Evaluating the truthfulness of fake news through online searches increases the chances of believing misinformation

Conventional wisdom suggests that searching online to evaluate the veracity of misinformation would reduce belief in it. But a new study by a team of researchers shows the opposite occurs: Searching to evaluate the truthfulness of false news articles actually increases the probability of believing misinformation.

The findings, which appear in the journal Nature, offer insights into the impact of search engines' output on their users -- a relatively under-studied area.

"Our study shows that the act of searching online to evaluate news increases belief in highly popular misinformation -- and by notable amounts," says Zeve Sanderson, founding executive director of New York University's Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP) and one of the paper's authors.

The reason for this outcome may be explained by search-engine outputs -- in the study, the researchers found that this phenomenon is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return lower-quality information.

"This points to the danger that 'data voids' -- areas of the information ecosystem that are dominated by low quality, or even outright false, news and information -- may be playing a consequential role in the online search process, leading to low return of credible information or, more alarming, the appearance of non-credible information at the top of search results," observes lead author Kevin Aslett, an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida and a faculty research affiliate at CSMaP.

In the newly published Nature study, Aslett, Sanderson, and their colleagues studied the impact of using online search engines to evaluate false or misleading views -- an approach encouraged by technology companies and government agencies, among others.

To do so, they recruited participants through both Qualtrics and Amazon's Mechanical Turk -- tools frequently used in running behavioral science studies -- for a series of five experiments and with the aim of gauging the impact of a common behavior: searching online to evaluate news (SOTEN).

The first four studies tested the following aspects of online search behavior and impact:
 

• The effect of SOTEN on belief in both false or misleading and true news directly within two days an article's publication (false popular articles included stories on COVID-19 vaccines, the Trump impeachment proceedings, and climate events)
• Whether the effect of SOTEN can change an individual's evaluation after they had already assessed the veracity of a news story
• The effect of SOTEN months after publication
• The effect of SOTEN on recent news about a salient topic with significant news coverage -- in the case of this study, news about the Covid-19 pandemic

A fifth study combined a survey with web-tracking data in order to identify the effect of exposure to both low- and high-quality search-engine results on belief in misinformation.

By collecting search results using a custom web browser plug-in, the researchers could identify how the quality of these search results may affect users' belief in the misinformation being evaluated.

The study's source credibility ratings were determined by NewsGuard, a browser extension that rates news and other information sites in order to guide users in assessing the trustworthiness of the content they come across online.

Across the five studies, the authors found that the act of searching online to evaluate news led to a statistically significant increase in belief in misinformation.

This occurred whether it was shortly after the publication of misinformation or months later.

This finding suggests that the passage of time -- and ostensibly opportunities for fact checks to enter the information ecosystem -- does not lessen the impact of SOTEN on increasing the likelihood of believing false news stories to be true.

Moreover, the fifth study showed that this phenomenon is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return lower-quality information.

"The findings highlight the need for media literacy programs to ground recommendations in empirically tested interventions and search engines to invest in solutions to the challenges identified by this research," concludes Joshua A. Tucker, professor of politics and co-director of CSMaP, another of the paper's authors.

Read more at Science Daily

Human beliefs about drugs could have dose-dependent effects on the brain

Mount Sinai researchers have shown for the first time that a person's beliefs related to drugs can influence their own brain activity and behavioral responses in a way comparable to the dose-dependent effects of pharmacology.

The implications of the study, which directly focused on beliefs about nicotine, are profound.

They range from elucidating how the neural mechanisms underlying beliefs may play a key role in addiction, to optimizing pharmacological and nonpharmacological treatments by leveraging the power of human beliefs.

The study was published in the journal Nature Mental Health.

"Beliefs can have a powerful influence on our behavior, yet their effects are considered imprecise and rarely examined by quantitative neuroscience methods," says Xiaosi Gu, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry, and Neuroscience, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and senior author of the study.

"We set out to investigate if human beliefs can modulate brain activities in a dose-dependent manner similar to what drugs do, and found a high level of precision in how beliefs can influence the human brain. This finding could be crucial for advancing our knowledge about the role of beliefs in addiction as well as a broad range of disorders and their treatments."

To explore this dynamic, the Mount Sinai team, led by Ofer Perl, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Gu's lab when the study was conducted, instructed nicotine-dependent study participants to believe that an electronic cigarette they were about to vape contained either low, medium, or high strengths of nicotine, when in fact the level remained constant.

Participants then underwent functional neuroimaging (fMRI) while performing a decision-making task known to engage neural circuits activated by nicotine.

The scientists found that the thalamus, an important binding site for nicotine in the brain, showed a dose-dependent response to the subject's beliefs about nicotine strength, providing compelling evidence to support the relationship between subjective beliefs and biological substrates in the human brain.

This effect was previously thought to apply only to pharmacologic agents.

A similar dose-dependent effect of beliefs was also found in the functional connectivity between the thalamus and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a brain region that is considered important for decision-making and belief states.

"Our findings provide a mechanistic explanation for the well-known variations in individual responses to drugs," notes Dr. Gu, "and suggest that subjective beliefs could be a direct target for the treatment of substance use disorders. They could also advance our understanding of how cognitive interventions, such as psychotherapy, work at the neurobiological level in general for a wide range of psychiatric conditions beyond addiction."

Dr. Gu, who is one of the world's foremost researchers in the emerging field of computational psychiatry, cites another way in which her team's research could inform clinical care.

"The finding that human beliefs about drugs play such a pivotal role suggests that we could potentially enhance patients' responses to pharmacological treatments by leveraging these beliefs," she explains.

Significantly, the work of the Mount Sinai team can also be viewed in a much broader context: harnessing beliefs in a systematic manner to better serve mental health treatment and research in general.

Read more at Science Daily

New model for predicting belief change

A new kind of predictive network model could help determine which people will change their minds about contentious scientific issues when presented with evidence-based information.

A study in Science Advances presents a framework to accurately predict if a person will change their opinion about a certain topic. The approach estimates the amount of dissonance, or mental discomfort, a person has from holding conflicting beliefs about a topic.

Santa Fe Institute Postdoctoral Fellows Jonas Dalege and Tamara van der Does built on previous efforts to model belief change by integrating both moral and social beliefs into a statistical physics framework of 20 interacting beliefs.

They then used this cognitive network model to predict how the beliefs of a group of nearly 1,000 people, who were at least somewhat skeptical about the efficacy of genetically modified foods and childhood vaccines, would change as the result of an educational intervention.

Study participants were shown a message about the scientific consensus on genetic modification and vaccines. Those who began the study with a lot of dissonance in their interwoven network of beliefs were more likely to change their beliefs after viewing the messaging, but not necessarily in accordance with the message. On the other hand, people with little dissonance showed little change following the intervention.

"For example, if you believe that scientists are inherently trustworthy, but your family and friends tell you that vaccines are unsafe, this is going to create some dissonance in your mind," van der Does says. "We found that if you were already kind of anti-GM foods or vaccines to begin with, you would just move more towards that direction when presented with new information even if that wasn't the intention of the intervention."

