Terrorism represents one of the most commonly studied types of threat in the social and political psychology literature. Of particular note, many studies (along with national polls) have shown that the threat of Islamist fundamentalism increases the appeal of conservativism. However, there are some important-and unresolved-questions regarding these threat-driven "shifts to the right." Our primary focus

Past research has focused on emotion regulation (ER) as an intrapersonal endeavor (managing one's own emotions), leaving many questions unanswered about interpersonal emotion regulation (IER; receiving support from another person to regulate one's emotions). This study sought to understand the effects of two common IER strategies (corumination, codistraction) by comparing them with each other and their

While trying to complete arduous tasks (e.g., emails, grading), our attention is often mired by the desire to disengage. Opportunity cost theories of mental effort argue that rather than our "sense of effort" being a cognitive limitation, it is an adaptive signal which repels us from unrewarding tasks toward worthwhile alternatives; in short, this signal ensures our cognitive resources are not spent

While the influence of scene-object semantic congruency on object perception is well established, the direction of the influence remains controversial. We address this issue by presenting an innovative approach that uses a vector-space semantic model to quantify scene-object congruency as a continuous variable. By exploring a wide range of congruency values and using multiple experimental tasks, we

Recent statistical learning views of reading posit that writing systems present to their readers a wide range of statistical regularities which are leveraged to process printed texts. While substantial research has focused on the "vertical" correlations between orthographic, phonological, and semantic units in a given writing system, here we employ information-theoretic measures to further consider

Although social interactions are ubiquitous, people often choose not to interact with others—for example, people may choose to not greet a stranger, to not talk to a colleague at work, or to ignore a text message from a friend. Here, we systematically investigate how people's actions, inactions, and their consequences (rewards and punishments) affect impressions. In four preregistered experiments (N = 240)

The central tendency effect emphasizes the use of priors by the brain for perceptual optimization within a Bayesian framework. This study explores the impact of blindness on central tendency and prior utilization in a distance estimation auditory task by testing a group of early blinds, late blinds, and sighted participants. The results showed that early blind individuals exhibit a general impairment

Leaders' behavior can powerfully alter group outcomes. In a programmatic series of preregistered studies, we provide the first rigorous test of whether and why leaders behave differently toward groups of men versus women. In a within-subjects pilot study (N = 336) and in between-subjects Study 1 (N = 368), American adults said they would lead groups of men (vs. women) in a more dominant (e.g., intimidating

Effective linguistic communication depends upon many different cognitive processes working together in concert. Yet, our computational models of these processes are often developed in isolation, without considering how these processes fit together. In this work, we study a simplified variant of the popular board game Codenames, which highlights the integration of two important processes: (1) lexical

Managing the trade-off between stability (robustness to interference) and flexibility (readiness to adapt to change) places considerable demands on human attention, cognitive control, and meta-control processes. However, little is known about the cognitive mechanisms driving stability-flexibility adaptation in multitasking contexts, and such mechanisms have implications for effective task completion

Motor planning forms a critical bridge between psycholinguistic and motoric models of word production. While syllables are often considered the core speech motor planning unit, growing evidence hints at suprasyllabic planning that may correspond to words, but firm experimental support is still lacking. We use differential adaptation to altered auditory feedback to provide novel, straightforward evidence

Continuous flow and evidence accumulation models have recently been combined to provide an integrated account of decision and motor mechanisms engaged in choice reaction time tasks. According to this account, muscle activation is essentially determined by the evidence accumulation decision variable through a continuous decision-to-motor transmission of information. However, it remains unclear whether

Whether it's choosing a tennis serve or escaping a predator, the ability to behave randomly provides a range of adaptive benefits. Decades of work explore how people both produce and detect randomness, revealing profound nonrandom biases and heuristics in our mental representations of randomness. But how is randomness realized in the mind? Do individuals have a "one-size-fits-all" conception of randomness

In post-conflict societies, peace and safety often depend on political and economic support from international organizations. But what happens when this support is withdrawn? To investigate this question, we conducted two cross-sectional (N = 832) and one two-wave longitudinal experiment (with waves two weeks apart, Wave 1: N = 416; Wave 2: N = 400) in the post-conflict context of Kosovo, exposing

Gender stereotypes take many forms. One relatively under-studied stereotype concerns gender and food. While prior work finds certain foods are viewed as more masculine or feminine, there is limited research on how the same food becomes gendered depending on portion size. Four studies (N = 2178) found that 1) participants held implicit and explicit associations between men with large portions and women

