Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Flexibility in continuous judgments of gender/sex and race.
Across six preregistered studies (N = 1,292; recruited from university subject pools and Prolific Academic), we investigate how face perception along the dimensions of gender/sex and race can vary based on immediate contextual information as well as personal experience. In Studies 1a and 1b, we find that when placing stimuli along a continuum from male to female, cisgender participants sort prototypical gender/sex faces in a bimodal fashion and show less consensus and greater error when placing faces of intermediate gender/sex. We replicate and extend these findings to race in Study 2. In Study 3, we test whether sorting patterns can be influenced by preexisting experiences, and find evidence that transgender/nonbinary participants show less error than cisgender heterosexual participants when sorting intermediary faces. Finally, in Studies 4 and 5, we test whether cisgender participants’ judgments of intermediary faces along the continuum are influenced by the specific circumstances under which they are asked to sort. Here, we find that changing the sorting framework to include a third category resulted in less error when placing intermediary faces along the continuum than when participants were provided with only two category labels or two categories and a line at the midpoint, suggesting that new perceptual categories introduced with minimal training can be adopted quickly and successfully in a perceptual task. These data suggest that both long-term life experiences and quick experimental interventions can shape how we think about gender/sex and race. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Children’s language-based pedagogical preferences in a multilingual society.
A majority of the world’s population is multilingual, yet children’s language-based preferences have largely been studied in Western monolingual contexts. The present research investigated language-based preferences in 4- to 8-year-old children living in Hyderabad, India, a multilingual region with languages such as Telugu (official language of the state, and the native language of many children in the state) and English (medium of instruction in some schools). We presented to children novel objects and probed their selective preference to learn from different speakers (Telugu, British-accented English, or Indian-accented English). In addition, the current study assessed the flexibility of children’s preferences by manipulating the learning goal (i.e., performance goal vs. enjoyment goal) and learning content (i.e., Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics [STEM] objects vs. cultural objects). Children showed a preference for both English speakers over Telugu speakers, a tendency that increased with age. This preference was especially pronounced for performance learning goals and for STEM learning content. Furthermore, children whose native language was Telugu showed a less pronounced English bias. The results of this study provide new insights into the development of language-based biases in multilingual environments. First, they highlight dual and intersecting considerations of speaker familiarity and speaker status in guiding children’s choices about from whom to learn. Second, the results suggest that children’s language-based preferences in a pedagogical setting are flexible, as children integrate social cues (e.g., language-based attitudes) as well as contextual cues (e.g., the learning goal) strategically. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Can selecting the most qualified candidate be unfair? Learning about socioeconomic advantages and disadvantages reduces the perceived fairness of meritocracy and increases support for socioeconomic diversity initiatives in organizations.
While the majority of Americans today endorse meritocracy as fair, we suggest that these perceptions can be shaped by whether or not people learn about the presence of socioeconomic advantages and disadvantages in others’ lives. Across five studies (N = 3,318), we find that people are able to attach socioeconomic inequalities in applicants’ backgrounds to their evaluation of the fairness of specific merit-based selection processes and outcomes. Learning that one applicant grew up advantaged—while the other grew up disadvantaged—leads both liberals and conservatives to believe that otherwise identical merit-based procedures and outcomes are significantly less fair. Importantly, learning about starting inequalities leads to greater support for policies that promote socioeconomic diversity in organizations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Probing the impact of exposure to diversity on infants’ social categorization.
Humans learn about the world through inductive reasoning, generalizing information about an individual to others in the category. Indeed, by infancy, monolingual children expect people who speak the same language (but not people who speak different languages) to be similar in their food preferences (Liberman et al., 2016). Here, we ask whether infants who are exposed to linguistic diversity are more willing to generalize information even across language-group lines. To test this, we ran an inductive inference task and collected data on exposure to linguistic diversity at the interpersonal and neighborhood levels. Infants with more linguistically diverse social networks were more likely to generalize a food preference across speakers of different languages. However, this relationship was not seen for neighborhood diversity. We discuss implications of this work on understanding the development of bias and its malleability based on early social experiences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Race effects on impression formation in social interaction: An instrumental learning account.
How does race influence the impressions we form through direct interaction? In two preregistered experiments (N = 239/179), White American participants played a money-sharing game with Black and White players, based on a probabilistic reward reinforcement learning task, in which they chose to interact with players and received feedback on whether a player shared. We found that participants formed stronger reward preferences for White relative to Black players despite equivalent reward feedback between groups—a pattern that was stronger among participants with low internal motivation to respond without prejudice and high explicit prejudice. This race effect in reward learning was evident in participants’ behavioral choice preferences, but not in their self-reported perceptions of group members’ reward rates. Computational modeling suggested two mechanisms through which race affected instrumental learning: race (a) influenced White participants’ initial expectancies (i.e., priors) about Black compared with White players’ behavior and (b) led participants to update reward representations of Black and White players according to separate learning rates. These findings demonstrate that race can influence the formation of impressions through direct social interaction and introduce an instrumental learning framework to understand the effects of bias in intergroup interactions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Loyalty from a personal point of view: A cross-cultural prototype study of loyalty.