While still in an early stage, the research could ultimately have important implications for communicating scientific, evidence-based information to the public.

Read more at Science Daily

Pre-teen children believe 'brilliance' is a male trait, and this stereotype increases in strength up to the age of twelve

Children hold stereotypical views that 'brilliance' is a male trait, and this belief strengthens as they grow up to the age of twelve, researchers from Singapore and the United States have reported.

The study led by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) in collaboration with New York University, was published in the scientific journal Child Development in May 2022. It involved 389 Chinese Singaporean parents and 342 of their children aged 8 to 12.

Tests were carried out to measure the extent to which parents and their children associate the notion of brilliance with men, and to probe the relationship between parents and their children's views.

The study defined brilliance as an exceptional level of intellectual ability and results showed that children are as likely to associate brilliance with men, as their parents are.

This belief was stronger among older children and stronger among those children whose parents held the same view.

While previous research on gender stereotypes has found the idea that giftedness is a male trait can emerge at around the age of six, it was not known whether and how this stereotype changes over the course of childhood, until now.

Lead author of the study, Associate Professor Setoh Peipei from NTU Singapore's School of Social Sciences, said the Singapore-based study is the first to identify that the tendency to associate brilliance with men (also known as the 'brilliance equals to men' stereotype) increases in strength through the primary school years, and reaches the level of belief seen in adults by the age of 13.

"Stereotypical views about how boys are smarter than girls can take root in childhood and become a self-fulfilling prophecy," said Prof Setoh. "For girls, this may lead them to doubt their abilities, thus limiting their ideas about their interests and what they can achieve in life."

"Our research work shows parents must also be included in policies and school programmes to effectively combat children's gender stereotypes from a young age," she added.

For example, as previous studies have found that parents use different explanation styles for daughters and for sons, the research team said programmes to train parents and teachers to be mindful of balancing their behaviour during interactions with children -- especially with girls -- could be introduced.

The authors say the study offers evidence to support Singapore's push to close the gender gap in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) sectors.

While Singapore has the second highest in the world OECD PISA scores in mathematics, science and reading, a recent study by the Promotion of Women in Engineering, Research, and Science (POWERS) programme at NTU Singapore found that women in Singapore are less confident in their math and science abilities compared to men. Women are also more likely than men to perceive gender barriers to STEM career entry and career progress.

How the study was conducted

The researchers used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) -- a commonly-used implicit measure of stereotyping -- to evaluate parents' and children's behaviour. During the test, participants were asked to categorise photographs of men and women, along with two sets of words. One set of 'genius words' referred to the notion of brilliance and included words such as "super-smart" and "genius," while the other set of words referred to creativity (control attribute).

During the first half of the trials, participants had to press a key to categorise the male photographs with the genius words. This process was repeated in the second half of the trials with female photographs and genius words. Participants with an implicit association of men being brilliant will react faster to the task of categorising genius words with the male photographs than the same task with female photographs.

Results revealed an average D score (a metric of the strength of the stereotypical 'intellectual brilliance = men' association) of 0.16, indicating that Singaporean children associate brilliance with men more than women and that this stereotypical belief increased in strength with age among the child sample and reached stereotype levels comparable to those of adults by age 12. Thereafter, there was little change in their perspective.

In the second part of the study, the researchers investigated scores from parent-child pairs who took the tests separately but at the same time and found that children's scores were correlated to their parents' test scores. This finding suggests that during the earlier years of primary school, parents may play a role in their children's acquisition of the 'brilliance equals to men' stereotype.

Further analysis revealed that as the age of the boys that were tested got older, they were less likely to hold the same stereotypical views of males as more brilliant as their parents. However, for girls, their stereotypes remained closely linked to their parents' stereotypes throughout the primary school years.

Co-author Andrei Cimpian, Professor of Psychology at New York University said, "This study adds to the evidence that the gender imbalances observed in many prestigious careers are not a function of differences between women and men in their inherent aptitudes or interests. Rather, these imbalances are the product of the messages that young people are getting from those around them about what women and men are supposedly -- and supposed to be -- like. As a society, we have a responsibility to work toward addressing this issue."

Moving forward, the research team is studying whether this gender stereotype about brilliance may differently impact primary and secondary school girls' and boys' outcomes in math -- a core STEM subject that is typically believed to require intellectual brilliance to excel in.

Read more at Science Daily

Who wants to be a billionaire? Most don't -- which is good news for the planet

A founding economic principle that everyone is motivated by 'unlimited wants', stuck on a consumerist treadmill and striving to accumulate as much wealth as they can, is untrue, say the authors of a new study.

The long-held economic belief that people have unlimited wants has permeated economic thinking and government policies and has shaped much of modern society, including advertising and consumerism.

But belief in this principle has also had dire consequences for the health of the planet. Striving to continually increase individual wealth, and pursuing unending economic growth, has come at a heavy cost. As wealth has increased, so too has resource use and pollution.

Up until now, researchers have struggled to find appropriate ways to decouple economic growth from damaging economic principles. Now though, a new study led by psychologists at the universities of Bath, Bath Spa and Exeter challenges the idea that unlimited wants are human nature, which could have important implications for the planet.

Across nearly 8000 people from 33 countries spanning six continents, they surveyed how much money people wanted to achieve their 'absolutely ideal life'. In 86% of countries most people thought they could achieve this with US $10 million or less, and in some countries as little as $1 million.

Whilst these figures may still sound a lot, when considered that they represent a person's ideal wealth across their whole life they are relatively moderate. Expressed differently, the wealth of the world's single richest person, at over $200 billion, is enough for more than two hundred thousand people to achieve their 'absolutely ideal lives'.

The researchers collected responses about ideal wealth from individuals in countries across all inhabited continents, including countries rarely used in cross-cultural psychology such as Saudi Arabia, Uganda, Tunisia, Nicaragua, and Vietnam. People with unlimited wants were identified in every country, but they were always in the minority.

They found that those with unlimited wants tended to be younger and city-dwellers, who placed more value on success, power, and independence. Unlimited wants were also more common in countries with greater acceptance of inequality and in countries that are more collectivistic: focused more on group than individual responsibilities and outcomes.

For example, Indonesia, which is considered more collectivistic and accepting of inequality, had the most people with unlimited wants whilst the more individualistic and equality-concerned UK had fewer. However, there were anomalies like China, where few people had unlimited wants despite high cultural collectivism and acceptance of inequality.

Lead researcher, Dr Paul Bain from the Department of Psychology at the University of Bath (UK) explained: "The ideology of unlimited wants, when portrayed as human nature, can create social pressure for people to buy more than they actually want.

"Discovering that most people's ideal lives are actually quite moderate could make it socially easier for people to behave in ways that are more aligned with what makes them genuinely happy and to support stronger policies to help safeguard the planet."

Read more at Science Daily

Men, women ride the same emotional roller coaster

Contrary to widely held gender stereotypes, women are not more emotional than men, researchers say.

Feelings such as enthusiasm, nervousness or strength are often interpreted differently between the two genders. It's what being "emotional" means to men vs. women that is part of a new University of Michigan study that dispels these biases.

