Five years after the beginning of the COVID pandemic, one thing is clear: The East Asian countries of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea outperformed the United States in responding to and controlling the outbreak of the deadly virus. Although multiple factors likely contributed to this disparity, we propose that the culturally linked psychological defaults (“cultural defaults”) that pervade these contexts

What solutions can we find in the research literature for preventing sexual violence, and what psychological theories have guided these efforts? We gather all primary prevention efforts to reduce sexual violence from 1985 to 2018 and provide a bird's-eye view of the literature. We first review predominant theoretical approaches to sexual-violence perpetration prevention by highlighting three interventions

In this article, we summarize key findings from 20 years of research conducted at the intersection of developmental psychology and juvenile justice in the United States. We predominantly examine data from two large-scale, multisite longitudinal studies involving justice-system-involved adolescents—the Pathways to Desistance study and the Crossroads study. Topics of discussion include predictors of

Substance dependence is a prevalent and urgent public health problem. In 2021, 60 million Americans reported abusing alcohol within the month prior to being surveyed, and nearly 20 million Americans reported using illegal drugs (e.g., heroin) or prescription drugs (e.g., opioids) for nonmedical reasons in the year before. Drug-involved overdose rates have been steadily increasing over the past 20 years

Stories have played a central role in human social and political life for thousands of years. Despite their ubiquity in culture and custom, however, they feature only peripherally in formal governm...

We synthesized the vast, contradictory scholarly literature on gender bias in academic science from 2000 to 2020. In the most prestigious journals and media outlets, which influence many people’s o...

Anthropogenic carbon emissions have the potential to trigger changes in climate and ecosystems that would be catastrophic for the well-being of humans and other species. Widespread shifts in produc...

Anthropogenic carbon emissions have the potential to trigger changes in climate and ecosystems that would be catastrophic for the well-being of humans and other species. Widespread shifts in production and consumption patterns are urgently needed to address climate change. Although transnational agreements and national policy are necessary for a transition to a fully decarbonized global economy, fluctuating

Anthony G. Greenwald is Professor of Psychology at University of Washington (emeritus since 2020) and taught previously at Ohio State University (1965–1986). He received a BA from Yale (1959) and a PhD from Harvard (1963). His major research areas have been implicit and unconscious cognition. In 1995, Greenwald invented the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which rapidly became a standard for assessing

Original article: Franconeri, S. L., Padilla, L. M., Shah, P., Zacks, J. M., & Hullman, J. (2021). The science of visual data communication: What works. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 22(3), 110–161. https://doi.org/10.1177/15291006211051956

Accumulated findings from studies in which implicit-bias measures correlate with discriminatory judgment and behavior have led many social scientists to conclude that implicit biases play a causal ...

Accumulated findings from studies in which implicit-bias measures correlate with discriminatory judgment and behavior have led many social scientists to conclude that implicit biases play a causal role in racial and other discrimination. In turn, that belief has promoted and sustained two lines of work to develop remedies: (a) individual treatment interventions expected to weaken or eradicate implicit

Effectively designed data visualizations allow viewers to use their powerful visual systems to understand patterns in data across science, education, health, and public policy. But ineffectively de...

Eyewitness misidentifications are almost always made with high confidence in the courtroom. The courtroom is where eyewitnesses make their last identification of defendants suspected of (and charge...

The high prevalence and societal burden of chronic pain, its undertreatment, and disparities in its management have contributed to the acknowledgment of chronic pain as a serious public-health conc...

The construct of active learning permeates undergraduate education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), but despite its prevalence, the construct means different things to different people, groups, and STEM domains. To better understand active learning, we constructed this review through an innovative interdisciplinary collaboration involving research teams from psychology and

Doug Lombardi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland. As the head of the Science Learning Research Group (http://sciencelearning.net), he conducts research examining reasoning and critical thinking about knowledge claims. Much of this research is situated within the context of formal classroom settings and focuses on effective

Active learning holds great promise for improving education, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Instead of receiving information passively, students take agency and actively construct their own understanding. A large meta-analysis has suggested that these features improve student performance in STEM (Freeman et al., 2014). Many instructional practices that promote

The Internet has evolved into a ubiquitous and indispensable digital environment in which people communicate, seek information, and make decisions. Despite offering various benefits, online environments are also replete with smart, highly adaptive choice architectures designed primarily to maximize commercial interests, capture and sustain users’ attention, monetize user data, and predict and influence

