Competence and confusion: How stereotype threat can make you a bad judge of your competence

Women tend to have competence doubts for masculine‐stereotyped domains (e.g., math), whereas men tend to think they can handle both feminine‐stereotyped and masculine‐stereotyped domains equally well. We suggest that perhaps women's more frequent experience with stereotype threat can partly explain why. Our results showed that when stereotype threat was primed in high school students (n = 244), there was no relationship between their performance on an academic test (the SweSAT) and their assessment of their performance (how well they did), whereas in a non‐stereotype threat condition, there was a medium‐sized relationship. The effect was similar for both men and women primed with stereotype threat. The results imply that stereotype threat undermines performance assessments.     

Intergroup threat,social dominance,and the malleability of ideology: The importance of conceptual replication

Consistent with the theory of malleable ideology, research has shown that, under intergroup threat, antiegalitarian individuals will exploit the malleable character of color blindness and strategically claim to be strong supporters of it. In three studies conducted in France, we found no support for this theory when measuring color blindness but strong support when using measures of laïcité, an ideology of secularism. Indeed, those who score low on social dominance orientation (SDO) were more likely to support laïcité than antiegalitarian individuals. However, a situational threat (Study 1), a symbolic threat experimentally induced (Study 2), and a perceived symbolic threat (Study 3) were all related to increased support for laïcité by people high in SDO, without affecting those low in SDO. Thus, laïcité is a malleable ideology that can be adopted by individuals having contrasting motivations, as color blindness in the United States. Implications for the role of exact and conceptual replications in the development of a psychological science are discussed.     

Emotional Responses to the Charlie Hebdo Attacks: Addressing the Authoritarianism Puzzle

The finding that threat boosts the public's preferences for authoritarian policies has been well established in the research literature. Why this shift occurs remains open as the extant literature reports contradictory findings regarding the interaction of dispositions, such as conservatism and authoritarianism, with threat. One line of research argues that threat increases authoritarian preferences among those who are more prone to authoritarianism. Another argues that it is those with a nonauthoritarian ideology who switch in response to threat. By using a two‐wave panel study of the French population taken before and after the January 2015 twin attacks in Paris, we find that both trends occur simultaneously. Our results show that the factors that drive the impact of ideological dispositions on support for authoritarian policies are emotional reactions. On the one hand, anxiety led left‐wing respondents to move towards adopting authoritarian policy preferences following the attacks, yet produced no such change among right‐wing respondents. On the other hand, anger did not turn left‐wing voters more authoritarian but strengthened authoritarian policy preferences among right‐wing respondents.     

Frightfully funny: combining threat and humour in health messages for men and women

Objective: It is imperative for public health to investigate what factors may reduce defensive responses and increase the effectiveness of health information. The present research investigated gender differences in responses to threatening health-promoting information communicated with humour.

Design: Male and female participants were exposed to a health message stressing the negative consequences of binge drinking (Experiment 1; N = 209) or caffeine consumption (Experiment 2; N = 242), that did or did not contain a funny visual metaphor (Experiment 1) or a slapstick cartoon (Experiment 2).

Main Outcome Measures: Message evaluation, message attention, and attitudes and intentions towards the behaviour were measured.

Results: Results showed that health messages were more persuasive when communicated with humour, although humour played a different role for men and women. Whereas men responded more in line with message goals when the message combined high threat with humour, women preferred the low threat humour messages.

Conclusion: By uncovering the moderating role of gender as a key audience characteristic, this research contributes to designing effective future health campaigns and provides important insights for future studies investigating the underlying mechanisms responsible for the different effects of threat and humour appeals for men and women.     

Generalized Information Theory Meets Human Cognition: Introducing a Unified Framework to Model Uncertainty and Information Search

Searching for information is critical in many situations. In medicine, for instance, careful choice of a diagnostic test can help narrow down the range of plausible diseases that the patient might have. In a probabilistic framework, test selection is often modeled by assuming that people's goal is to reduce uncertainty about possible states of the world. In cognitive science, psychology, and medical decision making, Shannon entropy is the most prominent and most widely used model to formalize probabilistic uncertainty and the reduction thereof. However, a variety of alternative entropy metrics (Hartley, Quadratic, Tsallis, Rényi, and more) are popular in the social and the natural sciences, computer science, and philosophy of science. Particular entropy measures have been predominant in particular research areas, and it is often an open issue whether these divergences emerge from different theoretical and practical goals or are merely due to historical accident. Cutting across disciplinary boundaries, we show that several entropy and entropy reduction measures arise as special cases in a unified formalism, the Sharma–Mittal framework. Using mathematical results, computer simulations, and analyses of published behavioral data, we discuss four key questions: How do various entropy models relate to each other? What insights can be obtained by considering diverse entropy models within a unified framework? What is the psychological plausibility of different entropy models? What new questions and insights for research on human information acquisition follow? Our work provides several new pathways for theoretical and empirical research, reconciling apparently conflicting approaches and empirical findings within a comprehensive and unified information‐theoretic formalism.     