For instance, a man whose emotions fluctuate during a sporting event is described as "passionate." But a woman whose emotions change due to any event, even if provoked, is considered "irrational," says the study's senior author Adriene Beltz, U-M assistant professor of psychology.

Beltz and colleagues Alexander Weigard, U-M assistant professor of psychiatry, and Amy Loviska, a graduate student at Purdue University, followed 142 men and women over 75 days to learn more about their daily emotions, both positive and negative. The women were divided into four groups: one naturally cycling and three others using different forms of oral contraceptives.

The researchers detected fluctuations in emotions three different ways, and then compared the sexes. They found little-to-no differences between the men and the various groups of women, suggesting that men's emotions fluctuate to the same extent as women's do (although likely for different reasons).

"We also didn't find meaningful differences between the groups of women, making clear that emotional highs and lows are due to many influences -- not only hormones," she said.

The findings have implications beyond everyday people, the researchers say. Women have historically been excluded from research participation in part due to the assumption that ovarian hormone fluctuations lead to variation, especially in emotion, that can't be experimentally controlled, they say.

"Our study uniquely provides psychological data to show that the justifications for excluding women in the first place (because fluctuating ovarian hormones, and consequently emotions, confounded experiments) were misguided," Beltz said.

From Science Daily

People love the billionaire, but hate the billionaires’ club

Americans may respect and admire how individual billionaires -- think Oprah Winfrey or Bill Gates -- made their billions, even as they rage against the "top 1%" as a group, new research finds.

In eight related studies, people tended to have fewer problems with hearing about the extreme wealth of a particular wealthy person, even as they thought it was unfair that billionaires in general controlled so much riches.

"When there's this group of people at the top, we think that's unfair and wonder how luck or the economic system may have played a role in how they made all the money," said Jesse Walker, co-author of the study and assistant professor of marketing at The Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business.

"But when we look at one person at the top, we tend to think that person is talented and hard-working and they're more deserving of all the money they made."

And this difference may have real-life implications: People are more likely to support wealth taxes on the super-rich when they think about a group like the top 1%, but less likely to support these taxes when they think about a specific rich person.

Walker conducted the study with Thomas Gilovich, professor of psychology, and Stephanie Tepper, a PhD student in psychology, both at Cornell University. Their findings were published today (Oct. 18, 2021) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In one study, 201 survey respondents had very different opinions about how much more a CEO should make relative to the average employee depending on how this fact was presented.

One group of participants read that the salaries of the CEOs of the largest 350 companies in America had grown from 48 times the average worker in 1995 to 372 times today.

The other group of participants read about one specific company in the top 350, called Avnet, and how Avnet's CEO, Robert Eisen, had seen his salary grow from 48 times the average worker in 1995 to 372 times today.

Participants in the study read that observers attributed the growth of all 350 companies, or the growth of Avnet, to their CEOs.

Those who were told about Avnet's CEO thought that the ratio of his salary to the average employee should be significantly higher than did those who were told about the whole group of CEOs.

"We appear to be a bit more tolerant of lavish compensation when it is an individual CEO being compensated, rather than CEOs as a group," Walker said.

The way the wealthy are portrayed and praised in society and the media may play a large role in how accepting people are of economic inequality, he said.

In one study, participants were shown a Forbes magazine cover. Half saw a cover adapted from an issue that highlighted the wealthiest people in the world. The cover was edited to remove five billionaires that most people were familiar with, such as Gates and Winfrey, in order to eliminate any positive or negative biases people might have toward them. It included only the seven billionaires that most people would either know nothing about or not feel strongly about.

The other half were shown a cover with only one of the seven billionaires.

After reading a brief description of the person or persons on the cover, participants were asked to write a few sentences conveying how they felt about the person or persons, and rate how much the person or persons deserved their wealth and how they thought they earned those riches.

The findings were striking, Walker said.

The comments of those who wrote about the individual were less angry than those who wrote about the group, and more likely to reflect the belief that the individual billionaire's success was due to talent and hard work.

"People in our study were clearly more upset by the wealth of the seven individuals pictured on a single cover than they were by any one of them pictured alone," Walker said.

And there was more. People who saw the seven billionaires pictured together were more in favor of an inheritance tax to close the gap between the wealthy and poor than were those who saw only one billionaire.

"How we think of the wealthiest people -- as a group or as individuals -- seems to affect even our policy preferences," he said.

The issue of how we think about policy regarding inequality is important, Walker said. Economic inequality has grown substantially over the past decades, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. One analysis suggests that U.S. billionaires saw their wealth surge $1.8 trillion (62%) during the pandemic.

Research has shown that countries with greater economic inequality tend to have higher homicide rates, greater infant mortality, lower well-being and lower commitment to democratic institutions.

"How we express and communicate information about inequality is important. Talking about "the 1%" is going to get a different reaction than personalizing it by talking about one person in that exclusive club," Walker said.

Read more at Science Daily

Genetic histories and social organization in Neolithic and Bronze Age Croatia

Present-day Croatia was an important crossroads for migrating peoples along the Danubian corridor and the Adriatic coast, linking east and west. "While this region is important for understanding population and cultural transitions in Europe, limited availability of human remains means that in-depth knowledge about the genetic ancestry and social complexity of prehistoric populations here remains sparse," says first author Suzanne Freilich, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the University of Vienna.

To this aim, an international team of researchers set out to fill the gap. They studied two archaeological sites in eastern Croatia -- one containing predominantly Middle Neolithic burials from within the settlement site, the other a Middle Bronze Age necropolis containing cremations and inhumations -- and sequenced whole genomes of 28 individuals from these two sites. The researchers' goal was to understand both the genetic ancestry as well as social organisation within each community -- in particular, to study local residency patterns, kinship relations and to learn more about the varied burial rites observed.

Middle Neolithic settlement at Popova zemlja

Dated to around 4,700-4,300 BCE the Middle Neolithic settlement at Beli-Manastir Popova zemlja belongs to the Sopot culture. Many children, especially girls, were buried here, in particular along the walls of pit houses. "One question was whether individuals buried in the same buildings were biologically related to each other," says Suzanne Freilich.

"We found that individuals with different burial rites did not differ in their genetic ancestry, which was similar to Early Neolithic people. We also found a high degree of haplotype diversity and, despite the size of the site, no very closely related individuals," Freilich adds. This suggests that this community was part of a large, mainly exogamous population where people marry outside their kin group. Interestingly, however, the researchers also identified a few cases of endogamous mating practices, including two individuals who would have been the children of first cousins or equivalent, something rarely found in the ancient DNA record.

Middle Bronze Age necropolis at Jagodnjak-Krčevine

The second site the researchers studied was the Middle Bronze Age necropolis of Jagodnjak-Krčevine that belongs to the Transdanubian Encrusted Pottery Culture and dates to around 1,800-1,600 BCE. "This site contains burials that are broadly contemporaneous with some individuals from the Dalmatian coast, and we wanted to find out whether individuals from these different ecoregions carried similar ancestry," says Stephan Schiffels.

