Favorite and least favorite colors are different in the digital age: Now Black, Pink Yarrow, and Blazing Yellow are the favorite ones, before they were the traditional red-green-blue

Exploring color attractiveness and its relevance to fashion. Kodzoman Duje, Hladnik Ales, Pavko Cuden Alenka, Cok Vanja. Color Research & Application, June 28 2021. https://doi.org/10.1002/col.22705

Abstract: Many studies have been conducted on the phenomenon of color preference, with the aim of identifying the key color preferences. Most of the previous studies have been placing blue in the most preferred position and green-yellow in the least preferred position. This study was conducted online and aims to showcase new color preference trends in the digital age. The colors selected for this study were based on the colors most frequently mentioned in previous color studies. Here, we show an evaluation using 14 Pantone colors as stimuli on the sample of (N = 146) participants based on pairwise adjectives (attractive-unattractive). Principal component analysis and other multivariate statistics were used to examine participants' color attractiveness. In addition, gender and age were examined to determine if they had an impact on color attractiveness ratings. Results show that participants tend to prefer distinctive colors (black, pink, yellow), but there are slight differences in preferences that could be related to the influence of gender and age.

5 CONCLUSION

This study examined color preferences in relation to attractiveness across all decades of the 20th century. Both ends of the preference spectrum (unattractive and attractive) were measured, and (N = 146) subjects were used. The study was conducted online with the goal of revealing color preference trends in the digital age. The following conclusions were indicated in the results, and can be used to guide future research:

• Three most unattractive colors were: Caramel Cafe (brown), Desert Sage (gray), and Sulfur Spring (green-yellow). These results are consistent with the findings of previous studies showing that we are repelled by colors associated with negative connotations because of experiences we have had with them.
• Three most attractive colors were: Black, Pink Yarrow, and Blazing Yellow. These results did not replicate previous findings, but provided new findings in the literature. Subjects did not report that their most preferred color combination matched those found in the literature (blue, red, or green). This is because the stability of preferences depends on the time period and era we live in—all influenced by age, gender, and likely education.
• Some differences in color perception were found depending on the age of the respondent. We found a statistically significant age difference in relation to Black, Caramel Cafe, and Ultra Violet. Caramel Cafe and Ultra Violet were perceived as the most attractive colors by far in the 45 to 54 age group, while the same age group rated black as the least attractive.
• Some differences were also found between the two genders in color preference. The study found statistically significant gender differences in relation to yellow, white and green-yellow. All three colors were perceived as more attractive by women than by men.
• Results from our study show that chromatic colors have been perceived as more attractive than achromatic, with exception for black.

Limitation of our study is that not all colors were included. Our results are limited to exploring attractiveness of colors that are defined to be trendy in season autumn/winter 2020/2021 in the fashion industry. Future research should focus more on the development of new technologies and digital influences regarding color preferences and their effects. Current sustainable ways of thinking should also be considered as it is evident that color preference trends are shifting due to positive sustainability trends.

Hadza with greater exposure to other cultures (schooling or participating in the market economy) shared more preferentially with campmates they ranked higher on generosity; the others showed no preference to sharing with generous campmates

Hadza hunter-gatherers with greater exposure to other cultures preferentially share with generous campmates. Kristopher M Smith. Human Behavior & Evolution Society HBES 2021, Jun-Jul 2021. https://osf.io/p9kmt

Abstract: Researchers hypothesize that we have an evolved partner choice psychology that tracks the cooperative reputations of others and motivates us to compete for access to cooperative partners, such as by sharing more with them. However, recent models and evidence suggest cultural institutions shape this partner choice psychology. Here we test Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania similarly share more with people perceived as cooperators and whether this is moderated by exposure to other cultures. Ninety-two Hadza ranked eight of their campmates on generosity and foraging ability and then played a game in which they could direct finite resources to those campmates. We found that Hadza with greater exposure to other cultures, such as via schooling or participating in the market economy, shared more preferentially with campmates they ranked higher on generosity, whereas Hadza with lower exposure showed no preference to sharing with generous campmates. However, this moderating effect was specific to generosity—regardless of exposure, Hadza did not share more preferentially with campmates ranked higher on foraging ability. These results suggest that cultural institutions shape Hadza partner choice psychology.

Hedonism is defined as valuing the personal experience of pleasure and comfort as a guiding principle in one’s life; There is no Temporal Relationship Between Hedonic Values And Life Satisfaction

There is no Temporal Relationship Between Hedonic Values And Life Satisfaction: A Longitudinal Study Spanning 13 Years. Mohsen Joshanloo. Journal of Research in Personality, June 29 2021, 104125. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2021.104125

Highlights

• The present study used a Dutch sample collected across 5 waves over 13 years.

• There is no longitudinal relationship between hedonism and life satisfaction.

• Hedonism declines over time.

Abstract: Hedonism is defined as valuing the personal experience of pleasure and comfort as a guiding principle in one’s life. Cross-sectional research shows null or weak positive associations between hedonism and life satisfaction. To examine the longitudinal associations between hedonism and life satisfaction, the present study used a nationally representative sample of Dutch adults (N = 7,199), collected across 5 waves during about 13 years. The lagged within-person associations between the 2 variables indicated that hedonism and life satisfaction are not longitudinally linked. The results also showed that whereas hedonism steadily decreased over time, life satisfaction showed a quadratic trend over the course of the study.

Keywords: hedonismlife satisfactionlongitudinalRI-CLPMgrowth

Sexual Language Use in U.S. College Students: Few terms were perceived as degrading or aggressive today (unlike 20 years ago); students believe that societal changes (sex education & #MeToo) are responsible for changes

Sexual Language Use in U.S. College Students Across Twenty Years. Sarah K. Murnen, Paige E. Bullock, Eleanor J. Tetreault, Sydney A. Matteson & Lauren Redman. Archives of Sexual Behavior, Jun 28 2021. https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-021-02022-8

Abstract: Study 1: Students (N = 256 women, 129 men, and 13 nonbinary individuals, 61.8% heterosexual) from the same college campus studied 20 years ago (Murnen, 2000) reported on terms they used to refer to male genitals, female genitals, and “having sex” either within the context of an intimate partnership, talking with friends of their gender, or talking with friends in a mixed-gender group. Terms for genitals were coded as degrading or not, and terms for sex as aggressive or not, based on the previous study. Whereas in the past almost three-quarters of men used a degrading term for female genitals, that amount decreased to about one-quarter in the present sample. On the other hand, among women there was a significant increase in the use of a degrading term for women’s genitals in the intimate partner context, particularly among sexual minority women. Degrading and aggressive language use was predicted by pornography use and endorsement of gender stereotyped sexual attitudes. Study 2: Interpretations of sexual terms were studied among 29 sexual minority women, 81 heterosexual women, 16 sexual minority men, and 54 heterosexual men. We found that few terms were perceived as degrading or aggressive today (unlike 20 years ago) and that students believe that societal changes such as sexual education and the #MeToo movement were perceived as responsible for changes in sexual language use.

