Knowledge that Transforms

Evolutionary theories suggest that retributive sentiments evolved to deter antisocial behavior, yet psychological evidence shows punitive sentiments imperfectly optimize deterrence. Recent theories resolve this paradox, suggesting that retributive sentiments serve to restore mutual benefit between partners by both compensating the victim and imposing an additional deterrent cost on the transgressor. In four experiments, we tested predictions of this hypothesis with adults from a small-scale, politically decentralized society (Mentawai horticulturalists, Indonesia; N = 74) and a large-scale society (the United States; N = 600). Consistent with compensatory concerns, participants demanded that victims be rewarded in the currency of their loss and that more severe punishment be imposed when victims suffered more, holding aggressor benefit constant. Consistent with compensation being entangled with deterrence, participants endorsed additional penalties beyond restitution that were higher for recidivism and intentional offenses. This proximate entanglement of compensation and deterrence helps resolve apparent contradictions about the function of punishment in humans.

People often understand parts of languages that are closely related to their native tongue. But do they understand what the speaker intends to convey? We discovered that linguistic similarity induces an illusion of understanding, leading people to believe they understand more than they actually do. In Study 1, adult native Italian speakers overestimated their understanding of a speaker's intent more when they listened to Spanish (close language) than to Northern Jiangsu Chinese (distant language). In Study 2, adult native Mandarin Chinese speakers overestimated their understanding more when they listened to Northern Jiangsu Chinese (close language) than to Spanish (distant language). When listening to the closer language, listeners were more confident, and this mediated their overestimation of understanding. An illusion of understanding, then, increases not despite language closeness but because of it. This has theoretical implications for the role of calibration in communication and practical implications for miscommunication in international settings.

In 2012, Livingston et al. found that Black women were buffered against gender backlash; whether Black women were dominant or supportive toward an employee did not affect people’s perceptions of them as leaders in an organization. Conversely, White women incurred a status penalty for being dominant. Twelve years later, no direct replication has been published, and related research reached different conclusions: that Black women experience the most gender backlash for being dominant (as politicians) or that race does not affect gender backlash (for expressing anger). Given the seemingly contradictory results and limitations of previous research, the relationship between race and gender backlash warrants reexamination. In this registered report, we conducted a high-powered direct replication and extension of Livingston et al. with adult participants online ( N = 1,996). We found that both Black and White women (as well as men) suffered a status penalty for displaying dominance, suggesting a failure to replicate Livingston et al.’s findings. We discuss implications for theories of intersectional gender backlash.

The present work evaluates the rise, impact, and imbalances of big-team psychology via an analysis of 3,023,895 articles published in the 21st century. Results indicate that big teams—ranging from 10 to more than 100 authors—are relatively unusual ( n = 49,695) but increasing in popularity. More notably, such collaborations generate unusually high impact in terms of yearly mentions in scholarly articles ( n = 39,788,158), the news ( n = 1,018,639), social media ( n = 5,971,965), and policy documents ( n = 69,959). An examination of country-level sociocultural indicators revealed that first authors, in general, tend to be in regions that are relatively WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. However, this imbalance is slightly more pronounced among larger teams. In summary, results suggest that big-team science is an emerging trend in psychology—one that is unevenly deployed across world regions to generate high-impact scientific insights.

Conscious experiences appear to play a central role in human behavior, yet most neural processing occurs outside of consciousness. Understanding how the mind prioritizes information for consciousness is, therefore, crucial for theories of cognition. Prior research has largely focused on vision, but generalization is tenuous given the vastly different characteristics of the senses—particularly for audition, which lacks foveation and cannot be intentionally stopped. We examine the affective domain, for which prioritization is not well understood. In three experiments (two preregistered), 101 Hebrew-speaking adults completed a visual task with a stream of auditory pseudowords in the background. Occasionally a meaningful word appeared, and participants were asked about its presence. Using objective and subjective awareness measures, we found that neutral words were prioritized over negative words, regardless of task difficulty, intelligibility, and low-level features. These findings challenge theorizing and modal intuitions, and we discuss ways in which those can be reconciled.

