More liberal participants assigned higher disgust ratings after the headlines discounted the threat of COVID-19, whereas more conservative participants did so after the headlines emphasized it

COVIDisgust: Language processing through the lens of partisanship. Veranika Puhacheuskaya, Isabell Hubert Lyall, Juhani Järvikivi. PLoS, July 21, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0271206

Abstract: Disgust is an aversive reaction protecting an organism from disease. People differ in how prone they are to experiencing it, and this fluctuates depending on how safe the environment is. Previous research has shown that the recognition and processing of disgusting words depends not on the word’s disgust per se but rather on individual sensitivity to disgust. However, the influence of dynamically changing disgust on language comprehension has not yet been researched. In a series of studies, we investigated whether the media’s portrayal of COVID-19 will affect subsequent language processing via changes in disgust. The participants were exposed to news headlines either depicting COVID-19 as a threat or downplaying it, and then rated single words for disgust and valence (Experiment 1; N = 83) or made a lexical decision (Experiment 2; N = 86). The headline type affected only word ratings and not lexical decisions, but political ideology and disgust proneness affected both. More liberal participants assigned higher disgust ratings after the headlines discounted the threat of COVID-19, whereas more conservative participants did so after the headlines emphasized it. We explain the results through the politicization and polarization of the pandemic. Further, political ideology was more predictive of reaction times in Experiment 2 than disgust proneness. High conservatism correlated with longer reaction times for disgusting and negative words, and the opposite was true for low conservatism. The results suggest that disgust proneness and political ideology dynamically interact with perceived environmental safety and have a measurable effect on language processing. Importantly, they also suggest that the media’s stance on the pandemic and the political framing of the issue may affect the public response by increasing or decreasing our disgust.

General discussion

Our study tested the hypothesis that the media’s stance on the pandemic may elevate or reduce participants’ disgust, which would affect word ratings and word recognition latencies. We also predicted that such person-based factors as disgust proneness and political ideology will mediate the effect. A word rating (Experiment 1) and a lexical decision (Experiment 2) study found partial support for these hypotheses. In brief, the main findings were as follows:

• More liberal participants rated the stimuli as more disgusting after being exposed to the headlines downplaying the threat of COVID-19, whereas more conservative participants gave higher disgust ratings following the headlines emphasizing it.
• More liberal participants were more extreme with their ratings and gave a broader range of responses (rating disgusting words as more disgusting and negative words as more negative, as well as rating non-disgusting words as less disgusting and positive words as more positive) than their more conservative peers regardless of the condition.
• Disgusting and negative words had a facilitatory effect for more liberal participants (shorter RTs) and an inhibitory effect for more conservative participants (longer RTs).
• More disgust-prone individuals rated everything as more disgusting than low disgust-prone ones.
• In the severe condition, low disgust-prone participants rated all the stimuli as more disgusting and negative, whereas high disgust-prone participants only rated low to moderately disgusting words as more disgusting and negative.

Affective word ratings and political ideology

As expected, political orientation had a clear impact on word ratings. As we noted in the Introduction, the perception of the severity of the virus became an identity marker for both ends of the political spectrum. Given such drastic polarization, it is not surprising that the two types of the headlines produced the exact opposite effect on the participants depending on their political ideology. More liberal participants in our study were more disgusted by the headlines downplaying the severity of COVID-19 than those emphasizing it, rating everything as more disgusting afterwards. In contrast, more conservative participants assigned higher disgust ratings following the severe headlines. We offer two possible explanations for this result, one based on direct affective evaluation and the other on the disgust system response due to stimulus habituation. According to the first explanation, the stance on the virus from the political outgroup (downplaying headlines for the liberal participants and severe headlines for the conservative ones) evoked a strong emotional response, which translated into higher ratings on the disgust scale. However, in this case, one would also expect lower ratings on the valence scale depending on the headline, and this was not what we found. That leaves us the second possibility. As the liberal narrative revolves around the costs of not treating the virus seriously enough, they may have become habituated and desensitized to it. The take on the danger of COVID-19 may thus be perceived as the “default” by them and no longer alert their disgust system, whereas headlines contradicting this view might instantly elevate their disgust levels, signaling danger. The opposite, of course, should be true for more conservative participants. Note that one of our hypotheses was that more conservative participants will discard the severe headlines as alarmist, since previous research showed that conservatives have less trust in contradictory media and firmly believe that COVID-19 does not pose big health risks [55]. The current findings suggest that this was either not the case or, if it was the case, it did not stop their disgust system from ramping up. All in all, this is in line with mounting evidence that conservatives are more prone to disgust [49–51]. Even though previous studies found conservatives to be less concerned about the pandemic and less eager to engage in social distancing than liberals [55, 70], our results show that highlighting the danger of the virus still makes conservative participants give higher disgust ratings. Whether this translates into more adherence to safety protocols is a topic for further research.

One novel finding of our study is more extreme disgust and valence ratings by more liberal participants compared to their more conservative peers regardless of the condition. Disgusting and negative words were rated as more disgusting and more negative by more liberal participants, and the opposite was true for non-disgusting and positive words. We are not aware of any research examining whether political ideology correlates with ratings’ extremity. It is entirely possible that this broader range of ratings is additionally mediated by some other personality traits and this needs to be verified by future research.

Affective word ratings and disgust proneness

Disgust proneness affected word ratings over and above the effects of political ideology. Regardless of the headline type, more disgust-prone individuals rated all the stimuli as more disgusting and negative stimuli as more negative than less disgust-prone individuals. This demonstrates that disgust ratings can serve as a good proxy for participant’s disgust and adds to the growing body of evidence regarding the effects of disgust proneness on cognition in general and language processing in particular. [40, 41] found that disgust sensitivity was positively correlated with pupil dilation during the processing of stereotype-based clashing statements, suggesting that more disgust-prone individuals may experience greater arousal when interacting with stimuli that are disgusting either physically or morally. The results of the current study further indicate that even single word processing can be significantly affected by the participant’s disgust sensitivity. In addition, disgust proneness significantly interacted with the headline type. While low disgust-prone participants rated all the stimuli as more disgusting and negative when the threat of COVID-19 was highlighted (severe headlines), high disgust-prone participants only rated low and moderately disgusting words as more disgusting and positive words as more negative in the severe condition. As we addressed in the Discussion after Experiment 1, this may be due to the ceiling effect since ratings assigned by high-disgust prone participants to extremely valenced stimuli were very close to the top of the disgust scale and the bottom of the valence scale.

