How a city is organized can create less-biased citizens

The city you live in could be making you, your family, and your friends more unconsciously racist. Or, your city might make you less racist. It depends on how populous, diverse, and segregated your city is, according to a new study that brings together the math of cities with the psychology of how individuals develop unconscious racial biases.

The study, published in the latest issue of Nature Communications, presents data and a mathematical model of exposure and adaptation in social networks that can help explain why there is more unconscious, or implicit, racial bias in some cities than others.

The authors hope that local communities and governments can use the findings to help create more just and equitable cities.

"What I think is most interesting is the implication that there's a piece of systemic racism that has to do with how people learn and the way cities are organized," says psychologist Andrew Stier, an SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow and lead author of the study.

Cities create dense networks of social interaction between people.

Because of the interactions with many different people, we need to be constantly adapting to new situations and learning, explains SFI External Professor Luís Bettencourt(University of Chicago), a co-leader of SFI's Cities, Scaling and Sustainability project and co-author of the study.

To see how racial biases emerge from how U.S. cities are organized, Stier turned to the enormous database of the Implicit Association Test (IAT). In the popular online test, volunteer participants are given a pairing of White or Black faces with positive or negative words and asked to categorize a single face or word.

If they are faster to categorize things when White/good are paired they have a White-good bias and if they are faster to categorize things when Black/good are paired they have a Black-good bias.

"People may feel they are not prejudiced, but can unconsciously have a preference for one group or another, and this is revealed by these tests," Stier says.

The researchers took the average IAT bias scores from approximately 2.7 million individuals in different geographic areas and linked them to racial demographics and population data from the U.S. Census to build a model that accounts for how individuals learn biases through their social networks.

They found that when these networks are larger, more diverse, and less segregated in cities, implicit racial biases decrease.

The results suggest that there are structural reasons why cities help or deter people from becoming less racially biased.

Perhaps the most pronounced reason is the segregation of different racial groups into different neighborhoods.

Related to that is the lack of more cosmopolitan public spaces where a diverse range of people can experience positive interactions with one another.

Read more at Science Daily

Social media algorithms exploit how humans learn from their peers

In prehistoric societies, humans tended to learn from members of our ingroup or from more prestigious individuals, as this information was more likely to be reliable and result in group success. However, with the advent of diverse and complex modern communities -- and especially in social media -- these biases become less effective. For example, a person we are connected to online might not necessarily be trustworthy, and people can easily feign prestige on social media. In a review published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science on August 3rd, a group of social scientists describe how the functions of social media algorithms are misaligned with human social instincts meant to foster cooperation, which can lead to large-scale polarization and misinformation.

"Several user surveys now both on Twitter and Facebook suggest most users are exhausted by the political content they see. A lot of users are unhappy, and there's a lot of reputational components that Twitter and Facebook must face when it comes to elections and the spread of misinformation," says first author William Brady, a social psychologist in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern.

"We wanted to put out a systematic review that's trying to help understand how human psychology and algorithms interact in ways that can have these consequences," says Brady. "One of the things that this review brings to the table is a social learning perspective. As social psychologists, we're constantly studying how we can learn from others. This framework is fundamentally important if we want to understand how algorithms influence our social interactions."

Humans are biased to learn from others in a way that typically promotes cooperation and collective problem-solving, which is why they tend to learn more from individuals they perceive as a part of their ingroup and those they perceive to be prestigious. In addition, when learning biases were first evolving, morally and emotionally charged information was important to prioritize, as this information would be more likely to be relevant to enforcing group norms and ensuring collective survival.

In contrast, algorithms are usually selecting information that boosts user engagement in order to increase advertising revenue. This means algorithms amplify the very information humans are biased to learn from, and they can oversaturate social media feeds with what the researchers call Prestigious, Ingroup, Moral, and Emotional (PRIME) information, regardless of the content's accuracy or representativeness of a group's opinions. As a result, extreme political content or controversial topics are more likely to be amplified, and if users are not exposed to outside opinions, they might find themselves with a false understanding of the majority opinion of different groups.

"It's not that the algorithm is designed to disrupt cooperation," says Brady. "It's just that its goals are different. And in practice, when you put those functions together, you end up with some of these potentially negative effects."

To address this problem, the research group first proposes that social media users need to be more aware of how algorithms work and why certain content shows up on their feed. Social media companies don't typically disclose the full details of how their algorithms select for content, but one start might be offering explainers for why a user is being shown a particular post. For example, is it because the user's friends are engaging with the content or because the content is generally popular? Outside of social media companies, the research team is developing their own interventions to teach people how to be more conscious consumers of social media.

In addition, the researchers propose that social media companies could take steps to change their algorithms, so they are more effective at fostering community. Instead of solely favoring PRIME information, algorithms could set a limit on how much PRIME information they amplify and prioritize presenting users with a diverse set of content. These changes could continue to amplify engaging information while preventing more polarizing or politically extreme content from becoming overrepresented in feeds.

Read more at Science Daily

How dogs are used impacts how they are treated

Research into the unique cognitive abilities of dogs often leads to surprises, including dogs' ability to form mental representations of things they smell, or that they know when their owners do something by accident. However, dog cognition research suffers from the same biases as general psychology: in both fields, studies are usually done in WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) societies.

Although nearly everything we know about dog-human bonds, dog behavior, and dog cognition comes from WEIRD societies, the majority of dogs in the world live outside of these conditions. To address this bias and form a better understanding of dog-human relationships in societies around the world, a team of researchers from the MPI of Geoanthropology and the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology assessed data on the functions and treatment of dogs in 124 globally distributed societies.

The researchers found that, across all societies, dogs' functions are a good predictor of how they are treated by their owners. Analysis showed that the more functions dogs have in a society, such as guarding, herding, or hunting, the closer the dog-human relationship is likely to be.

