People often respond to decreases in the prevalence of a stimulus by expanding their concept of it. This “prevalence-induced concept change” occurred even when participants were forewarned about it and even when they were instructed and paid to resist it.

Prevalence-induced concept change in human judgment. David E. Levari et al. Science  Jun 29 2018: Vol. 360, Issue 6396, pp. 1465-1467. DOI: 10.1126/science.aap8731

Perceptual and judgment creep: Do we think that a problem persists even when it has become less frequent? Levari et al. show experimentally that when the “signal” a person is searching for becomes rare, the person naturally responds by broadening his or her definition of the signal—and therefore continues to find it even when it is not there. From low-level perception of color to higher-level judgments of ethics, there is a robust tendency for perceptual and judgmental standards to “creep” when they ought not to. For example, when blue dots become rare, participants start calling purple dots blue, and when threatening faces become rare, participants start calling neutral faces threatening. This phenomenon has broad implications that may help explain why people whose job is to find and eliminate problems in the world often cannot tell when their work is done.

Abstract: Why do some social problems seem so intractable? In a series of experiments, we show that people often respond to decreases in the prevalence of a stimulus by expanding their concept of it. When blue dots became rare, participants began to see purple dots as blue; when threatening faces became rare, participants began to see neutral faces as threatening; and when unethical requests became rare, participants began to see innocuous requests as unethical. This “prevalence-induced concept change” occurred even when participants were forewarned about it and even when they were instructed and paid to resist it. Social problems may seem intractable in part because reductions in their prevalence lead people to see more of them.

Self-reported Addiction to Pornography in a Nationally Representative Sample: The Role of Religiousness and Morality

Grubbs, Joshua, Shane W. Kraus, and Samuel Perry. 2018. “Self-reported Addiction to Pornography in a Nationally Representative Sample: The Role of Religiousness and Morality.” PsyArXiv. June 29. doi:10.17605/OSF.IO/M94NK

Abstract

Background and Aims: Despite controversies regarding its existence as a legitimate mental health condition, self-reported pornography addiction is known to occur regularly. In the United States, prior works using various sampling techniques, such as undergraduate samples and online convenience samples, have consistently demonstrated that a number of pornography users report feeling dysregulated or out of control in their use. Even so, there has been very little work in U.S. nationally representative samples to examine self-reported pornography addiction.

Methods: The present study sought to examine self-reported pornography addiction in a U.S. nationally representative sample of adult internet users (N=2,075).

Results:  Results indicated that the majority of the sample had viewed pornography within their lifetimes (n = 1,466), with just over half reporting some use in the past year (n = 1,056).  Moreover, roughly 11% of men and 3% of women reported some agreement with feelings of pornography addiction. Across all participants, such feelings were most strongly associated with male gender, younger age, greater religiousness, greater moral incongruence regarding pornography use, and greater use of pornography.

Discussion and Conclusions: Collectively, these findings are consistent with prior works that have noted that self-reported pornography addiction is a complex phenomenon that is predicted by both objective behavior and subjective moral evaluations of that behavior.

Between 1800 & 2000, for both genders, adjectives related to agreeableness were used most often and those related to neuroticism least often. The usage frequency of agreeableness declined, whereas extraversion & openness showed increases

How Have Males and Females Been Described Over the Past Two Centuries? An Analysis of Big-Five Personality-related adjectives in the Google English Books. Shenglu Yea et al. Journal of Research in Personality, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2018.06.007

Highlights
•    Agreeableness was described most often for both men and women.
•    Positive personality words were used more often than negative words for all factors.
•    The usage frequencies were higher for men than women for four factors except openness.
•    Gender differences showed some reduction over time.

Abstract: Using the American corpus and the English fiction corpus from Google Books databases, this study examined the frequencies of Big-Five personality adjectives used to describe the two genders between 1800 and 2000. Both gender similarities and differences were found. For both genders, adjectives related to agreeableness were used most often and those related to neuroticism least often. The usage frequency of agreeableness showed a steady decline, whereas extraversion and openness (and, to some extent, neuroticism) showed increases first and then leveled off. In terms of gender differences, the overall frequencies were higher for men than women for agreeableness, extraversion, conscientiousness, and neuroticism, but there was no gender difference for openness. Gender differences showed some reduction over time.

Keywords: Word frequency; time trend; gender similarities; gender differences; Big Five

Odor awareness: A model including individual-level predictors (gender, age, material situation, education & preferred social distance) provided a relatively good fit to the data, but adding country-level predictors did not

Global study of social odor awareness. Agnieszka Sorokowska Agata et al. Chemical Senses, bjy038, https://doi.org/10.1093/chemse/bjy038

Abstract: Olfaction plays an important role in human social communication, including multiple domains in which people often rely on their sense of smell in the social context. The importance of the sense of smell and its role can however vary inter-individually and culturally. Despite the growing body of literature on differences in olfactory performance or hedonic preferences across the globe, the aspects of a given culture as well as culturally universal individual differences affecting odor awareness in human social life remain unknown. Here, we conducted a large-scale analysis of data collected from 10,794 participants from 52 study sites from 44 countries all over the world. The aim of our research was to explore the potential individual and country-level correlates of odor awareness in the social context. The results show that the individual characteristics were more strongly related than country-level factors to self-reported odor awareness in different social contexts. A model including individual-level predictors (gender, age, material situation, education and preferred social distance) provided a relatively good fit to the data, but adding country-level predictors (Human Development Index, population density and average temperature) did not improve model parameters. Although there were some cross-cultural differences in social odor awareness, the main differentiating role was played by the individual differences. This suggests that people living in different cultures and different climate conditions may still share some similar patterns of odor awareness if they share other individual-level characteristics.

Keywords: odor awareness, olfaction, smell, culture

We reveal that mobility patterns evolve significantly yet smoothly, and that the number of familiar locations an individual visits at any point is a conserved quantity with a typical size of ~25

Evidence for a conserved quantity in human mobility. Laura Alessandretti, Piotr Sapiezynski, Vedran Sekara, Sune Lehmann & Andrea Baronchelli. Nature Human Behaviour, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0364-x

Abstract: Recent seminal works on human mobility have shown that individuals constantly exploit a small set of repeatedly visited locations1,2,3. A concurrent study has emphasized the explorative nature of human behaviour, showing that the number of visited places grows steadily over time4,5,6,7. How to reconcile these seemingly contradicting facts remains an open question. Here, we analyse high-resolution multi-year traces of ~40,000 individuals from 4 datasets and show that this tension vanishes when the long-term evolution of mobility patterns is considered. We reveal that mobility patterns evolve significantly yet smoothly, and that the number of familiar locations an individual visits at any point is a conserved quantity with a typical size of ~25. We use this finding to improve state-of-the-art modelling of human mobility4,8. Furthermore, shifting the attention from aggregated quantities to individual behaviour, we show that the size of an individual’s set of preferred locations correlates with their number of social interactions. This result suggests a connection between the conserved quantity we identify, which as we show cannot be understood purely on the basis of time constraints, and the ‘Dunbar number’9,10 describing a cognitive upper limit to an individual’s number of social relations. We anticipate that our work will spark further research linking the study of human mobility and the cognitive and behavioural sciences.