Loyalty is considered central to people’s moral life, yet little is known about how people think about what it means to be loyal. We used a prototype approach to understand how loyalty is represented in Colombia and the United States and how these representations mediate attributions of loyalty and moral judgments of loyalty violations. Across seven studies (N = 1,984), we found cross-cultural similarities in the associative meaning of loyalty (Study 1) but found differences in the centrality of features associated with loyalty (Study 2) and the latent structure of loyalty representations (Study 3). Colombians represent loyalty in terms of more general moral characteristics, while U.S. participants represent loyalty in terms of interpersonal commitment, both in contrast with current approaches to loyalty. By comparing representations of loyalty and honesty, we establish that differences in loyalty conceptualizations reflect a different way of thinking about loyalty rather than morality more generally (Study 4). Further, Colombians attributed greater loyalty to individuals with general moral characteristics compared to participants from the U.S. sample (Study 5) and were more likely to classify nonloyal values as loyalty-related (Study 6). While the centrality of prototypical features predicts categorizing norm violations as loyalty-related, differences in prototypical structure account for differences in the severity of moral judgment for such violations (Study 7), which suggests that loyalty representations have similar functions, even though these representations differ in structural characteristics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Assessing the effects of “native speaker” status on classic findings in speech research.
It is common practice in speech research to only sample participants who self-report being “native English speakers.” Although there is research on differences in language processing between native and nonnative listeners (see Lecumberri et al., 2010, for a review), the majority of speech research that aims to establish general findings (e.g., testing models of spoken word recognition) only includes native speakers in their sample. Not only is the “native English speaker” criterion poorly defined, but it also excludes historically underrepresented groups from speech perception research, often without attention to whether this exclusion is likely to affect study outcomes. The purpose of this study is to empirically test whether and how using different inclusion criteria (“native English speakers” vs. “nonnative English speakers”) affects several well-known phenomena in speech perception research. Five hundred participants completed word (N = 200) and sentence (N = 300) identification tasks in quiet and in moderate levels of background noise. Results indicate that multiple classic findings in speech perception research—including the effects of noise level, lexical density, and semantic context on speech intelligibility—persist regardless of “native English” speaking status. However, the magnitude of some of these effects differed across participant groups. Taken together, these results suggest that researchers should carefully consider whether native speaker status is likely to affect outcomes and make decisions about inclusion criteria on a study-by-study basis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Analytic racecraft: Race-based averages create illusory group differences in perceptions of racism.
Research practices used by social scientists to understand and dismantle the psychological foundations that uphold racist hierarchies can backfire when they rely on racecraft. Racecraft ideology assumes the reality of race(s), an assumption that shapes study designs and inferences to the detriment of theoretical and practical goals. I showcase how racecraft manifests in studies seeking to quantify how perceptions of sociopolitical stimuli differ across racialized perceivers (e.g., black, white, latinx). The typical analysis for quantifying perceptions focuses on comparing group averages, which assumes the existence of discrete “races” whose perceptions can be sufficiently summarized by averages. Across three studies, I used variance component analyses on racism ratings of anti-immigrant tweets from differently racialized perceivers (N = 1,211) to show there was much larger disagreement than agreement within race categories, even when there were average differences in perceptions across race categories. This analysis shows how analytic practices can bolster different assumptions about the nature of race, some of which reify the illusion that race categories are stable cohesive groups. Researchers can improve their analytic inferences and avoid producing race-reifying caricatures of peoples’ perceptions by adding variance mapping to their toolkits and attending to racialization as a dynamic process—needed improvements within the psychological study of race and racism, group-based beliefs, and antiracist research endeavors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Early developmental insights into the social construction of race.
The way that societies assign people to racial categories has far-reaching social, economic, and political consequences. One framework for establishing racial boundaries is based on ancestry, which historically has been leveraged to create rigid racial categories, particularly with respect to being categorized as White. A second framework is based on skin tone, which can vary within families and across the lifespan, and is thus more likely to blur racial boundaries. The persistence of these distinct cultural beliefs about race requires that they be transmitted to each new generation, but there have been few cross-cultural studies on their development during childhood. Participants (5- to 12-year-old children, N = 123) were from the United States, in which the ancestry model has been more prevalent, or from Brazil, in which the skin tone model has been more prevalent. In both countries, 5- to 7-year-olds endorsed the belief that skin tone determines race, for example, by assigning biological siblings with differing skin tones to different racial categories. However, racial concepts diverged among the 10- to 12-year-olds, with children from the United States shifting toward a classification based on ancestry and children in Brazil endorsing a classification based on skin tone even more strongly with age. These differing conceptions were especially evident with reference to White racial categorization: Older children from Brazil persisted in classifying lighter skinned people as White when they had African ancestry, unlike older children from the United States. These findings provide important insights into the developmental and cultural influences on racial classification systems. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Reconciling opposing effects of emotion on relational memory: Behavioral, eye-tracking, and brain imaging investigations.
