Children's Ideas About What Can Really Happen: The Impact of Age and Religious Background

Five- to 11-year-old U.S. children, from either a religious or secular background, judged whether story events could really happen. There were four different types of stories: magical stories violating ordinary causal regularities; religious stories also violating ordinary causal regularities but via a divine agent; unusual stories not violating ordinary causal regularities but with an improbable event; and realistic stories not violating ordinary causal regularities and with no improbable event. Overall, children were less likely to judge that religious and magical stories could really happen than unusual and realistic stories although religious children were more likely than secular children to judge that religious stories could really happen. Irrespective of background, children frequently invoked causal regularities in justifying their judgments. Thus, in justifying their conclusion that a story could really happen, children often invoked a causal regularity, whereas in justifying their conclusion that a story could not really happen, they often pointed to the violation of causal regularity. Overall, the findings show that children appraise the likelihood of story events actually happening in light of their beliefs about causal regularities. A religious upbringing does not impact the frequency with which children invoke causal regularities in judging what can happen, even if it does impact the type of causal factors that children endorse.     

Measuring metaaesthetics: Challenges and ways forward

A growing body of psychological research seeks to understand how people's thinking comports with long-standing philosophical theories, such as whether they view ethical or aesthetic truths as subjective or objective. Yet such research can be critically undermined if it fails to accurately characterize the philosophical positions in question and fails to ensure that subjects understand them appropriately. We argue that a recent article by Rabb et al. (2020) fails to meet these demands and propose several constructive solutions for future research.     

Judging the Probability of Hypotheses Versus the Impact of Evidence: Which Form of Inductive Inference Is More Accurate and Time‐Consistent?

Inductive reasoning requires exploiting links between evidence and hypotheses. This can be done focusing either on the posterior probability of the hypothesis when updated on the new evidence or on the impact of the new evidence on the credibility of the hypothesis. But are these two cognitive representations equally reliable? This study investigates this question by comparing probability and impact judgments on the same experimental materials. The results indicate that impact judgments are more consistent in time and more accurate than probability judgments. Impact judgments also predict the direction of errors in probability judgments. These findings suggest that human inductive reasoning relies more on estimating evidential impact than on posterior probability.     

文化如何影响道德?文化间变异、文化内变异与多元文化的视角

道德判断与行为具有高度的文化敏感性, 来自不同文化背景、具有不同文化经历的个体, 对于同一道德现象的理解与建构存在显著差异。随着20世纪80年代文化心理学的复兴繁荣和全球化进程的不断深化, 文化视角的道德心理学在当代社会心理学语境中备受关注, 并已开展了初步的理论探索, 积累了大量的实证证据。基于文化心理学的视角, 本文将分别从文化间变异、文化内变异和多元文化三个方面梳理和评述不同文化因素(比如地域、生态、社会阶层等)如何影响个体的道德判断与行为, 期望推动未来研究进一步探索快速而剧烈的文化变迁背景下中国人的道德心理和价值体系已经发生了或正在发生着怎样的演变过程。     

美感对西方绘画无意识加工的影响

采用连续闪烁抑制范式(Continuous Flash Suppression, CFS), 通过比较不同美感的图片的突破抑制时间,考察了美感对西方绘画无意识加工的影响。实验1使用黑白噪音图片, 通过单因素被试内设计考察了高、中、低三种美感等级的彩色西方绘画的突破抑制时间。结果发现, 美感高和美感中等的西方绘画比美感低的西方绘画能更快突破噪音图片的抑制进入意识。实验2考察在彩色噪音图片的抑制下, 美感是否依然影响彩色西方绘画突破抑制的时间。结果发现, 美感不影响西方绘画突破抑制时间, 且突破抑制时间显著长于实验1。这些结果表明美感对西方绘画无意识加工的影响受到双眼竞争的眼间抑制过程的限制, 只有在黑白噪音图抑制的情况下, 美感会影响西方绘画进入意识的速度。与黑白噪音图片相比, 彩色噪音图片可能对颜色信息的抑制更强, 干扰了美感对西方绘画无意识加工的影响。     

Underlying mechanisms of initial feelings of knowing in children

Past research has pointed to two contrasting mechanisms behind feeling‐of‐knowing judgments (FOKs). The trace‐based account proposes a direct internal monitor that detects the presence or non‐presence of a target item. The inferential account dictates that judgments are actually based on cues external to the memory trace, such as familiarity; FOKs could therefore be based on sometimes misleading information. Thus, while a direct mechanism will lead to good learning strategies (i.e. successful searches), an inferential process could potentially lead to less optimal strategies (i.e. search for unknown target information). The question posed in this research was: What processes underlie the judgments children make prior to fully retrieving a target item? We used a simplified version of Reder and Ritter's (1992 ) game show paradigm to investigate the accuracy (and mechanism) of children's initial FOKs. The experiment found that initial FOKs were largely driven by familiarity of the cues. These data have important implications for strategies children utilize in educational settings.     