Policies, the mappings from states to actions, require memory. The amount of memory is dictated by the mutual information between states and actions or the policy complexity. High-complexity policies preserve state information and generally lead to greater rewards compared to low-complexity policies, which require less memory by discarding state information and exploiting environmental regularities

There is increasing evidence that moral and emotional rhetoric spreads widely on social media and is associated with intergroup conflict, polarization, and the spread of misinformation. However, this literature is largely correlational, making it unclear why moral and emotional content drives sharing and conflict. In this research, we examine the causal impact of moral-emotional content on sharing

Punishment can serve as a form of communication: People use punishment to express information to its recipients and interpret punishment between third parties as having communicative content. Prior work on the expressive function of punishment has primarily investigated the capacity of punishment in general to communicate a single type of message – e.g., that the punished behavior violated an important

Children often have to choose between two or more probabilistically rewarded options. How early in life do they learn to choose adaptively? Connecting research on ecologically rational probability matching in adulthood with research on the benefits of cognitive immaturity in childhood, we compared children's (3-11 years; N = 362) and adults' (N = 121) repeated choice behavior in a child-friendly probability

Whether and when explicit (self-reported) and implicit (automatically revealed) social group attitudes can change has been a central topic of psychological inquiry over the past decades. Here, we take a novel approach to answering these longstanding questions by leveraging data collected via the Project Implicit International websites from 1.4 million participants across 33 countries, five social group

What makes a word memorable? An important claim from past work is that words are encoded by their meanings and not their forms. If true, then, following rational analysis, memorable words should uniquely pick out a particular meaning, which means they should have few or no synonyms, and they should be unambiguous. Across two large-scale recognition-memory experiments (2,222 target words and > 600 participants

Every action demands some effort, and its level influences decision making. Existing data suggest that in some decision contexts, effort devalues outcomes, but in other contexts, effort enhances outcome valuation. Here, we describe an empirical study and propose a model that incorporates negative, positive, and mixed impacts of effort on outcomes in different decision contexts and different participants

Lee and Schlegelmilch (2025) reanalyzed data from Zaman, Yu, and Verheyen (2023), arguing that the role of perception in generalization is overemphasized and that higher level cognitive processes (in the form of a similarity-based rule) provide a better account. In this reply, we make the argument that their reanalysis contains flaws and inconsistencies and present additional evidence for consideration

Stimulus generalization, or the transfer of learned responses between stimuli, is a critical ability for adaptation to everyday life. In a typical experiment, generalization is assessed by measuring responses to stimuli varying along a physical dimension. Variations in the gradient of learned responses are usually interpreted as differences in the underlying cognitive process of generalization. A recent

Do stereotypes have a stronger and more persistent effect on impressions when they are moral in tone? In two experiments (N = 187), participants interacted with members of two groups in an interactive social decision game, modeled on a reward reinforcement task, in which they formed impressions of players based on their feedback. Prior to the task, participants were exposed to positive or negative

The other ethnicity effect (OEE) refers to the common finding that individuals generally perform better in recognizing faces from their own ethnicity than from others. Wan et al. (2017) identified a subset of individuals with a marked difficulty in recognizing other ethnicity faces, termed other ethnicity blindness (OEB). This study further examines the prevalence of OEB in two large samples of Asian

Adults often titrate the degree of their cognitive effort in an economical manner: they "think hard" when the reward benefits of a task exceed its difficulty costs. Nonetheless, it remains to be seen whether and how children and adolescents adjust their cognitive effort according to multiple cues about its worthwhileness, including in novel environments where these cues must be learned through experience

Natural scenes contain a multitude of cues that can support spatial perception, making it difficult to study. Here, in a series of preregistered behavioral studies, we quantify scene-specific spatial representations that generalize over tasks, stimulus durations, and participants. We presented 156 scene images at varying durations (125, 250, 1,000 ms) to independent groups of participants who either

We investigate how 3- to 5-year-old U.S. and Canadian children (N = 189) and U.S. adults (N = 241) balance the number of endorsements for a given option with the quality of the informants' source of information when deciding which of two boxes contains the better option. When choosing between two different boxes endorsed by groups of equal sizes, both children (Experiments 1-3) and adults (Experiment

