goal-primes likewise facilitated the recognition of temptation-related words. We did not replicate the previously reported asymmetry. Additionally, we found no significant moderation of the hypothesized priming asymmetry by any of the traits of self-regulatory success, construal level, temptation strength, or self-control, again failing to replicate prior findings. The same priming patterns were found among participants who completed the study in-lab and those who completed the study online. This replication study suggests that the cognitive associations between goals and temptations are relatively symmetric and faciliatory, at least during the initial, automatic level of cognitive processing.

False Positives Using Social Cognitive Mapping to Identify Children’s Peer Groups

Children and adolescents interact in peer groups, which are known to influence a range of psychological and behavioral outcomes. In developmental psychology and related disciplines, social cognitive mapping (SCM), as implemented with the SCM 4.0 software, is the most commonly used method for identifying peer groups from peer report data. However, in a series of four studies, we demonstrate that SCM has an unacceptably high risk of false positives. Specifically, we show that SCM will identify peer groups even when applied to random data. We introduce backbone extraction and community detection as one promising alternative to SCM, and offer several recommendations for researchers seeking to identify peer groups from peer report data.

Repeated Retrieval Practice to Foster Students’ Critical Thinking Skills

There is a need for effective methods to teach critical thinking. Many studies on other skills have demonstrated beneficial effects of practice that repeatedly induces retrieval processes (repeated retrieval practice). The present experiment investigated whether repeated retrieval practice is effective for fostering critical thinking skills, focusing on avoiding biased reasoning. Seventy-five students first took a pre-test. Subsequently, they were instructed on critical thinking and avoiding belief-bias in syllogistic reasoning and engaged in retrieval practice with syllogisms. Afterwards, depending on the assigned condition, they (1) did not engage in extra retrieval practice; (2) engaged in retrieval practiced a second time (week later); or (3) engaged in retrieval practiced a second (week later) and a third time (two weeks later). Two/three days after the last practice session, all participants took a post-test consisting of practiced tasks (to measure learning relative to the pre-test) and non-practiced (transfer) tasks. Results revealed no significant difference between the pretest and the posttest learning performance as judged by the mean total performance (MC-answers + justification), although participants were, on average, faster on the post-test than on the pre-test. Exploring performance on MC-answers-only suggested that participants did benefit from instruction/practice but may have been unable to justify their answers. Unfortunately, we were unable to test effects on transfer due to a floor effect, which highlights the difficulty of establishing transfer of critical thinking skills. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that addresses repeated retrieval practice effects in the critical thinking domain. Further research should focus on determining the preconditions of repeated retrieval practice effects for this type of tasks.

Predicting Mental Health From Followed Accounts on Twitter

The past decade has seen rapid growth in research linking stable psychological characteristics (i.e., traits) to digital records of online behavior in Online Social Networks (OSNs) like Facebook and Twitter, which has implications for basic and applied behavioral sciences. Findings indicate that a broad range of psychological characteristics can be predicted from various behavioral residue online, including language used in posts on Facebook (Park et al., 2015) and Twitter (Reece et al., 2017), and which pages a person ‘likes’ on Facebook (e.g., Kosinski, Stillwell, & Graepel, 2013). The present study examined the extent to which the accounts a user follows on Twitter can be used to predict individual differences in self-reported anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, and anger. Followed accounts on Twitter offer distinct theoretical and practical advantages for researchers; they are potentially less subject to overt impression management and may better capture passive users. Using an approach designed to minimize overfitting and provide unbiased estimates of predictive accuracy, our results indicate that each of the four constructs can be predicted with modest accuracy (out-of-sample R’s of approximately .2). Exploratory analyses revealed that anger, but not the other constructs, was distinctly reflected in followed accounts, and there was some indication of bias in predictions for women (vs. men) but not for racial/ethnic minorities (vs. majorities). We discuss our results in light of theories linking psychological traits to behavior online, applications seeking to infer psychological characteristics from records of online behavior, and ethical issues such as algorithmic bias and users’ privacy.

