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Narratives Shape Cognitive Representations of Immigrants and Immigration-Policy Preferences

Joel E. Martínez; Lauren A. Feldman; Mallory J. Feldman; Mina Cikara
Psychological Science 2021
Scholars from across the social and media sciences have issued a clarion call to address a recent resurgence in criminalized characterizations of immigrants. Do these characterizations meaningfully impact individuals’ beliefs about immigrants and immigration? Across two online convenience samples (total N = 1,054 adult U.S. residents), we applied a novel analytic technique to test how different narratives—achievement, criminal, and struggle-oriented—impacted cognitive representations of German, Russian, Syrian, and Mexican immigrants and the concept of immigrants in general. All stories featured male targets. Achievement stories homogenized individual immigrant representations, whereas both criminal and struggle-oriented stories racialized them along a White/non-White axis: Germany clustered with Russia, and Syria clustered with Mexico. However, criminal stories were unique in making our most egalitarian participants’ representations as differentiated as our least egalitarian participants’. Narratives about individual immigrants also generalized to update representations of nationality groups. Most important, narrative-induced representations correlated with immigration-policy preferences: Achievement narratives and corresponding homogenized representations promoted preferences for less restriction, and criminal narratives promoted preferences for more.

What Might Books Be Teaching Young Children About Gender?

Molly Lewis; Matthew James Cooper Borkenhagen; Ellen Converse; Gary Lupyan; Mark S. Seidenberg
Psychological Science 2021
We investigated how gender is represented in children's books using a novel 200,000-word corpus comprising 247 popular, contemporary books for young children. Using adult human judgments and word co-occurrence data, we quantified gender biases of words in individual books and in the whole corpus. We found that children's books contain many words that adults judge as gendered. Semantic analyses based on co-occurrence data yielded word clusters related to gender stereotypes (e.g., feminine: emotions; masculine: tools). Co-occurrence data also indicated that many books instantiate gender stereotypes identified in other research (e.g., girls are better at reading, and boys are better at math). Finally, we used large-scale data to estimate the gender distribution of the audience for individual books, and we found that children are more often exposed to stereotypes for their own gender. Together, the data suggest that children's books may be an early source of gender associations and stereotypes.

Idiosyncratic Tower of Babel: Individual Differences in Word-Meaning Representation Increase as Word Abstractness Increases

Xiaosha Wang; Yanchao Bi
Psychological Science 2021
Humans primarily rely on language to communicate, on the basis of a shared understanding of the basic building blocks of communication: words. Do we mean the same things when we use the same words? Although cognitive neural research on semantics has revealed the common principles of word-meaning representation, the factors underlying the potential individual variations in word meanings are unknown. Here, we empirically characterized the intersubject consistency of 90 words across 20 adult subjects (10 female) using both behavioral measures (rating-based semantic-relationship patterns) and neuroimaging measures (word-evoked brain activity patterns). Across both the behavioral and neuroimaging experiments, we showed that the magnitude of individual disagreements on word meanings could be modeled on the basis of how much language or sensory experience is associated with a word and that this variation increases with word abstractness. Uncovering the cognitive and neural origins of word-meaning disagreements across individuals has implications for potential mechanisms to modulate such disagreements.

Don’t Ditch the Laptop Just Yet: A Direct Replication of Mueller and Oppenheimer’s (2014) Study 1 Plus Mini Meta-Analyses Across Similar Studies