To conduct the study, the researchers investigated ethnographic data from the eHRAF cross-cultural database and identified societies in which dogs serve any of five main functions: hunting, defense, guarding herds, herding, and carrying or transporting supplies. They then collected data on how dogs are treated in those societies and coded it into three dimensions: positive care (e.g. dogs are allowed indoors, dogs receive healthcare, puppies are raised), negative treatment (e.g. dogs are not fed, dogs are physically abused, dogs are regularly culled), and personhood (e.g. dogs are named, dogs are buried and/or mourned, dogs are perceived as family members).

By analyzing the relationship between dog functions and treatment, the researchers showed that the number of functions is positively associated with positive care and personhood and negatively associated with negative treatment. However, they also found that not all of a dog's jobs influence treatment equally. For example, herding is particularly likely to increase positive care, whereas hunting has no impact on positive care or negative treatment, but does increase the odds of personhood. Thus, in societies where dogs are kept for hunting, humans are more likely to name their dogs and perceive them as family members.

Additionally, the study showed that negative treatment and positive care are not mutually exclusive. In fact, of the 77 societies with data for all three dimensions of dog treatment, 32 showed the presence of both positive care and negative treatment. This suggests that the dog-human relationship is not as simple or straightforward as "man's best friend," but involves a complex balance between offering care and minimizing costs.

"Our study adds a systematic test for explaining the cultural drivers that shape the variety of dog-human bonds around the world," says Juliane Bräuer of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology. "This represents a first step into understanding whether the cognitive and social skills associated with dogs are universal or are influenced by the cultural environment the dogs live in."

Read more at Science Daily

Research highlights gender bias persistence over centuries

New research from Washington University in St. Louis provides evidence that modern gender norms and biases in Europe have deep historical roots dating back to the Middle Ages and beyond, suggesting that DNA is not the only thing we inherit from our ancestors.

The findings -- published on March 13, 2023 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) -- highlight why gender norms have remained stubbornly persistent in many parts of the world despite significant strides made by the international women's rights movement over the last 100-150 years.

Using dental records of more than 10,000 people from 139 archaeological sites throughout Europe, researchers found that individuals who live in areas that historically favored men over women display more pro-male bias today than those who live in places where gender relations were more egalitarian centuries ago -- evidence that gender attitudes are "transmitted" or handed down from generation to generation.

These biases outlasted monumental socioeconomic and political changes such as industrialization and world wars. Researchers found one exception to the rule, however: In regions that experienced abrupt, large-scale population replacement -- such as a pandemic or natural disaster -- transmission of these values was interrupted.

"The median age of the skeletons in this study is about 1,000 years dating back to the medieval era. It is therefore remarkable that the patterns of gender bias that existed during those times and earlier are still replicated in contemporary attitudes," said Margit Tavits, the Dr. William Taussig Professor in Arts & Sciences at WashU.

"Given the enormous social, economic and political changes that have taken place in Europe during this time, our findings speak to the power of cultural transmission of gender norms."

The incredible stability of these norms over hundreds, if not thousands, of years also explains why it has been difficult in some regions to move the needle toward gender equality.

"There has been a widespread belief that gender norms are a byproduct of structural and institutional factors like religion and agricultural practices. Our findings draw attention to the fact that gender-equal norms passed down from one generation to the next can persist even if institutions or structures incentivize inequality, and vice versa," Tavits said.

"For those working to foster gender equality, the message from our research is that rules and policies are not going to be enough to undermine deeply rooted sexist beliefs and sustain equal ones. We must also address the cultural forces channeling these beliefs."

Taylor Damann and Jeremy Siow -- doctoral students in the Department of Political Science at WashU -- conducted research and co-authored the paper with Tavits.

About the research

Previous archaeological research has used linear enamel hypoplasias -- permanent lesions on the teeth caused by trauma, malnutrition or disease -- to analyze prehistoric gender equality. Because the lesions form exclusively in cases of sustained bodily stress, their presence or absence can tell researchers a great deal about the person's health and living conditions. Further, differences between male and female teeth at the same location are an indication of which sex received preferential treatment in terms of health care and dietary resources at the time.

According to Tavits, studying gender norms in Europe is advantageous given the relative similarity of various institutional and environmental conditions across the region. This allowed researchers to control for factors that could affect modern gender attitudes, such as religion and political institutions.

Because differences in gender attitudes are fairly small across the continent, compared with the rest of the world, this setting also set a higher bar for detecting significant associations between historical and contemporary attitudes. Yet, time and time again, researchers found evidence of this association. For example, individuals living in an area that was historically egalitarian were 20% more likely to have pro-female attitudes than people living in areas that were historically the most pro-male.

Additional tests showed that historical gender bias failed to predict modern gender attitudes for immigrant populations. Researchers also found no evidence of historical gender bias impacting contemporary attitudes in areas hardest hit by the bubonic plague of the 14th century. Finally, they looked to the United States, where the arrival of European settlers in the 16th century led to large-scale displacement of Native Americans. Once again, they found no association between historical and current gender norms.

"Together, these findings provide further support for the idea that historical biases persist because they are passed down from one generation to the next and occur only when the transmission across generations is not interrupted. We were surprised that such a clear relationship emerged," Tavits said.

A tale of two cities

In the paper, Tavits, Damann and Siow highlight two archaeological sites to illustrate how the contrasting historical treatment of women relative to men is reflected in current gender attitudes.

At the first site in Istria, a small urban Greek settlement on the Black Sea in the modern Dobruja region of Romania, researchers found evidence of a pro-male bias in historical dental records dating back to around 550 A.D. Out of the 49 skeletons for whom sex and dental information could be extracted, 58% of females show signs of malnutrition and trauma in their teeth, while only 25% of males do.