Children's metacognitive judgments in an eyewitness identification task

Two experiments examined children's metacognitive monitoring of recognition judgments within an eyewitness identification paradigm. A confidence-accuracy (CA) calibration approach was used to examine patterns of calibration, over-/underconfidence, and resolution. In Experiment 1, children (n=619, mean age=11 years 10 months) and adults (n=600) viewed a simulated crime and attempted two separate identifications from 8-person target-present or target-absent lineups given lineup instructions that manipulated witnesses choosing patterns by varying the degree of social pressure. For choosers, but not nonchoosers, meaningful CA relations were observed for adults but not for children. Experiment 2 tested a guided hypothesis disconfirmation manipulation designed to improve the realism of children's metacognitive judgments. Children (N=796, mean age=11 years 11 months) in experimental and control conditions viewed a crime and attempted two separate identifications. The manipulation had minimal impact on the CA relation for choosers and nonchoosers. In contrast to adults, children's identification confidence provides no useful guide for investigators about the likely guilt or innocence of a suspect. These experiments revealed limitations in children's metacognitive monitoring processes that have not been apparent in previous research on recall and recognition with younger children.     

编码强度对字体大小效应的影响

本研究采用3个实验考察编码强度对字体大小效应的影响, 探讨由于知觉特征而引发的元认知错觉的内在产生机制(实验1)与有效的矫正措施(实验2和实验3)。结果发现:(1)大字体词语的知觉流畅性显著优于小字体, 并且贝叶斯多层中介分析结果表明, 知觉流畅性对字体大小效应起部分中介作用(实验1); (2)随着编码强度的增加, 由字体大小引起的学习判断错觉逐渐消失(实验2和实验3)。以上结果表明, 刺激的知觉特征(字体大小)对个体学习判断的影响, 随编码强度激活线索的增加而逐渐减弱。这一结果为真实教学情境中提高学习者的编码强度, 进而削弱学习判断对知觉特征线索的依赖, 并准确地监测自身的学习进程提供了科学依据。     

Absolute and Relative Decision Processes in Eyewitness Identification

A prominent and long-standing theory of eyewitness identification decision making distinguishes between absolute judgments, based on the lineup members' match to the witness's memory of the perpetrator, versus relative judgments, based on match values relative to other lineup members. This distinction was implemented in a computational model and simulations showed that the model predicts an accuracy advantage for absolute judgments over relative judgments under some conditions. The present experiment tested this prediction by evaluating the accuracy of witnesses instructed to use relative or absolute rules. Contrary to predictions, the overall analysis did not show an absolute advantage. Additional exploratory analyses showed a relative advantage when the suspect was surrounded by high-similarity foils. These results are consistent with a model that assumes that side-by-side comparisons of lineup members increase diagnostic accuracy by allowing witnesses to give greater weight to more diagnostic features and less weight to less diagnostic features.     

Complexity as a guide to understanding decision bias: A contribution to the favorite‐longshot bias debate

This paper investigates the origins of a widespread decision bias in betting markets, the favorite‐longshot bias (FLB); in particular, whether it is caused by cognitive errors on the part of bettors or by the pricing policies of bookmakers. The methodology is based on previous literature, which has suggested that: (i) races, as decision tasks for bettors, can be distinguished by their degree of complexity and their attractiveness to those with access to privileged information (insiders), (ii) cognitive errors increase as complexity increases, and (iii) bookmakers set odds in a manner to protect themselves from insiders. The degree of FLB was examined in races of varying complexity and attractiveness to insiders using a dataset of 8545 races drawn from the parallel bookmaker and pari‐mutuel markets operating in the UK in 2004. The results, interpreted in the light of the cognitive error and complexity literature, suggest that neither bettors' nor bookmakers' cognitive errors are the main cause of the bias. Rather, bettors' preferences for risk and the deliberate pricing policies of bookmakers play key roles in influencing the bias in markets where bookmakers and pari‐mutuel operators coexist. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.