Knowledge that Transforms

We need to make substantial changes to how we conduct research. First, in response to heightened concern that our published research literature is incomplete and untrustworthy, we need new requirements to ensure research integrity. These include prespecification of studies whenever possible, avoidance of selection and other inappropriate data-analytic practices, complete reporting, and encouragement of replication. Second, in response to renewed recognition of the severe flaws of null-hypothesis significance testing (NHST), we need to shift from reliance on NHST to estimation and other preferred techniques. The new statistics refers to recommended practices, including estimation based on effect sizes, confidence intervals, and meta-analysis. The techniques are not new, but adopting them widely would be new for many researchers, as well as highly beneficial. This article explains why the new statistics are important and offers guidance for their use. It describes an eight-step new-statistics strategy for research with integrity, which starts with formulation of research questions in estimation terms, has no place for NHST, and is aimed at building a cumulative quantitative discipline.

Accuracy is paramount in radiology and security screening, yet many factors undermine success. Target prevalence is a particularly worrisome factor, as targets are rarely present (e.g., the cancer rate in mammography is ~0.5%), and low target prevalence has been linked to increased search errors. More troubling is the fact that specific target types can have extraordinarily low frequency rates (e.g., architectural distortions in mammography-a specific marker of potential cancer-appear in fewer than 0.05% of cases). By assessing search performance across millions of trials from the Airport Scanner smartphone application, we demonstrated that the detection of ultra-rare items was disturbingly poor. A logarithmic relationship between target detection and target frequency (adjusted R (2) = .92) revealed that ultra-rare items had catastrophically low detection rates relative to targets with higher frequencies. Extraordinarily low search performance for these extraordinarily rare targets-what we term the ultra-rare-item effect-is troubling given that radiological and security-screening searches are primarily ultra-rare-item searches.

Emotions are not simply concepts that live privately in the mind, but rather affective states that emanate from the individual and may influence others. We explored affect contagion in the context of one of the closest dyadic units, mother and infant. We initially separated mothers and infants; randomly assigned the mothers to experience a stressful positive-evaluation task, a stressful negative-evaluation task, or a nonstressful control task; and then reunited the mothers and infants. Three notable findings were obtained: First, infants' physiological reactivity mirrored mothers' reactivity engendered by the stress manipulation. Second, infants whose mothers experienced social evaluation showed more avoidance toward strangers compared with infants whose mothers were in the control condition. Third, the negative-evaluation condition, compared with the other conditions, generated greater physiological covariation in the dyads, and this covariation increased over time. These findings suggest that mothers' stressful experiences are contagious to their infants and that members of close pairs, like mothers and infants, can reciprocally influence each other's dynamic physiological reactivity.

The U.S. Census Bureau projects that racial minority groups will make up a majority of the U.S. national population in 2042, effectively creating a so-called majority-minority nation. In four experiments, we explored how salience of such racial demographic shifts affects White Americans' political-party leanings and expressed political ideology. Study 1 revealed that making California's majority-minority shift salient led politically unaffiliated White Americans to lean more toward the Republican Party and express greater political conservatism. Studies 2, 3a, and 3b revealed that making the changing national racial demographics salient led White Americans (regardless of political affiliation) to endorse conservative policy positions more strongly. Moreover, the results implicate group-status threat as the mechanism underlying these effects. Taken together, this work suggests that the increasing diversity of the nation may engender a widening partisan divide.