My Advice
Does the first letter of one’s name affect life decisions? A natural language processing examination of nominative determinism
Promothesh Chatterjee, Himanshu Mishra & Arul Mishra
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research examines whether the phenomenon of nominative determinism (a name-driven outcome) exists in the real world. Nominative determinism manifests as a preference for a profession or city to live in that begins with the same letter as a person’s own name. The literature presents opposing views on this phenomenon, with one stream of research documenting the influence and another stream questioning the existence and generalizability of the effect, as well as the proposed underlying process. To examine whether the effect occurs in the real world, we use large language models trained on Common Crawl, Twitter, Google News, and Google Books using two natural language processing word-embedding algorithms (word2vec and GloVe). After controlling for relevant variables, we find consistent evidence of the relationship between people’s names and a preference for major life choices starting with the same letter as their first name. Our theoretical framework of identity expression builds on the implicit egotism explanation.
Are people more or less likely to follow advice that is accompanied by a confidence interval?
Celia Gaertig & Joseph Simmons
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Are people more or less likely to follow numerical advice that communicates uncertainty in the form of a confidence interval? Prior research offers competing predictions. Although some research suggests that people are more likely to follow the advice of more confident advisors, other research suggests that people may be more likely to trust advisors who communicate uncertainty. Participants (N = 17,615) in 12 incentivized studies predicted the outcomes of upcoming sporting events, the preferences of other survey responders, or the number of deaths due to COVID-19 by a future date. We then provided participants with an advisor’s best guess and manipulated whether or not that best guess was accompanied by a confidence interval. In all but one study, we found that participants were either directionally or significantly more likely to choose the advisor’s forecast (over their own) when the advice was accompanied by a confidence interval. These results were consistent across different measures of advice following and did not depend on the width of the confidence interval (75% or 95%), advice quality, or on whether people had information about the advisor’s past performance. These results suggest that advisors may be more persuasive if they provide reasonably-sized confidence intervals around their numerical estimates.
Doctored photographs create false memories of spectacular childhood events. A replication of Wade et al. (2002) with a Scandinavian twist
Miriam Johnson et al.
Memory, forthcoming
Abstract:
Can exposure to a doctored photograph of a plausible yet fictitious childhood event create false memories in adults? Twenty years ago, (Wade, K. A., Garry, M., Don Read, J., & Lindsay, D. S. (2002). A picture is worth a thousand lies: Using false photographs to create false childhood memories. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9(3), 597–603) found that half of the participants reported false beliefs or memories after multiple interview sessions about a doctored photograph of themselves as children on a fictitious hot air balloon ride. In this replication, which rigorously recreated the method and procedure of Wade et al. (2002), participants were interviewed over three interview sessions using free recall and imagery techniques about three true and one fictitious childhood event photos. The balloon ride was modified to a culturally appropriate target event -- a Viking ship ride -- to ensure that the doctored photograph was functionally equivalent. The results showed almost identical patterns in the two studies: 40% (n = 8) of the participants reported partial or clear false beliefs or memories compared with 50% (n = 10) in the original study. The participants who reported false memories reported detailed and coherent memory narratives of the Viking ship ride not depicted in the doctored photograph. Our study successfully replicating the results of Wade et al. (2002), suggest that memories can relatively easily be implanted, regardless of cultural setting.
Maybe your child could have painted that: Comparing abstract works by artists, abstract art child prodigies, and typical children
Jennifer Drake & Ann Jose
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, forthcoming
Abstract:
Children gifted in the visual arts typically begin to draw realistically around the age of 3. Recently, a new kind of gifted child artist has been reported in the press -- children who paint nonrepresentationally and whose works have been likened to those by abstract expressionists. It is unclear whether the works of these abstract art prodigies are any different from the abstract paintings of typical children. In four studies, we examined nonexperts’ abilities to distinguish paintings by abstract prodigies from those by typical children and those by abstract expressionist artists. Our findings revealed that nonexperts were able to distinguish the works by abstract prodigies from those by typical children, but they could not distinguish works by abstract prodigies from those by abstract expressionists artists. While precocious realism has been noted most often as the indicator of visual art giftedness, our studies revealed a different kind of nonfigurative visual art giftedness.
Perceived similarity explains beliefs about possibility
Brandon Goulding & Ori Friedman
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
No one has ever performed a successful brain transplant or traveled the Milky Way, but people often see these events as within the realm of possibility. Across six preregistered experiments (N = 1,472) we explore whether American adults’ beliefs about possibility are driven by perceptions of similarity to known events. We find that people’s confidence in the possibility of hypothetical future events is strongly predicted by how similar they think the events are to events that have already happened. We find that perceived similarity explains possibility ratings better than how desirable people think the events are, or how morally good or bad they think it would be to accomplish them. We also show that similarity to past events is a better predictor of people’s beliefs about future possibilities than counterfactual similarity or similarity to events in fiction. We find mixed evidence regarding whether prompting participants to consider similarity shifts their beliefs about possibility. Our findings suggest that people may reflexively use memories of known events to guide their inferences about what is possible.
