Knowledge that Transforms

Decades of research from across the globe highlight unequal and unfair division of household labor as a key factor that leads to relationship distress and demise. But does it have to? Testing a priori predictions across three samples of individuals cohabiting with a romantic partner during the COVID-19 pandemic ( N = 2,193, including 476 couples), we found an important exception to this rule. People who reported doing more of the household labor and who perceived the division as more unfair were less satisfied across the early weeks and ensuing months of the pandemic, but these negative effects disappeared when people felt appreciated by their partners. Feeling appreciated also appeared to buffer against the negative effects of doing less, suggesting that feeling appreciated may offset the relational costs of unequal division of labor, regardless of who contributes more. These findings generalized across gender, employment status, age, socioeconomic status, and relationship length.

People learn about themselves from social feedback, but desires for coherence and positivity constrain how feedback is incorporated into the self-concept. We developed a network-based model of the self-concept and embedded it in a reinforcement-learning framework to provide a computational account of how motivations shape self-learning from feedback. Participants ( N = 46 adult university students) received feedback while evaluating themselves on traits drawn from a causal network of trait semantics. Network-defined communities were assigned different likelihoods of positive feedback. Participants learned from positive feedback but dismissed negative feedback, as reflected by asymmetries in computational parameters that represent the incorporation of positive versus negative outcomes. Furthermore, participants were constrained in how they incorporated feedback: Self-evaluations changed less for traits that have more implications and are thus more important to the coherence of the network. We provide a computational explanation of how motives for coherence and positivity jointly constrain learning about the self from feedback, an explanation that makes testable predictions for future clinical research.

Disparities in the treatment of Black and White Americans in police stops are pernicious and widespread. We examined racial disparities in police traffic stops by leveraging data on hundreds of U.S. counties from the Stanford Open Policing Project and corresponding county-level data on implicit and explicit racial attitudes from the Project Implicit research website. We found that Black-White traffic-stop disparities are associated with county-level implicit and explicit racial attitudes and that this association is attributable to racial demographics: Counties with a higher proportion of White residents had larger racial disparities in police traffic stops. We also examined racial disparities in several poststop outcomes (e.g., arrest rates) and found that they were not systematically related to racial attitudes, despite evidence of disparities. These findings indicate that racial disparities in counties' traffic stops are reliably linked to counties' racial attitudes and demographic compositions.

School underachievement is a persistent problem in the United States. Direct-to-student, computer-delivered growth-mindset interventions have shown promise as a way to improve achievement for students at risk of failing in school; however, these interventions benefit only students who happen to be in classrooms that support growth-mindset beliefs. Here, we tested a teacher-delivered growth-mindset intervention for U.S. adolescents in Grades 6 and 7 that was designed to both impart growth-mindset beliefs and create a supportive classroom environment where those beliefs could flourish ( N = 1,996 students, N = 50 teachers). The intervention improved the grades of struggling students in the target class by 0.27 standard deviations, or 2.81 grade percentage points. The effects were largest for students whose teachers endorsed fixed mindsets before the intervention. This large-scale, randomized controlled trial demonstrates that growth-mindset interventions can produce gains when delivered by teachers.

Can interleaved retrieval practice enhance learning in classrooms? Across a 4-week period, ninth- through 12th-grade students ( N = 155) took a weekly quiz in their science courses that tested half of the concepts taught that week. Questions on each quiz were either blocked by concept or interleaved with different concepts. A month after the final quiz, students were tested on the concepts covered in the 4-week period. Replicating the retrieval-practice effect, results showed that participants performed better on concepts that had been on blocked quizzes ( M = 54%, SD = 28%) than on concepts that had not been quizzed ( M = 47%, SD = 20%; d = 0.30). Interleaved quizzes led to even greater benefits: Participants performed better on concepts that had been on interleaved quizzes ( M = 63%, SD = 26%) than on concepts that had been on blocked quizzes ( d = 0.35). These results demonstrate a cost-effective strategy to promote classroom learning.

To address sexism, people must first recognize it. In this research, we identified a barrier that makes sexism hard to recognize: rudeness toward men. We found that observers judge a sexist perpetrator as less sexist if he is rude toward men. This occurs because rudeness toward men creates the illusion of gender blindness. We documented this phenomenon in five preregistered studies consisting of online adult participants and adult students from professional schools (total N = 4,663). These attributions are problematic because sexism and rudeness are not mutually exclusive. Men who hold sexist beliefs about women can be—and often are—rude toward other men. These attributions also discourage observers from holding perpetrators accountable for gender bias. Thus, rudeness toward men gives sexist perpetrators plausible deniability. It protects them and prevents the first perceptual step necessary to address sexism.

Cross-species research suggests that exploratory behaviors increase during adolescence and relate to the social, affective, and risky behaviors characteristic of this developmental stage. However, how these typical adolescent behaviors manifest and relate in real-world settings remains unclear. Using geolocation tracking to quantify exploration-variability in daily movement patterns-over a 3-month period in 58 adolescents and adults (ages 13-27) in New York City, we investigated whether daily exploration varied with age and whether exploration related to social connectivity, risk taking, and momentary positive affect. In our cross-sectional sample, we found an association between daily exploration and age, with individuals near the transition to legal adulthood exhibiting the highest exploration levels. Days of higher exploration were associated with greater positive affect irrespective of age. Higher mean exploration was associated with greater social connectivity in all participants but was linked to higher risk taking selectively among adolescents. Our results highlight the interplay of exploration and socioemotional behaviors across development and suggest that societal norms may modulate their expression in naturalistic contexts.

The COVID-19 pandemic has threatened lives and livelihoods, imperiled families and communities, and disrupted developmental milestones globally. Among the critical developmental disruptions experienced is the transition to college, which is common and foundational for personal and social exploration. During college shutdowns (spring 2020), we recruited 633 first-year U.S. students (mean age = 18.83 years, 71.3% cisgender women) to provide narratives about the impacts of the pandemic. We tested the ways narrative features were associated with concurrent and longitudinal COVID stressors, psychosocial adjustment, and identity development. Narrative growth expressed in spring 2020 was positively associated with psychosocial adjustment and global identity development and was negatively associated with mental health concerns. Associations were supported concurrently and at 1-year follow-up. Growth partly explained associations between COVID stressors and students' adjustment. Our findings reinforce the importance of growth for resilience and underscore the importance of connective reasoning as people navigate a chronic stress.