Political ideology vs disgust proneness in lexical access: The role of the pandemic

Our findings from the lexical decision experiment partially corroborated and extended the results for French by [46]. The authors found that disgusting words had a facilitatory effect for lexical recognition in less disgust-prone participants and an inhibiting effect in more disgust-prone participants. Our study, however, found that political ideology was more predictive of RTs than disgust sensitivity. Even though the general direction of the effect was the same (more liberal participants patterned like less disgust-prone ones), only political ideology significantly improved the model’s fit when both factors were examined together. Overall, disgusting and negative words had a facilitatory effect on word recognition for more liberal participants and an inhibitory effect for more conservative participants. To the best of our knowledge, the interaction between political ideology and lexical decision times has not yet been researched. One possible explanation for the dominant effect of political ideology in our study is a big political component pertinent to the ongoing pandemic from its very beginning. [55] suggested that political ideology was uniquely predictive of the participant’s COVID-19 behavior even when controlling for such variables as belief in science and COVID-related anxiety. Thus, it may be that political views have temporarily become a more salient marker of the behavioral immune system response than disgust sensitivity per se. This is, of course, a speculative idea that needs to be addressed by further research. One way to verify this would be to conduct the same study during the pandemic and post-pandemic.

Differential effects of traits and states on lexical access

We did not find an effect of dynamically changing disgust levels (induced by headlines) on lexical access. Even though the headlines successfully affected participants’ ratings in Experiment 1, they did not have an effect on RTs in Experiment 2—neither by themselves nor in interaction with person-based factors. Unlike headlines, however, political ideology was found predictive of word recognition latencies. Why would that be the case? Previous research has found political views to be just one manifestation of a cognitive and affective make-up and to have a robust correlation with threat perception [74]. It is thus not surprising that aligning with a particular political ideology may make disgust-related concepts in long-term memory more or less accessible (see [75] for converging findings with threat-related concepts). Thus, our results suggest a difference between fluctuating states (i.e., the participant’s emotional response to a particular set of headlines) and stable traits (i.e., aligning with more conservative or more liberal ideology) in affecting the ease of accessing disgusting and negative words. One alternative possibility to consider is that an exposure to COVID-related news may need to be longer to see an effect on lexical decision (we only showed a handful of headlines that the participants could switch through at their own pace). This could be tested by future research.

Limitations of present research

Our study had several limitations that need to be noted. First and foremost, we did not collect participants’ socioeconomic status, belief in science, self-perceived likelihood of contracting COVID-19, or COVID-19 related anxiety. Second, a convenience sample of university students produced a slightly skewed distribution of gender, age, and political ideology (most participants were young and more liberal females), which may have affected the results. That said, within the range of scores obtained in this experiment, the distribution was very close to normal.

One other concern needs to be addressed. Since our headlines reported on the pandemic, it is important to make sure that word recognition latencies were not affected by the presence of words directly related to the pandemic and to disease in general. As no lists of pandemic-related words exist, it is difficult to estimate how many words in the final dataset satisfied this criterion. Using our best judgment, we counted 6 out of 99 words that were disease-related, with the disgust indexes given in brackets: “unhealthy” (-0.7), “germ” (0.9), “sickening” (1.24), “deadly” (0.8), “parasite” (1.5), “disease” (1). Three of those words occurred in the severe headlines in full (“sickening”, “disease”, “deadly”) and one in part (“bloodthirsty”–“blood”). As one can see, the words were relatively dispersed on the disgust scale. To make sure the results of Experiment 2 were not contaminated by this overlap, we reran the models without these four words. While disgust proneness was no longer significant, political ideology remained significant. This, once again, testifies to the stability of the effect of political ideology.

All in all, our studies found that not only do headlines about the pandemic affect the participants’ disgust levels but that they also interact with a range of person-based factors, namely how prone the participant is to disgust and what political ideology they align with.

We routinely miss important information that is right in front of our eyes because our brains generate predictive models of the world that can overshadow what's out there

Normal blindness: when we Look But Fail To See. Jeremy M. Wolfe, Anna Kosovicheva, Benjamin Wolfe. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, July 21 2022. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.06.006

Highlights

Looked But Failed to See (LBFTS) errors occur when observers fail to notice a clearly visible item, and occur across a wide range of tasks and settings, from driving and medical image perception to laboratory visual search tasks.

We outline a new, unified account of LBFTS errors, arguing that processes that serve us well under most circumstances are guaranteed to produce a steady stream of LBFTS errors under some circumstances.

LBFTS can be thought of as a form of ‘normal blindness’. It is obviously far less severe than clinical blindness but it is so universal that its costs are substantial at a societal level.

Abstract: Humans routinely miss important information that is ‘right in front of our eyes’, from overlooking typos in a paper to failing to see a cyclist in an intersection. Recent studies on these ‘Looked But Failed To See’ (LBFTS) errors point to a common mechanism underlying these failures, whether the missed item was an unexpected gorilla, the clearly defined target of a visual search, or that simple typo. We argue that normal blindness is the by-product of the limited-capacity prediction engine that is our visual system. The processes that evolved to allow us to move through the world with ease are virtually guaranteed to cause us to miss some significant stimuli, especially in important tasks like driving and medical image perception.

Keywords: inattentional blindnessvisual searchfunctional visual fieldattentioneye movements

Boys/men are more isolated than girls/women through most of the life course; gap is much greater for the never married & those with disrupted relationship histories; levels of social isolation steadily increase from adolescence for both men/women

Gender and Social Isolation across the Life Course. Debra Umberson, Zhiyong Lin, Hyungmin Cha. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, July 20, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1177/00221465221109634

Abstract: Social isolation has robust adverse effects on health, well-being, dementia risk, and longevity. Although most studies suggest similar effects of isolation on the health of men and women, there has been much less attention to gendered patterns of social isolation over the life course—despite decades of research suggesting gender differences in social ties. We build on theoretical frames of constrained choice and gender-as-relational to argue that gender differences in isolation are apparent but depend on timing in the life course and marital/partnership history. Results indicate that boys/men are more isolated than girls/women through most of the life course, and this gender difference is much greater for the never married and those with disrupted relationship histories. Strikingly, levels of social isolation steadily increase from adolescence through later life for both men and women.

Keywords: aging, gender, life course, relationships, social isolation

Thriving at work & work-life balance: Those with the best of both worlds had five fewer hours in their workweek span, five fewer collaboration hours, three more focus hours, and 17 fewer employees in their internal network size

Why Microsoft Measures Employee Thriving, Not Engagement. Dawn Klinghoffer and Elizabeth McCune. Harvard Business Review Home. June 24, 2022. https://hbr.org/2022/06/why-microsoft-measures-employee-thriving-not-engagement

Summary.   As the pandemic continues and many people work hybrid schedules, people analytics researchers at Microsoft realized they needed to move from measuring employee engagement to measuring employee thriving. Defined as “to be energized and...more

One thing is clear: None of us are the same people today as we were prior to 2020. So, as our employees change, the ways we can best empower them need to evolve, too.

