Retraction statement: Racist biases in legal decisions are reduced by a justice focus

The following article from European Journal of Social Psychology, “Racist biases in legal decisions are reduced by a justice focus” by Joris Lammers and Diederik A. Stapel published online on 1 December 2010 in Wiley Online Library ( wileyonlinelibrary.com ), has been retracted by agreement between the co‐author, the journal Editor in Chief, Tom Postmes, and John Wiley and Sons Ltd. The retraction has been agreed following the results of an investigation into the work of Diederik A. Stapel ( https://www.commissielevelt.nl/ ). The Levelt Committee has determined that this article contained data that was fabricated as supplied by Diederik A. Stapel. His co‐author was unaware of his actions, and not in any way involved. REFERENCE Lammers, J. & Stapel, D. A. (2011). Racist biases in legal decisions are reduced by a justice focus. European Journal of Social Psycholology, 41, 375–387. DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.783     

Affective biases in English are bi-dimensional

A long-standing observation about the interface between emotion and language is that positive words are used more frequently than negative ones, leading to the Pollyanna hypothesis which alleges a predominantly optimistic outlook in humans. This paper uses the largest available collection of affective ratings as well as insights from linguistics to revisit the Pollyanna hypothesis as it relates to two dimensions of emotion: valence (pleasantness) and arousal (intensity). We identified systematic patterns in the distribution of words over a bi-dimensional affective space, which (1) run counter to and supersede most prior accounts, and (2) differ drastically between word types (unique, distinct words in the lexicon) and word tokens (number of occurrences of available words in the lexicon). We argue for two factors that shape affect in language and society: a pro-social benevolent communication strategy with its emphasis on useful and dangerous phenomena, and the structure of human subjective perception of affect.     

Basic psychological needs and school engagement: a focus on justice and agency

In this paper, we examine the relationship between basic psychological needs and student engagement in a population of Italian secondary school students. To measure the psychological needs, we have selected a set of indicators that, beyond the needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness, also include the need for justice, which is crucial in adolescence when the degree of sensitivity to the ways people behave in interpersonal interactions is well developed. To measure student engagement, we have considered the four-dimensional structure of the construct, which has added the factor of agentic engagement to the three conventional dimensions of emotional, behavioural and cognitive engagement. Participants were 640 secondary school Italian students aged 15–17. The results confirm that justice should be considered as an additional basic need in school settings, as it fosters intrinsic student motivation and engagement. Moreover, our findings provide evidence that agency is a dimension that enriches the construct of student engagement. In the conclusion, justice and agency are treated as constructs that deserve to be more deeply considered in future research into learning environments.     

Self-regulation and protective health behaviour: How regulatory focus and anticipated regret are related to vaccination decisions

Objective: We examined how individual motivational orientations and anticipated regret are related to the protective health decision of vaccination behaviour.

Design: The proposed relations were examined in a large-scale sample (N = 3168) and three medium-sized samples (N = 151, N = 194, N = 208). Questionnaires were applied to assess regulatory focus, anticipated regret and vaccination behaviour.

Results: Increased prevention-focused self-regulation – which is represented by concerns about security-related goals, responsibilities and obligations – was related to a greater likelihood of vaccination. Prevention-focused individuals’ higher likelihood of getting vaccinated seems at least in part to be a consequence of anticipated regret for not vaccinating. Study 3 suggests that regulatory focus is less related to vaccination decisions when regret is increased by the decision-making context; that is, when information highlighting vaccination effectiveness and a low likelihood of adverse responses is provided.

Conclusion: Prevention-focused self-regulation is related to a greater likelihood of engaging in health-protective behaviour. This can be explained by prevention-focused individuals’ greater tendency to anticipate regret about getting ill as a consequence of not adopting protective measures. If people perceive a protective measure such as a vaccination as highly effective, anticipated regret for not adopting it is generally increased, and individual differences in regulatory focus no longer predict the decision.     

Incidental sadness biases social economic decisions in the Ultimatum Game

Recent dual-process models of decision making have suggested that emotion plays an important role in decision making; however, the impact of incidental moods (i.e., emotions unrelated to the immediate situation) on decisions remains poorly explored. This question was investigated by inducing 2 basic emotional states (amusement or sadness) that were compared with a neutral-emotion control group. Decision making was assessed with a well-studied social task, the Ultimatum Game. In this task, participants had to make decisions to either accept or reject monetary offers from other players, offers that varied in their degree of unfairness. Emotion was induced with short movie clips. Induced sadness interacted with offer fairness, with higher sadness resulting in lower acceptance rates of unfair offers. Induced amusement was not associated with any significant biases in decision making. These results demonstrate that even subtle incidental moods can play an important role in biasing decision making. Implications of these results in regards to the emotion, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical literatures are discussed.     

