New Research in Psychological Science

Mindfulness-Gratitude Practice Reduces Prejudice at High Levels of Collective Narcissism
Agnieszka Golec de Zavala, Oliver Keenan, Matthias Ziegler, Magdalena Mazurkiewicz, Maria Nalberczak-Skóra, Pawel Ciesielski, Julia Wahl, and Constantine Sedikides

Intergroup hatred fueled by prejudice is one of humanity’s greatest challenges. The need for easy-to-implement and cost-effective psychological interventions to reduce prejudice is pressing in times of increasing societal polarization. Psychologists have suggested that meditation-based interventions may be an effective means of prejudice reduction. However, it is unclear whether such interventions can curtail prejudice among prejudiced individuals. We designed a novel intervention—a mobile-app-supported mindful-gratitude practice—to weaken the link between prejudice and one of its robust predictors, collective narcissism, which refers to a belief that the greatness of one’s in-group is not sufficiently recognized by others. A pilot experiment and a preregistered study demonstrated that mindful-gratitude practice attenuates the robust, positive association between collective narcissism and various forms of prejudice, such as anti-Semitism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-immigrant sentiment. This easily accessible intervention has the potential for widespread applicability in efforts to block prejudice. 

Dissociable Codes in Motor Working Memory
Hanna Hillman, Tabea Botthof, Alexander Forrence, and Samuel McDougle  

Remembering movement information over short timescales plays an important role in a wide range of tasks, from learning a new phrase on the piano, to relearning movements after a stroke. In this study, we used a novel paradigm in which participants were required to maintain movement information with no visual input and recall it after short delays. Beyond demonstrating classic working memory load and interference effects, we provide evidence for two distinct motor working memory codes: one that is bound to the recently moved limb (effector specific) and a more abstract representation that generalizes across limbs (effector independent). These findings advance our understanding of an important but understudied working memory subsystem and make novel mechanistic predictions with psychological, neural, and clinical implications.  

Distinct Inhibitory-Control Processes Underlie Children’s Judgments of Fairness
David Sobel, David Kamper, and Joo-Hyun Song  

Young children in the United States show distinct judgments when presented with unfair distributions. They reject cases in which they are disadvantaged—that is, in which they get fewer resources than others. Between the ages of 5 and 8, they develop a tendency to reject advantageous inequities, in which they get more resources than others. In this study, we tracked the movement of participants’ fingers while they reached to make these decisions; this allowed us to study the cognitive mechanisms that underpinned their judgments. We found that one type of inhibitory control was needed for both 5- through 8-year-olds and adults to assess distributions that were unfair to them, and this mechanism was stable over development. A different type of inhibition, which changed between ages 5 and 8, was needed to make the more egalitarian decision to reject advantageous inequities. Our novel research method allowed us to pinpoint the facets of inhibitory control that develop when children make social inferences.  

Observers Efficiently Extract the Minimal and Maximal Element in Perceptual Magnitudes Sets: Evidence for a Bipartite Format
Darko Odic, Tyler Knowlton, Alexis Wellwood, Paul Pietroski, Jeffrey Lidz, and Justin Halbeda  

How is information stored in the mind? Much like computers can store information as integers, strings, or floating points, the format of our mind’s representations dictates how information is used. With a population of college undergraduates, we show that a set of representations—perceptual magnitudes, including length, size, and number—are stored in a format that privileges endpoint values over inner ones. People can rapidly identify the maximal and minimal value in a set (e.g., find the longest or shortest line out of 11 heterogeneous options), even though they struggle to identify other members of the set (e.g., the third longest line). We propose that representations of perceptual magnitudes are in a bipartite format—akin to scientific notation— and therefore “scale” the representational set by the minimal and maximal value that we are currently attending to. 

