New Research From Psychological Science

Reward Association With Mental States Shapes Empathy and Prosocial Behavior
Yi Zhang, Leor Hackel

Valuing the welfare of others is a fundamental aspect of empathy and prosocial behavior. How do people develop this valuation? Theories of associative learning suggest that people can associate social cues, such as smiles, with personal reward, thus feeling good when others thrive. Yet people often display generalized concern for others’ welfare, regardless of the specific cues present. We propose that Pavlovian conditioning allows people to associate reward directly with others’ abstract mental states, learning that another’s happiness predicts their own reward. In four online experiments with 1,500 U.S.-based adults recruited from CloudResearch, participants’ monetary outcomes were congruently or incongruently predicted by a target’s mental states. Participants who experienced congruent learning reported more empathic feelings toward the target in novel situations. The values attached to mental states further influenced participants’ prosocial choices. These results demonstrate how associative learning of abstract mental states can give rise to generalizable empathy and influence moral behavior.

Overconfidence Persists Despite Years of Accurate, Precise, Public, and Continuous Feedback: Two Studies of Tournament Chess Players
Patrick R. Heck, Daniel J. Benjamin, Daniel J. Simons, Christopher F. Chabris

Overconfidence is thought to be a fundamental cognitive bias, but it is typically studied in environments where people lack accurate information about their abilities. We conducted a preregistered survey experiment and replication to learn whether overconfidence persists among tournament chess players who receive objective, precise, and public feedback about their skill. Our combined sample comprised 3,388 rated players aged 5 to 88 years from 22 countries with an average of 18.8 years of tournament experience. On average, participants asserted that their ability was 89 Elo rating points higher than their observed ratings indicated—expecting to outscore an equally rated opponent by nearly 2 to 1. One year later, only 11.3% of overconfident players achieved their asserted ability rating. Low-rated players overestimated their skill the most, and top-rated players were calibrated. Patterns consistent with overconfidence emerged in every sociodemographic subgroup we studied. We conclude that overconfidence persists in tournament chess, a real-world information environment that should be inhospitable to it.

What Is Rationality, Whom Is It Ascribed To, and Why Does It Matter? Evidence From Internet Text for 66 Social Groups and 101 Occupations
Charles A. Dorison, Tessa E. S. Charlesworth

Scholars have extolled the virtues of rationality for centuries while also debating what rationality is and who is rational. Advancing these debates, we used word embeddings trained on 840 billion words of internet text—and validated with Prolific workers in the United States—to uncover the representation, group stereotypes, and occupational correlates of rationality at scale in naturalistic language. Four results emerged. First, rather than being synonymous with competence, representations of rationality included both an analytic/logic component and an interpersonal/trust component. Second, irrationality was not merely the opposite of rationality but contained its own unique subcomponents (volatility and unfairness). Third, rationality was consistently ascribed to high-power targets across 66 social groups. Last, rationality (especially its analytic component) was consistently associated with both earnings and wage gaps across 101 occupations. Associations with demographic representation were less consistent. Complementing normative approaches, these descriptive findings advance canonical debates about rationality, extending understanding of its components, stereotypes, and correlates.

Assortative Mating Is a Natural Consequence of Heritable Variation in Preferences and Preferred Traits
Kaitlyn T. Harper, Brendan P. Zietsch

Assortative mating—the tendency to choose partners similar to oneself—is a ubiquitous phenomenon in mate choice. Despite numerous proposed explanations, a parsimonious mechanism has been overlooked: When individuals choose mates on the basis of heritable traits and preferences, offspring inherit a trait and the corresponding preference from each parent, creating genetic correlations that link having a trait to preferring that same trait. We evaluated this mechanism with an agent-based model simulating 100 generations in which agents, with traits and preferences each uniquely determined by 40 loci, chose reproductive partners based on preferences. Genetic correlations formed between preferences and preferred traits, as well as between partner traits (i.e., assortative mating), demonstrating that heritable variation in preferences and preferred traits is sufficient to drive assortative mating. We presented a toy model here, so we cannot speak to the robustness of such genetic correlations or to the relative explanatory power of this mechanism over others.

Good Learners Are Poor Monitors: A Negative Relation Between Learning Ability and Monitoring Accuracy
Mengqi Hu, Wenbo Zhao, Anran Li, et al.

Effective learning involves not only the ability to quickly acquire knowledge and skills, but also the capacity to accurately monitor one’s ongoing learning progress. The present research probed the relation between learning ability and monitoring accuracy. A meta-analysis (Study 1, N = 2,406) counterintuitively found that individuals with superior learning ability exhibited slightly poorer monitoring accuracy (measured as the resolution of judgments of learning). Study 2 reanalyzed the meta-analysis data and observed that expert learners remembered more items they erroneously believed they would not remember, and this underconfidence in expert learners led to a negative association between learning ability and monitoring accuracy. Studies 3 (N = 102, adults aged 18–23) and 4 (N = 481, adults aged 18–59) conceptually replicated the findings of Studies 1 and 2 in controlled experiments. These findings challenge the conventional wisdom that good learners are also good monitors, suggesting instead that expert learners are actually the ones with monitoring deficits.