Researchers seem surprised... Image Recognition Systems: Images of women received three times more annotations related to physical appearance; women in images are recognized at substantially lower rates in comparison with men

Schwemmer, Carsten, Carly Knight, Emily Bello-Pardo, Stan Oklobdzija, Martijn Schoonvelde, and Jeffrey W. Lockhart. 2018. “Diagnosing Gender Bias in Image Recognition Systems.” SocArXiv. September 21. doi:10.1177/2378023120967171

Abstract: Image recognition systems offer the promise to learn from images at scale without requiring expert knowledge. However, past research suggests that machine learning systems often produce biased output. In this article, we evaluate potential gender biases of commercial image recognition platforms using photographs of U.S. members of Congress and a large number of Twitter images posted by these politicians. Our crowdsourced validation shows that commercial image recognition systems can produce labels that are correct and biased at the same time as they selectively report a subset of many possible true labels. We find that images of women received three times more annotations related to physical appearance. Moreover, women in images are recognized at substantially lower rates in comparison with men. We discuss how encoded biases such as these affect the visibility of women, reinforce harmful gender stereotypes, and limit the validity of the insights that can be gathered from such data.

Why Has Personality Psychology Played an Outsized Role in the Credibility Revolution?

Atherton, Olivia E., PhD, Joanne M. Chung, Kelci Harris, Julia M. Rohrer, David M. Condon, Felix Cheung, Simine Vazire, et al. 2021. “Why Has Personality Psychology Played an Outsized Role in the Credibility Revolution?” PsyArXiv. June 28. doi:10.31234/osf.io/h45yn

Abstract: Personality is not the most popular subfield of psychology. But, in one way or another, personality psychologists have played an outsized role in the ongoing “credibility revolution” in psychology. Not only have individual personality psychologists taken on visible roles in the movement, but our field’s practices and norms have now become models for other fields to emulate (or, for those who share Baumeister’s (2016) skeptical view of the consequences of increasing rigor, a model for what to avoid). In this article we discuss some unique features of our field that may have placed us in an ideal position to be leaders in this movement. We do so from a subjective perspective, describing our impressions and opinions about possible explanations for personality psychology’s disproportionate role in the credibility revolution. We also discuss some ways in which personality psychology remains less-than-optimal, and how we can address these flaws.

Infants look longer at impossible or unlikely events than at possible events: Stable individual differences in infants’ responses to violations of intuitive physics

Stable individual differences in infants’ responses to violations of intuitive physics. Jasmin Perez and Lisa Feigenson. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences July 6, 2021 118 (27) e2103805118; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2103805118

Abstract: Infants look longer at impossible or unlikely events than at possible events. While these responses to expectancy violations have been critical for understanding early cognition, interpreting them is challenging because infants’ responses are highly variable. This variability has been treated as an unavoidable nuisance inherent to infant research. Here we asked whether the variability contains signal in addition to noise: namely, whether some infants show consistently stronger responses to expectancy violations than others. Infants watched two unrelated physical events 6 mo apart; these events culminated in either an impossible or an expected outcome. We found that infants who exhibited the strongest looking response to an impossible event at 11 mo also exhibited the strongest response to an entirely different impossible event at 17 mo. Furthermore, violation-of-expectation responses in infancy predicted children’s explanation-based curiosity at 3 y old. In contrast, there was no longitudinal relation between infants’ responses to events with expected outcomes at 11 and 17 mo, nor any link with later curiosity; hence, infants’ responses do not merely reflect individual differences in attention but are specific to expectancy violations. Some children are better than others at detecting prediction errors—a trait that may be linked to later cognitive abilities.

Keywords: cognitive developmentinfantspredictionsurpriseindividual differences

Divisions of labor within & between pathways of the human immunological & central nervous systems dictate without conscious perception the allocation of energy into somatic growth, somatic maintenance, reproduction, & social capital

The Human Colony: Origins and Function. Magdalena Hurtado. Human Behavior & Evolution Society HBES 2021, Jun-Jul 2021. https://www.hbes.com/hbes-2021-hurtado/

The “Human Colony” is a term I use to refer to the universal blueprint of the inputs, flows, and outputs of the built environments that humans invent. The Human Colony’s blueprint is universal and adaptable, taking on different dynamics as it changed the very conditions it started from 100,000 years ago in Africa, and as it adapted to the conditions it created anew since that time. The blueprint consists of observable physical and behavioral extensions of fertility- and survival-work modules and the tacit rules that produce them. These tacit rules give life to the Human Colony, but what are they, and what function do they serve? There are more rules than we can ever know, so I looked for the essential few. They are divisions of labor working together in different sub-systems of the Colony. Susceptibility-based divisions of labor dictate individuals’ fertility and survival work schedules. Divisions of labor within and between pathways of the human immunological and central nervous systems dictate without conscious perception the allocation of energy into somatic growth, somatic maintenance, reproduction, and social capital. Taken together, the Human Colony’s blueprint and tacit rules serve one function: to improve human population health through horizontal and vertical replication of its sub-systems. The most important implication of the Human Colony paradigm for the 21st Century is that the production of population health is the centerpiece of our species’ natural history and expansion. Ignoring this conclusion, if accurate, while increasing our reliance on artificial intelligence within the narrow scope of public health disciplines may stymie the hope of a better life for all.

Male biathletes improve their performance in conditioning task (skiing) but deteriorate in coordination task (shooting) in the presence of an audience; female athletes show the reverse pattern

Selection bias in social facilitation theory? Audience effects on elite biathletes' performance are gender-specific. Amelie Heinricha et al. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, Volume 55, July 2021, 101943. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2021.101943

Highlights

• Social facilitation effects in elite biathlon are task- and gender-specific

• Male biathletes improve their performance in conditioning task (skiing) but deteriorate in coordination task (shooting) in the presence of an audience; female athletes show the reverse pattern

• Sample selection bias in past research (<1/3 female) may explain the results, thereby questioning the generalizability of social facilitation theory

Abstract: Social facilitation proves robust in conditioning tasks (e.g., running), yet in coordination tasks (e.g., rifle-shooting) some studies report performance deterioration. Recent Biathlon World Cup data offered the unique opportunity to test this task-specificity (conditioning = cross country skiing, coordination = rifle-shooting). Audience restrictions due to COVID-19 allowed to compare athletes' performance in the absence (2020) and presence (season 2018/2019) of an audience. Gender-specific regulations (e.g., course length) necessitated the inclusion of gender as additional factor. Results of 83 (sprint competition) and 34 (mass start competition) biathletes revealed that task-specific social facilitation is moderated by gender: In the presence of an audience male biathletes showed performance improvements in the conditioning task and performance deteriorations in the coordination task; female biathletes showed the reverse pattern. This gender dependency may have gone unnoticed in the past due to sample selection bias (<1/3 female), thereby questioning the generalizability of social facilitation theory.

Keywords: Social facilitationMotor performancePresence of othersRifle shootingCross country skiing

Why Do People Watch Porn? An Evolutionary Perspective on the Reasons for Pornography Consumption

Why Do People Watch Porn? An Evolutionary Perspective on the Reasons for Pornography Consumption. Vlad Burtaverde et al. Evolutionary Psychology, June 28, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/14747049211028798

Abstract: We investigated the reasons for pornography consumption using a bottom-up approach (i.e., open-ended questionnaire) and proposed that those reasons would reflect a short-term mating orientation of individuals that watch pornography and a strategy that should help them to attract or maintain potential mates easier (i.e., a fitness increasing strategies) by enhancing their sexual knowledge through pornography watching. In Study 1 (N = 276), relying on an open-ended questionnaire and a content analysis, we identified 78 reasons for why people claim to consume pornography. In Study 2 (N = 322), we grouped those reasons into categories using a series of factor analyses, resulting in four dimensions of reasons for watching pornography: (1) increased sex drive, (2) enhancing sexual performance, (3) social and instrumental reasons, and (4) lack of relational and emotional skills. The content of these factors supported the idea that the reasons for consuming pornography are reflections of a short-term mating orientation and a way to enhance their sexual knowledge and performance. Individuals with higher scores on the dimensions of reasons for pornography consumptions had higher scores on the Dark Triad traits and sociosexuality, mate-value and slow life history strategies (in the case of enhancing sexual performance dimension). In Study 3 (N = 327), we tested to what extent the factorial structure of the reasons for pornography consumption can be confirmed via Confirmatory factor analysis and tested the convergent validity of the reasons to consume pornography.

