Knowledge that Transforms

Across four studies ( N = 816 U.S. adults), we uncovered a gender stereotype about dual pathways to social hierarchy: Men were associated with power, and women were associated with status. We detected this pattern both explicitly and implicitly in perceptions of individuals drawn from Forbes magazine’s powerful people lists in undergraduate and online samples. We examined social-cognitive implications, including prominent people’s degree of recognition by individuals and society, and the formation of men’s and women’s self-concepts. We found that power (status) ratings predicted greater recognition of men (women) and lesser recognition of women (men). In terms of the self-concept, we found that women internalized the stereotype associating women with status more than power implicitly and explicitly. Although men explicitly reported having less status and more power than women, men implicitly associated the self with status as much as power. No gender differences emerged in the desires for power and status.

Executive functioning (EF) has been shown to relate to academic achievement and well-being. Independent bodies of work have aimed to understand what environmental or personal attributes influence EF ability. However, most research has not considered how constellations of risk factors create distinct patterns of influence on EF ability. The current study tested a sample of children aged 9 to 10 years from the United States ( N = 10,323, 48.06% female, M ag e = 9.9 years, age range = 8.9–11.08 years) using a latent profile analysis (LPA) to detect subgroups that varied in their combinations of various risk factors. Six distinct groups of risk factors for children emerged, which in turn related to different average EF abilities. We found that family socioeconomic measures related to a subgroup having above- or below-average EF ability, but we also found an effect on EF across different risk factors. These results inform our understanding of individual variations in EF ability and highlight the idea that EF interventions should consider risk holistically.

Determining the manipulation unit of working memory is one of the fundamental questions in understanding how working memory functions. The prevalent object-based theory in cognitive research predicts that memory manipulation is performed on the level of objects. Here we show instead that the basic units of working memory manipulation are Boolean maps, a data structure describing what can be perceived in an instant. We developed four new manipulation tasks (with data from 80 adults) and showed that manipulation times only increased when the number of Boolean maps manipulated increased. Increasing the number of orientations manipulated did not induce longer manipulation times, consistent with a key prediction of the Boolean map theory. Our results show that Boolean maps are the manipulation unit of working memory.

Despite the persistence of anti-Black racism, White Americans report feeling worse off than Black Americans. We suggest that some White Americans may report low well-being despite high group-level status because of perceptions that they are falling behind their in-group. Using census-based quota sampling, we measured status comparisons and health among Black ( N = 452, Wave 1) and White ( N = 439, Wave 1) American adults over a period of 6 to 7 weeks. We found that Black and White Americans tended to make status comparisons within their own racial groups and that most Black participants felt better off than their racial group, whereas most White participants felt worse off than their racial group. Moreover, we found that White Americans’ perceptions of falling behind “most White people” predicted fewer positive emotions at a subsequent time, which predicted worse sleep quality and depressive symptoms in the future. Subjective within-group status did not have the same consequences among Black participants.

The aim of this research was to test an informational explanation of the effects observed in the affect misattribution procedure (AMP). According to this explanation, participants performing the AMP would simplify the task by asking whether the target is pleasant (yes vs. no) and would use the affective information provided by the prime to answer the question (positive = yes, negative = no). In line with this proposition, we observed in three preregistered experiments that slightly modifying the response options proposed in the task moderated the effect, which can be canceled (Experiment 1) and even reversed (Experiments 2 and 3). These results are consistent with the informational explanation and seem difficult to explain by the operation of misattribution processes.

Using publicly available data from 299 preregistered replications from the social sciences, we found that the language used to describe a study can predict its replicability above and beyond a large set of controls related to the article characteristics, study design and results, author information, and replication effort. To understand why, we analyzed the textual differences between replicable and nonreplicable studies. Our findings suggest that the language in replicable studies is transparent and confident, written in a detailed and complex manner, and generally exhibits markers of truthful communication, possibly demonstrating the researchers' confidence in the study. Nonreplicable studies, however, are vaguely written and have markers of persuasion techniques, such as the use of positivity and clout. Thus, our findings allude to the possibility that authors of nonreplicable studies are more likely to make an effort, through their writing, to persuade readers of their (possibly weaker) results.

Across development, people tend to demonstrate a preference for contexts in which they have the opportunity to make choices. However, it is not clear how children, adolescents, and adults learn to calibrate this preference based on the costs and benefits of agentic choice. Here, in both a primary, in-person, reinforcement-learning experiment ( N = 92; age range = 10–25 years) and a preregistered online replication study ( N = 150; age range = 8–25 years), we found that participants overvalued agentic choice but also calibrated their agency decisions to the reward structure of the environment, increasingly selecting agentic choice when choice had greater instrumental value. Regression analyses and computational modeling of participant choices revealed that participants’ bias toward agentic choice—reflecting its intrinsic value—remained consistent across age, whereas sensitivity to the instrumental value of agentic choice increased from childhood to early adulthood.

Our understanding of ownership influences how we interact with objects and with each other. Here, we studied people’s intuitions about ownership transfer using a set of simple, parametrically varied events. We found that people ( N = 120 U.S. adults) had similar intuitions about ownership for some events but sharply opposing intuitions for others (Experiment 1). People ( N = 120 U.S. adults) were unaware of these conflicts and overestimated ownership consensus (Experiment 2). Moreover, differences in people’s ownership intuitions predicted their intuitions about the acceptability of using, altering, controlling, and destroying the owned object ( N = 130 U.S. adults; Experiment 3), even when ownership was not explicitly mentioned ( N = 130 U.S. adults; Experiment 4). Subject-level analyses suggest that these disagreements reflect at least two underlying intuitive theories, one in which intentions are central to ownership and another in which physical possession is prioritized.

Abortion policy is conventionally viewed as a political matter with religious overtones. This article offers a different view. From the perspective of evolutionary biology, abortion at a young age can represent prioritization of long-term development over immediate reproduction, a pattern established in other animal species as resulting from stable ecologies with low mortality risk. We examine whether laws and moral beliefs about abortions are linked to local mortality rates. Data from 50 U.S. states, 202 world societies, 2,596 adult individuals in 363 U.S. counties, and 147,260 respondents across the globe suggest that lower levels of mortality risk are associated with more permissive laws and attitudes toward abortion. Those associations were observed when we controlled for religiosity, political ideology, wealth, education, and industrialization. Integrating evolutionary and cultural perspectives offers an explanation as to why moral beliefs and legal norms about reproduction may be sensitive to levels of ecological adversity.

The aggregation of many lay judgments generates surprisingly accurate estimates. This phenomenon, called the “wisdom of crowds,” has been demonstrated in domains such as medical decision-making and financial forecasting. Previous research identified two factors driving this effect: the accuracy of individual assessments and the diversity of opinions. Most available strategies to enhance the wisdom of crowds have focused on improving individual accuracy while neglecting the potential of increasing opinion diversity. Here, we study a complementary approach to reduce collective error by promoting erroneous divergent opinions. This strategy proposes to anchor half of the crowd to a small value and the other half to a large value before eliciting and averaging all estimates. Consistent with our mathematical modeling, four experiments ( N = 1,362 adults) demonstrated that this method is effective for estimation and forecasting tasks. Beyond the practical implications, these findings offer new theoretical insights into the epistemic value of collective decision-making.