Perceptions of Falling Behind “Most White People”: Within-Group Status Comparisons Predict Fewer Positive Emotions and Worse Health Over Time Among White (but Not Black) Americans
Nava Caluori, Erin Cooley, Jazmin Brown-Iannuzzi, Emma Klein, Ryan Lei, William Cipolli, and Lauren Philbrook  

There is a persistent racial wealth gap in the United States: The typical White family has 8 times the wealth of the typical Black family. Despite this reality, White Americans report feeling worse off economically than Black Americans do. We seek to understand the paradox of why poor White Americans feel their individual status is so bleak despite greater group-level status and how these feelings influence health. We raise the possibility that because racial economic inequality benefits White people on average, many White Americans may feel they are individually falling behind the perceived high status of their in-group. These feelings of low within-group status may then affect emotional experiences, and thus health. Using a longitudinal design and census-based quota sampling, we found that among White (but not Black) Americans, perceptions of falling behind other people in one’s racial group predict fewer positive emotions, worse sleep quality, and increased depressive symptoms.  

When and Why People Conceal Infectious Disease
Wilson Merrell, Soyeon Choi, and Joshua Ackerman  

People often experience negative reactions toward others who seem sick with contagious illnesses. To elude such outcomes, sick people may take steps to conceal their illnesses. Indeed, across health-care employees, university students, and general adult samples, we found that a large majority of people report having concealed an active infectious illness. People reported boarding flights, treating patients, and going on dates while hiding signs of sickness. Interestingly, when illnesses were most severe, people currently sick reported concealing even more than people who merely imagined being sick, suggesting a potentially serious public-health problem: Sick people may be relatively unmindful about the possible harm they could do by interacting with others. As most people in our samples reported concealing for social reasons (i.e., to avoid missing activities or upsetting others), novel approaches may be needed to mitigate this harmful concealment behavior. 

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The (Un)ideal Physicist: How Humans Rely on Object Interaction for Friction Estimate 
Harun Karimpur, Christian Wolf, and Katja Fiehler  

The emergence of advanced sensorimotor intelligence has been crucial for the evolutionary advantage of humans over other species. This becomes evident with each step we take, bottle we grasp, or cup we carry on a tray as our brain constantly faces the challenge to account for size, mass, and friction of the contacting bodies. How this challenge is met, however, is not well understood. Previous studies mainly focused on visual aspects but rarely contrasted visual with sensorimotor information. This is particularly dramatic in light of the ontogenetic role of sensorimotor interaction. It goes further than Piagetian theory and the crucial phase during which infants make sense of the world around them through motor activity and sensory feedback. In this study, we show that some physical properties are not sufficiently estimated through vision alone by contrasting perceptual estimates with estimates through object interaction.  

Effects of Voice Pitch on Social Perceptions Vary With Relational Mobility and Homicide Rate
Toe Aung, Alexander Hill, Jessica Hlay, Catherine Hess, Michael Hess, Janie Johnson, Leslie Doll, Sara Carlson, Caroline Magdinec, Isaac Gonzalez-Santoyo, Robert Walker, Drew Bailey, Steven Arnocky, Shanmukh Kamble, Tom Vardy, Thanos Kyritsis, Quentin Atkinson, Benedict Jones, Jessica Burns, Jeremy Koster, Gonzalo Palomo-Vélez, Joshua Tybur, José Muñoz-Reyes, Bryan Choy, Norman Li, Verena Klar, Carlota Batres, Patricia Bascheck, Christoph Schild, Lars Penke, Farid Pazhoohi, Karen Kemirembe, Jaroslava Valentova, Marco Antonio Correa Varella, Caio Santos Alves da Silva, Martha Borras-Guevara, Carolyn Hodges-Simeon, Moritz Ernst, Collin Garr, Bin-Bin Chen, and David Puts  

Pitch is the most perceptually important feature of our voices, but we know little about how its influence on our impressions of speakers varies across cultures. To study this, we manipulated the pitch of voice recordings and examined its effects on social perceptions in 2,647 adult listeners across 44 locations in 22 societies. We found that low male pitch increased men’s perceptions of male fighting ability and prestige, especially in societies with higher relational mobility and homicide rates in which rapidly identifying high-status and formidable competitors may be most critical. Low male pitch also increased women’s perceptions of male attractiveness. High female pitch increased women’s perceptions of female flirtatiousness where relational mobility was lower and thus where infidelity may threaten both women’s romantic and platonic relationships. Our findings suggest that the influence of voice pitch on human perceptions varies with socioecological variables related to competition for status and mates. 