Keywords: pornography consumption, evolutionary psychology, dark triad traits, sex differences, sociosexuality

General Discussion

In this study, we examined the self-reported reasons people consume pornography, as well as the personality correlates of those reason. In Study 1, we identified 78 reasons for watching pornography that we clustered in four broad dimensions in Study 2: increased sex drive, enhancing sexual performance, social and instrumental reasons, and lack of relational and emotional skills. These dimensions were associated with individual differences in the Dark Triad traits, sociosexuality, mate value, and life history strategies. Apart from “enhancing sexual performance”, men endorsed the reasons for pornography consumption more strongly. Finally, psychopathy mediated the relationship between sex and several reasons to consume pornography. In Study 3, we confirmed the factorial structure of the reasons to watch pornography using Confirmatory factor analysis, obtaining a final version of the questionnaire, consisting of 27 items. Also, we inspected the convergennt validity of the questionnaire, showing that the four dimensions are related to sexual disgust and sexual fantasies.

Regarding the identified reasons to watch pornography, our findings are partially aligned with other studies. Some of the most important reasons to consume pornography identified in other research include sexual exploration and learning about sexual health, coping, pleasure and enhancing offline sexuality (e.g., comfort when in a bad mood), emotional avoidance, and social reasons (Bolshinsky & Gelkopf, 2019; Franc et al., 2018; Hare et al., 2015; Reid et al., 2011). As we relied on an a bottom-up approach (i.e., open-ended questions), while other studies used a top-down approach that relied on content specified a priori, the similarity of the findings suggests a high degree of universality of the reasons for pornography consumption.

We contend that researchers could benefit from an evolutionary framework to better understand why people consume pornography. As such, we considered that the identified reasons could be understood as a reflection of a short-term mating orientation (e.g., high sociosexuality) and a fitness increasing strategy to enhance the probability of attracting a mate, and, implicitly, the probability of reproducing. We can see that the first identified dimension of pornography consumption reasons (i.e., sex drive) was composed of items such as “because sexual thoughts come to my mind”, and “for the pleasure of seeing other people’s bodies”. Individuals with high scores on this dimension had high levels of the Dark Triad traits and were more interested in casual sex (i.e., high sociosexuality) sociosexuality. Therefore, considering the content of this dimension and its correlates, we can assume that it reflects a short-term mating orientation. Individuals characterized by short-term mating may choose to engage in watching pornography to satisfy their increased sex drive, in contexts and situations when they cannot engage in casual sex. As such, the increased sex drive dimension of reasons for watching pornography should not be understood as an adaptation, but as a by-product that clusters around adaptations such as short-term mating orientation.

The second dimension of the reasons for watching pornography was enhancing sexual performance. We argued that, besides a reflection of a short-term mating orientation, reasons to watch pornography might be understood as a tactic that enhances the probability of attracting a mate, and, implicitly, the probability of reproducing. This second dimension was represented by items such as “to learn new sex positions” and “to understand the sexual pleasures of people of the opposite sex, being called “enhancing sexual performance.” Individuals high on this dimension had higher scores on the Dark Triad traits and sociosexuality, but, more interestingly, on mate value and slow life history strategy. Therefore, we can argue that people who perceive themselves as having high mate value and who are characterized by a slow life history strategy (i.e., high-K)—which is characterized by preferences for long-term mating—try to perfect their sexual skills through gathering new knowledge from pornographic movies. Doing so may enable them to better signal their “value” to their partners during sexual intercourse, meaning that they pay attention to the first impression they make on new mates, as the first impression is important in human relationships (Harris & Garris, 2008).

The third dimension of the reasons for pornography consumption was represented by items like “because all my friends are watching”, and “I paint nudes, and it is my source of inspiration”; we called this dimension “social and instrumental reasons”. Individuals with high scores on this dimension also had high levels of Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sociosexuality. It seems that this category of reasons for watching pornography reflects reasons that refer to watching pornography mainly because of seeking the acceptance of social groups, such as friends. This may be explained by the fact that watching pornography is a common habit (Hald, 2006). It is well known that young people (such as those from our samples) place great importance in their reputation and social acceptance more than older people (Marshall, 2001) and watching pornography may facilitate social approval among peers, especially college-aged ones.

The fourth factor of the reasons for pornography consumption (i.e., lack of relational and emotional skills) was composed of items like “due to the absence of a romantic relationship” and “it helps me drive away from my stressful thoughts”. People high on this dimension had lower scores on Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sociosexuality. The reasons encompassed by this factor suggest that individuals who score high on them watch pornography to regulate their mood and deal with negative emotions. This is congruent with other findings that showed that one of the reasons for pornography consumption is mood regulation (e.g., comforting when in a bad mood; Franc et al., 2018). It seems that people use pornography to alleviate negative emotions, which may be explained by the fact that pornography consumption induces psychological moods and emotions (e.g., pleasure, satisfaction) as those elicited during casual sex and sexual intercourse (Hald & Malamuth, 2008).

We found that men had higher scores on the dimensions of reasons for pornography consumption, except for the of enhancing sexual performance. That was to be expected, as men usually have a higher sex drive and more sexual fantasies than women (Baughman et al., 2014), being more oriented to short-term mating (Jonason et al., 2009). The fact that there were no sex differences on the dimension enhancing sexual performance is congruent with the idea that both men and women struggle with skills for mate retention (Apostolou, 2007). In traditional societies, parents used to choose the partners for their children (Apostolou et al., 2018). Therefore, both men and women engage in strategies to increase their fitness to attract mates and enhancing their sexual knowledge and performance, is one of them.

Psychopathy mediated the relationship between sex and the reasons to consume pornography (excepting the dimension of enhancing sexual performance, as there were no sex differences). This may be because men are more interested in casual sex than women (Jonason et al., 2009), have a wider array of sexual fantasies (Baughman et al., 2014), and men high on psychopathy have frequent sexual fantasies (Baughman et al., 2014), and may use pornography to satisfy this need. Therefore, psychopathy represents an explicative mechanism of the indirect relationship between sex and the reasons to consume pornography.

The findings of this research materialized on a psychometric measure that should be useful in assessing the reasons for pornography consumption in both research and practice settings, showing very good psychometric properties. The measure was developed using both qualitative and quantitative approach which should maximize the probability of tapping the most important reasons for pornography consumption, enhancing the internal validity of future research.

Limitations and Conclusions

Even though this research is, to our knowledge, the first to propose an evolutionary perspective on the reasons for watching pornography, it has some important limitations. First, our samples consisted mostly of young individuals, who are, in general, more interested, but less experienced in sex than older people (Buckingham & Bragg, 2004). Second, our samples consisted mostly of women. Because research has consistently shown that men seem to be more interested in sex than women (e.g., Jonason et al., 2009), further studies should use more balanced samples in terms of sex ratio when examining these factors. Third, we relied on non-probabilistic convenience samples and our findings are sample-dependent (e.g., WE.I.R.D. participants; Henrich et al., 2010) which may affect the generalizability of the research. Although many studies in psychology use convenience student samples, future studies should include more heterogeneous participants to increase the generalizability of the findings.

