Knowledge that Transforms

Whether acquiring a second language affords any general advantages to executive function has been a matter of fierce scientific debate for decades. If being bilingual does have benefits over and above the broader social, employment, and lifestyle gains that are available to speakers of a second language, then it should manifest as a cognitive advantage in the general population of bilinguals. We assessed 11,041 participants on a broad battery of 12 executive tasks whose functional and neural properties have been well described. Bilinguals showed an advantage over monolinguals on only one test (whereas monolinguals performed better on four tests), and these effects all disappeared when the groups were matched to remove potentially confounding factors. In any case, the size of the positive bilingual effect in the unmatched groups was so small that it would likely have a negligible impact on the cognitive performance of any individual.

Stressful events are often vividly remembered. Although generally adaptive to survival, this emotional-memory enhancement may contribute to stress-related disorders. We tested here whether the enhanced memory for stressful events is due to the expectancy violation evoked by these events. Ninety-four men and women underwent a stressful or control episode. Critically, to manipulate the degree of expectancy violation, we gave participants either detailed or minimal information about the stressor. Although the subjective and hormonal stress responses were comparable in informed and uninformed participants, prior information about the stressor abolished the memory advantage for core features of the stressful event, tested 7 days later. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy, we further linked the expectancy violation and memory formation under stress to the inferior temporal cortex. These data are the first to show that detailed information about an upcoming stressor and, by implication, a reduced expectancy violation attenuates the memory for stressful events.

Religion shapes the nature of intergroup conflict, but conflict may also shape religion. Here, we report four multimethod studies that reveal the impact of conflict on religious belief: The threat of warfare and intergroup tensions increase the psychological need for order and obedience to rules, which leads people to view God as more punitive. Studies 1 ( N = 372) and 2 ( N = 911) showed that people’s concern about conflict correlates with belief in a punitive God. Study 3 ( N = 1,065) found that experimentally increasing the salience of conflict increases people’s perceptions of the importance of a punitive God, and this effect is mediated by people’s support for a tightly regulated society. Study 4 showed that the severity of warfare predicted and preceded worldwide fluctuations in punitive-God belief between 1800 CE and 2000 CE. Our findings illustrate how conflict can change the nature of religious belief and add to a growing literature showing how cultural ecologies shape psychology.

Across two studies with more than 1,700 U.S. adults recruited online, we present evidence that people share false claims about COVID-19 partly because they simply fail to think sufficiently about whether or not the content is accurate when deciding what to share. In Study 1, participants were far worse at discerning between true and false content when deciding what they would share on social media relative to when they were asked directly about accuracy. Furthermore, greater cognitive reflection and science knowledge were associated with stronger discernment. In Study 2, we found that a simple accuracy reminder at the beginning of the study (i.e., judging the accuracy of a non-COVID-19-related headline) nearly tripled the level of truth discernment in participants' subsequent sharing intentions. Our results, which mirror those found previously for political fake news, suggest that nudging people to think about accuracy is a simple way to improve choices about what to share on social media.

Identifying brain biomarkers of disease risk is a growing priority in neuroscience. The ability to identify meaningful biomarkers is limited by measurement reliability; unreliable measures are unsuitable for predicting clinical outcomes. Measuring brain activity using task functional MRI (fMRI) is a major focus of biomarker development; however, the reliability of task fMRI has not been systematically evaluated. We present converging evidence demonstrating poor reliability of task-fMRI measures. First, a meta-analysis of 90 experiments ( N = 1,008) revealed poor overall reliability—mean intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) = .397. Second, the test-retest reliabilities of activity in a priori regions of interest across 11 common fMRI tasks collected by the Human Connectome Project ( N = 45) and the Dunedin Study ( N = 20) were poor (ICCs = .067–.485). Collectively, these findings demonstrate that common task-fMRI measures are not currently suitable for brain biomarker discovery or for individual-differences research. We review how this state of affairs came to be and highlight avenues for improving task-fMRI reliability.

Haunted attractions are illustrative examples of recreational fear in which people voluntarily seek out frightening experiences in pursuit of enjoyment. We present findings from a field study at a haunted-house attraction where visitors between the ages of 12 and 57 years ( N = 110) were equipped with heart rate monitors, video-recorded at peak scare points during the attraction, and asked to report on their experience. Our results show that enjoyment has an inverted-U-shaped relationship with fear across repeated self-reported measures. Moreover, results from physiological data demonstrate that the experience of being frightened is a linear function of large-scale heart rate fluctuations, whereas there is an inverted-U-shaped relationship between participant enjoyment and small-scale heart rate fluctuations. These results suggest that enjoyment is related to forms of arousal dynamics that are “just right.” These findings shed light on how fear and enjoyment can coexist in recreational horror.

Using representative cross-sections from 166 nations (more than 1.7 million respondents), we examined differences in three measures of subjective well-being over the life span. Globally, and in the individual regions of the world, we found only very small differences in life satisfaction and negative affect. By contrast, decreases in positive affect were larger. We then examined four important predictors of subjective well-being and how their associations changed: marriage, employment, prosociality, and life meaning. These predictors were typically associated with higher subjective well-being over the life span in every world region. Marriage showed only very small associations for the three outcomes, whereas employment had larger effects that peaked around age 50 years. Prosociality had practically significant associations only with positive affect, and life meaning had strong, consistent associations with all subjective-well-being measures across regions and ages. These findings enhance our understanding of subjective-well-being patterns and what matters for subjective well-being across the life span.

Visual search is facilitated when the target is repeatedly encountered at a fixed position within an invariant (vs. randomly variable) distractor layout—that is, when the layout is learned and guides attention to the target, a phenomenon known as contextual cuing. Subsequently changing the target location within a learned layout abolishes contextual cuing, which is difficult to relearn. Here, we used lateralized event-related electroencephalogram (EEG) potentials to explore memory-based attentional guidance ( N = 16). The results revealed reliable contextual cuing during initial learning and an associated EEG-amplitude increase for repeated layouts in attention-related components, starting with an early posterior negativity (N1pc, 80–180 ms). When the target was relocated to the opposite hemifield following learning, contextual cuing was effectively abolished, and the N1pc was reversed in polarity (indicative of persistent misguidance of attention to the original target location). Thus, once learned, repeated layouts trigger attentional-priority signals from memory that proactively interfere with contextual relearning after target relocation.

Although more individuals are relying on information provided by nonhuman agents, such as artificial intelligence and robots, little research has examined how persuasion attempts made by nonhuman agents might differ from persuasion attempts made by human agents. Drawing on construal-level theory, we posited that individuals would perceive artificial agents at a low level of construal because of the agents’ lack of autonomous goals and intentions, which directs individuals’ focus toward how these agents implement actions to serve humans rather than why they do so. Across multiple studies (total N = 1,668), we showed that these construal-based differences affect compliance with persuasive messages made by artificial agents. These messages are more appropriate and effective when the message represents low-level as opposed to high-level construal features. These effects were moderated by the extent to which an artificial agent could independently learn from its environment, given that learning defies people’s lay theories about artificial agents.