环境无序性对消费者多样化寻求的影响及作用机制

在日常生活和购物环境中, 混乱无序无处不在。然而, 关于环境无序性对消费者产品选择行为的影响研究却十分有限, 本文试图填补这一不足。具体而言, 本文创新性地提出环境无序性与多样化寻求行为之间存在着因果关系, 且自我效能威胁和未来偏好不确定感在其中发挥链式中介作用。通过1个预实验和4个实验, 本文发现无论在真实环境、线下购物环境、工作环境, 还是线上产品陈列情境下, 环境无序性均可提升多样化寻求行为; 无序的环境会对消费者的自我效能产生威胁, 进而增强其对未来产品偏好的不确定性感知, 最终促使其通过增加多样化寻求行为来应对未来可能变化的产品偏好。     

A Factor Analytic Investigation of the Pay Satisfaction Questionnaire

ABSTRACT

Threat perceptions are associated with politically conservative attitudes. Research has also found that specific forms of threat perception (e.g., concerns about pathogens) are associated with functional reactions (e.g., anti-fat prejudice). Recently, moral intuitions have been implicated in explaining political orientation: Liberals tend to place greater weight on “individualizing foundations” (justice and care concerns) in particular, whereas conservatives tend to place high weight on “binding foundations” (loyalty, respect, and purity concerns) as well. A recent study attempted to integrate the above strands of research by showing that the effect of threat perceptions on conservatism is mediated by a tendency to place relatively greater weight on the binding foundations. The present study was intended to replicate and extend past research by testing (a) whether concerns about pathogens predict conservatism and anti-fat prejudice and (b) whether those effects are mediated by a tendency to place relatively greater weight on the binding foundations.     

“Hit Me, Maybe, One More Time”: Brief measures of impulsivity and sensation seeking and their prediction of blackjack bets and sexual promiscuity

We sought to construct an efficient, reliable, and valid self-report measure of impulsivity and sensation-seeking. We used item response theory to identify the 8 best items (ImpSS-8) from the 19-item Impulsivity and Sensation-Seeking Scale (Zuckerman, Kuhlman, Joireman, Teta, & Kraft, 1993; Study 1). The ImpSS-8 interacted with a manipulated ego threat to predict blackjack bets: in a weak situation (no ego threat), individual differences were strong (a positive ImpSS-8-bets relationship); in a strong situation (ego threat), individual differences were weak (no relationship; Study 2). The ImpSS-8’s 4-item impulsivity and sensation-seeking subscales related differentially to the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (Study 2) as well as trait measures of openness and conscientiousness, hostility and physical aggression, and sexually promiscuous attitudes and timing (Study 3).     

Unsure what the future will bring? You may overindulge: Uncertainty increases the appeal of wants over shoulds

This paper examines the effect of uncertainty about the future on whether individuals select want options (e.g., junk foods, lowbrow films) or instead exert self-control and select should options (e.g., healthy foods, highbrow films). Consistent with the ego-depletion literature, which suggests that self-control resembles an exhaustible muscle, coping with uncertainty about what the future may bring reduces self-control resources and increases individuals’ tendency to favor want options over should options. These results persist when real uncertainty is induced, when the salience of naturally-arising uncertainty is heightened and when individuals are able to make choices contingent upon the outcomes of uncertain events. Overall, this work suggests that reducing uncertainty in a decision maker’s environment may have important spillover effects, leading to less impulsive choices.     

Which one made it go? The emergence of diagnostic reasoning in preschoolers

We evaluate the hypothesis that children's diagnostic causal reasoning becomes more sophisticated as their understanding of uncertainty advances. When the causal status of candidate causes was known, 3- and 4-year-olds were capable of diagnostic inference (Experiment 1) and could revise their beliefs when told their initial diagnosis was incorrect (Experiment 2). In Experiments 3 and 4, only 4-year-olds made successful inferences when the causal status of candidate causes was uncertain. The results suggest that by age 3, children appreciate that an effect can have multiple candidate causes, but it is not until age 4 that they begin to reason correctly when the causal status of candidate causes is unknown.