Despite these limitations, we showed that the reasons for pornography consumption are varied and can be understood from an evolutionary perspective. They represent reflections of a short-term mating orientation and fitness-increasing strategies—tactics that enhance the probability of maintaining a mate. We also proposed a psychometric measure for researchers and practitioners interested in pornography consumption reasons.

Vietnam is spending in education a fraction of what others spend and results are very good; the reason of this success, they told us, was: ‘because they wanted it’

Lant Pritchett in conversation with Ann Bernstein. The Centre for Development and Enterprise, Jun 2021. https://www.cde.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Lant-Pritchett-in-conversation-with-Ann-Bernstein.pdf

Ann Bernstein: From your knowledge of India and Indonesia, what are the core causes of their lack of educational progress? These are places with highly qualified civil servants and, at least in India’s case, a democratic government. How do you see this problem? How do we get out of this trap? 

Lant Pritchett: I’m head of this very large research project called RISE and we’re spending millions of dollars to find out the answer to that question. One of the countries where education improvements have been dramatic is Vietnam. At a tiny fraction of the spending in most countries – including South Africa – Vietnam is achieving OECD levels of learning. When we asked our Vietnam team why the country has produced this amazing success, they told us: ‘because they wanted it’.  On one level, that seems silly; on another level, it is the key. Unless, as a society, you agree on a set of achievable objectives and actually act in a way that reveals that you really want those objectives, you cannot achieve anything.

So, let me talk briefly about the two different experiences of India and Indonesia, because I think they both illustrate ways you can go wrong.

India never changed its mind about having a selection system rather than an education system. A selection system is where you put all children in a classroom, but provide a poor or indifferent environment for learning, and see what happens. The students that learn in that environment must be brilliant. As for those who do not learn, teachers will say they must be the type of children who cannot learn. India took that option because they expected that 2-3% of the population would be an educated elite, and that would be good enough. And so, they committed themselves to selection rather than education. Things will only change once they fundamentally change their ideas, which they are hopefully in the process of doing now.

Indonesia was different. They decided to provide a standardised product for all learners at a fairly low level, and they reached a decent level of learning where most kids learned some basics. In fact, they were superior to India. Many people think of India as doing better, but India does worse for the average person while also producing a smart elite whose members sometime win a Nobel Prize. Indonesia did far better at covering the basics for everyone as a way of building national unity around a common language. But they never really provoked themselves to go further. Now, they’re stuck at this low-level equilibrium of mediocrity, and they haven’t been able to budge past it in spite of making an important transition to democracy.

The fundamental issue is commitment. Do we have a clear vision of what we expect every child to know and do? Is it a reasonable set of commitments? Can we actually achieve it with the resources we have and the teaching force we have, and what we know how to do? And are we really committed to achieving it? Are we going to hold ourselves to account for achieving the reasonable and important objectives we’ve set? Once you get that right, there are some other things that need to happen, but those are minor details.

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Very sensible, progressive, well-intentioned, etc., but do we really know? We don't, the successes are not replicable. To me, there is no known "fundamental issue," "key," anything that will make success happen.

Ostensibly non-political objects and activities are becoming “partisan”; there is accordingly talk of a cultural divide between latte-drinking, Volvo-driving liberals & NASCAR-watching, truck-driving conservatives

Cued by Culture: Political Imagery and Partisan Evaluations. Dan Hiaeshutter-Rice, Fabian G. Neuner & Stuart Soroka. Political Behavior, Jun 26 2021. https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-021-09726-6

Abstract: There is a popular perception that politics is increasingly permeating the everyday lives of Americans. Ostensibly non-political objects and activities are becoming “partisan,” and there is accordingly talk of a cultural divide between Latte-drinking, Volvo-driving Liberals and NASCAR-watching, truck-driving Conservatives. This study examines the extent to which this perception is accurate. We first find that survey respondents have no trouble assigning partisan leaning to non-political activities and objects. We then explore whether voters use such non-political objects as heuristics in candidate evaluations. We show that exposure to images of candidates featuring such objects can affect perceptions of candidates’ partisanship, but that these cues only very rarely shift perceptions in the face of clear policy information. These findings have important implications for understanding the way that citizens evaluate politics in changing political and media environments.

People rely on photos as memory cues as a means to mitigate the cognitive limitations in encoding, storing, and retrieving experiences, & sometimes treat cameras as an external memory device, offloading their memories onto the camera

Henkel, L. A., Nash, R. A., & Paton, J. A. (2021). “Say cheese!”: How taking and viewing photos can shape memory and cognition. In S. M. Lane & P. Atchley (Eds.), Human capacity in the attention economy (pp. 103–133). American Psychological Association, Jun 2021. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000208-006

Abstract: This chapter explores attention economics in the context of how taking and viewing photos impacts memory and cognition. It explores the interplay between attention and memory in the context of taking and viewing photos. People rely on photos as memory cues as a means to mitigate the cognitive limitations in encoding, storing, and retrieving their experiences. The chapter discusses research that suggests that because of these limitations in attentional and cognitive resources, people sometimes treat cameras as an external memory device—in essence, offloading their memories onto the camera. It explores both the positive and negative consequences for memory of taking and viewing photos by outlining studies of what happens when we divide our attention between experiencing events and documenting them with a camera, and outlining studies on the attentional and memory demands created by the ensuing accumulation of photos.

From 2018... Adult entertainment establishments in NY City decrease daily sex crime between 7% & 13% with no effect on other types of crimes or in other precints; potential sex offenders become customers of the entertainment establishments

The Effects of Adult Entertainment Establishments on Sex Crime: Evidence from New York City. Riccardo Ciacci, Maria Micaela Sviatschi. Princeton Univ, Jun 2018. https://economics.princeton.edu/working-papers/the-effects-of-adult-entertainment-establishments-on-sex-crime-evidence-from-new-york-city/

Abstract: This paper studies how adult entertainment establishments affect sex crime. We build a daily panel that combines the exact location of non-reported sex crimes with the day of opening and exact location of adult entertainment establishments in New York City. We find that these businesses decrease daily sex crime between 7% and 13% in the precinct with no effect on other types of crimes. The results imply that the reduction is mostly driven by potential sex offenders that are now customers of the adult entertainment establishments. We also rule out other mechanisms such as an increase in the number of police officers; a reduction on the number of street prostitution and a possible reduction of potential victims in areas where these businesses opened. The effects are robust to using alternative measures of sex crimes.

Keywords: Sex crimes, rape, adult entertainment establishments, substitute services

JEL codes: I18, J16, J47, K14, K42

From 2018... The Effects of Adult Entertainment Establishments on Sex Crime

Brain volumetric changes in the general population following the COVID-19 outbreak and lockdown: The intense experience induced transient volumetric changes in brain regions commonly associated with stress & anxiety

Brain volumetric changes in the general population following the COVID-19 outbreak and lockdown. Tom Salomon et al. NeuroImage, June 26 2021, 118311. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.118311

Abstract: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak introduced unprecedented health-risks, as well as pressure on the economy, society, and psychological well-being due to the response to the outbreak. In a preregistered study, we hypothesized that the intense experience of the outbreak potentially induced stress-related brain modifications in the healthy population, not infected with the virus. We examined volumetric changes in 50 participants who underwent MRI scans before and after the COVID-19 outbreak and lockdown in Israel. Their scans were compared with those of 50 control participants who were scanned twice prior to the pandemic. Following COVID-19 outbreak and lockdown, the test group participants uniquely showed volumetric increases in bilateral amygdalae, putamen, and the anterior temporal cortices. Changes in the amygdalae diminished as time elapsed from lockdown relief, suggesting that the intense experience associated with the pandemic induced transient volumetric changes in brain regions commonly associated with stress and anxiety. The current work utilizes a rare opportunity for real-life natural experiment, showing evidence for brain plasticity following the COVID-19 global pandemic. These findings have broad implications, relevant both for the scientific community as well as the general public.