At Microsoft, where we work on the People Analytics team, that means learning what the data can tell us about how our employees aspire to live their lives meaningfully. In particular, we landed on a new way of measuring thriving, at both work and outside of it, that goes beyond engagement only.

In this article, we share how and why we came to this measurement — and how your own company can learn from our experiences.

Why Thriving Is the New North Star

Prior to this year, we conducted one lengthy, annual survey that tracked employee engagement. It often took months to digest and plan actions around. Yet, we consistently encountered challenges in building a shared definition of engagement across the company. And often, despite employee engagement scores that would seem to indicate that things were going well, it became clear that employees were struggling when we dived deeper into the responses. To us, this was a reflection that we hadn’t yet set a high enough bar for the employee experience, and it motivated us to do better in measuring what matters.

So, we started asking employees for feedback through a shorter yet more focused survey every six months, for which we partnered with employee success platform Glint. This new approach is helping us stay closer to employees’ feedback and take clearer and more immediate action in response.

We also sought to define a new, higher bar that went beyond engagement only, drawing inspiration from many sources. One was what Our Chief People Officer, Kathleen Hogan, calls “The 5 P’s.” Similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy, it breaks down employee fulfillment into five key, successive components: pay, perks, people, pride, and purpose. In a time that has prompted many to reflect on the role of work and career in their lives, it felt critical to recalibrate our listening systems to measure our progress towards that end goal — a sense of purpose. We were also inspired by Ross School of Business’s Gretchen Spreitzer and colleagues’ research on thriving as the antidote to languishing. As we moved beyond employee engagement, we decided to focus on our own version of employee thriving.

At Microsoft, we define thriving as “to be energized and empowered to do meaningful work.” This is the new core aspiration we have for our employees, one that challenges us to push ourselves every day so every employee can feel they’re pursuing that sense of purpose. Our focus on thriving isn’t just about recovering from the impact of the pandemic or matching pre-Covid employee sentiment scores. It’s about coming out the other side and doing even better.

What It Looks Like to Thrive

When our first employee survey data came back earlier this year, we began benchmarking our thriving for the first time. We looked at not just how many people reported they were thriving, but calculated company-wide averages based on responses from a five-point scale — if an employee selected “strongly disagree,” that translated to an individual score of zero, and “strongly agree” would be the equivalent of a 100. This ensured our insights took into account all positive, negative, and neutral sentiment.

After analyzing the results, we found that thriving averaged a 77 across the company — a number we see as strong, but one we can still work on. When we broke down thriving into its three components, we saw that meaningful work (79) and empowerment (79) both scored higher among employees than energized (73).

To understand the employee experiences behind the numbers, we dove into the open-ended survey responses. Three key themes stood out.

Culture matters.

What we saw was that employees who were thriving and not thriving were both talking about culture, but in vastly different ways.

Thriving employees talked about a collaborative environment and teamwork with colleagues, an inclusive culture with autonomy and flexibility, and well-being support. These comments reference examples such as being able to have honest, non-judgmental conversations on difficult topics, with a focus on finding solutions.

Employees who weren’t thriving talked about experiencing siloes, bureaucracy, and a lack of collaboration. In these comments we hear a lack of agency and a sense for being a cog in a machine. In other words, the opposite of being empowered and energized to do meaningful work.

Thriving takes a village.

Diving deeper into the numbers, it’s clear that everyone has a role to play. At Microsoft, we’ve long studied importance of managers, and we know their role has been more crucial than ever as they helped their teams navigate through uncertainty. It’s heartening to see our managers shine during such a difficult time. “My manager treats me with dignity and respect” scored a 93, meaning almost every employee selected “strongly agree” — but this also means we still need to ensure that’s the experience for every single employee. We also saw high scores in confidence in manager’s effectiveness (87) and managers’ support for careers (85), showing strong sentiment that managers are helping their teams succeed at the company.

While we see these scores as strengths, they’re strengths we want to keep building to ensure a positive lived experience for all employees.

Thriving and work-life balance are not the same thing.

As we think about how to support thriving, it’s important to distinguish it from work-life balance. While thriving is focused on being energized and empowered to do meaningful work in your role, work-life balance reflects employees’ personal lives, too. Employees rated their satisfaction with work-life balance as a 71, and while it’s encouraging to see work-life balance improving, it hasn’t fully recovered yet to pre-Covid levels. And there are times when thriving and work-life balance can move in different directions.

For example, an early-in-career employee who feels underutilized in their role may have great work-life balance from a perspective of hours and workload, but not feel energized while they’re at work or inspired by the meaning and impact of what they’re working on. On the other hand, there are times when people can thrive and feel so fulfilled by the hard work it takes to make progress on a big project that they can make a short-term tradeoff on work-life balance.

We know that work-life balance may ebb and flow, but wanted to learn from employees who both rated their work-life balance highly and said they were thriving in that work-focused portion of their life. So, we compared the 56% of our employees who said they were thriving and reported higher work-life balance to the 16% who were thriving but had lower work-life balance scores.

By combining sentiment data with de-identified calendar and email metadata, we found that those with the best of both worlds had five fewer hours in their workweek span, five fewer collaboration hours, three more focus hours, and 17 fewer employees in their internal network size. This reinforces what we know from earlier work-life balance research and network size analysis, which showed us that increased collaboration does have a negative impact on employees’ perception of work-life balance. It also confirms that collaboration is not inherently bad — for many employees, those times of close teamwork and striving toward a common goal can fuel thriving. However, it is important to be mindful of how intense collaboration can impact work-life balance, and leaders and employees alike should guard against that intensity becoming 24/7.

Challenges for Thriving on the Road Ahead

As more and more companies look closely at how they listen to and help their employees, it’s important to spend time understanding what your north star is — and to make sure it’s connected to the outcomes you are trying to drive as an organization. This new era of hybrid work won’t work for employees if you’re not listening — or if what you’re listening for doesn’t evolve along with them and how they do their jobs. There isn’t a singular one-size-fits-all solution out there, but paying close attention to how your employees thrive is one path forward.

We know this is just the beginning of our journey to understand this in our own organization. Looking holistically at the written responses from those who weren’t thriving offers more clues about where else we can improve for our employees. For example, while employees scored “I feel included in my team” highly at 86, by far the most common thread among those who were not thriving was a feeling of exclusion — from a lack of collaboration to feeling left out of decisions to struggling with politics and bureaucracy. We’ll continue to focus on ensuring inclusion is felt as part of our culture across all teams and orgs.

Ultimately, every score, whether high or low, gives us a baseline to keep listening, learning, improving, and adapting to new changes that still undoubtedly lie ahead. As we enter the hybrid work era, we’re excited to keep studying the numbers even more deeply to understand how thriving can be unlocked across different work locations, professions, and ways of working.

