This study researched the meaning of being single among 24 college-age adults of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (i.e., Mormons). It examined influences on the construction of meanings of singlehood, gender patterns regarding the meaning of singlehood, and pressures on L.D.S. singles to date and marry. The most important finding was that positive attitudes toward singlehood are more prevalent than negative or ambivalent attitudes. Families, as gate-keepers and transmitters of cultural information about singlehood and marriage, and the L.D.S. religion were the strongest influences on the development of meanings of singlehood. Families and religion mutually influence one another and meanings of singlehood, and supportive friends helped singles feel that they are not alone. Although there was more variation within than between gender accounts of singlehood, important patterns in construction of attitudes were also discovered. Participants felt both external and internal pressures to date and marry.
The past decades have seen an extraordinary growth in the number of large, open-access portals making data available for cross-national comparative social-science research and a corresponding increase in the use of such data. In particular, international organizations such as The World Bank, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the World Health Organization (WHO) provide users with comprehensive indicator systems on, for example, the economy, the environment, education, health, child well-being, gender inequality, and conflict and violence. If adequately used, data retrieved from such portals can help researchers to address important research questions. However, they can also lead to bad science if researchers fail to pay close attention to how the data were generated. We illustrate this risk using a real-life example, namely data on cross-national homicide rates.
We introduce a theoretical framework distinguishing between anchoring effects, anchoring bias, and judgmental noise: Anchoring effects require anchoring bias, but noise modulates their size. We tested this framework by manipulating stimulus magnitudes. As magnitudes increase, psychophysical noise due to scalar variability widens the perceived range of plausible values for the stimulus. This increased noise, in turn, increases the influence of anchoring bias on judgments. In 11 preregistered experiments ( N = 3,552 adults), anchoring effects increased with stimulus magnitude for point estimates of familiar and novel stimuli (e.g., reservation prices for hotels and donuts, counts in dot arrays). Comparisons of relevant and irrelevant anchors showed that noise itself did not produce anchoring effects. Noise amplified anchoring bias. Our findings identify a stimulus feature predicting the size and replicability of anchoring effects—stimulus magnitude. More broadly, we show how to use psychophysical noise to test relationships between bias and noise in judgment under uncertainty.
This statement is an Expression of Concern regarding the article “Effort for Payment: A Tale of Two Markets” (Heyman & Ariely, 2004) published in Psychological Science. This Expression of Concern is prompted by some uncertainty regarding the values of statistical tests reported in the article and the analytic approach taken to the data. The corresponding author of the article and coauthor of this statement, Dan Ariely, attempted to locate the original data in an effort to resolve the ambiguities but was unsuccessful. Because the ambiguities cannot be resolved, we decided to issue an Expression of Concern about the confidence that can be held in the results reported in the article. The ambiguity originally was brought to the attention of the Editor in Chief by Gilad Feldman, Hirotaka Imada, Wan Fei Chan, Yuk Ki Ng, Lee Hing Man, Mei Sze Wong, and Bo Ley Cheng. These researchers ran the article through statcheck (Epskamp & Nuijten, 2018), an R package that is designed to detect statistical errors (much like spell check and grammar check in Word). The program searches articles for statistical results, recalculates the values, and compares the reported and recalculated values to determine whether they match. Statcheck is now required for all articles published in Psychological Science. However, it was not available at the time of submission and acceptance of Heyman and Ariely’s article. The statcheck analysis conducted by Feldman and colleagues produced some discrepancies between the statistical values reported in the article and those determined by the recalculation. Gilad Feldman notified the editor of these discrepancies. On receipt of Feldman and colleagues’ report, we reran the statcheck analysis in house. The report yielded 13 “errors” or mismatches. Five of the discrepancies were associated with Experiment 1 of the article, four with Experiment 2, and four with Experiment 3. The values reported in the article and those resulting from the statcheck recalculation are provided in Table 1. In seven of the instances of discrepancy between the reported and recalculated values, the p value of the test changed, but the status of the test—as statistically significant or not statistically significant—remained the same. That is, the test was reported as statistically significant and remained so or was reported as nonsignificant and remained so. Thus, these discrepancies do not impact the interpretation or conclusions. In six of the instances of discrepancy, the outcome of the statistical test was different, resulting in what is known as a “decision error.” In these instances, there is a mismatch between results reported as significant and the results of the recalculations, which indicate that the tests are not statistically significant. These discrepancies, if the recalculated values are correct, would change the interpretation of the data in a manner that substantively alters the conclusions drawn from the research. In addition to the issues raised by the statcheck report, there is a lack of specificity regarding the analytic approach adopted in the article. The authors did not provide a narrative description of the analytic approach, which featured seven conditions in Experiment 1 (N = 614 participants), five conditions in Experiment 2 (N = 159), and five conditions in Experiment 3 (N = 90). In all cases, the statistical tests were F tests; for all reported tests, the degrees of freedom are indicated as (1, 607), (1, 154), and (1, 84), for Experiments 1, 2, and 3, respectively. Although the