According to the authors, the status of men and women in society today has remained relatively unequal in the southeastern region of Romania, based on modern indicators of gender equality. For example, they note, only 52.5% of women participate in the labor market compared with 78% of men, and only 18% of the representatives in the modern municipal council are women.

The population's beliefs about gender norms are similarly unequal, they write. More than half of the residents believe that men have more of a right to jobs than women and there is near consensus (89%) that a woman must have children to be fulfilled.

Contrast this with Plinkaigalis, a rural community in modern-day western Lithuania made up of a population of Balts. Unlike Istria, Plinkaigalis favored women's health. Of the 157 skeletons at this site -- also dating back to 550 A.D. -- 56% of males show dental signals of trauma and malnutrition whereas only 46% of females do. Separate studies have also found evidence that gender norms here were favorable to women.

In the modern era, this location, now called Ke ?dainiai, remains relatively gender equal. Employment levels in western Lithuanian do not vary strongly by gender: 76% men vs. 72.7% women. And women are nearly proportionally represented in local politics (48%). Likewise, less than a quarter of residents of the modern location believe men have more of a right to a job than women, and 56% believe women need children to be fulfilled.

Read more at Science Daily

Disbelief in human evolution linked to greater prejudice and racism

A disbelief in human evolution was associated with higher levels of prejudice, racist attitudes and support of discriminatory behavior against Blacks, immigrants and the LGBTQ community in the U.S., according to University of Massachusetts Amherst research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Similarly, across the globe -- in 19 Eastern European countries, 25 Muslim countries and in Israel -- low belief in evolution was linked to higher biases within a person's group, prejudicial attitudes toward people in different groups and less support for conflict resolution.

The findings supported the hypothesis of lead author Stylianos Syropoulos, a Ph.D. candidate in the War and Peace Labof senior author Bernhard Leidner, associate professor of social psychology. They collaborated with co-first author Uri Lifshin at Reichman University in Israel and co-authors Jeff Greenberg and Dylan Horner at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The researchers theorized that belief in evolution would tend to increase people's identification with all humanity, due to the common ancestry, and would lead to less prejudicial attitudes.

"People who perceive themselves as more similar to animals are also people who tend to have more pro-social or positive attitudes toward outgroup members or people from stigmatized and marginalized backgrounds," Syropoulos explains. "In this investigation, we were interested in examining whether belief in evolution would also act in a similar way, because it would reinforce this belief that we are more similar to animals."

In eight studies involving different areas of the world, the researchers analyzed data from the American General Social Survey (GSS), the Pew Research Center and three online crowdsourced samples. In testing their hypothesis about the associations of different levels of belief in evolution, they accounted for education, political ideology, religiosity, cultural identity and scientific knowledge.

"We found the same results each time, which is basically that believing in evolution relates to less prejudice, regardless of the group you're in, and controlling for all of these alternative explanations," Syropoulos says.

For example, religious beliefs, like political ideology, were measured separately from a belief or disbelief in evolution, the researchers note. "Regardless of whether one considers religion an important part of their life, belief in evolution relates to less prejudice independently from belief, or lack thereof, in God or any particular religion," Syropoulos says.

Leidner adds, "This whole effect and pattern seems to be present in all major political systems. It's very much a human phenomenon, no matter where you are in the world."

The researchers note that Darwin's 19th century theory of evolution has been cited to perpetrate racism, prejudice and homophobia, in part through the phrase, "survival of the fittest," used to describe the process of natural selection.

"There have been theoretical accounts that predict the opposite of what we found, so it was exciting for us to show that this actually is not the case, that the opposite is true and that belief in evolution seems to have pretty positive effects," Leidner says.

The U.S.-based study involved data from 1993, 1994, 2000, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018 -- the years the GSS surveyed Americans about their beliefs in evolution, as well as measures of attitudes toward immigrants, Blacks, affirmative action, LGBTQ people and other social matters.

The data analysis showed unfailingly "that the disbelief in human evolution is the driving factor and most consistent predictor of prejudice in comparison to other relevant constructs," the paper states.

In the Israel-based study, people with a higher belief in evolution were more likely to support peace among Palestinians, Arabs and Jews. In the study involving countries in the Islamic world, belief in evolution was associated with less prejudice toward Christians and Jews. And in the study based in Eastern Europe, where Orthodox Christians are the majority, a belief in evolution was linked with less prejudice toward gypsies, Jews and Muslims.

Syropoulos posits that a belief in evolution may expand people's "moral circle," leading to a sense that "we have more in common than things that are different."

The findings also suggest that "teaching evolution seems to have side effects that might make for a better or more harmonious society," Leidner adds.

Read more at Science Daily

Cultural biases impact native fish, too

From art to religion to land use, much of what is deemed valuable in the United States was shaped centuries ago by the white male perspective. Fish, it turns out, are no exception.

A study published in Fisheries Magazine, a journal of the American Fisheries Society, explores how colonialist attitudes toward native fishes were rooted in elements of racism and sexism. It describes how those attitudes continue to shape fisheries management today, often to the detriment of native fishes.

The study, led by the University of California, Davis, with Nicholls State University and a national team of fisheries researchers, found that nearly all states have policies that encourage overfishing native species. The study maintains that the term "rough fish" is pejorative and degrading to native fish.

"That has bothered me for a long time," said lead author Andrew Rypel, co-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences and the Peter B. Moyle and California Trout Chair in Coldwater Fish Ecology at UC Davis. He and others have been disturbed by images of "glory killings" of native fish that periodically pop up on the internet, as well as the lump categorization of less preferred species as "rough" or "trash" fish.