Dawn Klinghoffer is the head of people analytics at Microsoft. Elizabeth McCune is the director of employee listening systems and culture measurement at Microsoft.

Autistic people outperform neurotypicals in a cartoon version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes

Autistic people outperform neurotypicals in a cartoon version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes. Liam Cross, Andrea Piovesan, Gray Atherton. Autism Research, July 20 2022. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.2782

Abstract: Prior research suggests that while autistic people may demonstrate poorer facial emotion recognition when stimuli are human, these differences lessen when stimuli are anthropomorphic. To investigate this further, this work explores emotion recognition in autistic and neurotypical adults (n = 196). Groups were compared on a standard and a cartoon version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. Results indicated that autistic individuals were not significantly different from neurotypicals on the standard version. However, autistic people outperformed neurotypicals on the cartoon version. The implications for these findings regarding emotion recognition deficits and the social motivation account of autism are discussed and support the view of socio-cognitive differences rather than deficits in this population.

Lay Summary: The Reading the Mind in the Eyes test and a cartoon version were tested on autistic and neurotypical adults. Autistic adults were not significantly different on the original test compared to neurotypicals, but they outperformed neurotypical adults on the cartoon version.

DISCUSSION

Results showed that autistic people did not perform significantly worse on the RME than NTs. While this was not as hypothesized, it may be that the high proportion of female participants boosted ASC performance. Previous work, for instance, has shown that autistic females do not perform differently to NT females (Holt et al., 2014) and that there is a female advantage in the RME (Kirkland et al., 2013). Additionally, this may be explained by adding definitions to the RME to remove variance associated with vocabulary differences. In line with our predictions, individuals with ASC outperformed NTs on the cartoon version of the task. These results suggest that autistic individuals may lack a human-specific specialization in this domain seen in NTs. For instance, NTs performed better on the RME than the C-RME, while this was not the case for autistic individuals, whose performance on the two versions did not significantly differ. This is the first study to find that autistic people outperform NTs on the RME.1 Our results suggest that NT people have more difficulty than autistic people when the agent being evaluated is anthropomorphic. Our findings also suggest that autistic people are perhaps not experiencing the same processing deficits as NTs when taking the C-RME. Why might this be?

We speculated that this could be driven by either a reduced motivation for actual human agents or an increased motivation to evaluate cartoon agents. The descriptive statistics in the present study suggest that the interaction seen in the present study was likely driven not by autistic individuals over performing on the C-RME but by NTs underperforming on the C-RME. Additionally, descriptive statistics relating to the measure of difficulty suggested that the autistic individuals found both tasks more difficult than NTs on average. However, this difference was not significant at the 0.05 level.

If NTs were to be used as a ‘benchmark’ for FER development, it would appear that there is a specialization for the human in typical development. As a result, anthropomorphic FER is more difficult for NTs. Considering that autistic people do not see a reduced performance on such measures, they may not experience the same specialized interest or aptitude for human FER. Interestingly, this does not lead to the deterioration of anthropomorphic FER. Specifically, autistic performance was not lower across both conditions, and it did not follow the same pattern as NTs. As such, it may be that autistic people also have an enhanced ability to perform anthropomorphic FER. This ability may develop through protracted engagement with anthropomorphic agents, as is suggested through research on restricted interests. The enhanced development of anthropomorphic FER in autistic people would contrast with research suggesting that FER deficits only increase as autistic people age (Lozier et al., 2014). Instead, perhaps autistic people, and those with high autistic traits, continue to develop anthropomorphic FER and ToM which allows them to eventually surpass NTs. This continued development may explain why studies on very young autistic children show impaired performance in both human and nonhuman face recognition (Chawarska & Volkmar, 2007), while studies on older autistic children, adolescents and adults show an intact or even relatively enhanced ability for nonhuman performance (for a review, see Atherton & Cross, 2018).

Autism research is rife with studies showing that autistic people enjoy engaging with the nonhuman and may be doing so increasingly throughout development, whether it be through animation (Holmgaard et al., 2013), contact with pets (Atherton et al., 2022), animal-assisted therapy (O'Haire, 2013), or even embodying the nonhuman during online game-play (Stendal & Balandin, 2015) (for a review, see Atherton & Cross, 2018). This type of engagement may allow autistic people to develop social expertise and derive social pleasure in ways that do not rely on human specialization, which may function as an extension of how autistic people begin to see themselves as more than human (Davidson & Smith, 2009). Future research should look to better understand autistic people's motivations for interacting with anthropomorphic agents. Cross et al. (2019) and Carter et al. (2016) suggest that using anthropomorphic agents in therapeutic contexts may also improve social understanding and connection. Including such agents in virtual settings and observing changes in responsiveness would be a valuable avenue for future research. 

A small percentage of the population struggles with a complete lack of navigational skills; most are men, which is rich

“Where am I?” A snapshot of the developmental topographical disorientation among young Italian adults. Laura Piccardi et al. PLoS, July 20, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0271334

Abstract: In the last decade, several cases affected by Developmental Topographical Disorientation (DTD) have been described. DTD consists of a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting the ability to orient in the environment despite well-preserved cognitive functions, and in the absence of a brain lesion or other neurological or psychiatric conditions. Described cases showed different impairments in navigational skills ranging from topographic memory deficits to landmark agnosia. All cases lacked a mental representation of the environment that would allow them to use high-order spatial orientation strategies. In addition to the single case studies, a group study performed in Canada showed that the disorder is more widespread than imagined. The present work intends to investigate the occurrence of the disorder in 1,698 young Italian participants. The sample is deliberately composed of individuals aged between 18 and 35 years to exclude people who could manifest the loss of the ability to navigate as a result of an onset of cognitive decline. The sample was collected between 2016 and 2019 using the Qualtrics platform, by which the Familiarity and Spatial Cognitive Style Scale and anamnestic interview were administered. The data showed that the disorder is present in 3% of the sample and that the sense of direction is closely related to town knowledge, navigational strategies adopted, and gender. In general, males use more complex navigational strategies than females, although DTD is more prevalent in males than in females, in line with the already described cases. Finally, the paper discusses which protective factors can reduce DTD onset and which intervention measures should be implemented to prevent the spread of navigational disorders, which severely impact individuals’ autonomy and social relationships.

Discussion

The present online investigation aimed to estimate the presence of DTD in a large young Italian sample to better understand the spread of this condition in the population. Thus, we considered the percentage of the DTD in a sample of 1,698 participants, using as a basic criterion 2 standard deviations below the means of the SOD. Then, we also investigated the critical factors predictive of both the SOD and DTD. As in Iaria and Barton’s study [74], we confirmed that the rate of occurrence of the disorder is not a rare condition; rather, it affects 3% of young people undermining their autonomy and ability to work away from family boundaries.