Sexual Identity Development Milestones, Latent Profiles, and Proximal Minority Stressors in Australia’s Generation Z
William Warton, Michelle L. Byrne, Kelly-Ann Allen

This study examined the sequence and timing of sexual identity development (SID) milestones among Generation Z LGBTQ+ Australians, focusing on variations across subgroups and their relationship with minority stressors. The study included 490 Australian LGBTQ+ individuals aged 16 to 26, predominantly White (n= 389) and assigned female at birth (n= 402), with a balanced distribution between cisgender and gender-diverse participants. Demographic differences in the timing and achievement of SID milestones were found for sexual and gender identity. Latent profile analysis identified four distinct profiles, highlighting identity-centered and sex-centered sequences. Differences in rejection sensitivity, emotion dysregulation, and self-acceptance of sexual identity were noted across these profiles, but not for internalized homonegativity. Our findings indicate that SID trajectories do not strictly conform to discrete sexual or gender identity categories. The cross-sectional design limits causality inference, and findings are not generalizable to all LGBTQ+ young people or Generation Z more broadly.

Pseudo Effects: How Method Biases Can Produce Spurious Findings About Close Relationships
Samantha Joel, John K. Sakaluk, James J. Kim, Devinder Khera, Helena Yuchen Qin, Sarah C. E. Stanton

Research on interpersonal relationships frequently relies on accurate self-reporting across various relationship facets (e.g., conflict, trust, appreciation). Yet shared method biases—which may greatly inflate associations between measures—are rarely accounted for during measurement validation or hypothesis testing. To examine how method biases can affect relationship research, we embarked on the ironic exploration of a new construct—Pseudo—comprised of irrelevant relationship evaluations (e.g., “My relationship has very good Saturn”). Pseudo was moderately associated with common relationship measures (e.g., satisfaction, commitment) and predicted those measures 3 weeks later. Results of a dyadic longitudinal study suggested that Pseudo taps into method biases, particularly sentiment override (i.e., people’s tendency to project their global relationship sentiments onto every relationship evaluation). We conclude that psychometric standards must be sufficiently rigorous to distinguish genuine constructs and associations from methodological artifacts that can otherwise pose a serious validity threat.

The Anticipated Relational Effects of Confronting Bias (or not) in Interracial Friendships
Ashley L. Berkebile-Weinberg, Riana M. Brown, Casey E. McMahon, Maureen A. Craig

Most biased comments people experience are from friends. However, little is known about how people process experiences in which a friend expresses bias and how the relationship might be affected. The current research examines the anticipated relational effects of confronting (vs. not confronting) a friend’s bias, using adult participants in the United States. Asian participants who imagined confronting a White friend’s biased comment (or a stranger’s: see Study 1) anticipated higher friendship or relationship quality compared with those who imagined not having that confrontation. This effect remained regardless of whether bias was directed toward participants’ in-group or toward an out-group (see Study 2). The closer people felt to their friend, the more confronting (vs. not confronting) elicited higher friendship quality. Experimentally testing for mechanism demonstrated that the effect of confronting is driven by greater anticipated understanding (see Study 3). This work reveals that Asian people expect that confronting a friend’s bias will elicit greater understanding and buffer against negative interpersonal effects. Statement of Relevance The majority of biased comments people hear are from friends (Dickter & Newton, 2013), and 40% of Americans report confronting a friend or family member for a biased comment (Horowitz et al., 2019). Yet, how people think about confronting a friend (or not) is unknown. Relationship quality can be improved by mutual understanding (Reis et al., 2017), and confronting can provide an opportunity to express oneself and establish understanding with close others. Further, a proposed starting point for healing racial division is to start a conversation and talk to one’s friends (Song, 2019). Thus, it is essential to understand how racial minorities expect their interracial relationships to be impacted when they confront others about bias. Ultimately, our research helps explain why minority-group members might choose to confront bias from a close friend—namely, that they expect it to be less detrimental for their friendship than to stay silent.

Invariant Recognition Memory Spaces for Real-World Objects Revealed With Signal-Detection Analysis
Igor Utochkin, Daniil Azarov, Daniil Grigorev

Recognition memory refers to the process of distinguishing between previously experienced and novel events. Apart from the objective quality of stored memories, recognition depends on the retrieval context produced by all items (foils) presented together with actually memorized targets and causing confusion. Memory models often conceptualize target-foil confusability via distances in psychological spaces where greater confusability originates from shorter interitem distances. We tested whether recognition spaces change when other foils are added to the retrieval context or when target memory strength is changed (N= 1,311 adults). Using signal-detection modeling, we found that separately measured distances, from each foil to the target provide a good linear prediction of those distances for all foils being presented together against that target. Those predictions stay accurate even when the absolute distances are scaled up or down because of a change in memory strength. This suggests strong metric invariance of spaces used for recognition decisions under variable retrieval contexts.

Reply to “A Tendency to Answer Consistently Can Generate Apparent Failures to Learn From Failure”
Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Ayelet Fishbach

In Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach (2019), failure stymies learning: People learn less from failure than success. The commentary proposes that the failure to learn from failure could be due to a tendency to respond consistently. Although a consistent response pattern explains why people struggle to learn from failure in some paradigms, we argue that it does not explain the results of the original paradigm. Certain consistency mechanisms require that people assume they should be consistent with their initial intuition instead of updating as they learn new information. This assumption does not apply to the original paradigm. We discuss how the commentary helps sharpen the criteria for assessing learning from failure and the role of consistency as one potential barrier to learning.

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