"When you trace the history of the problem, you quickly realize it's because the field was shaped by white men, excluding other points of view," Rypel said. "Sometimes you have to look at that history honestly to figure out what to do."

The study offers several recommendations for how anglers and fisheries managers can shift to a new paradigm that's more inclusive and beneficial to all fish and people.

A 'rough' start

The term "rough fish" dates to commercial riverboat fishing in the mid-late 1800s. Slow, heavy boats would lighten their loads by "rough-dressing" -- removing organs but not filleting -- less desirable species and discarding them. Biologists came to use the term to describe an unsubstantiated idea that native fish limit game fish species historically desired by Europeans. That attitude posed a major threat to many native species, which were killed in large numbers.

For instance, the alligator gar, an ancient species that can grow more than 8 feet long and weigh 300 pounds, was particularly persecuted in the past century. Called a "wolf among fishes," poison, dynamite and electrocution were used to greatly reduce its population. But now some fishers spend thousands of dollars for the opportunity to catch and release a giant gar. In 2021, Minnesota changed its statute to describe gar as a "game fish" rather than a "rough fish."

Co-author Solomon David has helped fuel renewed appreciation for gar and its relative, bowfin. He runs the GarLab at Nicholls State University in Louisiana, where he is an assistant professor. He said many native fishes, such as suckers and gars, have long been valued by Indigenous people and people of color.

"European colonists heavily influenced what fishes were more valuable, often the species that looked more similar to what they're used to," David said. "So trout, bass and salmon got their value while many other native species got pushed to the wayside."

Limited view

The study authors conducted a survey of fishing regulations across the United States to compare policies and bag limits on "rough fish" with those of largemouth bass, a ubiquitous sport fish.

"When I was a kid fishing, you might go to the river with a worm and catch all these interesting species," Rypel said. "The guidebook would just say 'rough fish, bag unlimited.' Not much has changed since I was kid."

The study found that no states had bag limits rivaling those for the bass. While black basses were often managed at five fish per day, regulations for most native fishes were extremely liberal. Forty-three states had unlimited bag limits for at least one native species. In the remaining states, bag limits were between 15 and 50 fish a day.

Freshwater ecosystems are threatened by pollution, habitat loss and climate change. Up to half of fish species globally are in some form of decline, and 83 percent of native California fish species are declining. Native fishes help ecosystems in many ways, including nutrient cycling and food chain support for other native species. The authors pointedly call for a "rewrite" in managing them.

Recommendations

The study's recommendations for that rewrite include:
 

• Stop saying "rough fish." They suggest "native fish" as a simple alternative.
• Integrate Indigenous perspectives into fisheries management.
• Revisit species bag limits. Lower bag limits for native species until the science is conducted to confirm they could be higher. The study takes particular note of the fast-growing bowfishing market that has contributed to removing native species.
• Support science on native fishes. Game fish receive 11 times more research and management attention in American Fisheries Society journals than do "rough fish." To learn the true value of native fishes, more research is required.
• Co-manage species that have co-evolved, such as freshwater mussels and fish that host them.
• Correct misinformation and enhance science educationthrough outreach and education for all ages.

"We have a chance to redirect fisheries science and conservation and expand it with respect for biodiversity and diversity," David said. "It's been a long time coming. Change is slow, but we have an opportunity here, and we should take advantage of it."

Read more at Science Daily

How medical schools can transform curriculums to undo racial biases

 Medical school curriculums may misuse race and play a role in perpetuating physician bias, a team led by Penn Medicine researchers found in an analysis of curriculum from the preclinical phase of medical education. In a perspective piece published Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers identified five key categories in which curriculum misrepresented race in class discussions, presentations, and assessments. The authors recommend that rather than oversimplifying conversations about how race affects diseases' prevalence, diagnosis, and treatment, medical school faculty must widen the lens to "impart an adequate and accurate understanding of the complexity of these relationships."

"In medical school, 20 years ago, we often learned that higher rates of hypertension in certain racial and ethnic groups, was due to genetic predisposition, personal behaviors, or unfortunate circumstances. Now we know this is not true. There are no characteristics innate to racial and ethnic groups, biological or otherwise, that adequately explains these differences. They stem, instead, from differential experiences in our society -- it's structural racism, not race," said the study's senior author Jaya Aysola, MD, MPH, assistant dean of Inclusion and Diversity in the Perelman School of Medicine and executive director at the Penn Medicine Center for Health Equity Advancement. "When we speak of dismantling structural racism, we must begin with medical education, where these sorts of race-based biases are still being reinforced in the classroom."

Though the researchers focused on lectures from a single medical school, the study authors from other institutions found similar misrepresentations of race in their preclinical medical curriculums. The five categories of biases that the research team identified were: semantics, prevalence of disparities without context, race-based diagnostic bias, pathologizing race, and race-based clinical guidelines.

For example, the study authors noted the use of "African American," is a socially and politically meaningful identity for many people, but not for all people of African descent. Moreover, they write, it is a poor proxy for genetic difference, since it lumps people from many different ancestral populations together. The researchers also found that students were taught about the disproportionate burden of type 2 diabetes among the U.S. Akimel O'odham (formerly known as Pima) people, without sufficient historical and social context. Despite high degrees of genetic similarity, the Akimel O'odham living in Mexico have significantly lower rates of diabetes and obesity than those living in the U.S. The authors explain that a the construction of the Hoover Dam in 1930 that pushed the Akimel O'odham from their lands and into poverty, not a genetic predisposition, explains this pattern. The researchers also highlighted the teaching of guidelines that endorse the use of racial categories in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. One course they analyzed, for instance, encouraged the use of race-adjusted glomerular filtration rate, or GFR, equations, which many experts now say limits care for Black patients and exacerbates health disparities.