As concerns the predictive factors of SOD, the analyses showed that gender more than educational level is strictly related to SOD. In particular, although females use more landmark-based navigational strategies and complain more difficulties in SOD, males show a higher risk of DTD than females. Indeed, given a glance at the DTD literature, the most of the single cases described are males; this means that although males have better visuospatial and navigational skills than females, they are also the most fragile [69, 70, 72, 75, 77]. Moreover, SOD was related to TK and Survey competencies. Iaria and co-workers [87] clarified that normal navigators can switch from one strategy to another by increasing their familiarity with the environment. This means that it is possible to implement higher navigational skills by acting on environmental knowledge. Also in Nori and Piccardi [37] emerged that when the individual was familiar with the environment, even if s/he generally preferred low navigational strategies, s/he was able to perform more complex navigational tasks in that specific environment, therefore, citizens of Bologna who were familiar with a neighbourhood of the city were able to recognize rotated monuments of the city even though their ability to mentally rotate an object was low [37, 84].

Consistent with these results, we found that TK and the Survey strategy are negatively related to DTD, suggesting that they can be protective factors in counteracting the onset of DTD. In this vein, Bartonek and co-workers [88–90] showed that children with cerebral palsy and motor disability manifested differences in topographic working memory as a function of the degree of autonomy to explore the environment, regardless of motor impairment. Our results also showed that the use of advanced navigational strategies (survey strategies) is not associated with the presence of DTD. In line with this finding, we also showed that individuals who achieve high spatial skills do not complain of RLC, which is generally involved in navigational disorders [60]. Consistent with this result, Giancola et al. [36] showed that survey strategies also characterise samples of experienced navigators, such as military pilots. According to Verde et al. [32, 33, 91, 92] this professional category is already selected on the basis of spatial and navigational skills. In addition, the military training would reinforce the survey strategy even more, including all those cognitive processes related to navigation, such as the ability to mentally rotate two and three-dimensional objects [93] or the ability to make directional and metric judgments.

Undoubtedly, the presence of a navigational deficit can also make the subject anxious and more reluctant to explore the environment, so it is difficult to determine how much one comes before the other. This result is particularly interesting in light of Lopez et al.’s [94] study, which showed that the role of the direct experience with exploring hometown on spatial mental representations appeared to be more important in the elderly than in young people. Our sample includes young people, therefore we can imagine that TK and the Survey strategy protects not only seniors from the detrimental effects of ageing on spatial mental representations but also young people in acquiring spatial competence by reducing the risk of navigational disorders.

Given the key role of spatial strategies, our results imply navigational training starting with pre-schoolers, in order to prevent the DTD, such as the one already used in Boccia et al. [95], which allows implementing spatial orientation and autonomy skills from the earliest years of life, starting in kindergarten. The introduction of navigational training in education settings may be useful not only for healthy children but also for children with different types of disabilities (e.g. sensory-motor impairments or acquired brain-damaged or ADHD: [96]), who show several navigational disorders. Furthermore, given that simply enhancing cognitive performance is insufficient to reduce a sense of inadequacy about one’s ability [97], the introduction of training activities specifically designed to improve metacognition would improve self-efficacy in individuals with respect to their SOD and related activities, and by consequence would reduce the risk of DTD. In this vein, De Lisi and Wolford [98] showed children improvements in mental rotation through the daily practice of the popular video game Tetris. This policy of intervention could have important spin-offs increasing also social life.

The current research is not without limitations. First, the study was conducted using an online self-reported survey. In the future it will be important to investigate DTD in presence using a battery of navigational tests. For example, no significant result was found in terms of MoT (active and/or passive movements in the environment). Probably this aspect should be investigated differently by quantifying more precisely the movements and their duration and stratifying the sample by strategies developed. Future work should investigate this component along with environmental characteristics (size of the place where one lives; the presence of distant landmarks; need to travel far to receive medical care or to use school services). Second, individuals with DTD were not tested for other cognitive deficits using a battery of neuropsychological tests, but were only asked to report if they suffered from cognitive disorders. Third, the diagnosis of DTD was not supported by structural imaging data in order to exclude the presence of any brain lesions.

In conclusion, the present study allowed us to identify in a large sample of young Italians the presence of DTD and its occurrence. It has also allowed us to observe protective factors that are associated with good navigational skills and that in the future can be used within protocols for the prevention of the development of spatial orientation disorders, as well as to promote these skills by reducing the gender gap that still emerged in this sample.

Large-scale longitudinal research indicates that people shift to more left-leaning parties up to midlife and then become more likely to swing back towards rightist political parties

Age and vote choice: Is there a conservative shift among older voters? Benny Geys, Tom-Reiel Heggedal, Rune J. Sørensen. Electoral Studies, Volume 78, August 2022, 102485. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2022.102485

Abstract: Ageing is often believed to induce a movement towards the right of the political spectrum. Yet, empirical evidence remains inconclusive due to a dearth of longitudinal datasets covering multiple cohorts. Using eleven rotating panels of the Norwegian Election Studies (1977–2017) and exploiting first-derivative properties of the vote choice function, our empirical approach identifies non-linear life-cycle effects while controlling for cohort and period effects. Our main findings indicate that shifting towards the left is more likely among the young (under 40 years) whereas shifting towards the right occurs at an older age (over 55 years). Evaluating potential mechanisms, we find that individuals’ income, retirement, family status and political interest explain only a small part of the observed ageing effect. Life-cycle shifts in (some) policy preferences may play a bigger role. Finally, aging effects are similar across women and men, and only marginally stronger among groups with lower education and income levels.

Keywords: Population ageingVote choiceAge-period-cohortRotating panelNorway

4. Conclusion

Up to the 1960s, party choice was generally viewed as a result of stable party identifications and social class (“Michigan school”). Party preferences and political attitudes were assumed to be shaped during an individual's ‘formative’ or ‘impressionable’ years in adolescence and early adulthood, and to remain highly stable thereafter. Subsequent literature has criticized this view based on the recognition that citizens may well change their partisan preferences and ideological positioning over the life cycle. Consistent with the latter view, our analysis shows that people shift to more left-leaning parties up to midlife and then become more likely to swing back towards rightist political parties. These results are obtained using four decades of high-quality Norwegian Election Studies, which feature individual-level rotating panels that allow us to track party shifts over a fixed four-year election cycle.

While our analysis rests on a methodological innovation that allows identifying (non-linear) age effects while controlling for cohort and period effects, it naturally remains a challenge to track the exact mechanisms underlying this result. Nonetheless, our findings by and large reject the notion that social and political ageing can account for much of individuals' tendency to shift towards the right of the political spectrum as they age. This also implies that shifts in party choices over the life cycle are unlikely to be due to differences in individuals’ reliance on public sector transfers and services that accompany such social and political ageing. An alternative mechanism is that party choices can shift over the life-cycle due to changing perspectives on national identify and cultural values. Our evidence here provides partial support. While we find no evidence that fiscal policy preferences affect our estimated age affect, immigration, environmental and rural policy preferences do appear to account for a significant part of the observed ageing effect in vote choices.

