Knowledge that Transforms

Empowering people to navigate online information competently is essential to complement systemic content moderation and platform regulation. A nationally representative randomized controlled study among adults in Germany ( N = 2,666) compared two media-literacy interventions: a source-focused lateral-reading strategy to help participants distinguish trustworthy from untrustworthy news outlets, and a claim-focused search strategy to help them assess the credibility of specific claims. Both interventions showed small improvements in discernment, but not all effects were statistically distinguishable from zero. At a 2-week follow-up, discernment improved in all groups, and differences between the intervention and control groups were no longer statistically distinguishable. We found no evidence of backfire effects. An exploratory analysis of discernment pretreatment indicated the lowest performance for supporters of populist radical-right parties. Behavioral measures suggested increases in information search in both intervention groups. On average, lateral reading reduced trust in untrustworthy sources, and online search increased trust in trustworthy sources.

Investigations into people’s ability to use multiple working memory representations to concurrently search for targets have led to mixed findings. Although the discourse has predominantly centered around capacity limits in multitarget search, we here propose that people can switch between sequential and concurrent search. In Experiment 1 ( n = 16 adults), manual responses and oculomotor behavior revealed that participants could search sequentially, and concurrently for at least two targets, when instructed. In Experiments 2a ( n = 16 adults) and 2b ( n = 16 adults), participants were free to choose how they searched. Trial-level modeling showed that participants primarily used sequential and concurrent search as specific modes and flexibly adjusted between either mode depending on template set size, template availability, stimulus properties, and individual preference. Our findings stress the dynamic and adaptive nature of visual search. Moreover, understanding that different search modes can be flexibly picked as “tools from the toolbox” may reconcile inconsistencies in prior findings.

Realizing a sustainable future requires the active participation of today's young generations. How can we foster adolescents' proenvironmental engagement? In a preregistered, cross-national, longitudinal field experiment, we tested a novel approach to promoting adolescent behavior change: motive alignment. We hypothesized that presenting proenvironmental behavior as aligned with adolescents' developmentally salient motives (in this case, autonomy and peer status) would enhance their engagement. In Study 1 (the Netherlands), a motive-alignment (versus control) intervention implemented in secondary schools increased adolescents' proenvironmental food choices on the day of the intervention. Although this effect faded after 4 weeks, participants in the intervention condition continued to donate more to an environmental organization at follow-up. In Study 2 (China), we replicated these findings. Motive alignment thus offers a promising approach to strengthen interventions promoting adolescents' proenvironmental behavior; it presents scalable and affordable opportunities to foster youth behavior change.

Conscious experiences appear to play a central role in human behavior, yet most neural processing occurs outside of consciousness. Understanding how the mind prioritizes information for consciousness is, therefore, crucial for theories of cognition. Prior research has largely focused on vision, but generalization is tenuous given the vastly different characteristics of the senses—particularly for audition, which lacks foveation and cannot be intentionally stopped. We examine the affective domain, for which prioritization is not well understood. In three experiments (two preregistered), 101 Hebrew-speaking adults completed a visual task with a stream of auditory pseudowords in the background. Occasionally a meaningful word appeared, and participants were asked about its presence. Using objective and subjective awareness measures, we found that neutral words were prioritized over negative words, regardless of task difficulty, intelligibility, and low-level features. These findings challenge theorizing and modal intuitions, and we discuss ways in which those can be reconciled.

Episodic recollection involves retrieving context information bound to specific events. However, autobiographical memory largely comprises recurrent, similar experiences that become integrated into joint representations. In the current study, we used scalp electroencephalography (EEG) to extract a neural signature of temporal context and investigate whether recalling a recurring event accompanies the reinstatement of one or multiple occurrences. We asked 52 young adults (aged 18-30) from the Philadelphia area to study and recall lists of words that included both once-presented and repeated items. Participants recalled repeated items in association with neighboring list items from each occurrence, but with stronger clustering around the repetition's initial occurrence. Furthermore, multivariate spectral analyses of EEG data recorded just prior to the recall of these words revealed stronger patterns of context reinstatement of the first occurrence than the second. Together, these results suggest that the initial occurrence of an event carries stronger temporal-context associations than later repetitions, as predicted by retrieved-context frameworks of episodic memory.

