Knowledge that Transforms

Overconfidence is thought to be a fundamental cognitive bias, but it is typically studied in environments where people lack accurate information about their abilities. We conducted a preregistered survey experiment and replication to learn whether overconfidence persists among tournament chess players who receive objective, precise, and public feedback about their skill. Our combined sample comprised 3,388 rated players aged 5 to 88 years from 22 countries with an average of 18.8 years of tournament experience. On average, participants asserted that their ability was 89 Elo rating points higher than their observed ratings indicated-expecting to outscore an equally rated opponent by nearly 2 to 1. One year later, only 11.3% of overconfident players achieved their asserted ability rating. Low-rated players overestimated their skill the most, and top-rated players were calibrated. Patterns consistent with overconfidence emerged in every sociodemographic subgroup we studied. We conclude that overconfidence persists in tournament chess, a real-world information environment that should be inhospitable to it.

= 320). In Experiment 1, children considered scenarios that might elicit information avoidance: protecting against negative emotions, maintaining perceptions of likeability and competence, preserving beliefs and preferences, and acting in self-interest. When a motivation for avoidance was present, children were more likely to avoid learning information, particularly with age. Experiment 2 presented the self-interest scenario (a moral "wiggle room" task) involving real payoffs. Although children could reveal their partner's payoff without cost, older children capitalized on moral "wiggle room" by avoiding this information and choosing the self-interested payoff. In Experiment 3, we considered conditions under which even young children might avoid information, finding that they too avoided information when explicitly encouraged to protect their emotions. Additional qualitative findings probed children's open-ended responses about why people seek and avoid information. Together, these experiments document the origins of information avoidance.

Automatic evaluation has emerged as a central concept in contemporary thinking about prejudice. The current research tested a quintessential aspect of prejudice: whether group affiliation dominates the automatic evaluation of individual group members even when diagnostic evaluative information about the individuals is available. Participants read a list of descriptions about the behaviors of two individuals: one from a typically liked group and one from a typically disliked group. The list portrayed one individual more positively than the other, and we manipulated the extremity and direction of that difference. We conducted six studies ( N = 11,572) with samples consisting of U.S. adults across different regions and group types (age, gender, and race) and two indirect measures that purportedly measure automatic evaluation: the implicit association test (IAT) and the evaluative priming task (EPT). Group affiliation (relative to personal characteristics) influenced the IAT and the EPT more than it influenced the self-reported evaluation. These results may suggest that the automatic evaluation of individuals is more prejudiced than nonautomatic evaluation.

= 3,215 adults), we found that men, more than women, avoided shared experiences (e.g., going to the movies, sharing food) with individuals of the same gender. Furthermore, persistent societal expectations that men should be unambiguously heterosexual underpinned this pattern: Men felt more apprehensive about signaling same-gender romance in platonic relationships than women did. In turn, romantic prototypicality drove the pattern of men (more than women) avoiding shared activities, above and beyond differences in how hedonic, enjoyable, and feminine the activities were; our findings further suggested that men's reluctance to share these experiences was due to pressure to conform to societal expectations rather than solely a personal preference. This research offers insight into how, despite evolving societal attitudes, heterosexual norms can lead men to make suboptimal consumption decisions and to forgo opportunities to connect with other men, ultimately perpetuating a stigma against intimacy between men.

The gambler's fallacy is typically defined as the false belief that a random event is less likely to occur if it has occurred recently. Although forms of this fallacy have been documented numerous times, past work either has not actually measured probabilistic predictions but rather point predictions or used sequences that were not independent. To address these problems, we conducted a series of high-powered, preregistered studies in which we asked 750 adult Amazon Mechanical Turk workers from the United States to report probabilistic predictions for truly independent sequences. In contrast to point predictions, which generated a significant gambler's fallacy, probabilistic predictions were not found to lead to a gambler's fallacy. Moreover, the point predictions could not be reconstructed by sampling from the probability judgments. This suggests that the gambler's fallacy originates at the decision stage rather than in probabilistic reasoning, as posited by several leading theories. New theories of the gambler's fallacy may be needed to explain these findings.