Unfortunately, our data do not allow us to explore the role that changes over the life-cycle in individuals’ psychological traits may have on the ageing effects observed in our analysis. Previous research, however, has found some evidence suggestive of age-related psychological and personality changes. For instance, ageing has been linked to increasing levels of conservatism, authoritarianism, prejudice, and self-discipline, as well as lower levels of openness to change and cognitive flexibility (for reviews, see Tilley and Evans, 2014; Peterson et al., 2020). Evaluating whether – and, if so, to what extent – such psychological changes can account for the observed ageing effect would require direct measures of psychological traits at multiple points across the life-cycle. While these are not included in our dataset, we consider the further empirical verification of such psychological mechanisms an important avenue for future research.

Finally, we show that life-cycle effects in individuals’ vote choice are somewhat stronger among individuals with lower income levels. Hence, while the average aging effect observed within our overall sample is unaffected when controlling for income, different income groups within our sample display distinct (subgroup-average) age effects. This suggests that the increasing tendency among well-earning professionals to support left-wing parties in recent decades (e.g., Häusermann et al., 2012; Attewell, 2021; Gethin et al., 2022) need not exclusively derive from generational replacement or cohort effects – as recently argued by, among others, Gethin et al. (2022).

Cooperation among strangers has been hypothesized to have declined in the U.S. over the past several decades, an alarming trend that has potential far-reaching societal consequences; reality says otherwise

Yuan, M., Spadaro, G., Jin, S., Wu, J., Kou, Y., Van Lange, P. A. M., & Balliet, D. (2022). Did cooperation among strangers decline in the United States? A cross-temporal meta-analysis of social dilemmas (1956–2017). Psychological Bulletin, 148(3-4), 129–157. Jul 2022. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000363

Abstract: Cooperation among strangers has been hypothesized to have declined in the United States over the past several decades, an alarming trend that has potential far-reaching societal consequences. To date, most research that supports a decline in cooperation has relied on self-report measures or archival data. Here, we utilize the history of experimental research on cooperation in situations involving conflicting interests (i.e., social dilemmas). We meta-analyzed 511 studies conducted between 1956 and 2017 with 660 unique samples and effect sizes involving 63,342 participants to test whether the average level of cooperation observed in these studies had declined over time. We found no evidence for a decline in cooperation over the 61-year period. Instead, we found a slight increase in cooperation over time. In addition, some societal indicators (e.g., income inequality, societal wealth, urbanization level, and percentage of people living alone) measured 10 to 5 years prior to measures of cooperation were found to be positively associated with cooperation, suggesting that they may be potential societal underpinnings of increases in cooperation. These findings challenge the idea that social capital and civic cooperation among strangers have declined in the United States over time, and we offer directions for future research to understand causes of an increase in cooperation.

Scientific texts in the life sciences 1969-2019: Cluttering of texts, increasing use of emotion adjectives and adverbs

Adjectives and adverbs in life sciences across 50 years: implications for emotions and readability in academic texts. Ju Wen & Lei Lei. Scientometrics, Jul 11 2022. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-022-04453-z

Abstract: Writing in a clear and simple language is critical for scientific communications. Previous studies argued that the use of adjectives and adverbs cluttered writing and made scientific text less readable. The present study aims to investigate if the articles in life sciences have become more cluttered and less readable across the past 50 years in terms of the use of adjectives and adverbs. The data that were used in the study were a large dataset of 775,456 scientific texts published between 1969 and 2019 in 123 scientific journals. Results showed that an increasing number of adjectives and adverbs were used and the readability of scientific texts have decreased in the examined years. More importantly, the use of emotion adjectives and adverbs also demonstrated an upward trend while that of nonemotion adjectives and adverbs did not increase. To our knowledge, this is probably the first large scale diachronic study on the use of adjectives and adverbs in scientific writing. Possible explanations to these findings were discussed.

Rolf Degen summarizing... Curvy female bodies, with low waist-to-hip ratios, pop out in men's and women's visual search

Cloud, J. M., Stone, A. M., & McCarthy, J. D. (2022). No time to “waist:” low waist-to-hip ratios pop out in visual search. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, Jul 2022. https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000308

Abstract: Previous research demonstrates that evolutionarily relevant stimuli (e.g., snakes, angry faces) “pop-out” of visual arrays, leading to faster and more accurate identification compared with stimuli that do not impact fitness as strongly. The present study investigated the identification of low (vs. high) waist-to-hip ratios (WHR) using a visual search paradigm: participants searched for a discrepant female torso in matrices of otherwise identical female torsos. Participants viewed 3 × 3 and 5 × 5 matrices of female torsos with low (.70) or high (.90) WHRs and indicated whether a torso with a discrepant WHR was present or absent via a button press. As predicted, participants were faster and more accurate in detecting a low WHR among high WHRs than the reverse; however, results failed to support the predicted interaction whereby matrix size would more strongly affect participants’ ability to detect a torso with a discrepant WHR of .90 than .70. These results suggest that female torsos with low WHR readily capture attention but still require serial processing.

In our audacity, we infer others' political leanings from their faces alone --- and are willing to discriminate against those with dissenting faces

Partisan Discrimination Without Explicit Partisan Cues. Jeffrey Lyons, Stephen M. Utych. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, Vol. 10 No. 1 (2022), Jul 13 2022. https://doi.org/10.5964/jspp.6491

Abstract: Much research has demonstrated that Democrats and Republicans use information about party affiliation to discriminate against one another. However, we know little about how people gain the necessary information about other people’s partisanship to engage in discriminatory behavior. We explore whether people perceive partisanship when shown only images of faces, and whether they then use these perceptions to engage in partisan discrimination. We find that they do. Using two studies we show that the partisan perceptions people derive from seeing images of faces influence discrimination of job applicants, and propensities to engage is a wide range of social interactions. People appear to be making judgements about partisanship using only facial appearance, and are willing act on that perception. The implication of this finding is that partisan discrimination is likely widespread, and does not require the explicit communication of partisan affiliations.

2005-2017: 6% of Republicans and 4% of Democrats became entrepreneurs; Republicans increase their relative entrepreneurship during Republican administrations and decrease it during Democratic administrations

Partisan Entrepreneurship. Joseph Engelberg, Jorge Guzman, Runjing Lu & William Mullins. NBER Working Paper 30249.DOI 10.3386/w30249. July 2022. https://www.nber.org/papers/w30249

Abstract: Republicans start more firms than Democrats. In a sample of 40 million party-identified Americans between 2005 and 2017, we find that 6% of Republicans and 4% of Democrats become entrepreneurs. This partisan entrepreneurship gap is time-varying: Republicans increase their relative entrepreneurship during Republican administrations and decrease it during Democratic administrations, amounting to a partisan reallocation of 170,000 new firms over our 13-year sample. We find sharp changes in partisan entrepreneurship around the elections of President Obama and President Trump, and the strongest effects among the most politically active partisans: those that donate and vote.

