Inoculation against conspiracy theories: A consumer side approach to India's fake news problem

We attempt to replicate Roozenbeek and van der Linden's Western-based study in India by employing the Bad News Game, an online game, in which players take on the role of a misinformation tycoon. They are exposed to weakened doses of the strategies employed in conspiracy and fake news production with the aim to cognitively inoculate them against misinformation. The proliferation of inexpensive mobile connections coupled with a lack of digital literacy has resulted in a conspiratorial pandemic in developing countries like India. We test the game's impact on an Indian sample (n = 1002) using a within-subject design. We provide evidence of significant improvement in the ability of participants to identify the misinformation produced using Conspiracy, Impersonation, and to a lesser extent, the Discrediting technique, while observing greater truth discernment in correctly identifying true news. We also conduct sub-sample analyses. These findings have positive implications for methods that protect users from malignant online content.     

Locus of Control and Anti‐Immigrant Sentiment in Canada,the United States,and the United Kingdom

Using data collected in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, this article examines the determinants of attitudes toward immigrants. In particular, we draw on the literature in social psychology to explore the role of locus of control in promoting more ethnocentric and restrictive attitudes towards immigration. We conceptualize control at three levels: (1) perceptions of individual locus of control (i.e., feeling that one can control one's own circumstances), (2) perceptions of societal control (i.e., feeling that one's country has control over immigration), and (3) perceptions of an outgroup's locus of control (i.e., feeling that an outgroup's social circumstances are attributable to dispositional rather than external factors). Results show that all three measures of control are important predictors of negative attitudes toward immigrants: Those who feel in control (personally or as a society) are less hostile towards immigrants, while those who attribute negative outcomes to immigrants' predispositions are also more hostile. Results also suggest that measures of control are related to, but distinct from, both partisanship and racial prejudice.     

Person perception in the heat of conflict: Negative trait attributions affect procedural preferences and account for situational and cultural differences

Disputes by their nature involve contentious behavior. If one attributes such behavior to underlying personality traits, these attributions can be quite damning. The current research investigated negative trait attributions and their impact on dispute resolution decisions. We hypothesized that judging one's opponent to be low in agreeableness and high in emotionality (e.g. stubborn and volatile) shifts one's preference towards more formal procedures – formal in the sense that a third party judge controls the process and outcome. Drawing on the attribution literature, we hypothesized that two antecedents of these judgments (and consequent preferences) are the perceiver's level of prior information and the perceiver's cultural proclivity to explaining behavior in terms of personal dispositions. Results of an experiment measuring reactions to a hypothetical dispute found that prior information and culture (USA vs Hong Kong) increased trait attributions and preferences for formal procedures. Additionally, expectancy measures showed interaction effects suggesting that disputants dynamically construct expectancies in light of their personality impressions.     

When choice is demotivating: can one desire too much of a good thing?

Current psychological theory and research affirm the positive affective and motivational consequences of having personal choice. These findings have led to the popular notion that the more choice, the better-that the human ability to manage, and the human desire for, choice is unlimited. Findings from 3 experimental studies starkly challenge this implicit assumption that having more choices is necessarily more intrinsically motivating than having fewer. These experiments, which were conducted in both field and laboratory settings, show that people are more likely to purchase gourmet jams or chocolates or to undertake optional class essay assignments when offered a limited array of 6 choices rather than a more extensive array of 24 or 30 choices. Moreover, participants actually reported greater subsequent satisfaction with their selections and wrote better essays when their original set of options had been limited. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Choice freedom

Individuals seek and value choice freedom, firms provide consumers ever-increasing opportunities to exercise it, citizens worry about protecting their right to choose freely, and scholars across different disciplines study the topic around the globe. We adopt a consumer psychology perspective to systematize the vast literature on choice freedom, and we present a framework to examine the relationship between choice freedom and personal and societal well-being. We begin by proposing choice freedom as an antecedent of autonomy and personal control and by clarifying the meaning of these interrelated constructs. We then use autonomy and personal control as separate processes to explain benefits and limits of choice freedom for well-being, and we review interventions that mitigate the limits. Finally, we discuss future research questions related to autonomy and personal control. Whereas extant literature focuses on the presence of freedom and on the relationship between choice freedom and the individual, we reflect on the extent to which consumers actually have freedom of choice and on the role of others in the provision and exercise of choice freedom.     