"Race is not a biomedical term, and it is a poor proxy for ancestry. Yet, we continue to generate, impart, and assess medical knowledge with this imprecision. In doing so, we perpetuate biases and ignore the actual contributors to the race-based differences we see," Aysola said. "There are several aspects of the medical education apparatus that we have to fundamentally change in order to get to the ideal state where we're dismantling the structures that perpetuate racism."

Read more at Science Daily

Beauty in the biased eye of the beholder

When we pass through an art gallery, what determines our idea of beauty? A University of Sydney study of how people rate the aesthetics of each artwork shows part of our aesthetic assessment is due to the painting you saw a few moments before.

The research, led by PhD student Ms Sujin Kim in the School of Psychology, is published in the Journal of Vision. It shows that we don't appreciate every painting in isolation. Instead, we carry a bias from the artwork just seen.

This bias is not the contrast effect you might intuitively think. A beautiful painting does not make the next one look less attractive but makes it more attractive.

The study, completed under the supervision of Professor David Alais from the University of Sydney and Professor David Burr from the University of Florence, Italy, involved presenting a sequence of 40 paintings to 24 observers who were asked to rate each one using a slider to indicate how aesthetically appealing or attractive it was. The paintings were depicting scenery or still life.

"While it is often said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, this is not the whole story -- it partly depends on what was recently seen," Professor Alais said.

The first question the 24 observers were asked to respond to was whether they rated each painting independently of what they had just seen. To do this, the sequence was presented 20 times with each run having a different random order. In this way, a given painting was rated 20 times, but with a different random sequence preceding it. The data was clear: observers don't rate each painting consistently but are biased by what they just saw.

"Many people naively suppose a kind of 'contrast effect' whereby a painting may look more attractive if it follows an unattractive painting," Professor Alais said. "The surprising result was that the bias was a positive one: paintings were rated higher following an attractive painting, or lower, following unattractive ones."

The research refers to this effect as "serial dependence," which describes a systemic bias towards recent past experience. Previous studies have found, many stimulus attributes -- including orientation, numerosity, facial expression and attractiveness, and perceived slimness -- are systematically biased towards recent past experience. "Perhaps art curators have known all along about the bias towards the recent past," Professor Alais said. "They often keep the best pieces for last and build up to it. Our study shows this would ensure an accumulating effect and guarantee a big finish."

From Science Daily

'I knew that was going to happen:' Déjà vu and the 'postdictive' bias

For many, déjà vu is just a fleeting, eerie sensation that "I've been here before." For others, it gets even eerier: In that moment of unsettling familiarity, they also feel certain they know what's going to happen next -- like, a girl in a white shirt is going to pass me on the left.

And when the girl in the white shirt really does pass by, well, what can explain it? Cue theories of past lives, clairvoyance, and the supernatural.

Not so fast, says Anne Cleary, a memory researcher at Colorado State University who is one of the world's experts on déjà vu. A dogged scientist who uses laboratory experiments to induce déjà vu in human subjects, Cleary has a new theory on why déjà vu is accompanied not only by feelings of prediction, but also an "I knew that was going to happen" feeling a minute later.

Cleary's most recent déjà vu experiments, published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, document evidence of such a "postdictive" bias in déjà vu experiencers in the lab, and offers a plausible explanation for why it happens.

Prior experiments had uncovered a strong predictive bias in people having déjà vu -- that they feel like they know what's going to happen next. But in the lab, people who were having déjà vu were not able to actually predict what was going to happen next. That predictive feeling, however intense, was just that -- a feeling.

"If this is an illusion -- just a feeling -- why do people so strongly believe they actually predicted what unfolded next?" said Cleary, a professor in the CSU Department of Psychology. "I wondered if there was an explanation in some sort of cognitive illusion."

To test that theory in the lab, Cleary and co-authors immersed a bank of test subjects in a video game-like scene created in the Sims virtual world. Subjects were asked if they were experiencing déjà vu. Next, the virtual scene would turn left or right. Then participants were asked, did the scene unfold the way you expected? In a later experiment, participants were further asked to rate the familiarity of the scene, both before and after the turn.

After crunching their results, the researchers found that when intense feelings of prediction accompanied déjà vu, they were strongly correlated with feelings of "postdiction" -- that the person reported, after the fact, that they knew what particular turn was going to happen. But the experiment was set up so it would be impossible for them to know, because the turns were made at random.

The "I knew that was going to happen" bias was very strong when déjà vu occurred, and especially strong when the scene happened to be rated as very familiar. But, like the feelings of prediction, the feelings of having gotten the prediction right were not rooted in reality. In other words, déjà vu gave the subjects not only predictive feelings, but a strong hindsight bias after the fact.

Cleary's team concluded that the high degree of familiarity that accompanies déjà vu also carries through to the postdictive bias. "If the entire scene feels intensely familiar as it unfolds, that might trick our brains into thinking we got it right after all," Cleary said. "Because it felt so familiar as you were going through it, it felt like you knew all along how it was going to go, even if that could not have been the case."

So the "I knew that was going to happen" bias is probably all part of the illusion of prediction that often accompanies déjà vu, Cleary says. According to her prior experiments, déjà vu is a memory phenomenon in which we're trying to retrieve a memory, but we can't place it -- sort of like the feeling of a word on the tip of your tongue. She has previously demonstrated in the lab that when scenes in the Sims mapped spatially to different scenes that were viewed earlier but forgotten, more instances of déjà vu occur.