The researchers found that the people from Jagodnjak actually carried very distinct ancestry due to the presence of significantly more western European hunter-gatherer-related ancestry. This ancestry profile is present in a small number of other studied genomes from further north in the Carpathian Basin. These new genetic results support archaeological evidence that suggests a shared population history for these groups as well as the presence of trade and exchange networks.

"We also found that all male individuals at the site had identical Y chromosome haplotypes," says Freilich. "We identified two male first degree relatives, second degree and more distantly related males, while the one woman in our sample was unrelated. This points to a patrilocal social organisation where women leave their own home to join their husband's home." Contrary to the Middle Neolithic site at Popova zemlja, biological kinship was a factor for selection to be buried at this site. In addition the authors found evidence of rich infant graves that suggests they likely inherited their status or wealth from their families.

Filling the gap in the archaeogenetic record

This study helps to fill the gap in the archaeogenetic record for this region, characterising the diverse genetic ancestries and social organisations that were present in Neolithic and Bronze Age eastern Croatia. It highlights the heterogeneous population histories of broadly contemporaneous coastal and inland Bronze Age groups, and connections with communities further north in the Carpathian Basin. Furthermore, it sheds light on the subject of Neolithic intramural burials -- burials within a settlement -- that has been debated among archaeologists and anthropologists for some time. The authors show that at the site of Popova zemlja, this burial rite was not associated with biological kinship, but more likely represented age and sex selection related to Neolithic community belief systems.

Read more at Science Daily

Explanation of how religious beliefs may be formed

Feeling anxious can direct our attention and memory toward supernatural beings such as gods, a University of Otago study has found.

Lead author Dr Thomas Swan, of the Department of Psychology, says the research may help explain how religious beliefs are formed.

For the study, published in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 972 participants completed an online recall test to determine if a bias to recall supernatural agents was stronger in anxious people, rather than non-anxious people.

Those who felt anxious were more likely to remember beings with supernatural abilities than beings without.

"Anxiety is an emotion that evolved to make us pay greater attention to potential threats, so when we feel anxious, a god that can read our thoughts and punish us for them, or flood the Earth, is going to be memorable," he says.

Previous research has shown anxiety can lead to greater levels of religious belief, with the explanation being that belief provides comfort. However, this so-called 'comfort theory' has problems: why are there punishing gods and hellish afterlives when these are far from comforting?

Dr Swan believes the theory also fails to address what comes between feeling anxious and becoming a believer. This research suggests the first step involves the cognitive effects of anxiety, which cause people to attend to and recall threats.

"In our previous research, we found that supernatural beings are perceived as potentially threatening because they have abilities that defy our expectations about the world. The present research confirms that the cognitive effects of anxiety also extend to the threat that is afforded by supernatural beings.

"Ironically then, our research suggests comfort theory has it somewhat backwards: anxious people are attracted, at least initially, to the scary traits of gods, which may explain why so many gods have scary features. Comfort, we suspect, comes later when some people transform their view of the god into something more palatable that they are happier believing," he says.

The research also suggests other supernatural concepts -- such as ghosts, psychics, and astrology -- will be digested in the same way because of how they alarmingly defy our expectations about what is possible.

Dr Swan hopes the research prompts people to develop a greater understanding of how their emotional states affect the information they look at and remember, particularly religious information.

"We should all be mindful of how we came to believe the things we do, especially those with anxiety disorders who feel anxious much of the time -- they should be mindful of what they are attracted to and why. If they find themselves reading fantasy novels, that may be harmless. If they find themselves joining a cult, then it's time for some reflection. The same goes for people without disorders who are just in anxious situations, such as sitting in a hospital bed or suffering financial troubles."

On the flipside, he hopes religious groups pay more attention to people's mental states.

Read more at Science Daily

Answer quickly to be believed

 When people pause before replying to a question, even for just a few seconds, their answers are perceived to be less sincere and credible than if they had replied immediately, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

And the longer the hesitation, the less sincere the response appears.

"Evaluating other people's sincerity is a ubiquitous and important part of social interactions," said lead author Ignazio Ziano, PhD, of Grenoble Ecole de Management. "Our research shows that response speed is an important cue on which people base their sincerity inferences."

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

Researchers conducted a series of experiments involving more than 7,500 individuals from the United States, the United Kingdom and France. Participants either listened to an audio snippet, viewed a video or read an account of a person responding to a simple question (e.g., did they like a cake a friend made or had they stolen money from work). In each scenario, the response time varied from immediate to a 10-second delay. Participants then rated the sincerity of the response on a sliding scale.

Across all 14 experiments, participants consistently rated delayed responses as less sincere regardless of the question, whether it was a harmless one about cake or a more serious one about committing a crime.

A few conditions reduced this effect, the researchers found. For example, if the answer was considered socially undesirable, such as saying, "No, I don't like it" when a friend asks if you like their cake, response speed did not seem to matter much; the answer was considered sincere whether it was fast or slow. The researchers also found that if people thought a slower response was due to mental effort (for instance, having to think back if you had stolen candy 10 years ago), response speed had a smaller effect.

The findings have wide implications, according to Ziano. "Whenever people are interacting, they are judging each other's sincerity. These results can be applied to a wide range of interactions, going from workplace chit-chat to couples and friends bickering," he said. "Further, in job interviews and in court hearings and trials, people are often tasked with judgments of sincerity. Here, too, response speed could play a part."

For example, he said, imagine a hiring manager asking two job candidates, named Ann and Barb, whether they really know the programming language Javascript, as they claim. Ann says yes immediately, while Barb replies yes after three seconds.

"Our results suggest that in this situation, the hiring manager is more likely to believe Ann than Barb, and therefore more likely to hire Ann," said Ziano. "In general, whenever there is a response that requires an answer, such as in a job interview, delayed responses can be perceived as less sincere."

Another area where response time may be important is jury reactions to testimony in court.

"It would be unfair for the responder, such as a crime suspect, if the response delay was misattributed to thought suppression or answer fabrication when it was in fact caused by a different factor, such as simply being distracted or thoughtful," said Ziano.

The final experiment found that explicitly instructing participants to ignore delayed response reduced, but did not completely remove, the effect of delayed response on judgment of sincerity or guilt.

Read more at Science Daily

Haunted house researchers investigate the mystery of playing with fear

 Chainsaw-wielding maniacs and brain-munching zombies are common tropes in horror films and haunted houses, which, in normal years, are popular Halloween-season destinations for thrill seekers. But what makes such fearsome experiences so compelling, and why do we actively seek them out in frightful recreational settings?

New research accepted for publication in the journal Psychological Science reveals that horror entertains us most effectively when it triggers a distinct physical response -- measured by changes in heart rate -- but is not so scary that we become overwhelmed. That fine line between fun and an unpleasant experience can vary from person to person.

"By investigating how humans derive pleasure from fear, we find that there seems to be a 'sweet spot' where enjoyment is maximized," said Marc Malmdorf Andersen, a researcher at the Interacting Minds Center at Aarhus University and lead author of the paper. "Our study provides some of the first empirical evidence on the relationship between fear, enjoyment, and physical arousal in recreational forms of fear."

For years, researchers have suspected that physiological arousal, such as a quickening pulse and a release of hormones in the brain, may play a key role in explaining why so many people find horror movies and haunted houses so attractive.