Artificial intelligence and art: Identifying the aesthetic judgment factors that distinguish human- and machine-generated artwork
Andrew Samo & Scott Highhouse
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, forthcoming
Abstract:
Artistic creation has traditionally been thought to be a uniquely human ability. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), however, have enabled algorithms to create art that is nearly indistinguishable from human artwork. Existing research suggests that people have a bias against AI artwork but cannot accurately identify it in blind comparisons. The current study extends this investigation to examine the aesthetic judgment factors differentiating human and machine art. Results indicate that people are unable to accurately identify artwork source but prefer human art and experience more positive emotions in response to human artwork. The aesthetic judgment factors differentiating human- and machine-generated art were all related to positive emotionality. This finding has several implications for this research area and limitation and avenues for future research are discussed.
Needing everything (or just one thing) to go right: Myopic preferences for consolidating or spreading risks
Yilu Wang, Stephen Baum & Clayton Critcher
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Succeeding at a task often depends on the success or failure of component events. Such multicomponent risks can take one of two general forms. Disjunctive risks require the success of just one such component; conjunctive risks, all of them. Seven studies converge to show people prefer to consolidate disjunctive risks into fewer components and to spread conjunctive risks across more components, independent of the objective or subjective implications for the probability of overall success. These tendencies were reflected in preferences for how to approach potential investors, decisions about how much to invest in different business opportunities, and gamble valuations. Such preferences were specific to multicomponent risks as compared to single-component risks whose overall prospects for success were yoked to participants’ own perceptions of a matched multicomponent risk. Participants confronted multicomponent risks myopically, swayed by whether positive or disappointing news would likely be delivered at a single point in time instead of by the overall prospects for success. Supporting this account, these preferences for consolidating or spreading risks were reduced when the components’ outcomes would be revealed at once. Anticipated confidence while proceeding through the risk (even controlling for perceived probabilities of success) explained these preferences. After all, these preferred risk structures actually do allow people to traverse a multicomponent risk with more confidence that the next piece of news they receive will be positive (or not negative), though such myopic perspectives neglect just how many components will offer a chance for success (disjunctive risks) or the potential for failure (conjunctive risks).
People are worse at detecting fake news in their foreign language
Rafal Muda et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, forthcoming
Abstract:
Across two preregistered within-subject experiments (N = 570), we found that when using their foreign language, proficient bilinguals discerned true from false news less accurately. This was the case for international news (Experiment 1) and more local news (Experiment 2). When using a foreign (as opposed to native) language, false news headlines were always judged more believable, while true news headlines were judged equally (Experiment 2) or less believable (Experiment 1). In contrast to past theorizing, the foreign language effect interacted neither with perceived arousal of news (Experiment 1) nor with individual differences in cognitive reflection (Experiments 1 and 2). Finally, using signal detection theory modeling, we showed that the negative effects of using a foreign language were not caused by adopting different responding strategies (e.g., preferring omissions to false alarms) but rather by decreased sensitivity to the truth.
Social metacognition drives willingness to commit
Georgia Kapetaniou, Ophelia Deroy & Alexander Soutschek
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Showing or telling others that we are committed to cooperate with them can boost social cooperation. But what makes us willing to signal our cooperativeness, when it is costly to do so? In two experiments, we tested the hypothesis that agents engage in social commitments if their subjective confidence in predicting the interaction partner’s behavior is low. In Experiment 1 (preregistered), 48 participants played a prisoner’s dilemma game where they could signal their intentions to their co-player by enduring a monetary cost. As hypothesized, low confidence in one’s prediction of the co-player’s intentions was associated with a higher willingness to engage in costly commitment. In Experiment 2 (31 participants), we replicate these findings and moreover provide causal evidence that experimentally lowering the predictability of others’ actions (and thereby confidence in these predictions) motivates commitment decisions. Finally, across both experiments, we show that participants possess and demonstrate metacognitive access to the accuracy of their mentalizing processes. Taken together, our findings shed light on the importance of confidence representations and metacognitive processes in social interactions.
Intelligence Polygenic Score Is More Predictive of Crystallized Measures: Evidence From the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study
Robert Loughnan et al.
Psychological Science, June 2023, Pages 714–725
Abstract:
Findings in adults have shown that crystallized measures of intelligence, which are more culturally sensitive than fluid intelligence measures, have greater heritability; however, these results have not been found in children. The present study used data from 8,518 participants between 9 and 11 years old from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. We found that polygenic predictors of intelligence test performance (based on genome-wide association meta-analyses of data from 269,867 individuals) and of educational attainment (based on data from 1.1 million individuals) predicted neurocognitive performance. We found that crystallized measures were more strongly associated with both polygenic predictors than were fluid measures. This mirrored heritability differences reported previously in adults and suggests similar associations in children. This may be consistent with a prominent role of gene–environment correlation in cognitive development measured by crystallized intelligence tests. Environmental and experiential mediators may represent malleable targets for improving cognitive outcomes.