Positive intergroup contact reduces prejudice. However, the strength of intergroup contact effects is typically weaker for members of minority as compared to majority groups. Research on perceived outgroup entitativity (i.e., the extent to which an aggregate of people is perceived as a unified whole) has shown that minority group members perceive the majority outgroup as less entitative, while majority

Black women professionals face pressure to alter their natural hair (i.e., naturally textured hair and/or styles associated with Black individuals), undermining their identity-safety in the workplace. An identity-safety cue can signal social fit, or an environment that values attributes associated with one's identity, and foster identity-safety among Black women. Integrating social identity threat

The last 25 years of research have revealed that recalling the past with others changes memory. A key finding is that former group members show increased memory overlap or collective memory. Beyond memory content, we ask whether collaborative recall changes the organization of memory. How we organize information has far-reaching consequences on learning and remembering, and research has produced sophisticated

In order to maintain stability across saccades, the visual system must keep track of nonspatial information bound to each location (object-location binding). Here, we investigated whether saccade target status affects the reference frame of trans-saccadic object-location binding. Previous studies examining the reference frame of object-location binding showed that peripheral, nonsaccade target objects

Prior research on the relationship between group versus individual targets and unethical behavior directed toward those targets is incomplete. Extending this line of research, the present paper examines whether individuals engage in more dishonest behaviors when interacting with a group (vs. an individual). Across six experiments and three supplemental studies (N = 2376), we found that individuals

Black individuals often feel unheard and misunderstood by White people during conversations about race. These experiences could be due in part to a perceived disconnect between their own and White people's views on race. In the current research (N = 1,470 Black Americans), we developed and tested a new scale to capture this potential mechanism-racial shared reality (RSR)-which we conceptualize as Black

Victim blaming—the tendency to attribute responsibility and blame to innocent victims—is associated with people's belief that the world is a just place where everybody gets what they deserve and deserves what they get. In the present research, we examine the extent to which the relationship between just-world beliefs and victim blaming depends on (a) whether or not the victim is identifiable and (b)

The hippocampus is essential for episodic memory, yet its coding mechanism remains debated. In humans, two main theories have been proposed: one suggests that concept neurons represent specific elements of an episode, while another posits a conjunctive code, where index neurons code the entire episode. Here, we integrate new findings of index neurons in humans and other animals with the concept-specific

Social environments that stigmatize concealable identities increase observers' suspicion that an individual's claimed identity is not their “true” identity. Identity-stigmatizing environments incentivize “closeting” (i.e., concealing) targeted identities, rendering claims to contrasting non-stigmatized identities ambiguous (e.g., self-protective? self-expressive?). Such ambiguity fosters identity suspicion

Recent insights from cognitive science have reshaped our understanding of the reliability of eyewitness memory. Many believe that eyewitness memory is unreliable, but a better way of thinking is that eyewitness memory, like other types of forensic evidence, can be contaminated. Because contaminated evidence yields unreliable results, the focus should be placed on testing uncontaminated memory evidence

Black Americans remain underrepresented in organizations. Although extensive research demonstrates that inadequate representation undermines inclusion, few studies have assessed the psychological processes through which this relationship emerges. Across three online experiments, we investigate the role of social comparison perceptions-concerns about being assimilated, or likened, to another ingroup

Dishonest behavior is a prevalent phenomenon, and recent studies have suggested that seemingly trivial factors, such as the time of the day, can influence individuals' propensity to act dishonestly. Specifically, research has identified a phenomenon known as the Morning Morality Effect, where participants exhibit greater dishonesty during the afternoon or evening than in the morning. However, recent

Grouping sensory events into chunks is an efficient strategy to integrate information across long sequences such as speech, music, and complex movements. Although chunks can be constructed based on diverse cues (e.g., sensory features, statistical patterns, internal knowledge) recent studies have consistently demonstrated that the chunks constructed by different cues are all tracked by low-frequency

Black Americans often expect conversations about race with White people to go poorly, with heightened concerns about being stereotyped, devalued, and misunderstood. We propose one reason for these patterns is Black individuals' belief that their understanding of race is distinct from that of White people–that is, they do not expect to have racial shared reality with White individuals. Across 3 studies

In evaluating changing attributes (e.g., work output, pollution levels), perceivers care not only about an attribute's level but its rate of change. Two employees likely have different value in the eyes of a supervisor if they take different amounts of time to complete the same work. Ten studies in the main article (and five in the Supplemental Materials) document and explore a monitoring frequency