The effects of emotion on memory are wide-ranging and powerful, but they are not uniform. Although there is agreement that emotion enhances memory for individual items, how it influences memory for the associated contextual details (relational memory, RM) remains debated. The prevalent view suggests that emotion impairs RM, but there is also evidence that emotion enhances RM. To reconcile these diverging results, we carried out three studies incorporating the following features: (1) testing RM with increased specificity, distinguishing between subjective (recollection based) and objective (item–context match) RM accuracy, (2) accounting for emotion–attention interactions via eye-tracking and task manipulation, and (3) using stimuli with integrated item–context content. Challenging the prevalent view, we identified both enhancing and impairing effects. First, emotion enhanced subjective RM, separately and when confirmed by accurate objective RM. Second, emotion impaired objective RM through attention capturing, but it enhanced RM accuracy when attentional effects were statistically accounted for using eye-tracking data. Third, emotion also enhanced RM when participants were cued to focus on contextual details during encoding, likely by increasing item–context binding. Finally, functional magnetic resonance imaging data recorded from a subset of participants showed that emotional enhancement of RM was associated with increased activity in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, along with increased intra-MTL and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex–MTL functional connectivity. Overall, these findings reconcile evidence regarding opposing effects of emotion on RM and point to possible training interventions to increase RM specificity in healthy functioning, posttraumatic stress disorder, and aging, by promoting item–context binding and diminishing memory decontextualization. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Variance (un)explained: Experimental conditions and temporal dependencies explain similarly small proportions of reaction time variability in linear models of perceptual and cognitive tasks.
Any series of sensorimotor actions shows fluctuations in speed and accuracy from repetition to repetition, even when the sensory input and motor output requirements remain identical over time. Such fluctuations are particularly prominent in reaction time (RT) series from laboratory neurocognitive tasks. Despite their omnipresent nature, trial-to-trial fluctuations remain poorly understood. Here, we systematically analyzed RT series from various neurocognitive tasks, quantifying how much of the total trial-to-trial RT variance can be explained with general linear models (GLMs) by three sources of variability that are frequently investigated in behavioral and neuroscientific research: (1) experimental conditions, employed to induce systematic patterns in variability, (2) short-term temporal dependencies such as the autocorrelation between subsequent trials, and (3) long-term temporal trends over experimental blocks and sessions. Furthermore, we examined to what extent the explained variances by these sources are shared or unique. We analyzed 1913 unique RT series from 30 different cognitive control and perception-based tasks. On average, the three sources together explained ∼8%–17% of the total variance. The experimental conditions explained on average ∼2.5%–3.5% but did not share explained variance with temporal dependencies. Thus, the largest part of the trial-to-trial fluctuations in RT remained unexplained by these three sources. Unexplained fluctuations may take on nonlinear forms that are not picked up by GLMs. They may also be partially attributable to observable endogenous factors, such as fluctuations in brain activity and bodily states. Still, some extent of randomness may be a feature of the neurobiological system rather than just nuisance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
The curve of control: Nonmonotonic effects of task difficulty on cognitive control.
The U-shaped curve has long been recognized as a fundamental concept in psychological science, particularly in theories about motivational accounts and cognitive control. In this study (N = 330), we empirically tested the prediction of a nonmonotonic, curvilinear relationship between task difficulty and control adaptation. Drawing from motivational intensity theory and the expected value of control framework, we hypothesized that control intensity would increase with task difficulty until a maximum tolerable level, after which it would decrease. To examine this hypothesis, we conducted two experiments utilizing Stroop-like conflict tasks, systematically manipulating the number of distractors to vary task difficulty. We assessed control adaptation and measured subjective task difficulty. Our results revealed a curvilinear pattern between perceived task difficulty and adaptation of control. The findings provide empirical support for the theoretical accounts of motivational intensity theory and expected value of control, highlighting the nonlinear nature of the relationship between task difficulty and cognitive control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Unclearly immoral: Low self-concept clarity increases moral disengagement.
This research examines the effect of self-concept clarity (i.e., having self-beliefs that are clearly and confidently defined, internally consistent, and stable) on moral behavior. Seven preregistered studies (N = 3,373) document that low (vs. high) self-concept clarity decreases moral behavior (e.g., donation, volunteering, tax compliance, honesty in an incentivized game). This effect occurs because low self-concept clarity increases moral disengagement, leading people to behave in morally questionable manners without damaging their self-concept. As evidence for this proposed underlying mechanism, we show that the effect of self-concept clarity on moral behavior is mediated by state moral disengagement and attenuates (a) among people with low trait moral disengagement, (b) among people with high trait moral identity internalization, and (c) in the presence of an honor pledge cueing moral engagement. We then show that the effect holds only when a prosocial act is congruent with personal values. Overall, these findings contribute to the literature on self-concept and moral self-regulation and have implications for how to promote morality and curb unethical behavior in society. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - Vol 153, Iss 12