There are many ways to describe and represent the visuospatial world. A space can be described by its euclidean properties—the size of objects, the angles of boundaries, the distances between them. A space can also be described in nonspatial terms: One could explain the layout of a city by the order of its streets. Somewhere in between, topological representations —such as those commonly depicted in public-transit maps—capture coarse relational structure without precise euclidean detail, offering a relatively efficient, low-dimensional way of capturing spatial content. Here, we ask whether human adults quickly and automatically perceive such relations. In six experiments, we show that differences in simple topological features influence a range of visual tasks from object matching to number estimation to visual search. We discuss the possibility that topological relations are a kind of visual primitive that supports visuospatial representation.

Valuing the welfare of others is a fundamental aspect of empathy and prosocial behavior. How do people develop this valuation? Theories of associative learning suggest that people can associate social cues, such as smiles, with personal reward, thus feeling good when others thrive. Yet people often display generalized concern for others’ welfare, regardless of the specific cues present. We propose that Pavlovian conditioning allows people to associate reward directly with others’ abstract mental states, learning that another’s happiness predicts their own reward. In four online experiments with 1,500 U.S.-based adults recruited from CloudResearch, participants’ monetary outcomes were congruently or incongruently predicted by a target’s mental states. Participants who experienced congruent learning reported more empathic feelings toward the target in novel situations. The values attached to mental states further influenced participants’ prosocial choices. These results demonstrate how associative learning of abstract mental states can give rise to generalizable empathy and influence moral behavior.

= 29,298), a longitudinal survey of adult British households between 1991 and 2009. The outcome variables were mental health (as measured with the General Health Questionnaire) and life satisfaction. Using random-intercept cross-lagged panel models over 10 waves of data spanning over 18 years, the associations between religious-service attendance and mental health at the within-person level were mostly nonsignificant. The few significant findings indicated that an increase in religious-service attendance is associated subsequently with either higher or lower levels of mental health, suggesting both detrimental and beneficial effects. A series of robustness analyses (including the use of marginal structural models) mainly supported these findings. The results suggest that there is a need to question the assumption that religious-service attendance provides mental health benefits.

Prosocial interventions grounded in social interactions have shown limited effectiveness in alleviating depressive symptoms, possibly because of the discomfort and unease that depressed individuals experience during such interactions. We developed and examined an innovative prosocial intervention—an online micro-charitable giving intervention, in which individuals voluntarily donated at least one Chinese cent (¥0.01, or about $0.0014) daily. We conducted three preregistered, 2-month randomized controlled trials with depressed individuals (Sample 1: N = 125, Sample 2: N = 296, Sample 3: N = 462). Results showed that, compared with the waitlist group, the intervention group exhibited significantly greater improvements in both depressive symptoms (Cohen’s d s = −0.19 to −0.46) and emotional positivity (Cohen’s d s = 0.22 to 0.49), and that emotional positivity mediated the intervention’s effect on the reduction of depressive symptoms. Exploratory analysis found a slightly larger intervention effect for generous donors than for minimal donors. This low-cost, easily accessible prosocial intervention holds potential for the prevention of depression. Statement of Relevance Can donating one cent (specifically one Chinese cent, or about $0.0014) alleviate depressive symptoms? We have developed a practical and effective intervention—donating at least one cent daily on an online charity platform—and have discovered that this intervention effectively mitigates depressive symptoms in depressed individuals. Despite the nominal purchasing power of one cent in contemporary society, this act of giving has been shown to significantly enhance mental health. Our findings could be relevant to everyone in society; charitable donations promote societal harmony and, in addition, offer a cost-effective way to alleviate depressive symptoms. As the intervention instruction asserts, “Charity encompasses love, regardless of its size, as even one cent holds value.”

Awaiting news of uncertain outcomes is distressing because the news might be disappointing. To prevent such disappointments, people often “brace for the worst,” pessimistically lowering expectations before news arrives to decrease the possibility of surprising disappointment (a negative prediction error, or PE). Computational decision-making research commonly assumes that expectations do not drift within trials, yet it is unclear whether expectations pessimistically drift in real-world, high-stakes settings, what factors influence expectation drift, and whether it effectively buffers emotional responses to goal-relevant outcomes. Moreover, individuals learn from PEs to accurately anticipate future outcomes, but it is unknown whether expectation drift also impedes PE-based learning. In a sample of students awaiting exam grades ( N = 625), we found that expectations often drift and tend to drift pessimistically. We demonstrate that bracing is preferentially modulated by uncertainty; it transiently buffers the initial emotional impact of negative PEs but impairs PE-based learning, counterintuitively sustaining uncertainty into the future.