A narwhal is an animal: partial word knowledge biases adults' decisions

Adults' accuracy on a sentence verification task was measured to assess reliable biases in their responses as a function of their level of knowledge about the target words, as well as adults' ability to reject incorrect ontological category membership for their partially known words. Three levels of word knowledge (known, frontier, and unknown) were assessed in two experiments. Results indicated that participants were conservative decision-makers about sentences using the vocabulary words and that the conservative bias increased in strength as their level of knowledge about the target word increased. When biased guessing was discouraged, results indicated that participants were able to accurately identify both correct and incorrect sentences using targets at all three levels of knowledge, including their partially known words, but were least reliable at rejecting false sentences using unknown targets. Implications for the role of knowing not in adults' vocabulary acquisition are discussed.     

Regulatory focus and investment decisions in small groups

Regulatory Focus Theory was applied to small interactive groups. Based on previous research, it was expected that groups with a promotion focus would discuss gain-relevant information, whereas groups with a prevention focus would be concerned with potential losses. Furthermore, promotion groups were expected to make riskier decisions than prevention groups. Regulatory focus was manipulated by rewarding good or penalizing poor group performance on a preliminary task. Subsequently, three-person groups discussed several investment funds and made a consensual investment decision. Results supported the hypotheses and suggested that regulatory focus requires time to exert its influence in groups.     

Set-specific capture can be reduced by preemptively occupying a limited-capacity focus of attention

Recent work has shown that contingent attentional capture effects can be especially large when multiple attentional sets for color guide visual search (Moore & Weissman, 2010). In particular, this research suggests that detecting a target-colored (e.g., orange) distractor leads the corresponding attentional set (e.g., identify orange letters) to enter a limited-capacity focus of attention in working memory, where it remains briefly while the distractor is being attended. Consequently, the ability to identify a differently-colored (e.g., green) target 100-300 ms later is impaired because the appropriate set (e.g., identify green letters) cannot also enter the focus of attention. In two experiments, we investigated whether such set-specific capture can be reduced by preemptively occupying the focus of attention. As predicted, a target-colored central distractor presented 233 ms before a target-colored peripheral distractor eliminated set-specific capture arising from the peripheral distractor. Moreover, this effect was observed only when the central distractor's color (e.g., orange) (a) matched a different set than the upcoming peripheral distractor's color (e.g., green) and (b) matched the same set as the upcoming central target's color (e.g., orange). We conclude that the same working memory limitations that give rise to set-specific capture can be preemptively exploited to reduce it.     

Not all stereotypic biases are created equal: evidence for a stereotype-disconfirming bias

Stereotype-confirming biases are well documented in the social psychological literature. However, motivations to disconfirm social stereotypes may be more influential for unprejudiced individuals. Three experiments are presented that test the hypothesis that extremely unprejudiced people exhibit a bias toward stereotype disconfirmation. Experiment 1 investigates stereotype disconfirmation in information-seeking preferences. Experiments 2 and 3 explore attributional strategies for stereotype disconfirmation. In all experiments, unprejudiced participants respond in ways reflecting a motivation to disconfirm social stereotypes. Implications for stereotype change and stereotypic influences on judgment and behavior are discussed.     

Aversive racism in Britain: the use of inadmissible evidence in legal decisions

The aversive racism framework (S. L. Gaertner & J. F. Dovidio, 1986 ) suggests that bias against Blacks is most likely to be expressed by Whites when it can be explained or justified along non‐racial grounds. The present experiment adopted a 2 (Evidence: admissible vs. inadmissible) × 2 (Defendant Race: White vs. Black) between subjects design, asking White participants, whose self‐reported prejudice was assessed, to judge a legal case. As predicted, increased guilt ratings and longer sentencing recommendations were forwarded for the Black (vs. White) defendant only when DNA evidence linking the defendant to the crime had previously been ruled inadmissible. This result was not qualified by self‐report racial attitudes. The implications for evidence inadmissibility in interracial contexts are considered, along with the repercussions of finding experimental evidence of aversive racism outside of North America. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Effects of interactional justice on egocentric bias in resource allocation decisions

Three studies demonstrated that interactional justice was able to attenuate egocentric bias, i.e., the tendency to regard a larger share for oneself as fair. Study 1, an experimental study of negotiation, showed that fair interpersonal treatment led to a smaller egocentric bias, quicker settlements, and fewer stalemates. Study 2 showed that fair treatment was related to a smaller egocentric bias in a real-life context. University students were more willing to accept a higher tuition fee and less willing to cut the salary of their teachers if the interpersonal treatment received from the teachers was more positive. Study 3 showed experimentally that in support of fairness heuristic theory, when the fair interpersonal treatment received could be attributed externally, its attenuating effect on the egocentric bias disappeared.     