Until now, however, a direct relationship between arousal and enjoyment from these types of activities has not been established. "No prior studies have analyzed this relationship on subjective, behavioral, as well as physiological levels," said Andersen.

To explore this connection, Andersen and his colleagues studied how a group of 110 participants responded to a commercial haunted house attraction in Vejle, Denmark. The researchers fitted each participant with a heart rate monitor, which recorded real-time data as they walked through the attraction. The nearly 50-room haunted house produced an immersive and intimate live-action horror experience. The attraction used a variety of scare tactics to frighten guests, including frequent jump scares, in which zombies or other monstrous abominations suddenly appeared or charged toward the guest.

The researchers also studied the participants in real time through closed-circuit monitors inside the attraction. This enabled the team to make first-hand observations of participants' reactions to the most frightening elements, and, subsequently, to have independent coders analyze participants' behavior and responses. After the experience, participants evaluated their level of fright and enjoyment for each encounter. By comparing these self-reported experiences with the data from the heart rate monitors and surveillance cameras, the researchers were able to compare the fear-related and enjoyment-related elements of the attraction on subjective, behavioral, and physiological levels.

What Is Recreational Fear?

Recreational fear refers to the mixed emotional experience of feeling fear and enjoyment at the same time. Fear is generally considered to be an unpleasant emotion that evolved to protect people from harm. Paradoxically, humans sometimes seek out frightening experiences for purely recreational purposes. "Past studies on recreational fear, however, have not been able to establish a direct relationship between enjoyment and fear," said Andersen.

Studies on fearful responses to media, for example, have mostly been conducted in laboratory settings with relatively weak stimuli, such as short video clips from frightening films. Such experimental setups can sometimes make it difficult to measure physiological arousal because responses may be modest in a laboratory context.

"Conducting our study at a haunted attraction, where participants are screaming with both fear and delight, made this task easier," said Andersen. "It also presented unique challenges, such as the immensely complex logistics associated with conducting empirical studies in a 'messy' real-world context like a haunted house."

Discovering the "Goldilocks Zone"

Plotting the relationship between self-reported fear and enjoyment, the researchers discovered an inverted U-shape trend, revealing an apparent sweet spot for fear where enjoyment is maximized.

"If people are not very scared, they do not enjoy the attraction as much, and the same happens if they are too scared," said Andersen. "Instead, it seems to be the case that a 'just-right' amount of fear is central for maximizing enjoyment."

The data also showed a similar inverted U-shape for the participants' heart rate signatures, suggesting that enjoyment is related to just-right deviations from a person's normal physiological state. However, when fearful encounters trigger large and long-lasting deviations from this normal state, as measured by pulse rates going up and down frequently over a longer period of time, unpleasant sensations often follow.

"This is strikingly similar to what scientists have found to characterize human play," said Andersen. "We know, for instance, that curiosity is often aroused when individuals have their expectations violated to a just-right degree, and several accounts of play stress the importance of just-right doses of uncertainty and surprise for explaining why play feels enjoyable."

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Unconscious learning underlies belief in God, study suggests

 

Hands raised to sunset, prayer concept

Individuals who can unconsciously predict complex patterns, an ability called implicit pattern learning, are likely to hold stronger beliefs that there is a god who creates patterns of events in the universe, according to neuroscientists at Georgetown University.

Their research, reported in the journal Nature Communications, is the first to use implicit pattern learning to investigate religious belief. The study spanned two very different cultural and religious groups, one in the U.S. and one in Afghanistan.

The goal was to test whether implicit pattern learning is a basis of belief and, if so, whether that connection holds across different faiths and cultures. The researchers indeed found that implicit pattern learning appears to offer a key to understanding a variety of religions.

"Belief in a god or gods who intervene in the world to create order is a core element of global religions," says the study's senior investigator, Adam Green, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology and Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience at Georgetown, and director of the Georgetown Laboratory for Relational Cognition.

"This is not a study about whether God exists, this is a study about why and how brains come to believe in gods. Our hypothesis is that people whose brains are good at subconsciously discerning patterns in their environment may ascribe those patterns to the hand of a higher power," he adds.

"A really interesting observation was what happened between childhood and adulthood," explains Green. The data suggest that if children are unconsciously picking up on patterns in the environment, their belief is more likely to increase as they grow up, even if they are in a nonreligious household. Likewise, if they are not unconsciously picking up on patterns around them, their belief is more likely to decrease as they grow up, even in a religious household.

The study used a well-established cognitive test to measure implicit pattern learning. Participants watched as a sequence of dots appeared and disappeared on a computer screen. They pressed a button for each dot. The dots moved quickly, but some participants -- the ones with the strongest implicit learning ability -- began to subconsciously learn patterns hidden in the sequence, and even press the correct button for the next dot before that dot actually appeared. However, even the best implicit learners did not know that the dots formed patterns, showing that the learning was happening at an unconscious level.

The U.S. section of the study enrolled a predominantly Christian group of 199 participants from Washington, D.C. The Afghanistan section of the study enrolled a group of 149 Muslim participants in Kabul. The study's lead author was Adam Weinberger, a postdoctoral researcher in Green's lab at Georgetown and at the University of Pennsylvania. Co-authors Zachery Warren and Fathali Moghaddam led a team of local Afghan researchers who collected data in Kabul.

"The most interesting aspect of this study, for me, and also for the Afghan research team, was seeing patterns in cognitive processes and beliefs replicated across these two cultures," says Warren. "Afghans and Americans may be more alike than different, at least in certain cognitive processes involved in religious belief and making meaning of the world around us. Irrespective of one's faith, the findings suggest exciting insights into the nature of belief."

"A brain that is more predisposed to implicit pattern learning may be more inclined to believe in a god no matter where in the world that brain happens to find itself, or in which religious context," Green adds, though he cautions that further research is necessary.

"Optimistically," Green concludes, "this evidence might provide some neuro-cognitive common ground at a basic human level between believers of disparate faiths."

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How human sperm really swim: New research challenges centuries-old assumption

A breakthrough in fertility science by researchers from Bristol and Mexico has shattered the universally accepted view of how sperm 'swim'.

More than three hundred years after Antonie van Leeuwenhoek used one of the earliest microscopes to describe human sperm as having a "tail, which, when swimming, lashes with a snakelike movement, like eels in water," scientists have revealed this is an optical illusion.

Using state-of-the-art 3D microscopy and mathematics, Dr Hermes Gadelha from the University of Bristol, Dr Gabriel Corkidi and Dr Alberto Darszon from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, have pioneered the reconstruction of the true movement of the sperm tail in 3D.

Using a high-speed camera capable of recording over 55,000 frames in one second, and a microscope stage with a piezoelectric device to move the sample up and down at an incredibly high rate, they were able to scan the sperm swimming freely in 3D.

The ground-breaking study, published in the journal Science Advances, reveals the sperm tail is in fact wonky and only wiggles on one side. While this should mean the sperm's one-sided stroke would have it swimming in circles, sperm have found a clever way to adapt and swim forwards.