Racial Prejudice Affects Representations of Facial Trustworthiness
Ryan Hutchings, Erin Freiburger, Mattea Sim, and Kurt Hugenberg  

People spontaneously infer strangers’ trustworthiness from their faces alone, and these inferences impact critical social exchanges despite their limited accuracy. What makes a face seem trustworthy? One perspective is that the apparent trustworthiness of a face is in the face itself. For example, happy faces seem trustworthy. However, we argue that perceivers’ own racial biases can distort the facial features that they employ to infer trustworthiness. Across four studies, we find that people’s racial biases altered how they judged trustworthiness from faces. Participants who endorse anti-Black prejudice or who have less positive contact with Black people tend to conflate Blackness with untrustworthiness and Whiteness with trustworthiness more than their peers—a trust–race overlap. Our findings are a critical advance in understanding the roots of trustworthiness inferences from faces. Apparent trustworthiness is not just in the face. It is also in the biased mind of the perceiver.  

Devaluation by Omission: Limited Identity Options Elicit Anger and Increase Identification
Sean Fath and Devon Proudfoot  

From completing the census to creating an online profile, people are often asked to provide demographic information about themselves, such as their gender or race, by selecting their identity from a list of options. However, the options provided in such situations are seldom unlimited—they typically reflect only a subset of possible identities. Our research documents how people respond to situations in which information about group memberships is requested but their identity is not among the options provided. For instance, how might a gender-nonbinary person experience being asked to choose between the options “man” and “woman” when applying for a passport? We demonstrate across six experiments (N = 2,964 adults) that minority-group members interpret situations in which their identity is omitted from a range of options as a sign that their identity is not valued within a given context, prompting anger and bolstering identification with the missing group. 

Synchrony Influences Estimates of Cooperation in a Public-Goods Game
Luke McEllin and Natalie Sebanz  

Many of the collective challenges people face (both in their ancestral pasts and today) require them to pool resources for the public good—that is, cooperate. To behave efficiently in a cooperative interaction (or to decide whether to join an interaction in the first place), they need to judge the effectiveness of the group’s cooperative efforts, which is particularly challenging considering that they may not have direct access to the material outcomes of such interactions (i.e., they may not see individual group members’ contributions to the public good). The current study demonstrates that the synchrony by which a group plans and executes contributions to a public good influence judgments of how cooperatively the group acted. This highlights the importance of action dynamics for understanding cooperation and provides new avenues for interventions that increase individual contributions (e.g., sustainable behavior) toward small- and large-scale real-life public goods (e.g., the environment).  

Unlocking the Benefits of Gender Diversity: How an Ecological-Belonging Intervention Enhances Performance in Science Classrooms
Kevin Binning, Danny Doucette, Beverly Conrique, and Chandralekha Singh  

Increasing demographic diversity has both risks and benefits. On one hand, diverse contexts can heighten subgroup identities and increase bias. On the other hand, people benefit cognitively, emotionally, and behaviorally from exposure to diverse perspectives and ways of thinking. The present study, which focused on students taking an introductory college physics course, offers a way to realize the benefits of diversity. By collectively establishing local norms that adversity is both normative and surmountable, an ecological-belonging intervention changes social contexts in ways that help students in diverse context thrive. The findings are relevant for leaders wishing to leverage demographic diversity to enhance performance. 

Verbal Aggressions Against Major League Baseball Umpires Affect Their Decision Making
Joël Guérette, Caroline Blais, and Daniel Fiset  

The use of aggressive behavior to resolve conflicts is often considered socially unacceptable. Nevertheless, when people feel that they are victims of injustice, they tend to react aggressively in an attempt to restore justice. In this research, we used a context in which perceived injustices are numerous and real—professional baseball games in the United States—to test the effectiveness of verbal aggression toward officials. We found that players and coaches who yell at officials influence decisions of those officials to their team’s advantage in a bidirectional way. After being verbally abused, the officials call fewer strikes to that team’s batters and more to those of the opposing team. These findings must be considered when formulating strategies to mitigate human-to-human aggression. Recognizing the potential impact of aggression on decision makers raises questions about the ethical considerations surrounding its use, particularly in situations where individuals perceive themselves as victims of injustice. 

