Knowledge that Transforms

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.

This is a registered report to directly replicate the primary finding in Hecht and Proffitt (1995). Hecht and Proffitt found that those with occupational experience handling liquid in containers performed worse at solving a water-level problem than those in occupations that did not require handling liquids. Shortly after, Vasta et al. (1997) found the opposite: Experience was associated with superior performance on the task. The conflicting findings and the small sample sizes in each study leave the relationship between experience and water-level-task performance uncertain. We addressed these concerns with a high-powered direct replication of Hecht and Proffitt with adults in Germany ( N = 407). We failed to replicate Hecht and Proffitt’s results, finding that their study had less than 33% power to detect the small, nonsignificant difference that we observed between groups.

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.

Prosocial behavior is common and often socially rewarded (e.g., via liking, status, and trust). Yet prior research has found that if actors themselves also benefit from their prosocial behavior, then they are morally derogated: They are evaluated as worse than purely selfish actors. This tainted-altruism effect has been explained by the use of different counterfactuals for the evaluation of prosocial and selfish actors. Here I propose social rewards protection theory , which explains why evaluators use these different counterfactuals in the first place: Social rewards are treated as being reserved for costly prosocial actions. Claiming such rewards without incurring costs seems like cheating and thus deserves moral derogation. Accordingly, being transparent about the action’s costs and benefits prevents such derogation. I conducted six experiments (five preregistered) with Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers in the United States and lab participants in Spain (total N = 4,732 adults). The findings provide support for the proposed functional explanation of tainted altruism, which also sheds light on related phenomena, such as overhead aversion and hypocrisy.

An inherent feature of any choice is the set size from which that choice is made (i.e., the number of available options in a choice set). Choice set size impacts the likelihood of landing on a more preferred option: Larger sets are more likely to contain an option matching one's preferences. Nevertheless, in six preregistered experiments with 10,092 U.S. adults, we demonstrated that people consistently underestimated the effect of set size when predicting others' liking for a chosen option. We propose this effect arises because, although people recognize that set size predicts liking of a chosen option, they typically fail to attend to it when considering others' choices. Accordingly, this effect was attenuated when attention was drawn to set size, specifically (a) when participants considered multiple set sizes simultaneously, (b) when the decision process was framed as ranking rather than choosing, or (c) when participants were prompted to recall set size before predicting others' preferences.

Understanding variation in cognitive abilities is critical to understanding both the evolution and development of cognition. In this study, we examined the stability, structure, and predictability of individual differences in cognitive abilities in great apes across a broad range of domains, including social cognition, reasoning about quantities, executive function, and inferential reasoning. We administered six tasks to 48 individuals from four species, spanning 10 sessions over 1.5 years. Task performance was most strongly predicted by stable, individual-specific characteristics rather than transient or group-level variables. Using additional data from the same individuals in other tasks, we found substantial positive correlations between nonsocial tasks. In contrast, tasks measuring social cognition were not correlated either with each other or with nonsocial measures. Future studies should work toward mechanistic models of great apes' cognitive processes to build an understanding of the evolution of cognition based on process-level commonalities across species.

People overaccept information that supports their identity and underaccept information that opposes their identity—a phenomenon known as partisan bias . Although partisan-bias effects in judgments of misinformation are robust and pervasive, there is ongoing debate about whether partisan-bias effects arise from identity-protective motivated reasoning or differential knowledge of identity-congenial versus identity-uncongenial information. Prior empirical work has been unable to differentiate the two accounts because of a reliance on groups with pre-existing differences in knowledge (e.g., Democrats and Republicans). The current research addresses this issue by using randomly assigned rather than pre-existing identities. Across two experiments ( N total = 1,411), adult U.S. Prolific workers showed lower thresholds for accepting information that is congenial versus uncongenial to a randomly assigned identity, despite having no differences in prior knowledge. These results support theories that emphasize identity protection as a factor underlying partisan bias in the acceptance of misinformation, with important practical implications for misinformation interventions.

Salient stimuli have the potential to distract us from our immediate goals. Much research has therefore aimed to understand how we learn to use attention to resist distraction by salient stimuli. We propose a new hypothesis whereby an initial instance of distraction can improve future suppression of salient stimuli. Across three experiments ( N = 120 college students, aged 18–35 years), we provide evidence for this hypothesis using a new eye-tracking approach. The results demonstrated that an initial instance of distraction occurred before salient distractors were suppressed. Notably, if this initial instance of distraction was eliminated or weakened via experimental manipulations, learned suppression of the distracting stimuli was greatly reduced. Together, these findings suggest that attentional capture can serve as a learning signal that improves future attentional control. They also indicate that learned suppression emerges rapidly, which has strong implications for models of attention and cognitive control.

Metacognition involves second-order judgments about first-order judgments. It remains unclear whether an individual’s confidence in being correct is generated by the same system across tasks ( domain generality ) or whether it is computed independently in the context of each task ( domain specificity ). Previous studies have focused on correlations across several tasks, yet the evidence is mixed, and more complex models of domain generality were not taken into account. Analyzing data from 10 tasks collected across three studies in Denmark and Poland ( N = 253–547 adult participants), we found a fixed pattern of cross-task correlations for both metacognitive bias and metacognitive efficiency. In accordance with previous studies, we found that hierarchical estimation of metacognitive efficiency led to higher correlations. We used confirmatory factor analyses to investigate the existence of general processes. We found evidence for a weak domain generality with a metacognitive module for perceptual tasks and another for cognitive tasks.