3. Discussion

Our study demonstrates that volumetric change patterns in the brain occurred following the COVID-19 initial outbreak period and restrictions in a sample of healthy participants, who were not somatically affected by the pandemic. While previous studies demonstrated brain plasticity using T1-weighted MRI following planned interventions (Maguire et al., 2000, Jung et al., 2013, Draganski et al., 2004), the current work outstands in its unique demonstration of stark structural brain plasticity following a major real-life event.

Our findings show neural changes that were not caused directly due to COVID-19 infection, but rather related to the societal effect, further resonating the mental contagiousness aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic (Valenzano et al., 2020). We show volumetric increase in gray matter in the amygdalae, putamen, and ventral anterior temporal cortices. The changes in the amygdalae showed a temporal-dependent effect, related to the time elapsed from lockdown but not the duration from the baseline scan. It should be noted that although lockdown restrictions had initially reduced infection rates in Israel, just one month after the lockdown was lifted, the number of infected cases started to rise again and reached higher number of active infected cases by the end of data collection, compared with the peak numbers during the actual lockdown period (approximately 2,000 daily new cases by the end of July versus under 750 new daily cases during the peak of the lockdown period in April (Israel Ministry of Health 2020), see detailed timeline in the methods section and Figure 4). This suggests that the effects observed in the current study are less likely to be attributed to the concrete health risks of contracting the virus, but rather to the first wave of the outbreak, characterized with perceived uncertainty and substantial unexpected changes in everyday life.

Figure 4. Study timeline and outbreak data

On February 21st, 2020, the first COVID-19 case in Israel was recorded. Daily new cases were smoothed using 7-days moving average. Data were retrieved and modified based on the Israeli Ministry of Health reports (Israel Ministry of Health 2020, Max et al., 2020). A lockdown was issued on March 25th, which was gradually released until the removal of the 100-meter restriction on May 1st, marking lockdown onset and relief, respectively (shorter vertical dashed line). MRI data of the test group were collected between May 10th to July 29th (longer vertical dashed line). Red bars on top represent the number of participants scanned for the study each day.

Examining the contribution of study features such as volumetric measurements at baseline, the initial study, and scan angle, revealed that the volumetric change effects in the bilateral amygdalae and temporal cortical ROIs, were mostly stable. Although some confirmatory analysis with confounding covariates slightly reduced the significance of the group-time interaction effect, this decrease was relatively small (with significant results before FDR correction), and more importantly, the confounding factor were not significant in any of the models. Thus, it is unlikely that a confound related to the study design could account for the volumetric change effect. Changing the analysis pipeline from surface-based to voxel-based morphometry, resulted in non-significant effect in the Putamen; thus, suggesting that the effect in these nuclei might be susceptible to differences in analysis pipeline. Putatively, the results in these regions change due to different segmentation of the nuclei, registration or smoothing. Therefore, conclusions regarding volumetric change in the Putamen should be more reserved.

The current literature regarding volumetric changes in the amygdala following stressful events, and especially real-life events, is quite limited. Some studies found evidence in agreement with our results, such as one work showing decreased amygdala volume was associated with greater stress reduction following mindfulness training (Hölzel et al., 2009); while others found evidence in the opposite direction, such as one study which found smaller amygdala volumes within participants who were in closer proximity to the World Trade Center during 9/11 events (Ganzel et al., 2008), and overall meta-analyses approach often showing contradicting evidence regarding amygdala volumetric difference within population associated with stress such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and generalized stress disorder (O'Doherty et al., 2015, Duval et al., 2015). Our results, showing a gradual decline of the volumetric change effect as a function of TFL, could provide a potential insight into these inconclusive patterns. It is possible that without time-locking to a strong external event, volumetric change effect would be more difficult to detect. This point highlights the uniqueness of our study that included a repeated session design within with a real-world event.

The current study was in many aspects unplanned; therefore, we are left with only partial answers as to which specific behavioral or cognitive impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak led to the neural changes observed in the healthy participants that took part in our study. The involvement of the amygdala may suggest that stress and anxiety could be the source of the observed phenomenon, due to its well-recorded functional and structural associations (Ganzel et al., 2008, Hölzel et al., 2009, Rogers et al., 2009, Schienle et al., 2011, Mochcovitch et al., 2014, Bryant et al., 2008, Stevens et al., 2017). Nevertheless, it is hard to draw clear conclusions as many aspects of life have changed in this time period, and could have potentially affected different regions in the brain – from limiting social interactions, increased financial stress, changes in physical activity, work routine, and many more. The limited behavioral data collected in the current study did not provide a strong connection to the imaging results, and thus future work could try to better address the complex brain-behavioral associations in this real-life experience.

Furthermore, as our study only examined T1-weighted anatomical scans, we are limited in our scope to gross-anatomy macroscale changes. Imaging research using additional imaging methods such as diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and functional MRI (fMRI), showed that neural plasticity processes are often characterized by changes of microstructural scale, commonly expressed in the white matter (Sagi et al., 2012, Scholz et al., 2009, Sampaio-Baptista et al., 2013, Steele and Zatorre, 2018) and functional neural activity (Brodt et al., 2018), which were not examined here. Further research combining both more extensive behavioral and imaging measurements might be able to link brain modification with specific behavioral manifestations of COVID-19 outbreak.

Despite these limitations, our findings show that healthy young adults, with no records of mental health issues, were deeply affected by the outbreak of COVID-19. These findings are both ground-breaking in showing brain plasticity of subcortical regions following real-life external event, as well as in revealing an additional impact of the COVID-19 on the well-being of the general public. Our results emphasize the impact of widescale societal changes and suggest that when forming such changes, one should take into consideration the indirect impact on the general well-being of the population, alongside the efficacy of the societal changes.

Motivations—in particular, a need to belong—may be foundational for the development of social essentialism; children consider intentional behaviors performed by in-group members as normative

A Motivational Perspective on the Development of Social Essentialism. Gil Diesendruck. Current Directions in Psychological Science, January 20, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721420980724

Abstract: The tendency to view groups as constituting essentially different categories emerges early in development. To date, most attempts at understanding the origins of this tendency have focused on cognitive processes. Drawing from social-psychological and evolutionary theory, I propose that motivations—in particular, a need to belong—may be foundational for the development of social essentialism. I review evidence indicating that this perspective not only is developmentally plausible but also may explain children’s tendency to consider intentional behaviors performed by in-group members as normative.

Keywords: development, essentialism, motivations, social groups

In the Beginning, There Were “Us”

By 4 to 5 years of age, children’s intergroup attitudes are influenced by perceived power differences between groups. For instance, in a racially diverse sample of South African children, awareness of the status difference between Blacks and Whites was positively correlated with children’s degree of pro-White preference (Olson et al., 2012). Evidently, in order for intergroup power differences to affect children’s tendency to essentialize social groups, children first need to differentiate between groups to which they belong from those they do not.

An awareness of social-group identity arguably takes years to congeal (Nesdale, 2004). This process may be expedited by contextual factors, such as living in a society with salient intergroup conflicts, in which schools (Deeb et al., 2011) or parents (Segall et al., 2015) may transmit to children the crucial group identities constituting their society. Thus, by the time they are 5 to 6 years old, their budding social identity may already impact their essentializing tendencies.

