Knowledge that Transforms

-specular reflections from the surface of the eye that vary with the position of light sources in the environment. This study tested whether eye glint influences face perception, particularly in how observers perceive the gaze direction of a person they are viewing. Adult participants viewed computer-rendered face images that varied in eye direction, head rotation, and illumination. The presence of eye glint had little influence on the accuracy or precision of perceived gaze direction when faces were viewed under simplified conditions. However, biases in perceived gaze direction caused by changes in head orientation or illumination direction were reduced when eye glint was present relative to when it was absent. This suggests that eye glint can help an observer to maintain constancy in gaze perception despite variability in the appearance of the eye region that occurs across viewing conditions.

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.

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.

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.

This is a registered report to directly replicate the primary finding in Hecht and Proffitt (1995). Hecht and Proffitt found that those with occupational experience handling liquid in containers performed worse at solving a water-level problem than those in occupations that did not require handling liquids. Shortly after, Vasta et al. (1997) found the opposite: Experience was associated with superior performance on the task. The conflicting findings and the small sample sizes in each study leave the relationship between experience and water-level-task performance uncertain. We addressed these concerns with a high-powered direct replication of Hecht and Proffitt with adults in Germany ( N = 407). We failed to replicate Hecht and Proffitt’s results, finding that their study had less than 33% power to detect the small, nonsignificant difference that we observed between groups.

Do individuals possess a “gaze fingerprint” that reveals how they uniquely look at the world? We tested this question by examining intra- and intersubject gaze similarity across 700 static pictures of complex natural scenes. Independent discovery ( n = 105) and replication data sets ( n = 46) of adults aged 18 to 50 years (sampled from Italy and Germany) revealed that gaze fingerprinting is possible at relatively high rates (e.g., 52%–63%) compared with chance (e.g., 1%–2%). We also identify gaze-fingerprint barcodes , which reveal a unique individualized code describing which stimuli an individual can be gaze-fingerprinted on. Preregistered longitudinal follow-up experiments have shown that gaze-fingerprint barcodes are nonrandom within an individual over short and long time fraframmes. Finally, we find that increased gaze fingerprintability for social stimuli is associated with decreased levels of autistic traits. To summarize, this work showcases the potential of gaze fingerprinting for isolating traitlike factors that may be of high neurodevelopmental and biological significance.

How does the mind grow? Despite centuries of philosophical and psychological inquiry, little is known about how ordinary people intuitively conceptualize mental development. Across six countries (Australia, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States), adult participants reported their intuitions about mental development by indicating when they think various mental capacities first emerge. Across tasks and cultures, intuitions about mental development were consistently organized along two dimensions: an earlier-developing perceptual and experiential dimension (e.g., seeing, fear, hunger, pain) and a later-developing reflective and evaluative dimension (e.g., reasoning, beliefs, self-restraint, pride). Competing models were ruled out, showing that this structure is unique to lay beliefs about mental development. These dimensions also aligned with participants' intuitions about the origins of mental capacities within a nature-nurture framework. Together, the findings reveal a consistent cross-cultural pattern for reasoning about mental development and illuminate the intuitive architecture of mind perception.