Heather L. Urry; Chelsea Crittle; Victoria A. Floerke; Michael Z. Leonard; Clinton S. Perry; Naz Akdilek; Erica R. Albert; Avram Block; Caroline Ackerley Bollinger; Emily M. Bowers; Renee S. Brody; Kelly Burk; Ally Burnstein; Allissa K. Chan; Petrina C. Chan; Lena J. Chang; Emily Chen; Chakrapand Paul Chiarawongse; G. J. Chin; Kathy Chin; Ben G. Cooper; Katherine Adele Corneilson; Amanda M. Danielson; Elizabeth Davis; Ycar Devis; Melissa Dong; Elizabeth K. Dossett; Nick Dulchin; Vincent N. Duong; Ben Ewing; Julia Mansfield Fuller; Thomas E. Gartman; Chad R. Goldberg; Jesse Greenfield; Selena Groh; Ross A. Hamilton; Will Hodge; Dylan Van Hong; Joshua E. Insler; Aava B. Jahan; Jessica Paola Jimbo; Emma M. Kahn; Daniel Knight; Grace E. Konstantin; Caitlin Kornick; Zachary J. Kramer; Meghan Lauze; Misha S. Linnehan; Tommaso Lombardi; Hayley Long; Alec J. Lotstein; Myrna-Nahisha A. Lyncee; M Lyons; Eli Maayan; Nicole Marie May; Elizabeth C McCall; Rhea Ann Charlotte Montgomery-Walsh; Michael C. Morscher; Amelia D. Moser; Alexandra S. Mueller; Christin A. Mujica; Elim Na; Isabelle R. Newman; Meghan K. O’Brien; Katherine Alexandra Ochoa Castillo; Z. Ayotola Onipede; Danielle A. Pace; Jasper H. Park; Angeliki Perdikari; Catherine E. Perloff; Rachel C. Perry; Akash A. Pillai; Avni Rajpal; Emma Ranalli; Jillian E. Schreier; Justin R. Shangguan; Micaela Jen Silver; Avery Glennon Spratt; Rachel E. Stein; Grant J. Steinhauer; Devon K. Valera; Samantha Vervoordt; Lena Walton; Noah Weinflash; Karen Weinstock; Jiaqi Yuan; Dominique T. Zarrella; Jonah E. Zarrow
Psychological Science 2021
In this direct replication of Mueller and Oppenheimer’s (2014) Study 1, participants watched a lecture while taking notes with a laptop ( n = 74) or longhand ( n = 68). After a brief distraction and without the opportunity to study, they took a quiz. As in the original study, laptop participants took notes containing more words spoken verbatim by the lecturer and more words overall than did longhand participants. However, laptop participants did not perform better than longhand participants on the quiz. Exploratory meta-analyses of eight similar studies echoed this pattern. In addition, in both the original study and our replication, higher word count was associated with better quiz performance, and higher verbatim overlap was associated with worse quiz performance, but the latter finding was not robust in our replication. Overall, results do not support the idea that longhand note taking improves immediate learning via better encoding of information.

Attitudes Based on Feelings: Fixed or Fleeting?

Matthew D. Rocklage; Andrew Luttrell
Psychological Science 2021
Researchers and practitioners want to create opinions that stick. Yet whereas some opinions stay fixed, others are as fleeting as the time it takes to report them. In seven longitudinal studies with more than 20,000 individuals, we found that attitudes based more on emotion are relatively fixed. Whether participants evaluated brand-new Christmas gifts or one of 40 brands, the more emotional their opinion, the less it changed over time, particularly if it was positive. In a word-of-mouth linguistic analysis of 75,000 real-world online reviews, we found that the more emotional consumers are in their first review, the more that attitude persists when they express it again even years later. Finally, more emotion-evoking persuasive messages create attitudes that decay less over time, further establishing emotion's causal effect. These effects persist above and beyond other attitude-strength attributes. Interestingly, we also found that lay individuals generally fail to appreciate the relation between emotionality and attitude stability.

Generating Options and Choosing Between Them Depend on Distinct Forms of Value Representation

Adam Morris; Jonathan Phillips; Karen Huang; Fiery Cushman
Psychological Science 2021
Humans have a remarkable capacity for flexible decision-making, deliberating among actions by modeling their likely outcomes. This capacity allows us to adapt to the specific features of diverse circumstances. In real-world decision-making, however, people face an important challenge: There are often an enormous number of possibilities to choose among, far too many for exhaustive consideration. There is a crucial, understudied prechoice step in which, among myriad possibilities, a few good candidates come quickly to mind. How do people accomplish this? We show across nine experiments ( N = 3,972 U.S. residents) that people use computationally frugal cached value estimates to propose a few candidate actions on the basis of their success in past contexts (even when irrelevant for the current context). Deliberative planning is then deployed just within this set, allowing people to compute more accurate values on the basis of context-specific criteria. This hybrid architecture illuminates how typically valuable thoughts come quickly to mind during decision-making.

