Knowledge that Transforms

= 5,323), we measured implicit evaluations of social groups following exposure to historical narratives about their oppression. Although the valence of such information is highly negative and its interpretation was left up to participants, implicit evaluations of oppressed groups shifted toward positivity, including in designs involving fictitious, well-known, and even self-relevant targets. The sole deviation from this pattern was observed in an experiment using a vignette about slavery in the United States, in response to which neither White nor Black Americans exhibited any change in implicit race attitudes. In line with propositional perspectives, these findings suggest that implicit evaluations (including, notably, implicit evaluations of well-known and self-relevant social groups) tend to change toward positivity in response to extremely negative information involving past oppression. However, macro-level phenomena, such as public awareness of histories of oppression, can modulate such updating processes.

Regional explicit and implicit bias are associated with real-world discrimination and marginalization. We extended this research area by focusing on sexual minorities and where same-gender couples live. Using data on 2,939 U.S. counties from Project Implicit and other publicly available sources, we found that measures with known associations with systemic anti-lesbian, gay, and bisexual (anti-LGB) bias are similarly associated with regional implicit and explicit anti-LGB bias. Furthermore, we found that fewer same-gender couples reside in counties with more explicit and implicit anti-LGB bias, above and beyond other factors that likely influence same-gender-couple residency. These findings further suggest that explicit and implicit measures of regional bias are capturing similar, if not the same, construct of a region's culture of bias toward particular groups. Couched specifically within the ongoing systemic political antagonization of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, plus (LGBTQ+) community, these findings also highlight the importance of considering contextual (in addition to individual) factors that reinforce systemic inequality.

Initial impressions of others based on facial appearances are often inaccurate yet can lead to dire outcomes. Across four studies, adult participants underwent a counterstereotype training to reduce their reliance on facial appearance in consequential social judgments of White male faces. In Studies 1 and 2, trustworthiness and sentencing judgments among control participants predicted whether real-world inmates were sentenced to death versus life in prison, but these relationships were diminished among trained participants. In Study 3, a sequential priming paradigm demonstrated that the training was able to abolish the relationship between even automatically and implicitly perceived trustworthiness and the inmates' life-or-death sentences. Study 4 extended these results to realistic decision-making, showing that training reduced the impact of facial trustworthiness on sentencing decisions even in the presence of decision-relevant information. Overall, our findings suggest that a counterstereotype intervention can mitigate the potentially harmful effects of relying on facial appearance in consequential social judgments.

Planning underpins the impressive flexibility of goal-directed behavior. However, even when planning, people can display surprising rigidity in how they think about problems (e.g., “functional fixedness”) that lead them astray. How can our capacity for behavioral flexibility be reconciled with our susceptibility to conceptual inflexibility? We propose that these tendencies reflect avoidance of two cognitive costs: the cost of representing task details and the cost of switching between representations. To test this hypothesis, we developed a novel paradigm that affords participants opportunities to choose different families of simplified representations to plan. In two preregistered, online studies ( Ns = 377 and 294 adults), we found that participants’ optimal behavior, suboptimal behavior, and reaction time were explained by a computational model that formalized people’s avoidance of representational complexity and switching. These results demonstrate how the selection of simplified, rigid representations leads to the otherwise puzzling combination of flexibility and inflexibility observed in problem solving.

The psychophysical laws governing the judgment of perceived numbers of objects or events, called the number sense, have been studied in detail. However, the behavioral principles of equally important numerical representations for action are largely unexplored in both humans and animals. We trained two male carrion crows ( Corvus corone) to judge numerical values of instruction stimuli from one to five and to flexibly perform a matching number of pecks. Our quantitative analysis of the crows’ number production performance shows the same behavioral regularities that have previously been demonstrated for the judgment of sensory numerosity, such as the numerical distance effect, the numerical magnitude effect, and the logarithmical compression of the number line. The presence of these psychophysical phenomena in crows producing number of pecks suggests a unified sensorimotor number representation system underlying the judgment of the number of external stimuli and internally generated actions.