"Human sperm figured out if they roll as they swim, much like playful otters corkscrewing through water, their one-sided stoke would average itself out, and they would swim forwards," said Dr Gadelha, head of the Polymaths Laboratory at Bristol's Department of Engineering Mathematics and an expert in the mathematics of fertility.

"The sperms' rapid and highly synchronised spinning causes an illusion when seen from above with 2D microscopes -- the tail appears to have a side-to-side symmetric movement, "like eels in water," as described by Leeuwenhoek in the 17th century.

"However, our discovery shows sperm have developed a swimming technique to compensate for their lop-sidedness and in doing so have ingeniously solved a mathematical puzzle at a microscopic scale: by creating symmetry out of asymmetry," said Dr Gadelha.

"The otter-like spinning of human sperm is however complex: the sperm head spins at the same time that the sperm tail rotates around the swimming direction. This is known in physics as precession, much like when the orbits of Earth and Mars precess around the sun."

Computer-assisted semen analysis systems in use today, both in clinics and for research, still use 2D views to look at sperm movement. Therefore, like Leeuwenhoek's first microscope, they are still prone to this illusion of symmetry while assessing semen quality. This discovery, with its novel use of 3D microscope technology combined with mathematics, may provide fresh hope for unlocking the secrets of human reproduction.

"With over half of infertility caused by male factors, understanding the human sperm tail is fundamental to developing future diagnostic tools to identify unhealthy sperm," adds Dr Gadelha, whose work has previously revealed the biomechanics of sperm bendiness and the precise rhythmic tendencies that characterise how a sperm moves forward.

Dr Corkidi and Dr Darszon pioneered the 3D microscopy for sperm swimming.

"This was an incredible surprise, and we believe our state-of the-art 3D microscope will unveil many more hidden secrets in nature. One day this technology will become available to clinical centres," said Dr Corkidi.

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Narcissists don't learn from their mistakes because they don't think they make any

When most people find that their actions have resulted in an undesirable outcome, they tend to rethink their decisions and ask, "What should I have done differently to avoid this outcome?"

When narcissists face the same situation, however, their refrain is, "No one could have seen this coming!"

In refusing to acknowledge that they have made a mistake, narcissists fail to learn from those mistakes, a recent study from Oregon State University -- Cascades found.

The mental process of analyzing past actions to see what one should have done differently is called "should counterfactual thinking." Counterfactual thinking is the mental process of imagining a different outcome or scenario from what actually occurred.

All of us engage in some level of self-protective thinking, said study author Satoris Howes, a researcher at OSU-Cascades with the OSU College of Business. We tend to attribute success to our own efforts, but blame our failures on outside forces -- while often blaming other people's failure on their own deficiencies.

"But narcissists do this way more because they think they're better than others," Howes said. "They don't take advice from other people; they don't trust others' opinions. ... You can flat-out ask, 'What should you have done differently?' And it might be, 'Nothing, it turned out; it was good.'"

Narcissism is typically defined as a belief in one's superiority and entitlement, with narcissists believing they are better and more deserving than others.

The study, published recently in the Journal of Management, consisted of four variations on the same experiment with four different participant groups, including students, employees and managers with significant experience in hiring. One of the four was conducted in Chile with Spanish-speaking participants.

Participants first took a test that ranked their narcissism by having them choose among pairs of statements ("I think I am a special person" versus "I am no better or worse than most people"). In the first of the four variations, they then read the qualifications of hypothetical job candidates and had to choose whom to hire. After choosing, they were given details about how this hypothetical employee fared in the job, and were assessed regarding the extent they engaged in "should counterfactual thinking" about whether they made the right decision.

The four variations employed different methods to analyze how counterfactual thinking was affected by hindsight bias, which is the tendency to exaggerate in hindsight what one actually knew in foresight. The researchers cite the example of President Donald Trump saying in 2004 that he "predicted the Iraq war better than anybody."

The authors note that prior research has shown that hindsight bias is often reversed as a form of self-protection when a prediction proves to be inaccurate -- e.g., Trump saying in 2017 that "No one knew health care could be so complicated" after failing to put forth a successful alternative to the Affordable Care Act.

In the OSU study, researchers found that when narcissists predicted an outcome correctly, they felt it was more foreseeable than non-narcissists did ("I knew it all along"); and when they predicted incorrectly, they felt the outcome was less foreseeable than non-narcissists did ("Nobody could have guessed").

Either way, the narcissists didn't feel they needed to do something differently or engage in self-critical thinking that might have positive effects on future decisions.

"They're falling prey to the hindsight bias, and they're not learning from it when they make mistakes. And when they get things right, they're still not learning," Howes said.

Narcissists often rise in the ranks within organizations because they exude total confidence, take credit for the successes of others and deflect blame from themselves when something goes wrong, Howes said.

However, she said, over time this can be damaging to the organization, both because of low morale of employees who work for the narcissist and because of the narcissist's continuing poor decisions.

To avoid the trap of hindsight bias, Howes said individuals should set aside time for reflection and review after a decision, even if the outcome is positive. Whether the decision was favorable or unfavorable, they should ask themselves what they should have done differently. And because narcissists don't engage in this process, Howes said it would be wise to have advisory panels provide checks and balances when narcissists have decision-making authority.

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Even if you want to, you can't ignore how people look or sound

Your perceptions of someone you just met are influenced in part by what they look like and how they sound.

But can you ignore how someone looks or how they sound if you're told it is not relevant?

Probably not, at least in most cases, a new Ohio State University study found.

For example, some study participants were shown a photo of a face and heard a brief snippet of speech at the same time and were told that the photo and voice belonged to different people.

In some cases, participants were told to rate how strong an accent they thought the person shown in the photo would have.

Participants thought the person in the photo would have a more accented voice if the words they heard also had a stronger accent -- despite being told the image and sound represented two different people.

"Even though we told them to ignore the voice, they couldn't do it completely," said study author Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, an associate professor of linguistics at Ohio State.

"Some of the information from the voice seeped into their evaluation of the face."

The same was true when participants were asked to evaluate how "good-looking" the person with a particular voice was -- they were influenced by the photo they viewed, even when told it was a different person from the speaker they heard.

Although study participants usually could not ignore the irrelevant information, there was one intriguing exception in which participants feared showing a racial stereotype when it came to gauging accented voices.

The study was published online this week in the Journal of Sociolinguistics.

The study included 1,034 people who visited an exhibit hosted by Ohio State's Department of Linguistics at the Center of Science and Industry, a science museum in Columbus.

Participants were shown photos of 15 men on a television screen. As each photo was shown, they heard a single-word recording repeated three times over the course of five seconds, also by one of 15 men. Depending on what group they were in, participants had to rate how accented or good-looking the face or the voice was.

Some of the speakers these study participants heard had been rated by people in a previous study as sounding relatively unaccented. Other voices were from people who had learned English at older ages and had been rated as having more of an accent.

When participants evaluated the combined face and voice and were not told to ignore anything, they evaluated "good-looking" mostly based on the face, and "accented" on the voice -- as expected.

But some people were told to evaluate the face while ignoring the voice, or evaluate the voice while ignoring the face, because they represented two different people.

