New Research in Psychological Science

Does Honesty Require Time? Two Preregistered Direct Replications of Experiment 2 of Shalvi, Eldar, and Bereby-Meyer (2012)
Ine Van der Cruyssen, Jonathan D’hondt, Ewout Meijer, and Bruno Verschuere

New research by Van der Cruyssen and colleagues refutes conclusions of an earlier study of honesty. In 2012, Shalvi and colleagues found that time pressure increased cheating, indicating that dishonesty might come more naturally than honesty. Recently, Van der Cruyssen and colleagues attempted to replicate these effects by using the same procedure and materials. The new study found that reducing the time available to respond did not increase how often subjects lied about the outcome of a dice roll to maximize monetary rewards.

The Scent of a Good Night’s Sleep: Olfactory Cues of a Romantic Partner Improve Sleep Efficiency
Marlise K. Hofer and Frances S. Chen

The scent of a loved one can improve our quality of sleep, according to this research. Subjects slept with one of two T-shirts placed on their pillow: either a T-shirt that their partner had worn for 24 hours or a control shirt (either an unworn shirt or one worn by a stranger). Quality of sleep was measured with a wrist-worn monitor and a self-reported log. Subjects who slept with their partner’s shirt slept on average 9 minutes more per night by spending less time tossing and turning. Subjects also reported having slept better when they thought they were sleeping with their partner’s scent.

The Effects of Three-Dimensional Context on Shape Perception
Margaret Sereno, Kelly Robles, Atsushi Kikumoto, and Alexander Bies

The presence of 3D context helps to estimate objective physical shapes but makes the projective (retinal) judgments necessary for realistic drawing more difficult, this research suggests. Subjects saw rectangles that either had no context or were embedded in rotated polyhedrons. They then estimated the rectangles’ objective width (stable at varying polyhedron rotations) or projective width (dependent on the polyhedron rotation). When the rectangles were presented without context, participants were better at estimating the projective width than the objective width. The opposite happened when 3D context was available.