Cleary was driven to do experiments probing the postdictive bias because it felt like a missing puzzle piece to her existing theories on why déjà vu tends to be associated with clairvoyance. Since she started studying déjà vu over a decade ago, she's had countless people describe to her their déjà vu experiences, including when they were very sure they'd predicted something without explanation. And it's not just people who believe in the supernatural; many of them are what she calls "trained skeptics" - even fellow memory researchers -- who report extremely unsettling déjà vu experiences in which they feel like they predicted what was going to happen next.

Read more at Science Daily

Even scientists have gender stereotypes ... which can hamper the career of women researchers

However convinced we may be that science is not just for men, the concept of science remains much more strongly associated with masculinity than with femininity in people's minds. This automatic bias, which had already been identified among the general public, also exists in the minds of most scientists, who are not necessarily aware of it. And, in certain conditions, it may lead to otherwise careful scientific evaluation committees putting women at a disadvantage during promotion rounds involving men and women researchers. These are the findings of a study conducted by behavioural scientists from the Social and cognitive psychology laboratory (CNRS/Université Clermont Auvergne), the Laboratory of Cognitive Psychology (CNRS/Aix-Marseille Université), and the University of British Columbia (Canada), with the support of the CNRS Mission for the place of women. The study is published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour on 26 August 2019.

Women remain underrepresented in scientific research: at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), across all disciplines, the average percentage of female researchers is 35%. And the higher the scientific research position, the more this percentage declines. Several reasons have been cited to explain these disparities: differences in levels of motivation, self-censorship ... but is discrimination also part of the story?

To find out, scientists in social and cognitive psychology studied 40 evaluation committees tasked with evaluating applications for research director positions at the CNRS over a period of two years. This is the first time that a research institution has carried out such a scientific study of its practices in the course of an annual nationwide competition covering the entire scientific spectrum.

This study shows that, from particle physics to the social sciences, most scientists, whether male or female, associate "science" and "masculine" in their semantic memory (the memory of concepts and words). This stereotype is implicit, which is to say that most often it is not detectable at the level of discourse. And it is equivalent to that observed among the general population.

Yet does this implicit stereotype have consequences on the decisions made by evaluation committees? Yes, when committees deny or minimise the existence of bias against women. Here, this is the case for around half of the committees. In these committees, the stronger the implicit stereotypes, the less often women are promoted. In contrast, when committees acknowledge the possibility of bias, implicit stereotypes, however strong they may be, have no influence.

Even if disparities between men and women in science have multiple causes and start at school (as the same authors have shown in other publications), this study indicates for the first time the existence of implicit gender stereotypes among male and female researchers across all disciplines -- stereotypes that can harm the careers of women scientists.

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Change the bias, change the behavior? Maybe not

The concept of implicit bias has made its way into the general consciousness, most often in the context of racial bias. More broadly, however, implicit biases can affect how people think of anything -- from their thoughts about cookies to those about white men.

"All the little ways in which our everyday thinking about social stuff is unconscious or uncontrollable," wrote Calvin Lai, assistant professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, in an article in DCist. "The stuff that we don't realize is influencing us when we make decisions."

Along with a broader cultural awareness of implicit bias is idea that the actions that they influence can be changed by eliminating the bias itself.

Change the bias, changes in the behavior will follow. It seems logical enough.

If true, reducing implicit bias could be put to practical use for anything from ending discrimination (removing a bias in favor of white males) to losing weight (dialing down a cookie bias).

In a meta-analysis of research papers published on the subject of implicit bias, however, Lai found that the evidence does not show this kind of causal relationship.

The research is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Lai worked with Patrick Forscher, of the University of Arkansas, to systematically review 492 studies that dealt with changing people's "automatic mental processes," the uncontrollable, unconscious mental processes that have come to be known in particular contexts as "implicit bias."

The studies contained more than 87,000 participants. After crunching the numbers, Lai and Forscher saw that studies suggest biases can, in fact, be changed -- although not dramatically.

When they honed in, looking at 63 studies that explicitly considered a link between changes in bias and changes in actions, however, they found no evidence of a causal relationship.

"We definitely didn't expect this," Lai said. "And it challenges assumptions about the relationship between implicit bias and behavior."

Lai suggested four possible reasons that a link was not established in the meta-analysis:

Measurement errors: The way outcomes were measured may have picked up on changes unrelated to the underlying bias. For example, Lai said, such a measurement would be analogous to "moving the mercury around within a thermometer rather than changing the heat in the room."

Confounds: After tests to measure an implicit bias, something happened, unrelated to the changed subjects' behavior.

Measured too narrow of a bias: Appeared to assess the same associations, but maybe the effects were too broad to capture a change associated with the change in bias. For example, the implicit bias measured was about broad attitudes toward White vs. Black people, but the behaviors measured were about behavior toward a specific person of a particular race. In that case, the attitude measured may have been too general.

No causal relationship: Implicit bias doesn't affect behavior at all.

This last option doesn't sit well with Lai. "It would open a theoretical can of worms because there are decades of experiments in other lines of research showing evaluation without conscious intention or control," he said.

However, Lai said there is a more effective way to change these behaviors; one that doesn't rely on changing people's implicit biases: ridding society of the features that cause people to act in a biased way.

For example, reducing subjectivity makes it more difficult for a person's biases to affect decision-making. Instead of relying on a "gut feeling" for a hiring decision, for example, lay out the requirements first, and stick to them.

Or, in the cookie realm, don't have any on hand -- not at home or at the office -- and don't drive past the bakery on the way home.

On an individual level, Lai said, "Equip people with strategies to resist the environment's biasing influence.

"The power of counterstereotypes is not to be underestimated," Lai wrote in a paper describing possible ways to counteract implicit biases. "And if counterstereotypical encounters become typical, shift in attitudes and beliefs will follow."

Lai points out that this study was heavily constrained by the available literature. The studies they included focused on brief interventions and assessments and was heavily skewed toward a certain demographic: university students.