In those cases, some people evaluated the face on the "good-looking" dimension and some evaluated the face on the "accented" dimension. The same was true for evaluating the voice. In both cases, they had to ignore the other input, voice or face.

"We found that people could exercise some control over what information to favor, the voice or the face, depending on what we told them to do," Campbell-Kibler said.

"But in most cases, they were unable to entirely eliminate the irrelevant information."

There was one exception: People were able to completely ignore the face when rating how accented the voice sounded.

Campbell-Kibler said the reason seems to be that the participants, most of whom were white, were being careful not to show any racial stereotyping.

"Some of the participants explicitly told us they were attempting to avoid responses that could be seen as stereotypical," she said.

They knew that how a person looks has no real connection to how they sound, even though racial stereotypes often prompt people to associate strong accents with people who don't look white.

"They sensed a danger is showing racial bias when it came to evaluating accents. That's why they were careful to exclude what the face looked like when evaluating if the voice sounded accented," Campbell-Kibler said.

"They didn't have that issue when evaluating 'good-looking,' because that is seen as subjective enough that you can't really be wrong," Campbell-Kibler said.

Because this study used photographs rather than video, the audio people heard had a stronger influence on them than it might in real life, she said. Videos would probably have a stronger effect on people's evaluations than these still images.

But the main message is the same: We are influenced by all the information we have available, whether it is applicable or not.

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Vision scientists discover why people literally don't see eye to eye

We humans may not always see eye to eye on politics, religion, sports and other matters of debate. But at least we can agree on the location and size of objects in our physical surroundings. Or can we?

Not according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley, recently published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences journal, that shows that our ability to pinpoint the exact location and size of things varies from one person to the next, and even within our own individual field of vision.

"We assume our perception is a perfect reflection of the physical world around us, but this study shows that each of us has a unique visual fingerprint," said study lead author Zixuan Wang, a UC Berkeley doctoral student in psychology.

The discovery by Wang and fellow researchers in UC Berkeley's Whitney Laboratory for Perception and Action has ramifications for the practices of medicine, technology, driving and sports, among other fields where accurate visual localization is critical.

For example, a driver who makes even a small miscalculation about the location of a pedestrian crossing the street can cause a catastrophe. Meanwhile, in sports, an error of visual judgment can lead to controversy, if not a fiercely disputed championship loss.

Take, for example, the 2004 U.S. Open quarterfinals, in which tennis icon Serena Williams lost to Jennifer Capriati after a series of questionable line calls. An umpire incorrectly overruled a line judge who called a backhand hit by Williams as in, resulting in an apology to Williams by the U.S. Tennis Association.

"Line judges need to rule on whether the ball is outside or inside the parameters. Even an error as small as half a degree of visual angle, equal to a sub-millimeter shift on the judge's retina, may influence the result of the whole match," said Wang, a die-hard tennis fan.

Researchers sought to understand if different people see objects in their surroundings exactly the same way. For example, when glancing at a coffee cup on a table, can two people agree on its exact position and whether its handle is big enough to grip? The result of a series of experiments suggest not, though there's an upside.

"We may reach for a coffee mug thousands of times in our life, and through practice we reach our target," Wang said. "That's the behavioral aspect of how we train ourselves to coordinate how we act in relation to what we see."

In the first task to test visual localization, study participants pinpointed on a computer screen the location of a circular target. In another experiment looking at variations of acuity within each person's field of vision, participants viewed two lines set a minimal distance apart and determined whether one line was located clockwise or counterclockwise to the other line.

And in an experiment measuring perception of size, participants viewed a series of arcs of varying lengths and were asked to estimate their lengths. Surprisingly, people perceived the exact same arcs to be bigger at some locations in the visual field and smaller at other locations.

Overall, the results showed remarkable variations in visual performance among the group and even within each individual's field of vision. The data were mapped to show each study participant's unique visual fingerprint of perceptual distortion.

"Though our study might suggest that the source of our visual deficiencies can originate from our brain, further investigations are needed to uncover the neural basis," said Wang.

"What's also important," she added, "is how we adapt to them and compensate for our errors."

Read more at Science Daily

Consumers prefer round numbers even when the specific number is better news

Consider this scenario: A vaccine for the novel coronavirus has been developed that is 91.27% effective. If public health officials present this information using the specific number, people are likely to think the vaccine is actually less effective than if it is presented as being 90% effective.

This concept is a real-life application of recent findings from Gaurav Jain, an assistant professor of marketing in the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, published recently in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Process.

The paper, titled "Revisiting Attribute Framing: The Impact of Number Roundedness on Framing," explores an area of behavioral economics research pertaining to attribute framing, which evaluates how people make decisions based on the manner in which information is presented.

Watch this video to learn more.

For decades, researchers in this field have been focused on the attributes, the adjectives, and other words that describe what is being measured. In this paper, Jain looked at the numbers that are used in the frames themselves.

Using six sets of data with more than 1,500 participants, Jain and his co-authors considered what would happen to peoples' perception of information when specific, or non-round, numbers were used instead of round numbers.

The research showed that people find non-round numbers unique and jarring. Jain and his team determined that people pause to think about the specific number due to its uniqueness. Because it isn't easy to comprehend, people tend to compare the non-round number to an easily understood ideal standard -- like 100%. Then, because the specific number doesn't live up to the ideal, people perceive it negatively.

"Numbers have a language and give non-numerical perceptions," Jain said. "When we use specific numbers, the evaluations decrease. There was no apparent reason for this kind of behavior, and this was incredibly surprising."

While Jain and his team explored this question using standard behavioral economic research scenarios and not a specific question, such as communications regarding a potential coronavirus vaccine, this research has direct and critical impact in marketing and public health messaging.

"The extensive use of attribute framing in marketing, organizational behavior, and public policy communication and the robustness of the effects in experimental settings make it one of the most important and frequently studied phenomena in the field," Jain said. "Managers and public health officials should be careful when using non-round numbers, because the use of this approach in communication messages may decrease the subjective evaluations of the target on the associated attributes."

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What it means when animals have beliefs

Humans are not the only ones who have beliefs; animals do too, although it is more difficult to prove them than with humans. Dr. Tobias Starzak and Professor Albert Newen from the Institute of Philosophy II at Ruhr-Universität Bochum have proposed four criteria to understand and empirically investigate animal beliefs in the journal Mind and Language. The article was published online on 16 June 2020.

Flexible use of information about the world

The first criterion for the existence of beliefs worked out by the philosophers is that an animal must have information about the world. However, this must not simply lead to an automatic reaction, like a frog instinctively snapping at a passing insect.

Instead, the animal must be able to use the information to behave in a flexible manner. "This is the case when one and the same piece of information can be combined with different motivations to produce different behaviours," explains Albert Newen. "For example, if the animal can use the information that there is food available at that moment for the purpose of eating or hiding the food."

Information can be relinked

The third criterion says that the information is internally structured in a belief; accordingly, individual aspects of that information can be processed separately. This has emerged, for example, in experiments with rats that can learn that a certain kind of food can be found at a certain time in a certain place. Their knowledge has a what-when-where structure.