Grandiose narcissism is defined as increased motivation for status and viewing oneself as entitled and superior to others. We hypothesized that these tendencies might be associated with basal levels of testosterone because testosterone is considered the most social hormone-driving dominance and the motivation to achieve social status. We distinguished between two facets of grandiose narcissism: agentic (i.e., the tendency to self-promotion in order to win others' admiration and social influence) and antagonistic (i.e., a reactive strategy used to restore threatened status). In 283 adult men, we examined the association between these facets of narcissism and blood-tested and self-reported testosterone levels. Agentic narcissism-the default narcissistic strategy-was positively associated with both testosterone indicators. Moreover, self-reported and objectively measured testosterone were positively correlated. These findings extend previous work by showing that the facets of narcissism have distinct hormonal underpinnings.

Humans often generalize rewarding experiences across abstract social roles. Theories of reward learning suggest that people generalize through model-based learning, but such learning is cognitively costly. Why do people seem to generalize across social roles with ease? Humans are social experts who easily recognize social roles that reflect familiar semantic concepts (e.g., “helper” or “teacher”). People may associate these roles with model-free reward (e.g., learning that helpers are rewarding), allowing them to generalize easily (e.g., interacting with novel individuals identified as helpers). In four online experiments with U.S. adults ( N = 577), we found evidence that social concepts ease complex learning (people generalize more and at faster speed) and that people attach reward directly to abstract roles (they generalize even when roles are unrelated to task structure). These results demonstrate how familiar concepts allow complex behavior to emerge from simple strategies, highlighting social interaction as a prototype for studying cognitive ease in the face of environmental complexity.

The current study investigated how stress affects value-based decision-making during spatial navigation and different types of learning underlying decisions. Eighty-two adult participants (42 females) first learned to find object locations in a virtual environment from a fixed starting location (rigid learning) and then to find the same objects from unpredictable starting locations (flexible learning). Participants then decided whether to reach goal objects from the fixed or unpredictable starting location. We found that stress impairs rigid learning in females, and it does not impair, and even improves, flexible learning when performance with rigid learning is controlled for. Critically, examining how earlier learning influences subsequent decision-making using computational models, we found that stress reduces memory integration, making participants more likely to focus on recent memory and less likely to integrate information from other sources. Collectively, our results show how stress impacts different memory systems and the communication between memory and decision-making.

It is widely recognized that psychological stress impairs performance for elite athletes, yet direct evidence is scarce when it comes to high-stakes competition because measuring real-time psychological stress without interference is often challenging. Contactless real-time heart rate—a technology-enabled biomarker of stress—was measured and broadcast on TV during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics archery competition for the first time in sports. Here we examined whether the real-time heart rate of 122 adult archers predicted their performance in this unique setting. We found that higher heart rate—which indicates an increase in psychological stress—is associated with lower scores, correlation coefficient r(2096) = −.076, p < .001, and the observation is robust after we controlled for fixed effects at the individual and match level. Our results provide the first direct evidence in support of the detrimental effect of psychological stress measured by a real-time biomarker in a high-stakes competitive setting.

A growing body of research has shown that simple choices involve the construction and comparison of values at the time of decision. These processes are modulated by attention in a way that leaves decision makers susceptible to attentional biases. Here, we studied the role of peripheral visual information on the choice process and on attentional choice biases. We used an eye-tracking experiment in which participants ( N = 50 adults) made binary choices between food items that were displayed in marked screen “shelves” in two conditions: (a) where both items were displayed, and (b) where items were displayed only when participants fixated within their shelves. We found that removing the nonfixated option approximately doubled the size of the attentional biases. The results show that peripheral visual information is crucial in facilitating good decisions and suggest that individuals might be influenceable by settings in which only one item is shown at a time, such as e-commerce.