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The unpopular truth about biases toward people with disabilities

Needing to ride in a wheelchair can put the brakes on myriad opportunities -- some less obvious than one might think. New research from Michigan State University sheds light on the bias people have toward people with disabilities, known as "ableism," and how it shifts over time.

Contrary to popular belief, the findings suggest that biases toward people with disabilities increase with age and over time, but that people are less likely to show how they really feel publicly.

"Disabilities are a sensitive, uncomfortable topic for many people to talk about. Few are willing to acknowledge a bias toward people with disabilities," said William Chopik, MSU assistant professor of psychology and senior author. "Because this is so understudied, the goal of our research was to characterize why -- and which types of -- people hold higher biases against those with disabilities."

The research, published in the Journal of Social Issues, is the largest of its kind using data from 300,000 participants gathered over 13 years. Participants ranged from 18- to 90-years-old, and 15% classified themselves as having a disability.

Authors Jenna Harder, Victor Keller and Chopik used data from Project Implicit, a platform that allows users to learn and measure biases anonymously. The platform defined a disability as "some sort of physical, mental or emotional limitation" and asked a series of questions measuring feelings about people with disabilities. The researchers also measured how much contact participants had with the disability community using a scale of one to seven, one being "knowing someone" and seven being "having constant contact" with a person with a disability.

The researchers used the surveys to measure implicit attitudes and explicit bias. Harder explained that an implicit attitude are thoughts or feelings that happen automatically, which are hard to control, suppress or regulate. Explicit attitudes, she said, are the things people consciously agree with and are more controllable because it is how people express or portray their opinions about something publicly. One can think through what they are about to say and filter themselves if necessary, she said.

The researchers found that implicit bias from respondents increased over time and with age, meaning that they had less-favorable feelings toward people with disabilities. But, when asking explicitly how much participants preferred people with disabilities to be abled, they shared more positive responses with time and age, meaning that they outwardly portrayed positive opinions about people with disabilities.

"This is a big mystery because people outwardly say they feel less biased, but in actuality the implicit attitude has been getting stronger as time goes on," Chopik said. "It's not popular to express negative opinions about people with disabilities, so perhaps they feel inclined say nicer things publicly instead. Changes in explicit attitudes do not always lead to changes in implicit prejudice -- sometimes becoming more aware of a prejudice might increase implicit prejudice."

The findings also revealed that women felt less implicit bias, and that people who had contact with the disabled population had lower prejudice.

"Some of our findings related to women align with stereotypes: when you look at how men and women compare on bias, women are more compassionate toward stigmatized groups," Harder said.

"Gender was one of the most consistent predictors in this study, supporting theories that women are particularly receptive to people who they perceive as needing help."

Chopik explained that lower prejudice from people who had contact with disabled people was consistent with theories related to interactions with other stigmatized groups.

"As you interact more with a stigmatized group, you can potentially have more positive experiences with them, which changes your attitudes," he said. "You start with a certain bias, but over time those biases are challenged and your attitude changes because you have the chance to develop positive associations with the group and see them in a different light."

Data gathered from disabled participants showed feelings of warmth among their own community and a more positive attitude toward their peers. The more visible a disability -- like needing a wheelchair or a walker -- the stronger the positive attitude toward the disability community was.

Chopik emphasized the lack of research on ableism and hopes to encourage more participation from academia.

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People's motivations bias how they gather information

A new study suggests people stop gathering evidence earlier when the data supports their desired conclusion than when it supports the conclusion they wish was false. Filip Gesiarz, Donal Cahill and Tali Sharot of University College London, U.K. report in PLOS Computational Biology.

Previous studies had already provided some clues that people gather less information before reaching desirable beliefs. For example, people are more likely to seek a second medical opinion when the first diagnosis is grave. However, certain design limitations of those studies prevented a definitive conclusion and the reasons behind this bias was previously unknown. By fitting people's behavior to a mathematical model Gesiarz and colleagues were able to identify the reasons for this bias.

"Our research suggests that people start with an assumption that their favored conclusion is more likely true and weight each piece of evidence supporting it more than evidence opposing it. Because of that, people will find no need to gather additional information that could have revealed their conclusion to be false. They will stop the investigation as soon as the jury tilts in their favor" said Gesiarz.

In this new study 84 volunteers played an online categorization game in which they could gather as much evidence as they wanted to help them make judgements and were paid according to how accurate they were. In addition, if the evidence pointed to a certain category they would get bonus points and if it pointed to another category they would lose points. So while there was reason to wish the evidence pointed to a specific judgement, the only way for volunteers to maximize rewards was to provide accurate responses. Despite this, they found that the volunteers stopped gathering data earlier when it supported the conclusion they wished was true than when it supported the undesirable conclusion.

"Today, a limitless amount of information is available at the click of a mouse," Sharot says. "However, because people are likely to conduct less through searches when the first few hits provide desirable information, this wealth of data will not necessarily translate to more accurate beliefs."

Next, the authors hope to determine what factors make certain individuals more likely to have a bias in how they gather information than others. For instance, they are curious whether children might show the same bias revealed in this study, or whether people with depression, which is associated with motivation problems, have different data-gathering patterns.

From Science Daily

Medical guidelines may be biased, overly aggressive in US

Dr. Sunita Sah practiced general medicine for several years in the United Kingdom's National Health Service. When she came to the United States, she noticed something strange.

The U.K. guidelines for tests such as mammograms and colon cancer screenings drastically differed from those in the U.S. -- even though they were based on the same medical evidence.