From 2019... Mental time travel and counterfactual thought: 6-year-olds but few younger children can reason counterfactually about past events

A taxonomy of mental time travel and counterfactual thought: Insights from cognitive development. Shalini Gautam et al. Behavioural Brain Research, Volume 374, November 18 2019, 112108. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2019.112108

Abstract: Humans often engage in complex thought about the past, present, and future. They not only think about what did happen, is happening, and will happen, but also what did not happen, is not happening, and will not happen. Here we present an integrated taxonomy of mental time travel and counterfactual thought, in which event representations are assigned categorically distinct temporal locations (i.e., past, present, or future) and subjective propositional values (i.e., affirmed, negated, or uncertain). We review research on children’s developing abilities to generate and reason about event representations with these characteristics. We find that children’s development typically proceeds in three stages: (1) the capacity to imagine and reflect on affirmed and uncertain past, present, and future outcomes, (2) the capacity to imagine and reflect on counterfactual, negated versions of known past outcomes and present situations, and (3) the capacity to anticipate experiencing counterfactual emotions (i.e., regret and relief) in the future. This protracted developmental trajectory may be a function of increasing executive demands, increasing hierarchical complexity of temporal representations, or both.

Both sexes reacted less positively to research findings showing a sex difference favoring males rather than females, and they judged male-favoring research to be lower in quality and more harmful

Reactions to research on sex differences: Effect of sex favoured, researcher sex, and importance of sex-difference domain. Steve Stewart-Williams et al. British Journal of Psychology, July 18 2022. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12580

Abstract: Two studies (total N = 778) looked at (1) how people react to research finding a sex difference depending on whether the research puts men or women in a better light and (2) how well people can predict the average man and average woman's reactions. Participants read a fictional popular-science article about fictional research finding either a male- or a female-favouring sex difference. The research was credited to either a male or a female lead researcher. In both studies, both sexes reacted less positively to differences favouring males; in contrast to our earlier research, however, the effect was larger among female participants. Contrary to a widespread expectation, participants did not react less positively to research led by a female. Participants did react less positively, though, to research led by a male when the research reported a male-favouring difference in a highly valued trait. Participants judged male-favouring research to be lower in quality than female-favouring research, apparently in large part because they saw the former as more harmful. In both studies, participants predicted that the average man and woman would exhibit substantial own-sex favouritism, with both sexes predicting more own-sex favouritism from the other sex than the other sex predicted from itself. In making these predictions, participants overestimated women's own-sex favouritism, and got the direction of the effect wrong for men. A greater understanding of the tendency to overestimate gender-ingroup bias could help quell antagonisms between the sexes.

Almost everyone practices secret consumer behaviors at one time or another, consuming things/paying for services that they keep secret from those close to them; the guilt leads to greater relationship investment

Secret consumer behaviors in close relationships. Danielle J. Brick, Kelley Gullo Wight, Gavan J. Fitzsimons. Journal of Consumer Psychology, June 30 2022. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1315

Abstract: Although close relationships are often characterized by openness and disclosure, in the present research, we propose that there are times when individuals choose not to tell close others about their consumer behavior, keeping it a secret. For example, one partner may eat a candy bar on the way home from work, hide a package that was delivered to the house, or hire a cleaning service and not tell the other partner. We theorize that this type of consumer behavior is both common and mundane. That is, the consumption itself is minor—and has likely been done with the partner's knowledge in the past—but is being intentionally kept from the partner. We further investigate whether such behavior has downstream effects on the relationship, despite its mundaneness. Five studies support our conceptualization of secret consumer behaviors in close relationships and illustrate one consequence: guilt from secret consumption leads to greater relationship investment. This research explores a common, yet understudied, area of consumer behavior and highlights areas for future research. Thus, we contribute to the literature by being the first work to examine emotional, behavioral, and relational aspects of secret consumer behavior.

General Discussion

People commonly keep consumption a secret from close others. It tends to be mundane consumer behavior, but due to the nature of secrecy (i.e., intentional nondisclosure), it can have consequences for the relationship. By investigating the nature of secret consumer behaviors in relationships and examining emotional, behavioral, and relational outcomes, this research contributes to the literatures on close relationships (e.g., Brick & Fitzsimons, 2017; Caprariello & Reis, 2011; Finkel et al., 2015; Wight et al., 2022), social influences (e.g., Argo, 2020; Dzhogleva & Lamberton, 2014; McFerran et al., 2010; Ordabayeva & Chandon, 2011; Wood & Hayes, 2012), and secrecy in consumption (e.g., He et al., 2021; Rodas & John, 2020). This research also opens the door for future research to examine many more questions regarding the antecedents, methods, and consequences of secret consumer behavior (SCB) in close relationships. In the present research, we were agnostic as to why people keep SCBs, but future research should investigate relational motivations of SCBs. For example, one reason why an individual could choose to keep a SCB from a close other is to avoid a fight (e.g., secretly buying a shirt to avoid fighting about spending money). Another reason could be to help their partner (e.g., secretly eating candy in order to help their partner stick to their diet). In the shirt example, the person is keeping the secret for prevention reasons, and, in the candy example, the person is keeping the secret for promotion reasons (e.g., Regulatory Focus Theory; Higgins, 1998). Similarly, while we find that most people engage in SCB in close relationships, future research could examine antecedents to the tendency to do so. For example, consumers with a high need for independence may be more likely to engage in SCB, since it could give a sense of autonomy within an otherwise interconnected relationship. Another possibility is that attachment styles within a given relationship (Bowlby, 1982) affect the propensity to engage in SCB within that relationship. Those with a secure attachment to their relationship may ironically be more likely to keep SCBs as they may feel more confident that it would not threaten the relationship. In line with prior relational work (e.g., Slepian et al. 2017), we focused on the intent to conceal and were agnostic about the way in which the secret was kept. However, there are multiple ways in which individuals may keep a secret (e.g., omission, avoidance, lying; Thomas & Jewell, 2019). Future research could explore whether there are differences in relational outcomes depending upon the method for keeping the secret (e.g., lying may make the same SCB seem more severe than if it were kept via omission). Relatedly, we focused on relatively mundane consumer behaviors, but it is possible that some SCBs are more severe. In such cases, their relational outcomes may reflect the negative outcomes of the more severe general secrets that are typically studied in social psychology. While we do not find evidence of this in the current research (all interactions with how big of a deal the SCB is on both guilt and relationship investment are non-significant, p’s > .18), future research seems warranted. 

