New Content From Perspectives on Psychological Science

The Future of Women in Psychological Science
June Gruber, Jane Mendle, Kristen A. Lindquist, et al.

Gruber and colleagues analyze 10 topics relevant for women’s professional prospects in psychological science: career advancement; financial compensation; service assignment and practices; lifestyle roles and work–family conflict; gender biases; prevalence and perceptions of positions of power; intersectionality; harassment and incivility; agency, self-esteem, and self-promotion; and lack of belonging. The authors discuss empirical evidence for each of these issues and clarify gender gaps and positive change. They hope that a better understanding of these issues will spark conversation and help to mitigate remaining gender differences in psychological science.

Self-Regulation Without Force: Can Awareness Leverage Reward to Drive Behavior Change?
Vera U. Ludwig, Kirk Warren Brown, and Judson A. Brewer

Effortful self-control is one way to regulate behavior to achieve goals (e.g., restraining oneself from eating cake to lose weight). However, another way to self-regulate behaviors relies on autonomous motivation (e.g., eating healthfully because doing so is intrinsically satisfying or aligned with one’s values). Ludwig and colleagues propose that bringing awareness to one’s subjective experience and behavior can change the value (or reward) one assigns to learned but unhealthy behaviors, leading to behavior changes. These changes would derive from reinforced learning, rather than being forced and dependent on self-control.

Is the Political Slant of Psychology Research Related to Scientific Replicability?
Diego A. Reinero, Julian A. Wills, William J. Brady, Peter Mende-Siedlecki, Jarret T. Crawford, and Jay J. Van Bavel

Reinero and colleagues investigated the impact of political ideology on the quality of scientific articles, including their replicability. They asked psychology students and laypeople to classify the political slant (liberal vs. conservative) of the abstracts of 194 articles reporting studies that had been subjected to later replication attempts. The political slant of the articles was not associated with the success of later replications, subsequent citations, original effect size, or original sample size. However, research with a greater political slant—liberal or conservative—appeared to be less replicable.

A Call for Greater Attention to Culture in the Study of Brain and Development
Yang Qu, Nathan A. Jorgensen, and Eva H. Telzer

Developmental cultural neuroscience—a potential interdisciplinary approach combining developmental psychology, cultural psychology, and cognitive neuroscience—could compensate for the current dearth of studies considering cultural and ethnic variation in neural processing across the life span. Qu and colleagues analyzed 80 publications in developmental neuroscience, finding that 99% of them used samples from Western countries and only 22% provided a detailed description of the racial/ethnic makeup of their sample. These findings point to the importance of incorporating culture into the investigation of neurodevelopment.

When Beliefs Face Reality: An Integrative Review of Belief Updating in Mental Health and Illness
Tobias Kube and Liron Rozenkrantz

Kube and Rozenkrantz integrate different lines of research about how people adjust their beliefs in light of new evidence. Some research suggests that everyone is prone to biases when updating their beliefs, although people with mental disorders appear to have difficulty updating disorder-specific dysfunctional beliefs (e.g., patients with depression may have difficulty revising negative beliefs). These biases include failures to take information into account that goes against one’s own view, with political and societal implications. The authors discuss different anomalies in belief updating, propose a new model of belief updating, and recommend directions for future research.

The Emerging Science of Virtue
Blaine J. Fowers, Jason S. Carroll, Nathan D. Leonhardt, and Bradford Cokelet

The study of virtues has grown in the past two decades and has incorporated diversified research methods. Fowers and colleagues propose a framework to help to resolve theoretical and methodological challenges surrounding the science of virtue. Their model, STRIVE-4 (Scalar Traits that are Role sensitive, include Situation × Trait Interactions, and are related to important Values that help to constitute Eudaimonia), depicts virtue as acquired traits dependent on one’s role and situation and related to values that partly constitute eudaimonia (human flourishing). The model also proposes that virtue traits include components of knowledge, behavior, emotion/motivation, and disposition.