Adults’ and Children’s Comprehension of Linguistic Disjunction

Disjunction has played a major role in advancing theories of logic, language, and cognition, featuring as the centerpiece of debates on the origins and development of logical thought. Recent studies have argued that due to non-adult-like pragmatic reasoning, preschool children’s comprehension of linguistic disjunction differs from adults in two ways. First, children are more likely to interpret “or” as “and” (conjunctive interpretations); Second, children are more likely to consider a disjunction as inclusive (lack of exclusivity implicatures). We tested adults and children’s comprehension of disjunction in existential sentences using two and three-alternative forced choice tasks, and analyzed children’s spontaneous verbal reactions prior to their forced-choice judgments. Overall our results are compatible with studies that suggest children understand the basic truth-conditional semantics of disjunction. Children did not interpret “or” as “and”, supporting studies that argue conjunctive interpretations are due to task demands. In addition, even though our forced-choice tasks suggest children interpreted disjunction as inclusive, spontaneous verbal reactions showed that children were sensitive to the adult-like pragmatics of disjunction. Theoretically, these studies provide evidence against previous developmental accounts, and lend themselves to two alternative hypotheses. First, that preschool children’s pragmatic knowledge is more adult-like than previously assumed, but forced-choice judgments are not sensitive enough to capture this knowledge. Second, children may have the knowledge of the relevant lexical scale themselves, but be uncertain whether a new speaker also has this knowledge (mutual knowledge of the scale).

The Role of Parental Input in the Early Acquisition of Japanese Politeness Distinctions

Japanese polite language (teineigo) varies with the speaker-addressee relationship as well as social norms. Descriptive studies have found that young Japanese children use polite-speech early in development. This claim was experimentally tested in 3- to 6-year-old Japanese children and correct use of polite verb forms was found even in the youngest children. The early acquisition of these verb forms is surprising, because there is a Japanese social norm that parental speech to children is mostly not polite, so it is not clear how children acquire the knowledge of how to use polite forms. To examine this, a large scale corpus analysis of polite language was performed using a probabilistic measure of the intended addressee. We confirmed that parental speech is mostly not polite, but parents also produced a substantial amount of polite language that varied appropriately with addressees and this can help to explain the early use of polite speech in Japanese children under experimental conditions.

Self-interest Is Overestimated: Two Successful Pre-registered Replications and Extensions of Miller and Ratner (1998)

Self-interest is a central driver of attitudes and behaviors, but people also act against their immediate self-interest through prosocial behaviors, voting incongruously with their finances, or punishing others at personal cost. How much people believe that self-interest causes attitudes and behaviors is important, because this belief may shape regulation, shared narratives, and institutional structures. An influential paper claimed that people overestimate the power of self-interest on others’ attitudes and behavioral intentions (Miller & Ratner, 1998). We present two registered, close, and successful replications (U.S. MTurk, N = 800; U.K. Prolific, N = 799) that compared actual to estimated intentions, with open data and code. Consistent with the original article, participants overestimated the impact of payment on blood donation in Study 1, ds = 0.59 [0.51, 0.66], 0.57 [0.49, 0.64], and overestimated the importance of smoking status for smoking policy preferences in Study 4, ds = 0.75 [0.59, 0.90], 0.84 [0.73, 0.96]. These replications included two extensions: 1) communal orientation as a moderator of overestimation and 2) a more detailed measure of self-interest in Study 4 (ordinal smoking status). Communal orientation did not predict overestimation, and the ordinal smoking measure yielded similar results to the main study. Verifying the overestimation error informs behavioral theories across several fields and has practical implications for institutions that require trust and cooperation. All materials, data, and code are available at osf.io/57mdc/

Associating With Art: A Network Model of Aesthetic Effects

In recent years, understanding psychological constructs as network processes has gained considerable traction in the social sciences. In this paper, we propose the aesthetic effects network (AEN) as a novel way to conceptualize aesthetic experience. The AEN represents an associative process where having one association leads to the next association, generating an overall aesthetic experience. In art theory, associations of this kind are referred to as aesthetic effects. The AEN provides an explicit account of a specific cognitive process involved in aesthetic experience. We first outline the AEN and discuss empirical results (Study 1, N=255) to explore what can be gained from this approach. Second, in Study 2 (N=133, pre-registered) we follow calls in the literature to substantiate network theories by using an experimental manipulation, and found evidence in favor of the AEN over other alternatives. The AEN provides a basis for future studies that can apply a network perspective to different aesthetic experiences and processes. This perspective takes a process-based approach to aesthetic experience, where aesthetic experience is represented as an active interaction between viewer and artwork. If we want to understand how people experience art, it is central to know why people have different experiences with the same artworks, and, also, why people have similar experiences when looking at different artworks. Our proposed network perspective offers a new way to approach and potentially answer these questions.