Episodic recollection involves retrieving context information bound to specific events. However, autobiographical memory largely comprises recurrent, similar experiences that become integrated into joint representations. In the current study, we used scalp electroencephalography (EEG) to extract a neural signature of temporal context and investigate whether recalling a recurring event accompanies the reinstatement of one or multiple occurrences. We asked 52 young adults (aged 18-30) from the Philadelphia area to study and recall lists of words that included both once-presented and repeated items. Participants recalled repeated items in association with neighboring list items from each occurrence, but with stronger clustering around the repetition's initial occurrence. Furthermore, multivariate spectral analyses of EEG data recorded just prior to the recall of these words revealed stronger patterns of context reinstatement of the first occurrence than the second. Together, these results suggest that the initial occurrence of an event carries stronger temporal-context associations than later repetitions, as predicted by retrieved-context frameworks of episodic memory.

Income inequality is frequently cited as a forceful determinant of mental health and as a possible contributor to the rising trend in adolescent depressive symptoms. However, research findings often rely on low-powered cross-sectional designs. We conducted a preregistered study of the within-municipality effect of income inequality on adolescent depressive symptoms in Norway, covering ≈550,000 respondents nested within 863 municipality years and 340 municipalities. Using multilevel modeling and equivalence testing, the overall within-municipality effect of income inequality was neither statistically significant nor practically meaningful and did not significantly interact with family financial situation. A significant gender interaction showed that rising inequality predicted slightly higher depressive symptoms among females and slightly lower among males; however, the main gender effects were also probably too small to be meaningful. We conclude that changes in income inequality likely do not meaningfully predict nor help explain changes in adolescent depressive symptoms in Norway from 2010 to 2019.

We studied the consequences of economic inequality for depression among adults using individual-level longitudinal administrative data from Denmark ( n = 60,654,690 person time points). The data allow us to (a) measure depression without nonresponse (by proxy of redemption of prescriptions for antidepressants), (b) measure income inequality at a low level of aggregation to capture individuals’ everyday experiences, (c) conduct within-individual analyses from stable individual characteristics to address confounding, and (d) test whether inequality has similar consequences for people located differently in the local income distribution. In contrast to previous work, we found a modest negative average effect of economic inequality (a 1- SD increase in inequality is associated with a 1%–2% relative decrease in the probability of depression). However, this average masks substantial heterogeneity: The negative effect was confined to the locally relatively well-off, whereas those with the lowest relative income tended to become more depressed as inequality rose.

Whose welfare and interests matter from a moral perspective? This question is at the center of many polarizing debates, for example, on the ethicality of abortion or meat consumption. A widely cited hypothesis holds that attributions of moral standing are guided by which mental capacities an entity is perceived to have. Specifically, perceived sentience (the capacity to feel pleasure and pain) is thought to be the primary determinant, rather than perceived agency (the capacity to navigate the world and social relationships) or other abilities. This has been described as a general feature of moral cognition, but the evidence for this is mixed and overwhelmingly based on Western participants. Here, we examined the link between attributions of mind and moral standing across six culturally diverse countries—Brazil, Nigeria, Italy, Saudi Arabia, India, and the Philippines—using a sample of 1,255 participants (aged 18–74 years old) who were recruited via the online platform Toloka. In every country, entities’ moral standing was most strongly related to their perceived sentience.

Evidence from cross-sectional studies suggests that people who eat more meat tend to report somewhat lower depression—a link that, if causal, could have important implications for mental health. However, little is known about why meat consumption is associated with depression. We examined the nature and magnitude of this association in three large, representative, longitudinal samples in the Netherlands, Germany, and Australia (total N = 77,678, aged 14–102 years). Adjusting for income, age, education, and gender, we observed a weak association of β = −0.05 between meat consumption and depression that was not moderated by living context. Moreover, the longitudinal within-person association was very small (β = −0.01) and lagged within-person effects were not significant, casting doubt on a direct causal association. Overall, results do not support low meat consumption as an important risk factor for depression.