All measures of behavior have a temporal context. Changes in behavior over time often take a similar form: monotonically decreasing or increasing toward an asymptote. Whether these behavioral dynamics are the object of study or a nuisance variable, their inclusion in models of data makes conclusions more complete, robust, and well-specified, and can contribute to theory development. Here, we demonstrate

Social perception accuracy includes stereotype accuracy, defined as holding correct beliefs about social groups. The present article examines this type of accuracy in relation to gender stereotypes, defined by beliefs about differences between women and men. After locating all studies yielding comparisons between judges' stereotypes and relevant criterion data, we extracted their results and/or conducted

Episodic memory must accomplish two adversarial goals: encoding and storing a multitude of experiences without exceeding the finite neuronal structure of the brain, and recalling memories in vivid detail. Dimensionality reduction and expansion (‘dimensionality transformation’) enable the brain to meet these demands. Reduction compresses sensory input into simplified, storable codes, while expansion

Traditionally considered a motor structure, the cerebellum has been shown to play a key role in several cognitive functions. However, for decades, the cerebellum has been largely overlooked and even deliberately excluded from ‘whole-brain’ neuroimaging studies. Here, we propose that the continued exclusion of the cerebellum has limited our understanding of whole-brain function. We describe reasons

The role of behaviour – choices, actions, and habits – in shaping neurodivergent development remains unclear. In this forum article we introduce computational rationality as a framework for understanding dynamic feedback between brain and behavioural development, and neurodevelopmental variation.

A growing literature has shown that people tend to make faster decisions when choosing between two high-intensity or high-utility options than when choosing between two less-intensity or low-utility options. However, the underlying cognitive mechanisms of this effect of overall value (OV) on response times (RT) remains controversial, partially due to inconsistent findings of OV effects on accuracy

The severity and pervasiveness of anti-fat prejudice and discrimination have led to calls for interventions to address them. However, intervention studies to combat anti-fat prejudice have often been stymied by ineffective approaches, small sample sizes, and the lack of standardization in measurement. To that end, we conducted two mega-experiments totaling 28,240 participants and 50 conditions where

Over the past decade, a surge in protests and social movements worldwide has offered promise for positive social change while also introducing divisions and tensions into society. In the current research, we examined the impact of joint collective action involving both advantaged and disadvantaged group members, as well as collective action solely involving disadvantaged group members, on public support

Extensive evidence suggests that perceptions of discrimination are influenced by a mental prototype of what constitutes discriminatory behavior, the so-called prototype effect of discrimination perception. However, the underlying psychological processes and thus the extent to which statistical expectations and moral evaluations contribute to this prototype effect remain underexplored. In a series of

Recent analyses of social media activity indicate that outgroup animosity drives user engagement more than ingroup favoritism, with content that derogates the outgroup tending to generate more viral responses online. However, it is unclear whether those findings are due to most people's underlying preferences or structural features of the social media landscape. To address this uncertainty, we conducted

Predicting the location of moving objects in noisy environments is essential to everyday behavior, like when participating in traffic. Although many objects provide multisensory information, it remains unknown how humans use multisensory information to localize moving objects, and how this depends on expected sensory interference (e.g., occlusion). In four experiments, we systematically investigated

Judgments of attractiveness have many important social outcomes, highlighting the need to understand how people form these judgments. One aspect of appearance that impacts perceptions of attractiveness is facial femininity/masculinity (sexual dimorphism). However, extant research has focused primarily on White, Western, heterosexual participants' preferences for femininity/masculinity in White faces

Individual differences in working memory predict a wide range of cognitive abilities. However, little research has been done on whether working memory continues to predict task performance after repetitive learning. Here, we tested whether working memory ability continued to predict long-term memory (LTM) performance for picture sequences even after participants showed massive learning. In Experiments

Emotion perception is a fundamental aspect of our lives because others' emotions may provide important information about their reactions, attitudes, intentions, and behavior. Following the seminal work of Ekman, much of the research on emotion perception has focused on facial expressions. Recent evidence suggests, however, that facial expressions may be more ambiguous than previously assumed and that

It has long been debated whether latent memory signals determine recognition judgments directly or through a small number of discrete states. Often, signal detection theory (SDT) models instantiate the former perspective, whereas the two-high-threshold (2HT) model instantiates the latter. Kellen and Klauer (2014) conducted a critical test using a ranking paradigm that yielded results in line with common