"Having colonoscopy at the age of 50 -- that struck me as rather odd when I moved to the U.S., because you don't really hear about people having colonoscopies as a screening procedure in the U.K.," said Sah. "It's much less invasive to test for blood in the stool. It's also less costly and doesn't have the risks of undertaking a colonoscopy."

Now an assistant professor of management and organizations at Cornell, Sah and Ismail Jatoi of the University of Texas Health, San Antonio, say the treatment guidelines recommended by medical specialist organizations are more likely to call for greater use of health care services and exacerbate overdiagnosis, overtreatment and spiraling health care costs. Their commentary, "Clinical Practice Guidelines and the Overuse of Health Care Services: Need for Reform," appeared March 18 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

The implications are significant, she said, because guidelines are supposed to provide standard evidence-based treatment practices for all doctors.

"The recommendations put out by specialty organizations -- like the American College of Cardiology or the American College of Radiology -- show specialty bias in recommending more aggressive and/or more frequent screening procedures," said Sah, an expert on conflict of interest. "In the U.S. in particular, where the fee-for-service compensation model dominates medicine, which is different from countries like the U.K., you see even more recommendations for greater use of health care services."

Specialty bias refers to the tendency of physicians to recommend the treatments in which they are trained to deliver. For example, localized prostate cancer can be treated with either surgery or radiation.

"If you go to a surgeon, chances are that they are more likely to recommend that you have surgery; if you go to a radiation oncologist, they are more likely to recommend that you have radiation," she said. "They each often believe that the treatment that they're trained in is the better one."

In the case of screening for colorectal cancer, the American College of Gastroenterology's panel -- all of whom were gastroenterologists -- recommended colonoscopy as the best strategy.

But the United States Preventive Task Force, with no gastroenterologists or gastrointestinal surgeons, recommended testing the stool, sigmoidoscopy (an exam of only the lower part of the colon) or colonoscopy as a last resort. Stool testing was also recommended by the European Society of Medical Oncology panel, which consisted of six medical oncologists, no gastroenterologists and one gastrointestinal surgeon. The panel said there was limited evidence that screening colonoscopy is effective.

"Colonoscopies are more invasive than stool testing and come with potentially greater risks and costs for patients -- but increased clinical volume and profits for gastroenterologists," Sah said.

Specialty guidelines are also subject to fee-for-service bias, according to the commentary. Doctors who receive a payment for each treatment may tend to recommend that treatment more often, because they have a financial interest in it.

"The bias is not necessarily malicious or intentional," Sah said. "In a fee-for-service environment, they may be biased to do more rather than less, so it becomes a habit."

But more is not necessarily better, she said. "Sometimes the risks of those procedures are just not worth the benefits."

The authors call for a reduction in conflicts of interest in the fee-for-service model, and more professional diversity in the makeup of the guideline committees. "You need a variety of different voices on those committees," Sah said.

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Overcoming bias about music takes work

Expectations and biases play a large role in our experiences. This has been demonstrated in studies involving art, wine and even soda. In 2007, Joshua Bell, an internationally acclaimed musician, illustrated the role context plays in our enjoyment of music when he played his Stradivarius violin in a Washington, D.C., subway, and commuters passed by without a second glance.

Researchers at University of Arkansas, Arizona State University and the University of Connecticut studied this phenomenon and recently published their results in Scientific Reports. They found that simply being told that a performer is a professional or a student changes the way the brain responds to music. They also found that overcoming this bias took a deliberate effort.

The study involved 20 participants without formal training in music. Inside a functional magnetic imaging, or fMRI, machine in the newly founded Brain Imaging Research Center at the University of Connecticut, the participants listened to eight pairs of 70-second musical excerpts, presented in a random order. Each pair consisted of two different performances of the same excerpt. The participants were told that one of the pairs was played by a "conservatory student of piano" and the other was a "world-renowned professional pianist." Although participants were actually listening to a student and professional performance, they heard each pair twice during the experiment with the labels reversed, ensuring that the researchers could investigate the effect of the label independent of the qualities of the performance itself.

Participants rated their enjoyment of each excerpt on a scale of one to 10, and they indicated which of the two excerpts in each pair they preferred. The researchers used the fMRI scans to examine regions of the brain that are associated with auditory processing, pleasure and reward, and cognitive control.

In order to study the brain activity associated with bias, the researchers compared brain images of the participants who preferred the "professional" excerpts with images of participants who preferred the "student" excerpts. They found that when a participant preferred the piece attributed to a professional player, there was significantly more activity in the primary auditory cortex, as well as a region of the brain associated with pleasure and reward.

This activity started when the participant was informed that the player was a professional -- before the music even began -- and remained consistent during the excerpt, suggesting that the belief that a musician is a professional caused these participants to pay more attention to the music and biased their listening experience not just at the start, but throughout the excerpt.

The researchers also examined the brain activity of participants who preferred the "student" recordings over the "professional" recordings. While these participants were listening to the recordings attributed to the professional, researchers saw higher activity in a region of the brain related to cognitive control and deliberative thinking throughout the course of the excerpt. They also found that these participants had more connectivity between the parts of their brain related to cognitive control and reward.

"It was different when people listened carefully enough to realize we were fooling them -- that is, when they realized they liked the performance labeled 'student' better," said Edward Large, a theoretical neuroscientist at UConn who made the fMRI available for the study.

"The participants who could resist the bias (who decided they liked the performance primed as student or disliked the one primed as professional) had to recruit regions devoted to executive control -- it looked like work for them to suppress the bias," said Elizabeth Margulis, distinguished professor of music theory and music cognition at the University of Arkansas. "These data demonstrate how critical factors outside the notes themselves, like the information you have about a performer (explicitly in the form of a prime or implicitly in the form of positioning on stage at Carnegie Hall or on a subway platform) can transform what you are able to hear and how you evaluate a musical performance."

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