Turning quickly on myself: Automatic interpretation biases in dysphoria are self-referent

Cognitive theories emphasise automatic interpretation biases (AIB) in the development and maintenance of depression. The current study examined AIB using the word sentence association paradigm for depression (WSAP-D) via endorsement rates and reaction time indices. We directly tested the importance of self-relevance for AIB by modifying the WASP-D task to include self-referent ambiguous stimuli and contrasting them with other-referent ambiguous stimuli. We hypothesised that the dysphoric group, but not the non-dysphoric group, would demonstrate AIB only for self-referent ambiguous stimuli. Consistent with our main hypotheses, dysphoric individuals endorsed negative interpretations more often and faster than non-dysphoric individuals, only for self-referent ambiguous stimuli. Self-relevance may be a critical aspect of AIB in dysphoric populations.     

Observational drawing biases are predicted by biases in perception: Empirical support of the misperception hypothesis of drawing accuracy with respect to two angle illusions

We tested the misperception hypothesis of drawing errors, which states that drawing accuracy is strongly influenced by the perceptual encoding of a to-be-drawn stimulus. We used a highly controlled experimental paradigm in which nonartist participants made perceptual judgements and drawings of angles under identical stimulus exposure conditions. Experiment 1 examined the isosceles/scalene triangle angle illusion; congruent patterns of bias in the perception and drawing tasks were found for 40 and 60° angles, but not for 20 or 80° angles, providing mixed support for the misperception hypothesis. Experiment 2 examined shape constancy effects with respect to reproductions of single acute or obtuse angles; congruent patterns of bias in the perception and drawing tasks were found across a range of angles from 29 to 151°, providing strong support for the misperception hypothesis. In both experiments, perceptual and drawing biases were positively correlated. These results are largely consistent with the misperception hypothesis, suggesting that inaccurate perceptual encoding of angles is an important reason that nonartists err in drawing angles from observation.     

Perceptual biases in the horizontal and vertical dimensions are driven by separate cognitive mechanisms

Perceptual attention in healthy participants is characterized by two biases, one operating in the horizontal plane, which draws attention leftward, and the other operating in the vertical plane, which draws attention upward. Given that these biases are reliably found in the same individual, and appear similar at a surface level, a number of researchers have investigated the relationship between horizontal and vertical attentional biases. To date, these investigations have failed to find an association, and this may be due to the fact that one-dimensional vertical and horizontal stimuli were presented separately rather than being measured from a single, two-dimensional stimulus. Across three experiments, two dimensional stimuli were presented, and participants marked the centre of the stimuli. In addition, the shapes of the stimuli were manipulated to determine whether this produced the same modulation of the two biases. Across 13 stimuli and three experiments there were no correlations between the vertical and horizontal biases. In addition, manipulations of stimulus shape, which affected biases in one dimension, did not affect biases in the other dimension. There were, however, consistent correlations between the degree of bias within each dimension across the different stimuli. This study has produced converging evidence that horizontal and vertical biases in spatial judgments rely on separate cognitive mechanisms. To account for these results we discuss a model whereby horizontal asymmetries rely more on space-based mechanisms whereas vertical asymmetries rely more on object-based mechanisms.     

Combining disparate views of objects: Viewpoint costs are reduced by stereopsis

An issue of central concern in the object recognition literature is whether changes in the viewpoint from which an object is depicted produces systematic costs in performance, or whether performance is (largely) unaffected by such changes. This issue has generated a vigorous and lengthy debate because viewpoint-dependent or viewpoint-independent performance has been seen as a reflection of the underlying object representations. The current experiment shows that the effect of viewpoint differences between objects is strongly affected by whether or not they are depicted with stereoscopic depth, a result that is predicted by neither of the main approaches to object recognition. Instead, it is proposed that viewpoint costs in object recognition experiments are a function of the extent to which the information a subject is provided with generalizes across views, without this holding any necessary implications for the nature of the underlying object representations.     

Eccentricity biases of object categories are evident in visual working memory

In high-order object areas, face-selective areas prefer centrally presented stimuli, whereas building-selective areas prefer peripherally presented stimuli (Levy et al., 2001). We investigated whether this eccentricity bias was also evident in visual working memory. In Experiment 1, we found that working memory performance for faces decreased towards the periphery while the performance for buildings remained unchanged across different eccentricities. To rule out the possibility that lower level features influence these results, we manipulated the spatial frequency of faces and buildings (Experiment 2) and the spatial layout information of the buildings (Experiment 3). In both of the experiments, we replicated the results of Experiment 1, even when these lower level features of stimuli were controlled. Consistent with previous findings, the current results suggest that each object category is processed in a different manner depending on the eccentricity. This eccentricity bias is likely the result of how the high-order object areas represent different object categories.