Unlocking the Benefits of Gender Diversity: How an Ecological-Belonging Intervention Enhances Performance in Science Classrooms
Kevin R. Binning, Danny Doucette, Beverly G. Conrique, Chandralekha Singh 

Gender diversity signals inclusivity, but meta-analyses suggest that it does not boost individual or group performance. This research examined whether a social-psychological intervention can unlock the benefits of gender diversity on college physics students’ social and academic outcomes. Analyses of 124 introductory physics classrooms at a large research institution in the eastern United States ( N = 3,605) indicated that in classrooms doing “business as usual,” cross-gender collaboration was infrequent, there was a substantial gender gap in physics classroom belonging, and classroom gender diversity had no effect on performance. The ecological-belonging intervention aimed to establish classroom norms that adversity in the course is normal and surmountable. In classrooms receiving the intervention, cross-gender interaction increased 51%, the gender gap in belonging was reduced by 47%, and higher classroom diversity was associated with higher course grades and 1-year grade point average for both men and women. Addressing contextual belongingness norms may help to unlock the benefits of diversity.   

Verbal Aggressions Against Major League Baseball Umpires Affect Their Decision Making
Joël Guérette, Caroline Blais, Daniel Fiset 

Excessively criticizing a perceived unfair decision is considered to be common behavior among people seeking to restore fairness. However, the effectiveness of this strategy remains unclear. Using an ecological environment where excessive criticism is rampant—Major League Baseball—we assess the impact of verbal aggression on subsequent home-plate umpire decision making during the 2010 to 2019 seasons ( N = 153,255 pitches). Results suggest a two-sided benefit of resorting to verbal abuse. After being excessively criticized, home-plate umpires ( N = 110 adults, employed in the United States) were less likely to call strikes to batters from the complaining team and more prone to call strikes to batters on the opposing team. A series of additional analyses lead us to reject an alternative hypothesis, namely that umpires, after ejecting the aggressor, seek to compensate for the negative consequences brought on by the loss of a teammate. Rather, our findings support the hypothesis that, under certain conditions, verbal aggression may offer an advantage to complainants.   

Manipulating Prior Beliefs Causally Induces Under- and Overconfidence
Hélène Van Marcke, Pierre Le Denmat, Tom Verguts, Kobe Desender 

Humans differ vastly in the confidence they assign to decisions. Although such under- and overconfidence relate to fundamental life outcomes, a computational account specifying the underlying mechanisms is currently lacking. We propose that prior beliefs in the ability to perform a task explain confidence differences across participants and tasks, despite similar performance. In two perceptual decision-making experiments, we show that manipulating prior beliefs about performance during training causally influences confidence in healthy adults ( N = 50 each; Experiment 1: 8 men, one nonbinary; Experiment 2: 5 men) during a test phase, despite unaffected objective performance. This is true when prior beliefs are induced via manipulated comparative feedback and via manipulated training-phase difficulty. Our results were accounted for within an accumulation-to-bound model, explicitly modeling prior beliefs on the basis of earlier task exposure. Decision confidence is quantified as the probability of being correct conditional on prior beliefs, causing under- or overconfidence. We provide a fundamental mechanistic insight into the computations underlying under- and overconfidence.   

Bridging the Gap Between Self-Report and Behavioral Laboratory Measures: A Real-Time Driving Task With Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Sang Ho Lee, Myeong Seop Song, Min-hwan Oh, Woo-Young Ahn

A major challenge in assessing psychological constructs such as impulsivity is the weak correlation between self-report and behavioral task measures that are supposed to assess the same construct. To address this issue, we developed a real-time driving task called the “highway task,” in which participants often exhibit impulsive behaviors mirroring real-life impulsive traits captured by self-report questionnaires. Here, we show that a self-report measure of impulsivity is highly correlated with performance in the highway task but not with traditional behavioral task measures of impulsivity (47 adults aged 18–33 years). By integrating deep neural networks with an inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) algorithm, we inferred dynamic changes of subjective rewards during the highway task. The results indicated that impulsive participants attribute high subjective rewards to irrational or risky situations. Overall, our results suggest that using real-time tasks combined with IRL can help reconcile the discrepancy between self-report and behavioral task measures of psychological constructs.  

