When Payment Undermines the Pitch: On the Persuasiveness of Pure Motives in Fund-Raising
Studies on crowding out document that incentives sometimes backfire—decreasing motivation in prosocial tasks. In the present research, we demonstrated an additional channel through which incentives can be harmful. Incentivized advocates for a cause are perceived as less sincere than nonincentivized advocates and are ultimately less effective in persuading other people to donate. Further, the negative effects of incentives hold only when the incentives imply a selfish motive; advocates who are offered a matching incentive (i.e., who are told that the donations they successfully solicit will be matched), which is not i...
Source: Psychological Science - October 6, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Barasch, A., Berman, J. Z., Small, D. A. Tags: Research Reports Source Type: research
Facial-Attractiveness Choices Are Predicted by Divisive Normalization
Do people appear more attractive or less attractive depending on the company they keep? A divisive-normalization account—in which representation of stimulus intensity is normalized (divided) by concurrent stimulus intensities—predicts that choice preferences among options increase with the range of option values. In the first experiment reported here, I manipulated the range of attractiveness of the faces presented on each trial by varying the attractiveness of an undesirable distractor face that was presented simultaneously with two attractive targets, and participants were asked to choose the most attractive ...
Source: Psychological Science - October 6, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Furl, N. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Ownership Status Influences the Degree of Joint Facilitatory Behavior
When engaging in joint activities, humans tend to sacrifice some of their own sensorimotor comfort and efficiency to facilitate a partner’s performance. In the two experiments reported here, we investigated whether ownership—a socioculturally based nonphysical feature ascribed to objects—influenced facilitatory motor behavior in joint action. Participants passed mugs that differed in ownership status across a table to a partner. We found that participants oriented handles less toward their partners when passing their own mugs than when passing mugs owned by their partners (Experiment 1) and mugs owned by ...
Source: Psychological Science - October 6, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Constable, M. D., Bayliss, A. P., Tipper, S. P., Spaniol, A. P., Pratt, J., Welsh, T. N. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Young Children See a Single Action and Infer a Social Norm: Promiscuous Normativity in 3-Year-Olds
Human social life depends heavily on social norms that prescribe and proscribe specific actions. Typically, young children learn social norms from adult instruction. In the work reported here, we showed that this is not the whole story: Three-year-old children are promiscuous normativists. In other words, they spontaneously inferred the presence of social norms even when an adult had done nothing to indicate such a norm in either language or behavior. And children of this age even went so far as to enforce these self-inferred norms when third parties "broke" them. These results suggest that children do not just passively a...
Source: Psychological Science - October 6, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Schmidt, M. F. H., Butler, L. P., Heinz, J., Tomasello, M. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
The Development of Inequity Aversion: Understanding When (and Why) People Give Others the Bigger Piece of the Pie
Children and adults respond negatively to inequity. Traditional accounts of inequity aversion suggest that as children mature into adults, they become less likely to endorse all forms of inequity. We challenge the idea that children have a unified concern with inequity that simply becomes stronger with age. Instead, we argue that the developmental trajectory of inequity aversion depends on whether the inequity is seen as fair or unfair. In three studies (N = 501), 7- to 8-year-olds were more likely than 4- to 6-year-olds to create inequity that disadvantaged themselves—a fair type of inequity. In findings consistent ...
Source: Psychological Science - October 6, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Shaw, A., Choshen-Hillel, S., Caruso, E. M. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Overcorrection for Social-Categorization Information Moderates Impact Bias in Affective Forecasting
Plural societies require individuals to forecast how others—both in-group and out-group members—will respond to gains and setbacks. Typically, correcting affective forecasts to include more relevant information improves their accuracy by reducing their extremity. In contrast, we found that providing affective forecasters with social-category information about their targets made their forecasts more extreme and therefore less accurate. In both political and sports contexts, forecasters across five experiments exhibited greater impact bias for both in-group and out-group members (e.g., a Democrat or Republican) t...
Source: Psychological Science - October 6, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Lau, T., Morewedge, C. K., Cikara, M. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Cultural Variability in the Link Between Environmental Concern and Support for Environmental Action
Research on sustainability behaviors has been based on the assumption that increasing personal concerns about the environment will increase proenvironmental action. We tested whether this assumption is more applicable to individualistic cultures than to collectivistic cultures. In Study 1, we compared 47 countries (N = 57,268) and found that they varied considerably in the degree to which environmental concern predicted support for proenvironmental action. National-level individualism explained the between-nation variability above and beyond the effects of other cultural values and independently of person-level individuali...
Source: Psychological Science - October 6, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Eom, K., Kim, H. S., Sherman, D. K., Ishii, K. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Relearn Faster and Retain Longer: Along With Practice, Sleep Makes Perfect
Both repeated practice and sleep improve long-term retention of information. The assumed common mechanism underlying these effects is memory reactivation, either on-line and effortful or off-line and effortless. In the study reported here, we investigated whether sleep-dependent memory consolidation could help to save practice time during relearning. During two sessions occurring 12 hr apart, 40 participants practiced foreign vocabulary until they reached a perfect level of performance. Half of them learned in the morning and relearned in the evening of a single day. The other half learned in the evening of one day, slept,...