I propose that yet a third type of motivation that might be particularly effective for propelling social essentialism in the early years is the evolutionarily basic need to belong (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). It might take a few years for young children to map the social categories instituted by their culture and then figure out their power relations. But from earlier on, they need to find out whom they can trust for providing them sustenance, protection, and cultural knowledge (Pietraszewski et al., 2014). They need to know whom they should affiliate with.

Indeed, recent work indicates that such an affiliative motivation seems to affect even infants’ social preferences and concepts. For instance, 18-month-olds were more likely to help others after being cued for affiliative interactions (Over & Carpenter, 2009), and 14-month-olds were more likely to imitate arbitrary actions modeled by a speaker of their language than those modeled by a speaker of a foreign language (Buttelmann et al., 2013). Furthermore, whereas 10-month-olds have been found to hold positive associations regarding individuals familiar to them on some dimension, they did not evince a negative association regarding individuals unfamiliar to them (Pun et al., 2018). In other words, affect was attached to the in-group proxy, not the out-group, suggesting the primacy of a positive motivation—for example, affiliation—as a driver of intergroup attitudes. Finally, exposing White 14-month-olds to brief videos of an affiliative interaction between two White actresses boosted infants’ subsequent racial (White vs. Black) categorization of women (Ferera et al., 2018).

The above studies expose a certain conundrum affecting young children’s social-group cognition. On the one hand, they have a bursting need to belong to a group; on the other, they are at a loss as to how to define and conceptualize the group (Liberman et al., 2017). I propose that this tension drives young children to reify cues they regularly observe in similar social partners. In other words, in their pursuit to feel safe in their belongingness to a group, young children will be drawn to construe such observable cues as proxies for essences. I propose that children do exactly that, treating people’s intentional actions as such proxies.

Children’s Pursuit of Our Essence

If group essences are permanent, mandatory, inherent, and exclusive characteristics of distinct groups and if intentional behaviors are to serve as proxies for such essences, then children should treat intentional behaviors as having the above characteristics. It turns out that they do.

First, from a young age, children expect various intentional actions—even arbitrary ones—to be mandatory and actively complain when others deviate from a modeled action (Schmidt & Rakoczy, 2018). In fact, children expect other people to replicate causally irrelevant intentional actions with high fidelity, and they themselves do so—a phenomenon described as overimitation (Hoehl et al., 2019).

Second, children seem to be particularly zealous in their normativization of group-related arbitrary actions (Roberts et al., 2017). For instance, Hindu 9-year-olds judged that only Hindus should conform to Hindu norms and only Muslims to Muslim norms (Srinivasan et al., 2019). In other words, children endorse behavioral norms in a group-bounded fashion. In fact, anthropological, correlational, and experimental studies indicate that participation in ritualistic conventional actions may be particularly effective for fostering group affiliation (Watson-Jones & Legare, 2016).

Third and finally, the above zealousness is most strongly manifest for in-group norms. Infants are selectively adamant about overimitating in-group models (Buttelmann et al., 2013), and young children are automatically biased to imitate in-group models (Essa et al., 2019). Moreover, children are particularly judgmental about in-group members’ violations of conventional norms (Schmidt et al., 2012), a tendency that increases with children’s developing expectations about the cohesiveness of their group (Killen et al., 2013).

In young children’s eyes, everything “we” do is done because that is who we are. Children’s normativization of group-bound intentional actions provides them assurances that they belong to a group that is stable, unique, and exclusive, in other words, an essentialist-like group.

Fictions with imaginary worlds should be more appealing for individuals higher in Openness to experience, for younger people, & be more successful in more economically developed societies

Why imaginary worlds? Exploratory preferences explain the cultural success of fictions with imaginary worlds in modern societies. Edgar Dubourg. Human Behavior & Evolution Society HBES 2021, Jun-Jul 2021. https://osf.io/bz26m Poster: https://osf.io/tw8fp/?pid=bz26m

Abstract: Imaginary worlds are one of the hallmarks of modern culture. They are present in many of the most successful fictions, be it in novels (e.g., Harry Potter), films (e.g., Star Wars), video games (e.g., The Legend of Zelda), graphic novels (e.g., One piece) and TV series (e.g., Game of Thrones). This phenomenon is global (e.g., the emergence of xuanhuan and xanxia genres in China), and massive (e.g., the worldwide success of Lord of the Ring). Why so much attention devoted to nonexistent worlds? We propose that imaginary worlds in fictions co-opt exploratory preferences. Imaginary worlds are fictional superstimuli that tap into the human’s evolved interest for unfamiliar and potentially rewarding environments. This hypothesis can explain the cultural success of specific artefacts, such as maps in fictions, and the cultural distribution of such fictions across time, space, and individuals. Notably, this hypothesis makes predictions that rely on previous research in psychological and behavioral sciences: 1) fictions with imaginary worlds should be more appealing for individuals higher in Openness to experience (because this Big Five personality trait is associated with exploratory preferences), 2) such fictions should be more attractive for younger people (because young people reap more reward from exploratory behaviors, thanks to parental investments, and are thus adaptively more motivated to explore) and 3) such fictions should be more successful in more economically developed societies (because affluent and safe ecologies lower the costs of exploration, and phenotypic plasticity thus promotes exploratory preferences). We successively tested these predictions with two large open-collaborative datasets, namely IMDb (N=85,855 films) and Wikidata (N=96,711 literary works), and with the Movie Personality Dataset, which aggregates averaged personality traits and demographic data from the Facebook myPersonality Database (N=3.5 million). We provide evidence that the appeal for imaginary worlds relies on our exploratory psychology.

Modern racial categorization may be a byproduct of a system designed for ancestral alliance detection; phenotype-based classifications are suppressed when valid cues of allegiance are made

A Sufficiency Test of the Alliance Hypothesis of Race. Daniel Conroy-Beam. Human Behavior & Evolution Society HBES 2021, Jun-Jul 2021. https://osf.io/4rqhs

Abstract: Racial categorization is a widespread phenomenon at the root of many of the most pressing problems in modern human life. These facts are peculiar from an evolutionary perspective given that racial categories as we understand them today are not biologically real and are evolutionarily novel inventions. The alliance hypothesis of race attempts to reconcile these facts by proposing that modern racial categorization is a byproduct of a system designed for ancestral alliance detection. Support for this hypothesis comes from studies demonstrating that redirecting coalitional psychology can suppress racial categorization. However, the capacity of coalitional psychology to generate racial categories from scratch is less clear. Here we use a series of agent-based models to provide a sufficiency test of the alliance hypothesis. We generate populations of agents that vary on arbitrary phenotypic dimensions and engage in cooperative interactions with one another. We show that the introduction of a coalitional psychology that attempts to detect patterns of allegiance based on available cues can hallucinate and then reify correlations between phenotype and allegiance, leading to the emergence of social groups that vary systematically by phenotype. This occurs even when phenotype is in reality distributed continuously and has no true connection to behavior. Furthermore, consistent with psychological evidence, such phenotypic classification is suppressed when valid cues of allegiance are made available. These models provide evidence that a coalitional psychology alone can be sufficient to create beliefs in phenotype-based social categories even when no such categories truly exist.