Action Enhances Predicted Touch

Emily R. Thomas; Daniel Yon; Floris P. de Lange; Clare Press
Psychological Science 2021
It is widely believed that predicted tactile action outcomes are perceptually attenuated. The present experiments determined whether predictive mechanisms necessarily generate attenuation or, instead, can enhance perception-as typically observed in sensory cognition domains outside of action. We manipulated probabilistic expectations in a paradigm often used to demonstrate tactile attenuation. Adult participants produced actions and subsequently rated the intensity of forces on a static finger. Experiment 1 confirmed previous findings that action outcomes are perceived less intensely than passive stimulation but demonstrated more intense perception when active finger stimulation was removed. Experiments 2 and 3 manipulated prediction explicitly and found that expected touch during action is perceived more intensely than unexpected touch. Computational modeling suggested that expectations increase the gain afforded to expected tactile signals. These findings challenge a central tenet of prominent motor control theories and demonstrate that sensorimotor predictions do not exhibit a qualitatively distinct influence on tactile perception.

Global Variation in Subjective Well-Being Predicts Seven Forms of Altruism

Shawn A Rhoads; Devon Gunter; Rebecca M. Ryan; Abigail A. Marsh
Psychological Science 2021
The geographic prevalence of various altruistic behaviors (nonreciprocal acts that improve other people’s welfare) is not uniformly distributed, but whether this reflects variation in a superordinate construct linked to national-level outcomes or cultural values is unknown. We compiled data on seven altruistic behaviors across 48 to 152 nations and found evidence that these behaviors reflect a latent construct positively associated with national-level subjective well-being (SWB) and individualist values, even when we controlled for national-level wealth, health, education, and shared cultural history. Consistent with prior work, our results showed that SWB mediated the relationship between two objective measures of well-being (wealth and health) and altruism ( n = 130). Moreover, these indirect effects increased as individualist values increased within the subset of countries ( n = 90) with available data. Together, our results indicate that altruism increases when resources and cultural values provide objective and subjective means for pursuing personally meaningful goals and that altruistic behaviors may be enhanced by societal changes that promote well-being.

How Collective-Action Failure Shapes Group Heterogeneity and Engagement in Conventional and Radical Action Over Time

Morgana Lizzio‐Wilson; Emma F. Thomas; Winnifred R. Louis; Brittany Wilcockson; Catherine E. Amiot; Fathali M. Moghaddam; Craig McGarty
Psychological Science 2021
Extensive research has identified factors influencing collective-action participation. However, less is known about how collective-action outcomes (i.e., success and failure) shape engagement in social movements over time. Using data collected before and after the 2017 marriage-equality debate in Australia, we conducted a latent profile analysis that indicated that success unified supporters of change ( n = 420), whereas failure created subgroups among opponents ( n = 419), reflecting four divergent responses: disengagement (resigned acceptors), moderate disengagement and continued investment (moderates), and renewed commitment to the cause using similar strategies (stay-the-course opponents) or new strategies (innovators). Resigned acceptors were least inclined to act following failure, whereas innovators were generally more likely to engage in conventional action and justify using radical action relative to the other profiles. These divergent reactions were predicted by differing baseline levels of social identification, group efficacy, and anger. Collective-action outcomes dynamically shape participation in social movements; this is an important direction for future research.

Against Empathy Bias: The Moral Value of Equitable Empathy

Zoë Fowler; Kyle Fiore Law; Brendan Gaesser
Psychological Science 2021
Empathy has long been considered central to living a moral life. However, mounting evidence has shown that people’s empathy is often biased toward (i.e., felt more strongly for) others that they are close or similar to, igniting a debate over whether empathy is inherently morally flawed and should be abandoned in efforts to strive toward greater equity. This debate has focused on whether empathy limits the scope of our morality, but little consideration has been given to whether our moral beliefs may be limiting our empathy. Across two studies conducted on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk ( N = 604), we investigated moral judgments of biased and equitable feelings of empathy. We observed a moral preference for empathy toward socially close over distant others. However, feeling equal empathy for all people is seen as the most morally and socially valuable approach. These findings provide new theoretical insight into the relationship between empathy and morality, and they have implications for navigating toward a more egalitarian future.