A Practical Significance Bias in Laypeople’s Evaluation of Scientific Findings
Audrey L. Michal, Priti Shah 

People often rely on scientific findings to help them make decisions—however, failing to report effect magnitudes might lead to a potential bias in assuming findings are practically significant. Across two online studies (Prolific; N = 800), we measured U.S. adults’ endorsements of expensive interventions described in media reports that led to effects that were small, large, or of unreported magnitude between groups. Participants who viewed interventions with unreported effect magnitudes were more likely to endorse interventions compared with those who viewed interventions with small effects and were just as likely to endorse interventions as those who viewed interventions with large effects, suggesting a practical significance bias. When effect magnitudes were reported, participants on average adjusted their evaluations accordingly. However, some individuals, such as those with low numeracy skills, were more likely than others to act on small effects, even when explicitly prompted to first consider the meaningfulness of the effect.   

Multivariate Assessment of Inhibitory Control in Youth: Links With Psychopathology and Brain Function
Elise M. Cardinale, Jessica Bezek, Olivia Siegal, et al. 

Inhibitory control is central to many theories of cognitive and brain development, and impairments in inhibitory control are posited to underlie developmental psychopathology. In this study, we tested the possibility of shared versus unique associations between inhibitory control and three common symptom dimensions in youth psychopathology: attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety, and irritability. We quantified inhibitory control using four different experimental tasks to estimate a latent variable in 246 youth (8–18 years old) with varying symptom types and levels. Participants were recruited from the Washington, D.C., metro region. Results of structural equation modeling integrating a bifactor model of psychopathology revealed that inhibitory control predicted a shared or general psychopathology dimension, but not ADHD-specific, anxiety-specific, or irritability-specific dimensions. Inhibitory control also showed a significant, selective association with global efficiency in a frontoparietal control network delineated during resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. These results support performance-based inhibitory control linked to resting-state brain function as an important predictor of comorbidity in youth psychopathology.   

The Interactive Effect of Incentive Salience and Prosocial Motivation on Prosocial Behavior
Y. Rin Yoon, Kaitlin Woolley

Charities often use incentives to increase prosocial action. However, charities sometimes downplay these incentives in their messaging (pilot study), possibly to avoid demotivating donors. We challenge this strategy, examining whether increasing the salience of incentives for prosocial action can in fact motivate charitable behavior. Three controlled experiments ( N = 2,203 adults) and a field study with an alumni-donation campaign ( N = 22,468 adults) found that more (vs. less) salient incentives are more effective at increasing prosocial behavior when prosocial motivation is low (vs. high). This is because more (vs. less) salient incentives increase relative consideration of self-interest (vs. other-regarding) benefits, which is a stronger driver of behavior at low (vs. high) levels of prosocial motivation. By identifying that prosocial motivation moderates the effect of incentive salience on charitable behavior, and by detailing the underlying mechanism, we advance theory and practice on incentive salience, motivation, and charitable giving.   

Can Invalid Information Be Ignored When It Is Detected?
Adam T. Ramsey, Yanjun Liu, Jennifer S. Trueblood 

With the rapid spread of information via social media, individuals are prone to misinformation exposure that they may utilize when forming beliefs. Over five experiments (total N = 815 adults, recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk in the United States), we investigated whether people could ignore quantitative information when they judged for themselves that it was misreported. Participants recruited online viewed sets of values sampled from Gaussian distributions to estimate the underlying means. They attempted to ignore invalid information, which were outlier values inserted into the value sequences. Results indicated participants were able to detect outliers. Nevertheless, participants’ estimates were still biased in the direction of the outlier, even when they were most certain that they detected invalid information. The addition of visual warning cues and different task scenarios did not fully eliminate systematic over- and underestimation. These findings suggest that individuals may incorporate invalid information they meant to ignore when forming beliefs.   

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