It is more permissible to harm a few animals to save a greater number of animals than to harm a few humans to save a greater number of humans, even when animals are described as having greater suffering capacity than some humans

Caviola, L., Kahane, G., Everett, J. A. C., Teperman, E., Savulescu, J., & Faber, N. S. (2021). Utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people? Harming animals and humans for the greater good. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 150(5), 1008–1039. Jun 2021. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000988

Abstract: Most people hold that it is wrong to sacrifice some humans to save a greater number of humans. Do people also think that it is wrong to sacrifice some animals to save a greater number of animals, or do they answer such questions about harm to animals by engaging in a utilitarian cost-benefit calculation? Across 10 studies (N = 4,662), using hypothetical and real-life sacrificial moral dilemmas, we found that participants considered it more permissible to harm a few animals to save a greater number of animals than to harm a few humans to save a greater number of humans. This was explained by a reduced general aversion to harm animals compared with humans, which was partly driven by participants perceiving animals to suffer less and to have lower cognitive capacity than humans. However, the effect persisted even in cases where animals were described as having greater suffering capacity and greater cognitive capacity than some humans, and even when participants felt more socially connected to animals than to humans. The reduced aversion to harming animals was thus also partly due to speciesism—the tendency to ascribe lower moral value to animals due to their species-membership alone. In sum, our studies show that deontological constraints against instrumental harm are not absolute but get weaker the less people morally value the respective entity. These constraints are strongest for humans, followed by dogs, chimpanzees, pigs, and finally inanimate objects.

The caution observed in medical decisions does not replicate in financial decisions with large amounts; in fact, risk-taking was accentuated for large amounts in the gain domain

Batteux, E., Ferguson, E., & Tunney, R. J. (2021). Do we become more cautious for others when large amounts of money are at stake? Experimental Psychology, 68(1), 32–40. Jun 2021. https://doi.org/10.1027/1618-3169/a000508

Abstract: A considerable proportion of financial decisions are made by agents acting on behalf of other people. Although people are more cautious for others when making medical decisions, this does not seem to be the case for economic decisions. However, studies with large amounts of money are particularly absent from the literature, which precludes a clear comparison to studies in the medical domain. To address this gap, we investigated the effect of outcome magnitude in two experiments where participants made choices between safe and risky options. Decision-makers were not more cautious for others over large amounts. In fact, risk-taking was accentuated for large amounts in the gain domain. We did not find self-other differences in the loss domain for either outcome magnitude. This suggests that the caution observed in medical decisions does not replicate in financial decisions with large amounts, or at least not in the same way. These results echo the concerns that have been raised about excessive risk-taking by financial agents.

Toddlers from an indigenous people were considerably less likely to recognize themselves in the mirror, possibly due to lack of being imitated by their mothers

Cebioğlu, S., & Broesch, T. (2021). Explaining cross-cultural variation in mirror self-recognition: New insights into the ontogeny of objective self-awareness. Developmental Psychology, 57(5), 625–638. May 2021. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001171

Abstract: Mirror self-recognition (MSR) is considered to be the benchmark of objective self-awareness—the ability to think about oneself. Cross-cultural research showed that there are systematic differences in toddlers’ MSR abilities between 18 and 24 months. Understanding whether these differences result from systematic variation in early social experiences will help us understand the processes through which objective self-awareness develops. In this study, we examined 57 18- to 22-month-old toddlers (31 girls) and their mothers from two distinct sociocultural contexts: urban Canada (58% of the subsample were Canadian-born native English-speakers) and rural Vanuatu, a small-scale island society located in the South Pacific. We had two main goals: (a) to identify the social-interactional correlates of MSR ability in this cross-cultural sample, and (b) to examine whether differences in passing rates could be attributed to confounding factors. Consistent with previous cross-cultural research, ni-Vanuatu toddlers passed the MSR test at significantly lower rates (7%) compared to their Canadian counterparts (68%). Among a suite of social interactive variables, only mothers’ imitation of their toddlers’ behavior during a free play session predicted MSR in the entire sample and maternal imitation partially mediated the effects of culture on MSR. In addition, low passing rates among ni-Vanuatu toddlers could not be attributed to reasons unrelated to self-development (i.e., motivation to show mark-directed behavior, understanding mirror-correspondence, representational thinking). This suggests that differences in MSR passing rates reflect true differences in self-recognition, and that parental imitation may have an important role in shaping the construction of visual self-knowledge in toddlers.

People With Larger Social Networks Show Poorer Voice Recognition

People With Larger Social Networks Show Poorer Voice Recognition. Shiri Lev-Ari. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, June 24, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218211030798

Abstract: The way we process language is influenced by our experience. We are more likely to attend to features that proved to be useful in the past. Importantly, the size of individuals’ social network can influence their experience, and consequently, how they process language. In the case of voice recognition, having a larger social network might provide more variable input and thus enhance the ability to recognize new voices. On the other hand, learning to recognize voices is more demanding and less beneficial for people with a larger social network as they have more speakers to learn yet spend less time with each. This paper tests whether social network size influences voice recognition, and if so, in which direction. Native Dutch speakers listed their social network and performed a voice recognition task. Results showed that people with larger social networks were poorer at learning to recognize voices. Experiment 2 replicated the results with a British sample and English stimuli. Experiment 3 showed that the effect does not generalize to voice recognition in an unfamiliar language suggesting that social network size influences attention to the linguistic rather than non-linguistic markers that differentiate speakers. The studies thus show that our social network size influences our inclination to learn speaker-specific patterns in our environment, and consequently the development of skills that rely on such learned patterns, such as voice recognition.

Keywords: voice recognition, talker identification, social network size, social networks

Beyond Aesthetic Judgment: Beauty Increases Moral Standing Through Perceptions of Purity

Beyond Aesthetic Judgment: Beauty Increases Moral Standing Through Perceptions of Purity. Christoph Klebl, Yin Luo, Brock Bastian. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, June 24, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672211023648

Abstract: Researchers have tended to focus on mind perception as integral to judgments of moral standing, yet a smaller body of evidence suggests that beauty may also be an important factor (for some people and animals). Across six studies (N = 1,662), we investigated whether beauty increases moral standing attributions to a wide range of targets, including non-sentient entities, and explored the psychological mechanism through which beauty assigns moral standing to targets. We found that people attribute greater moral standing to beautiful (vs. ugly) animals (Study 1 and Study 5a, preregistered) and humans (Study 2). This effect also extended to non-sentient targets, that is, people perceive beautiful (vs. ugly) landscapes (Study 3) and buildings (Study 4 and Study 5b, preregistered) as possessing greater moral standing. Across all studies, perceptions of purity mediated the effect of beauty on moral standing, suggesting that beauty increases the moral standing individuals place on targets through evoking moral intuitions of purity.

Keywords: beauty, aesthetic judgment, moral standing, purity

Check also Beauty of the Beast: Beauty as an important dimension in the moral standing of animals. Christoph Klebl et al. Journal of Environmental Psychology, May 7 2021, 101624. https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2021/05/beauty-perceptions-causally-influenced.html

Work with infants suggests that the adaptive problems humans faced with respect to plants have left their mark on the human mind

From 2019... How Plants Shape the Mind. Annie E.Wertz. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 23, Issue 7, July 2019, Pages 528-531. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2019.04.009

Full PDF: How Plants Shape the Mind (miami.edu)

Abstract: Plants are easy to overlook in modern environments, but were a fundamental part of human life over evolutionary time. Recent work with infants suggests that the adaptive problems humans faced with respect to plants have left their mark on the human mind.