Anastasia Kozyreva is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Adaptive Rationality (ARC) at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. She is a philosopher and a cognitive scientist working on cognitive and ethical implications of digital technologies and artificial intelligence on society. After completing her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Heidelberg in 2016, she joined ARC

Some environmental influences, including intentional interventions, have shown persistent effects on psychological characteristics and other socially important outcomes years and even decades later. At the same time, it is common to find that the effects of life events or interventions diminish and even disappear completely, a phenomenon known as fade-out. We review the evidence for persistence and

C. Shawn Green is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research program utilizes both traditional methods (e.g., psychophysics, brain imaging) as well as certain modern forms of media (e.g., video games, virtual reality) to examine factors that influence the rate and generalization of perceptual and cognitive learning. His research has been supported by grants

In his 1955 address to the National Academy of Sciences, Richard Feynman delineated three key ways in which he saw science as having value (Feynman, 1955). One of these ways was the simple “intellectual enjoyment which some people get from reading and learning and thinking” (p. 13). For many scientists, there is intrinsic value in simply coming to understand how things work. They feel a certain joy

When designing intervention research that has a longterm goal, fade-out is an important consideration. Bailey, Duncan, Cunha, Foorman, and Yeager (2020; this issue) offer several important takeaways for such interventions, beginning from the initial plan to later longitudinal analyses of treatment effects. For example, researchers would be well advised to consider the contextual influences, such as

Cognitive abilities are important predictors of educational and occupational performance, socioeconomic attainment, health, and longevity. Declines in cognitive abilities are linked to impairments in older adults’ everyday functions, but people differ from one another in their rates of cognitive decline over the course of adulthood and old age. Hence, identifying factors that protect against compromised

In this article, we report the results of a two-part investigation of psychological assessments by psychologists in legal contexts. The first part involves a systematic review of the 364 psychological assessment tools psychologists report having used in legal cases across 22 surveys of experienced forensic mental health practitioners, focusing on legal standards and scientific and psychometric theory

Original article: Barrett, L. F., Adolphs, R., Marsella, S., Martinez, A. M., & Pollak, S. D. (2019). Emotional expressions reconsidered: Challenges to inferring emotion from human facial movements. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 20, 1–68. doi:10.1177/1529100619832930

Two major questions about addictive behaviors need to be explained by any worthwhile neurobiological theory. First, why do people seek drugs in the first place? Second, why do some people who use drugs seem to eventually become unable to resist drug temptation and so become "addicted"? We will review the theories of addiction that address negative-reinforcement views of drug use (i.e., taking opioids

It is commonly assumed that a person's emotional state can be readily inferred from his or her facial movements, typically called emotional expressions or facial expressions. This assumption influences legal judgments, policy decisions, national security protocols, and educational practices; guides the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric illness, as well as the development of commercial applications;

What would a comprehensive atlas of human emotions include? For 50 years, scientists have sought to map emotion-related experience, expression, physiology, and recognition in terms of the "basic six"-anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. Claims about the relationships between these six emotions and prototypical facial configurations have provided the basis for a long-standing debate

Almost everyone struggles to act in their individual and collective best interests, particularly when doing so requires forgoing a more immediately enjoyable alternative. Other than exhorting decision makers to "do the right thing," what can policymakers do to reduce overeating, undersaving, procrastination, and other self-defeating behaviors that feel good now but generate larger delayed costs? In

Original article: Castles, A., Rastle, K., & Nation, K. (2018). Ending the reading wars: Reading acquisition from novice to expert. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 19, 5–51. doi:10.1177/1529100618772271

Collaborative problem solving (CPS) has been receiving increasing international attention because much of the complex work in the modern world is performed by teams. However, systematic education and training on CPS is lacking for those entering and participating in the workforce. In 2015, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a global test of educational progress, documented the

Learning to read transforms lives. Reading is the basis for the acquisition of knowledge, for cultural engagement, for democracy, and for success in the workplace. Illiteracy costs the global economy more than $1 trillion (U.S. dollars) annually in direct costs alone (World Literacy Foundation, 2015). The indirect costs are far greater because the failure to attain satisfactory literacy blocks people

Parents, educators, reading researchers, and policy makers all agree that children must learn to read to participate fully in a modern society. They agree, moreover, that much of this learning will take place in school. Beyond this, agreement breaks down. There have been many debates about how children should learn to read; those between proponents of phonics instruction and proponents of whole-language