Fourthly, animals with beliefs must be able to recombine the information components in novel ways. This reassembled belief should then lead to flexible behaviour. Rats can do this too, as the US researcher Jonathan Crystal demonstrated in experiments in an eight-armed labyrinth. The animals learned that if they received normal food in arm three of the maze in the morning, chocolate could be found in arm seven at noon.

Crows and scrub jays meet all criteria

The authors from Bochum also cite crows and scrub jays as examples of animals with beliefs. British researcher Nicola Clayton carried out conclusive experiments with scrub jays. When the birds are hungry, they initially tend to eat the food. When they are not hungry, they systematically hide the leftovers. In the process, they encode which food -- worm or peanut -- they have hidden where and when. If they are hungry in the following hours, they first look for the worms they prefer. After the period of time has elapsed that takes worms to become inedible, they head for the peanut hiding places instead.

"What best explains this change in behaviour is the birds' belief about the worms being spoiled and their beliefs about the location of other food items," says Tobias Starzak. The animals also react flexibly in other situations, for example if they notice that they are being watched by rivals while hiding; if this is the case, they hide the food again later.

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Vaccine skeptics actually think differently than other people

In 2000, the measles virus was declared eliminated from the United States. Despite cases coming in from outside the country, there were few outbreaks because most people were vaccinated against measles. And then 2019 happened.

The U.S. saw 1,282 confirmed cases in 31 states -- the greatest number reported since 1992, with nearly three-fourths linked to recent outbreaks in New York, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most cases were among people who were not vaccinated against measles.

After events like this, many people express confusion about others' hesitancy or unwillingness to get vaccinated or to vaccinate their children, a concept called vaccine skepticism. As vaccine skepticism has become increasingly widespread, two researchers in the Texas Tech University Department of Psychological Sciences have suggested a possible explanation.

In an article published recently in the journal Vaccine, Mark LaCour and Tyler Davis suggest some people find vaccines risky because they overestimate the likelihood of negative events, particularly those that are rare.

The fact that these overestimations carry over through all kinds of negative events -- not just those related to vaccines -- suggests that people higher in vaccine skepticism actually may process information differently than people lower in vaccine skepticism, said Davis, an associate professor of experimental psychology and director of the Caprock FMRI Laboratory.

"We might have assumed that people who are high in vaccine skepticism would have overestimated the likelihood of negative vaccine-related events, but it is more surprising that this is true for negative, mortality-related events as a broader category," Davis said. "Here we saw an overestimation of rare events for things that don't have anything to do with vaccination. This suggests that there are basic cognitive or affective variables that influence vaccine skepticism."

In their first experiment, LaCour and Davis surveyed 158 participants to determine the level of vaccine skepticism underlying their perceived dangers, feelings of powerlessness, disillusionment and trust in authorities regarding vaccines. Participants then estimated the frequency of death associated with 40 different causes, ranging from cancers, animal bites and childbirth to fireworks, flooding and car accidents. LaCour and Davis found that people higher in vaccine skepticism were less accurate in their estimations of how frequently these causes of death occur. Specifically, they found that higher vaccine skepticism was associated with an overestimation of rare events.

The second experiment followed the same procedures as the first, but participants additionally estimated the frequency of neutral or positive events -- such as papal visits to the United States, triplet births or Willie Nelson concerts -- to test whether the negative tone of mortality statistics may play a role. LaCour and Davis found that people higher in vaccine skepticism were less accurate in their estimations of mortality-related events and overestimated the negative events more than the neutral/positive events.

"My takeaway is that vaccine skeptics probably don't have the best understanding of how likely or probable different events are," said LaCour, a doctoral student in psychological sciences. "They might be more easily swayed by anecdotal horror stories. For example, your child can have a seizure from getting vaccinated. It's extremely rare, but it is within the realm of possibility. If you were so inclined, you could follow Facebook groups that publicize extremely rare events. These cognitive distortions of anecdotes into trends are probably exacerbated by decisions to subscribe to statistically non-representative information sources."

While the researchers didn't find an association between a person's education level and their vaccine skepticism, LaCour and Davis believe there is a difference in the information being consumed and used by people higher in vaccine skepticism.

"It may be the case that they are specifically seeking out biased information, for example, to confirm their skeptical beliefs," Davis said. "It could be that they have more of an attentional bias to negative, mortality-related events, which makes them remember this information better. Strategies to get the right information to people through public service announcements or formal education may work, but it doesn't seem to be an issue that people with higher vaccine skepticism are less educated in any fundamental way in terms of basic science or math education. Thus, simple increases in these alone -- without targeted informational interventions -- would seem unlikely to help."

As LaCour noted, these results leave open many new avenues for further research.

"Do some people encode scary stories -- for instance, hearing about a child that has a seizure after getting vaccinated -- more strongly than others and then consequently remember these anecdotes more easily?" he asked. "Do they instead have certain attitudes and search their memory harder for evidence to support this belief? Is it a bit of both? How can you counteract these processes?

Read more at Science Daily

False memories of crime appear real when retold to others

People are no better than chance at identifying when someone else is recounting a false or real memory of a crime, according to a new UCL study.

The findings, published in Frontiers in Psychology, build on a previous study that was the first to successfully implant false memories of committing a crime -- involving either assault or assault with a weapon that resulted in police contact.

Study author Dr Julia Shaw (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences) said: "Everyone thinks that they couldn't be tricked into believing they have done something they never did, and that if someone were telling them about a false memory, they would be able to spot it. But we found that actually, people tend to be quite susceptible to having false memories, and they sound just like real memories."

For the previous study, published in 2015, Dr Shaw and a colleague invited young adults into a study about emotional memories, and also spoke with a member of their family to learn about events from the participants' early adolescence, in as much detail as possible.

The researchers spoke to the participants about their past, and used leading questions and suggestive tactics, as well as visualisation techniques to convince the participants that they were helping them recover a forgotten memory -- while in fact they were implanting a false memory that the participant had committed a crime when they were young, such as theft or assault.

"We were essentially doing exactly 'what not to do' when conducting a police interview," explained Dr Shaw.

The 2015 study reported that the majority of participants developed a false memory of committing a crime, and the participants consistently reported that the false memories felt incredibly real.

The current research involves two studies that used videos from the 2015 study, of the study participants recounting their false memories of a crime, which they believed to be real. The new participants watched those videos and were asked if the person was describing an event that actually happened or not.

Participants were only 53% accurate (no better than chance) at identifying false memories of committing a crime. These results were replicated in the second study. Even when participants were explicitly told that one of the memories they watched was false, their judgment was still no better than tossing a coin.

In addition to incorrectly believing false memories to be true, participants were just as likely to watch someone recount a genuine memory, and then misidentify it as false, once the research team told them that some of the videos would feature false memories. In other words, many true memories looked like false memories.

"Legal professionals and police officers need to realise how easy it is to manipulate someone's memories. Judges in particular should never assume that they can tell when someone has a false memory, and should consider the entire process to see if there was any risk of contamination of a defendant or witness' memories," Dr Shaw said.

Read more at Science Daily