Keywords: cognitive evolutionplantssocial learningavoidanceinfancy

Full text, references, photos, charts, in the PDF above

Plants Are A(n Adaptive) Problem

In many societies, plants are no longer a conspicuous part of human life. Plants are a part of the scenery outside and available for purchase, already packaged and processed, in grocery stores and garden centers. This limited contact with plants may seem perfectly normal, but across the entirety of human history it is quite unusual. Taking as a starting point the emergence of the genus Homo, humans spent 99% of our evolutionary history as hunter–gatherers. In a hunter–gatherer world, there were no such shops where the necessities of life could be easily acquired. Instead, our ancestors had to make a living by effectively utilizing the natural environment. Plants were an essential part of this process.

The archeological record and studies of modern hunter–gatherer and hunter–horticulturalist populations show that humans relied on plants in a variety of ways [1].

Plants are an important component of human diets, particularly the roots, fruits, and nuts of plants. Plant materials are used to construct a diverse array of artifacts and shelters. Plant chemicals are used to facilitate hunting and fishing, as well as in rituals and medicines. However, despite all of these benefits, plants can inflict serious costs. Plants have evolved an impressive set of defenses to protect against damage from herbivores [2]. All plants produce toxic chemical defenses, some of which can be harmful or even fatal to humans when ingested. Some plants also have mechanical defenses, such as thorns or stinging hairs, that can cause serious skin injury and in some cases systemic effects.

The problem is: how do humans figure out which plants are food (or otherwise useful) and which ones are fatal? This turns out to be a very difficult task. There are myriad plant species and herbivores that feed on them. The result of these complex coevolutionary relationships is that, from a human perspective, there are no morphological features common to all edible or toxic plants, even in the scale of the environments humans typically encounter without modern means of travel. Therefore, using general rules such as ‘Avoid plants with white flowers’ or ‘Purple fruits are edible’ simply would not work. In the former case, one would miss out on pears, and in the latter one would end up eating deadly nightshade. Importantly, the presence of difficult-to-detect and potentially fatal toxins makes learning about plants through trial and error sampling very costly. The best outcome for this process involves large amounts of wasted time and repeated exposure to noxious plant defenses. The worst-case scenario is death. These kinds of circumstances select for the evolution of social learning mechanisms [3].

The recurrent adaptive problems our species encountered over evolutionary time have shaped the human mind [4] and it is well known that plant defenses have structured the physiology and behavior of many animal species [2], including humans [5].  Accordingly, along with my colleagues, I have recently proposed a solution for the learning problems plants pose. We argue that the human mind contains a collection of behavioral avoidance strategies and social learning rules geared toward safely acquiring information about plants [6,7]. I will refer to this collection of cognitive systems as Plant Learning and Avoidance of Natural Toxins, or PLANT.

Evidence for PLANT

We have begun testing PLANT with studies of human infants. One line of work examines whether infants possess behavioral strategies that would mitigate plant dangers, similar to plant food rejections in older children [8]. Unlike the animate dangers that infants readily attend to (e.g., snakes, spiders [9]), dangerous plant toxins are difficult to detect but relatively easy to avoid. Plants are quite literally rooted to the spot and consequently can inflict harm only on individuals that come into contact with them. Therefore, we propose that PLANT includes behavioral avoidance strategies that protect infants by minimizing their physical contact with plants. To test this proposal, we present infants with plants and different kinds of control objects and measure their reaching behavior (Figure 1). Our results show that, as predicted, infants are reluctant to touch plants compared with other object types [7,10,11] and touch plants less frequently after making contact with them [10]. Infants are similarly avoidant of benign-looking plants and plants covered in sharp-looking thorns [10], suggesting that they initially treat all plants as potentially dangerous – a sensible strategy given that delicate-ooking plants can be deadly poisonous.

Of course, not all plants can be avoided.  Plant foods and materials must be foraged, which necessarily means coming into contact with plants. In some modern hunter–gatherer societies, plant foraging can begin as early as 2–3 years of age [1]. Therefore, in a second line of work, we are investigating whether infants are vigilant for social information about plants and use it to guide their behavior. These studies allow us to test the proposal that PLANT includes social learning rules.

Thus far, we have found that infants look more often to adults when they first encounter plants, in the time before touching them [11], suggesting that behavioral avoidance strategies operate in concert with social learning processes. This structure would enable infants to observe signals from adults before making contact with potentially dangerous plants. Infants appear to be particularly attuned to social signals that allow them to learn which plants are edible [6,12]. In our studies, we show 6- and 18-month-olds an adult eating pieces of fruit from a plant and a manmade object (Figure 2A).

Despite seeing the same social information demonstrated with both object types, infants identify the plant, over the artifact, as a food source [6]. Once infants have learned that fruits from a particular plant are edible, 18-month-olds generalize this information only to other plants that share the same leaf shape and fruit color [12]. This combination of social learning and restrictive generalization rules would prevent infants from inadvertently ingesting toxic plants.

Seeing the Forest for the Trees

Our empirical findings to date are consistent with the proposed PLANT systems.  Infants appear to deploy a collection of behavioral avoidance strategies and social learning rules for plants. Consequently, PLANT minimizes infants’ exposure to harmful plant defenses and allows them to safely acquire information about the specific plants they encounter from more knowledgeable individuals. In short, this work supports the claim that plants have shaped the human mind.

PLANT is a novel research area that provides fertile ground for future exploration (Figure 2). Of particular interest are cross-cultural studies that can shed light on the development of PLANT in different environments and comparative studies that can clarify the evolution of PLANT. Further, the integral role that plants played in human life and human evolution means that PLANT is likely to be enmeshed in a web of cognitive systems that support broader capacities like food learning, threat mitigation, categorization, and cultural transmission, among others. This interconnectedness makes PLANT an excellent starting point for future inquiry in these areas. At the same time, it is highly unlikely that infants, or adults for that matter, will treat plants as a special category in all circumstances. Research on cognitive systems like PLANT can provide new ways of exploring fundamental aspects of human cognition and understanding the evolution of learning.

Results robustly show that humans across the Globe (25 countries, 6 continents) respond with stronger preferences for dominant leaders when they find themselves in contexts of intergroup conflict

Intergroup Conflict and Preferences for Dominant Leaders: Testing Universal Features of Human Followership Psychology across 25 Countries. Lasse Laustsen, Xiaotian Sheng, Mark van Vugt. Human Behavior & Evolution Society HBES 2021, Jun-Jul 2021. https://www.hbes.com/hbes2021/

Abstract: Research shows that followers exhibit heightened preferences for dominant leaders in situations of intergroup conflict and coalitional competition (e.g. Little et al., 2007; Spisak et al., 2012; Laustsen & Petersen, 2017). Accordingly, humans are theorized to possess an evolved psychology of adaptive followership that flexibly regulates preferences for leader dominance in accordance with levels of intergroup conflict (Laustsen & Petersen, 2015). However, existing research is based exclusively on studies conducted in the US or Western Europe. Consequently, the central claim that the adaptive followership psychology constitutes a human universal remains untested. This project tests if followers across the Globe-spanning 25 countries (across six continents) such as Colombia, Kenya, Pakistan, Hungary and China-hold stronger preferences for dominant leaders during intergroup conflict. Building on existing experimental protocols, subjects we assigned subjects randomly to either an intergroup conflict condition or a no-conflict condition asking them to choose their favored leader from dominant and non-dominant looking alternatives. Results robustly show that humans across the Globe respond with stronger preferences for dominant leaders when they find themselves in contexts of intergroup conflict. Hence, the project provides unique and unprecedented support for the notion of a universal and context sensitive human followership psychology.