Source: Psychological Science - October 6, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Mazza, S., Gerbier, E., Gustin, M.-P., Kasikci, Z., Koenig, O., Toppino, T. C., Magnin, M. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Backward Semantic Inhibition in Toddlers
In this study, we used the preferential-looking paradigm to examine whether attention switching is accompanied by backward semantic inhibition in toddlers. We found that 24-month-olds can indeed refocus their attention to a new item by selectively inhibiting attention to the old item. The consequence of backward inhibition is that subsequent attention to a word semantically related to the old item is impaired. These findings have important implications for understanding the underlying mechanism of backward semantic inhibition and the development of lexical-semantic inhibition in early childhood. (Source: Psychological Science)
Source: Psychological Science - October 6, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Chow, J., Aimola Davies, A. M., Fuentes, L. J., Plunkett, K. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Blacks Death Rate Due to Circulatory Diseases Is Positively Related to Whites Explicit Racial Bias: A Nationwide Investigation Using Project Implicit
Perceptions of racial bias have been linked to poorer circulatory health among Blacks compared with Whites. However, little is known about whether Whites’ actual racial bias contributes to this racial disparity in health. We compiled racial-bias data from 1,391,632 Whites and examined whether racial bias in a given county predicted Black-White disparities in circulatory-disease risk (access to health care, diagnosis of a circulatory disease; Study 1) and circulatory-disease-related death rate (Study 2) in the same county. Results revealed that in counties where Whites reported greater racial bias, Blacks (but not Whi...
Source: Psychological Science - October 6, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Leitner, J. B., Hehman, E., Ayduk, O., Mendoza-Denton, R. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Spatial Processing in Infancy Predicts Both Spatial and Mathematical Aptitude in Childhood
Despite considerable interest in the role of spatial intelligence in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) achievement, little is known about the ontogenetic origins of individual differences in spatial aptitude or their relation to later accomplishments in STEM disciplines. The current study provides evidence that spatial processes present in infancy predict interindividual variation in both spatial and mathematical competence later in development. Using a longitudinal design, we found that children’s performance on a brief visuospatial change-detection task administered between 6 and 13 months of...
Source: Psychological Science - October 6, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Lauer, J. E., Lourenco, S. F. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
The Social Reach: 8-Month-Olds Reach for Unobtainable Objects in the Presence of Another Person
Linguistic communication builds on prelinguistic communicative gestures, but the ontogenetic origins and complexities of these prelinguistic gestures are not well known. The current study tested whether 8-month-olds, who do not yet point communicatively, use instrumental actions for communicative purposes. In two experiments, infants reached for objects when another person was present and when no one else was present; the distance to the objects was varied. When alone, the infants reached for objects within their action boundaries and refrained from reaching for objects out of their action boundaries; thus, they knew about...
Source: Psychological Science - September 7, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Ramenzoni, V. C., Liszkowski, U. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Large Capacity of Conscious Access for Incidental Memories in Natural Scenes
When searching a crowd, people can detect a target face only by direct fixation and attention. Once the target is found, it is consciously experienced and remembered, but what is the perceptual fate of the fixated nontarget faces? Whereas introspection suggests that one may remember nontargets, previous studies have proposed that almost no memory should be retained. Using a gaze-contingent paradigm, we asked subjects to visually search for a target face within a crowded natural scene and then tested their memory for nontarget faces, as well as their confidence in those memories. Subjects remembered up to seven fixated, non...
Source: Psychological Science - September 7, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Kaunitz, L. N., Rowe, E. G., Tsuchiya, N. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Childhood Adversity, Self-Esteem, and Diurnal Cortisol Profiles Across the Life Span
Childhood adversity is associated with poor health outcomes in adulthood; the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis has been proposed as a crucial biological intermediary of these long-term effects. Here, we tested whether childhood adversity was associated with diurnal cortisol parameters and whether this link was partially explained by self-esteem. In both adults and youths, childhood adversity was associated with lower levels of cortisol at awakening, and this association was partially driven by low self-esteem. Further, we found a significant indirect pathway through which greater adversity during childhood was lin...
Source: Psychological Science - September 7, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Zilioli, S., Slatcher, R. B., Chi, P., Li, X., Zhao, J., Zhao, G. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Visual Experience Shapes Orthographic Representations in the Visual Word Form Area
Current neurocognitive research suggests that the efficiency of visual word recognition rests on abstract memory representations of written letters and words stored in the visual word form area (VWFA) in the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex. These representations are assumed to be invariant to visual characteristics such as font and case. In the present functional MRI study, we tested this assumption by presenting written words and varying the case format of the initial letter of German nouns (which are always capitalized) as well as German adjectives and adverbs (both usually in lowercase). As evident from a Word Type...
Source: Psychological Science - September 7, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Wimmer, H., Ludersdorfer, P., Richlan, F., Kronbichler, M. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