Additionally, while we focus on the effects of keeping SCBs (as opposed to disclosure), future research on confession seems warranted. Prior work has shown that confessing selfcontrol failures can affect subsequent self-control (Lowe & Haws, 2019); might confessing SCBs increase feelings of visibility and therefore decrease future secrecy? Could it bring people closer together? This reasoning opens questions about the potential relational effects of confessing SCBs depending upon to whom the secret is confessed: targets or non-targets. Future research could also examine other relational outcomes of SCB, such as relationship satisfaction or interpersonal goal pursuit. Individuals must navigate both inter- and intra-partner goals within close relationships, and sometimes the goals may not be aligned. For example, perhaps Partner A has a goal to lose weight, while Partner B does not. Would it be better for their relationship satisfaction, and perhaps for Partner A’s goal pursuit, if Partner B consumes pizza in secret? Research on invisible support (Bolger et al., 2000) suggests that it might, but future research should explore these questions. Finally, future research could explore other consequences for the partner from whom the SCB is kept. In a dyadic study of romantic partners’ spending on and satisfaction with Valentine’s Day, we found secret consumption can have positive downstream outcomes for the partner. Specifically, we found that Partner A’s guilt from engaging in SCB was associated with greater spending on Valentine’s Day for Partner B, and this, in turn, increased Partner B’s satisfaction with how Valentine’s Day went (see MDA for more information on this study). This provides initial evidence that SCB could have positive downstream consequences for the partner, but future research should explore this finding in more detail. In conclusion, the current work identifies secret consumer behavior as a common, but understudied, phenomenon in close relationships and demonstrates consequences of this behavior. We hope the current work will inspire researchers to pursue additional questions in this exciting area

Two decades of infidelity research through an intersectional lens -- Complaints of the intersectionists for not being able to analyze the subjects with a lens that includes "systems of" heterosexism, cissexism, classism in the many studies that lack enough data

“I’ve been cheated, been mistreated, when will I be loved”: Two decades of infidelity research through an intersectional lens. Dana A Weiser et al. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, July 6, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1177/02654075221113032

Abstract: Infidelity is a common experience within romantic relationships and is closely linked with relationship dissolution and well-being. Using an intersectionality theoretical framework, we undertook a systematic review of the infidelity literature in flagship journals associated with the disciplines of the International Association for Relationship Research. Our review includes findings from 162 published empirical articles. We identified several themes within the infidelity literature, including: individual, interpersonal, and contextual predictors; outcomes and reactions; beliefs and attitudes; prevalence; and conceptualization. We also found that the infidelity literature primarily utilizes participants who are White, heterosexual, cisgender individuals who reside in the United States or Canada. Moreover, researchers were limited in information they provided about participants’ identities so in most articles it was difficult to assess many dimensions of identity. Ultimately, these findings limit our ability to apply an intersectional framework. We argue that researchers should extend the research they cite, collect richer demographic data, expand their samples (especially beyond White heterosexual cisgender American college students), and consider the sociohistorical context of their participants (e.g., the particular social circumstances and historical forces which shape individuals’ lived experiences). For example, scholars using an intersectional framework would explain their participants’ relationship experiences through a lens which includes systems of sexism, racism, heterosexism, cissexism, classism, etc., in conjunction with individual and interpersonal factors.

Keywords: Deception, infidelity, jealousy, sexuality

Recent evidence challenges long-standing views of male–female power relationships by showing that power ranges along a continuum from strictly male- to strictly female-dominated animal societies

The eco-evolutionary landscape of power relationships between males and females. Eve Davidian et al. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Volume 37, Issue 8, August 2022, Pages 706-718. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2022.04.004

Highlights

Inequality in the degree of control (or ‘power’) that members of one sex exert over members of the other sex is a pervasive characteristic of mammalian societies, including our own.

The study of the drivers of male–female power relationships has been impeded by methodological limitations and a lack of conceptual embedding in theories of sexual conflict, sexual selection and social evolution.

Recent evidence challenges long-standing views by showing that (i) power ranges along a continuum from strictly male- to strictly female-dominated animal societies and (ii) intersexual power relationships are not fixed attributes of species.

Here we break with dichotomist and static approaches to adopt a dynamic, theory-driven framework that provides a better understanding of the power struggles between the sexes, and how these relate to the social and mating system of a species.

Abstract: In animal societies, control over resources and reproduction is often biased towards one sex. Yet, the ecological and evolutionary underpinnings of male–female power asymmetries remain poorly understood. We outline a comprehensive framework to quantify and predict the dynamics of male–female power relationships within and across mammalian species. We show that male–female power relationships are more nuanced and flexible than previously acknowledged. We then propose that enhanced reproductive control over when and with whom to mate predicts social empowerment across ecological and evolutionary contexts. The framework explains distinct pathways to sex-biased power: coercion and male-biased dimorphism constitute a co-evolutionary highway to male power, whereas female power emerges through multiple physiological, morphological, behavioural, and socioecological pathways.

Keywords: intersexual power inequalitysexual conflictsocial dominancesexual size dimorphismreproductive controlsocial evolution

Belief in Luck and Precognition Around the World

Belief in Luck and Precognition Around the World. Emily A. Harris, Taciano L. Milfont, Matthew J. Hornsey. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, July 14, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1177/00220221221110462

Abstract: Although magical beliefs (such as belief in luck and precognition) are presumably universal, the extent to which such beliefs are embraced likely varies across cultures. We assessed the effect of culture on luck and precognition beliefs in two large-scale multinational studies (Study 1: k = 16, N = 17,664; Study 2: k = 25, N = 4,024). Over and above the effects of demographic factors, culture was a significant predictor of luck and precognition beliefs in both studies. Indeed, when culture was added to demographic models, the variance accounted for in luck and precognition beliefs approximately doubled. Belief in luck and precognition was highest in Latvia and Russia (Study 1) and South Asia (Study 2), and lowest in Protestant Europe (Studies 1 and 2). Thus, beyond the effects of age, gender, education, and religiosity, culture is a significant factor in explaining variance in people’s belief in luck and precognition. Follow-up analyses found a relatively consistent effect of socio-economic development, such that belief in luck and precognition were more prevalent in countries with lower scores on the Human Development Index. There was also some evidence that these beliefs were stronger in more collectivist cultures, but this effect was inconsistent. We discuss the possibility that there are culturally specific historical factors that contribute to relative openness to such beliefs in Russia, Latvia, and South Asia.

Keywords: magical beliefs, luck, precognition, cross-cultural, multi-national

h/t: Tyler Cowen Belief in Luck and Precognition Around the World - Marginal REVOLUTION