original analyses cannot be located, the authors recall conducting the analyses using a planned contrasts approach in the SuperANOVA package, using all the data from all the conditions for the error term and the specific cells for the conditions. Note that this is a unique analysis approach, and the differences from the statcheck results could be due to the way this approach was carried out or reported. Because the data for this article cannot be located, it cannot be determined whether the original reported values or those resulting from the statcheck recalculation are correct. Nor is it possible to more fully disambiguate the analytic approach. Given the ambiguities, the confidence we place in the conclusions drawn from the research is diminished. However, again, given the ambiguities, the Editor in Chief decided not to change the official publication record of the article through a Corrigendum. Instead, the corresponding author and editor are issuing this Expression of Concern and note that the differences between the values reported in the published article and the values recalculated through 1035782 PSSXXX10.1177/09567976211035782Bauer, ArielyExpression of Concern: Effort for Payment: A Tale of Two Markets research-article2021
Little is known about the role of declarative memory in the ongoing perception of one's personality. Seven individuals who developed a rare and severe type of anterograde amnesia following damage to their medial temporal lobes were identified from our neurological patient registry. We examined the stability of their personality ratings on the Big Five Inventory over five retest periods and assessed the accuracy of their ratings via analyses of self-caregiver agreement. The patients portrayed a stable sense of self over the course of 1 year. However, their self-ratings differed from those provided by the caregivers. Intriguingly, these discrepancies diminished when caregivers retrospectively rated the patients' personalities prior to their brain injury, suggesting that patients' perceptions of themselves were stuck in the past. We interpret our findings to indicate that the ability to form new declarative memories is not required for maintaining a stable sense of self but may be important for updating one's sense of self over time.
Despite the pervasiveness of facial inferences, scholars have debated whether our face reflects valid information regarding how we actually behave. Whereas previous research has largely focused on the accuracy of facial inferences, the present research examined the validity of face-based judgments. Specifically, we tested how accurate face-based judgments are, whether the accuracy of and confidence in face-based judgments are associated, and what mechanisms potentially link facial appearance to behaviors ( N = 1,386 American and Korean adults). We found that although face-based judgments could accurately predict someone’s behavior (Study 1), participants’ confidence about their face-based judgments was not associated with their accuracy (Studies 2a and 2b). Moreover, Study 3 demonstrated that the accuracy of facial inferences is possibly due to self-fulfilling effects of facial inferences. That is, accuracy is largely driven by perceivers’ beliefs rather than by the direct association between faces and behaviors.
Over the past decade, evolutionary psychologists have proposed that many moral stances function to promote self-interests. At the same time, behavioral geneticists have demonstrated that many moral stances have genetic bases. We integrated these perspectives by examining how moral condemnation of recreational drug use relates to sexual strategy (i.e., being more vs. less open to sex outside of a committed relationship) in a sample of Finnish twins and siblings ( N = 8,118). Twin modeling suggested that genetic factors accounted for 53%, 46%, and 41% of the variance in drug condemnation, sociosexuality, and sexual-disgust sensitivity, respectively. Further, approximately 75% of the phenotypic covariance between drug condemnation and sexual strategy was accounted for by genes, and there was substantial overlap in the genetic effects underlying both drug condemnation and sexual strategy ( r g = .41). Results are consistent with the proposal that some moral sentiments are calibrated to promote strategic sexual interests, which arise partially via genetic factors.
Adults are biologically responsive to context, and their responses to particular situations may differ across cultures. However, are preschoolers' biological systems also responsive to situational contexts and cultures? Here, we show that children's neurobiological stress responses, as indexed by salivary cortisol, are activated and responsive to psychosocial stressors relevant to their sociocultural emphases. By examining cortisol changes across different contexts among 138 preschoolers living in the United States, China, and Japan, we found that an achievement-related stressor elicited an increased cortisol response among Chinese preschoolers, whereas interpersonal-related stressors elicited an increased cortisol response among Japanese preschoolers. By contrast, U.S. preschoolers showed decreased cortisol responses after these stressors but consistently higher levels of anticipatory responses to separation at the beginning of each session. Our findings suggest that children's neurobiological stress systems may be a critical biological mechanism allowing societal-level cultural phenomena to be embodied in individual-level responses, even among preschoolers.
The conflict in Syria created a dire humanitarian situation, as nations around the world struggled with how best to deal with the more than 6.6 million Syrian refugees who fled their homes to escape aggression. Resistance to granting refugee status to individuals often originates in the belief that the influx of refugees endangers national security because of the presumably extremist religious and political beliefs that refugees hold. The present research surveyed Syrian refugees residing in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Iraq ( N = 1,000). The results revealed that the majority of surveyed refugees did not intend to migrate to the West and would rather return to their home country. More importantly, refugees most interested in moving to Western countries were the least likely to subscribe to Islamist extremism or to harbor negative sentiment toward the West. Theoretical and practical implications for addressing the current refugee crisis are discussed.