Transformed Facial Similarity as a Political Cue: A Preliminary Investigation

Experimental subjects evaluated a political candidate whose face was digitally altered to absorb the subjects' facial structure. For half of the subjects, the photograph of the candidate was morphed such that the image presented was a blend composed of 60% of the unfamiliar Caucasian male and 40% of the subject. For the other half the photograph was unaltered. Given previous research on implicit familiarity (Zajonc, 1968, 1980), we predicted that the morph would advantage the candidate. The results demonstrated no main effect of the similarity manipulation. However, there was a robust similarity by gender interaction. Male subjects evaluated the morphed candidate more favorably than the unaltered photograph, while female subjects rated him more negatively. We discuss potential explanations for this interaction effect and explore the possible implications of facial similarity as a political cue in both high- and low-information elections.     

Clarifying Heterogeneity of Daytime and Nighttime Symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress in Combat Veterans With Insomnia

Daytime and nighttime symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are common among combat veterans and military service members. However, there is a great deal of heterogeneity in how symptoms are expressed. Clarifying the heterogeneity of daytime and nighttime PTSD symptoms through exploratory clustering may generate hypotheses regarding ways to optimally match evidence-based treatments to PTSD symptom profiles. We used mixture modeling to reveal clusters based on 6 daytime and nighttime symptoms of 154 combat veterans with insomnia and varying levels of PTSD symptoms. Three clusters with increasing symptom severity were identified (n1 = 50, n2 = 70, n3 = 34). These results suggest that, among veterans with insomnia, PTSD symptoms tend to exist on a continuum of severity, rather than as a categorical PTSD diagnosis. Hypotheses regarding possible targeted treatment strategies for veterans within each identified cluster, as well as ways to generalize these methods to other groups within the military, are discussed.     

Neural mechanisms underlying subsequent memory for personal beliefs:An fMRI study

Many fMRI studies have examined the neural mechanisms supporting emotional memory for stimuli that generate emotion rather automatically (e.g., a picture of a dangerous animal or of appetizing food). However, far fewer studies have examined how memory is influenced by emotion related to social and political issues (e.g., a proposal for large changes in taxation policy), which clearly vary across individuals. In order to investigate the neural substrates of affective and mnemonic processes associated with personal opinions, we employed an fMRI task wherein participants rated the intensity of agreement/disagreement to sociopolitical belief statements paired with neural face pictures. Following the rating phase, participants performed an associative recognition test in which they distinguished identical versus recombined face–statement pairs. The study yielded three main findings: behaviorally, the intensity of agreement ratings was linked to greater subjective emotional arousal as well as enhanced high-confidence subsequent memory. Neurally, statements that elicited strong (vs. weak) agreement or disagreement were associated with greater activation of the amygdala. Finally, a subsequent memory analysis showed that the behavioral memory advantage for statements generating stronger ratings was dependent on the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Together, these results both underscore consistencies in neural systems supporting emotional arousal and suggest a modulation of arousal-related encoding mechanisms when emotion is contingent on referencing personal beliefs.     

Monozygotic twins with schizoform psychosis and hypothalamic-induced hypogonadotropic hypogonadism

It is reported about an uniovular male pair of twins which has been permanently hospitalized because of an intermittently progressing schizoform psychosis. A hypothalamically conditioned hypogonadotropic hypogonadism provable beyond that substantiates the possibility of the common causal genetic embodiment of both the clinical pictures which is disputed in literature.