Income inequality is frequently cited as a forceful determinant of mental health and as a possible contributor to the rising trend in adolescent depressive symptoms. However, research findings often rely on low-powered cross-sectional designs. We conducted a preregistered study of the within-municipality effect of income inequality on adolescent depressive symptoms in Norway, covering ≈550,000 respondents nested within 863 municipality years and 340 municipalities. Using multilevel modeling and equivalence testing, the overall within-municipality effect of income inequality was neither statistically significant nor practically meaningful and did not significantly interact with family financial situation. A significant gender interaction showed that rising inequality predicted slightly higher depressive symptoms among females and slightly lower among males; however, the main gender effects were also probably too small to be meaningful. We conclude that changes in income inequality likely do not meaningfully predict nor help explain changes in adolescent depressive symptoms in Norway from 2010 to 2019.

Whose welfare and interests matter from a moral perspective? This question is at the center of many polarizing debates, for example, on the ethicality of abortion or meat consumption. A widely cited hypothesis holds that attributions of moral standing are guided by which mental capacities an entity is perceived to have. Specifically, perceived sentience (the capacity to feel pleasure and pain) is thought to be the primary determinant, rather than perceived agency (the capacity to navigate the world and social relationships) or other abilities. This has been described as a general feature of moral cognition, but the evidence for this is mixed and overwhelmingly based on Western participants. Here, we examined the link between attributions of mind and moral standing across six culturally diverse countries—Brazil, Nigeria, Italy, Saudi Arabia, India, and the Philippines—using a sample of 1,255 participants (aged 18–74 years old) who were recruited via the online platform Toloka. In every country, entities’ moral standing was most strongly related to their perceived sentience.

Social situations are key determinants of cognition and behavior, and although several frameworks for representing situations have been proposed, these remain partial, nonintegrated, and not systematically mapped onto the rich space of situations encountered in everyday life. We address this problem by analyzing more than 20,000 detailed textual descriptions of dyadic social interactions obtained from participant-generated stories, published fiction, blogs, and autobiographical narratives. Our main methodological contribution is to use generative artificial intelligence to code these textual descriptions along a very large set of features and derive a detailed taxonomy of situational classes or categories of social interactions. We subsequently relate these situational classes to high-level situational variables like conflict, power, and duty, which have been identified by prior theory. In this way, our article provides a comprehensive, data-driven, and integrative framework for quantifying situational structure, advancing the study of social cognition and behavior.

Conspiracy mentality is conceptualized as a continuum. Research on this topic has focused on unwarranted conspiracy claims and the upper end of the conspiracy-mentality continuum-people seeing conspiracies everywhere. This focus neglects warranted conspiracy claims and the lower end of the continuum. To better understand conspiracy mentality, we aimed to clarify both ends of the continuum using signal detection theory. We examined how people evaluate warranted and unwarranted conspiracy claims across levels of conspiracy mentality in two studies with 331 French-speaking adult participants from France, Switzerland, and Belgium (Study 1) and 576 English-speaking adult participants from the United States and the United Kingdom (Study 2), both groups recruited via Prolific. Compared with participants high in conspiracy mentality, those low in conspiracy mentality not only believed less in conspiracies but also underestimated their prevalence. However, participants low in conspiracy mentality were more accurate at distinguishing warranted from unwarranted conspiracy claims. These results provide a better understanding of conspiracy mentality and its relationship with the perceived truthfulness of conspiracies.

Pretending not to know requires appreciating how one would behave without a given piece of knowledge and acting accordingly. Here, two game-based experiments reveal a capacity to simulate decision-making under such counterfactual ignorance. English-speaking adults ( N = 1,001) saw the solution to a game (ship locations in Battleship, the hidden word in Hangman) but attempted to play as though they never had this information. Pretenders accurately mimicked broad aspects of genuine play, including the number of guesses required to reach a solution, as well as subtle patterns, such as the effects of decision uncertainty on decision time. Although peers were unable to detect pretense, statistical analysis and computational modeling uncovered traces of overacting in pretenders’ decisions, suggesting a schematic simulation of their minds. Opening up a new approach to studying self-simulation, our results reveal intricate metacognitive knowledge about decision-making, drawn from a rich—but simplified—internal model of cognition.