Perspectives On Psychological Science[JOURNAL]
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200 papers
How Genetic-Conflict Theory Can Inform Studies of Human Nature.
Ayers JD
Perspect Psychol Sci · 2025 Jul · PMID 38346115 · Publisher ↗
Understanding how genetics influences human psychology is something that the evolutionary sciences emphasize. However, the functions of complex genetic influences on behavior have been overlooked in favor of perspectives...
Understanding how genetics influences human psychology is something that the evolutionary sciences emphasize. However, the functions of complex genetic influences on behavior have been overlooked in favor of perspectives that posit unitary influences of genes on behavior. One such example is the belief that human growth, development, and behavior are influenced uniformly by their genes even though previous research has highlighted the genetic conflict endemic in these domains. Although much psychological research has robustly documented areas in which we see the footprints of genetic conflict in human behavior, these areas are referred to by different names that prevent researchers from making connections under a unifying framework. In this article, I outline what genetic conflict is and how genetic conflict can provide a unifying framework for psychological investigations of social relationships. I also discuss avenues for future research on genetic conflict in humans and the importance of considering cultural, ecological, and other developmental factors when researching the genetic influences on human behavior.
Health Communication and Behavioral Change During the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Albarracin D, Oyserman D, Schwarz N
Perspect Psychol Sci · 2024 Jul · PMID 38319808 · Full text
The COVID-19 pandemic challenged the public health system to respond to an emerging, difficult-to-understand pathogen through demanding behaviors, including staying at home, masking for long periods, and vaccinating mult...
The COVID-19 pandemic challenged the public health system to respond to an emerging, difficult-to-understand pathogen through demanding behaviors, including staying at home, masking for long periods, and vaccinating multiple times. We discuss key challenges of the pandemic health communication efforts deployed in the United States from 2020 to 2022 and identify research priorities. One priority is communicating about uncertainty in ways that prepare the public for disagreement and likely changes in recommendations as scientific understanding advances: How can changes in understanding and recommendations foster a sense that "science works as intended" rather than "the experts are clueless" and prevent creating a void to be filled by misinformation? A second priority concerns creating a culturally fluent framework for asking people to engage in difficult and novel actions: How can health messages foster the perception that difficulties of behavior change signal that the change is important rather than that the change "is not for people like me?" A third priority entails a shift from communication strategies that focus on knowledge and attitudes to interventions that focus on norms, policy, communication about policy, and channel factors that impair behavior change: How can we move beyond educating and correcting misinformation to achieving desired actions?
Subjective Confidence as a Monitor of the Replicability of the Response.
Koriat A
Perspect Psychol Sci · 2025 Jul · PMID 38319741 · Full text
Confidence is commonly assumed to monitor the accuracy of responses. However, intriguing results, examined in the light of philosophical discussions of epistemic justification, suggest that confidence actually monitors t...
Confidence is commonly assumed to monitor the accuracy of responses. However, intriguing results, examined in the light of philosophical discussions of epistemic justification, suggest that confidence actually monitors the reliability of choices rather than (directly) their accuracy. The focus on reliability is consistent with the view that the construction of truth has much in common with the construction of reality: extracting reliable properties that afford prediction. People are assumed to make a binary choice by sampling cues from a "collective wisdomware," and their confidence is based on the consistency of these cues, in line with the self-consistency model. Here, however, I propose that internal consistency is taken to index the reliability of choices themselves-the likelihood that they will be repeated. The results of 10 studies using binary decisions from different domains indicated that confidence in a choice predicts its replicability both within individuals and across individuals. This was so for domains for which choices have a truth value and for those for which they do not. For the former domains, differences in replicability mediated the prediction of accuracy whether confidence was diagnostic or counterdiagnostic of accuracy. Metatheoretical, methodological, and practical implications are discussed.
The Colonial History of Systemic Racism: Insights for Psychological Science.
Tarlow KR
Perspect Psychol Sci · 2025 Jul · PMID 38316123 · Publisher ↗
The psychological study of systemic racism can benefit from the converging insights of "Black Marxism" and development economics, which illustrate how modern systemic racism is rooted in the political and economic instit...
The psychological study of systemic racism can benefit from the converging insights of "Black Marxism" and development economics, which illustrate how modern systemic racism is rooted in the political and economic institutions established during the historical period of European colonization. This article explores how these insights can be used to study systemic racism and challenge scientific racism in psychology by rethinking traditional research paradigms to incorporate the histories of race, class, and capitalism. Antiracism strategies that make use of these histories are also discussed, which include disrupting the psychological processes that sustain racist systems.
Metacognitive Feelings: A Predictive-Processing Perspective.
Fernández Velasco P, Loev S
Perspect Psychol Sci · 2025 Jul · PMID 38285929 · Full text
Metacognitive feelings are affective experiences that concern the subject's mental processes and capacities. Paradigmatic examples include the feeling of familiarity, the feeling of confidence, or the tip-of-the-tongue e...
Metacognitive feelings are affective experiences that concern the subject's mental processes and capacities. Paradigmatic examples include the feeling of familiarity, the feeling of confidence, or the tip-of-the-tongue experience. In this article, we advance an account of metacognitive feelings based on the predictive-processing framework. The core tenet of predictive processing is that the brain is a hierarchical hypothesis-testing mechanism, predicting sensory input on the basis of prior experience and updating predictions on the basis of the incoming prediction error. According to the proposed account, metacognitive feelings arise out of a process in which visceral changes serve as cues to predict the error dynamics relating to a particular mental process. The expected rate of prediction-error reduction corresponds to the valence at the core of the emerging metacognitive feeling. Metacognitive feelings use prediction dynamics to model the agent's situation in a way that is both descriptive and directive. Thus, metacognitive feelings are not only an appraisal of ongoing cognitive performance but also a set of action policies. These action policies span predictive trajectories across bodily action, mental action, and interoceptive changes, which together transform the epistemic landscape within which metacognitive feelings unfold.
Motivation Science Can Improve Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Trainings.
Legate N, Weinstein N
Perspect Psychol Sci · 2025 Jul · PMID 38285642 · Publisher ↗
Recent reviews of efforts to reduce prejudice and increase diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace have converged on the conclusion that prejudice is resistant to change and that merely raising awareness...
Recent reviews of efforts to reduce prejudice and increase diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace have converged on the conclusion that prejudice is resistant to change and that merely raising awareness of the problem is not enough. There is growing recognition that DEI efforts may fall short because they do not effectively motivate attitudinal and behavioral change, especially the type of change that translates to reducing disparities. Lasting change requires sustained effort and commitment, yet insights from motivation science about how to inspire this are missing from the scientific and practitioner literatures on DEI trainings. Herein, we leverage evidence from two complementary approaches to motivating change and reducing defensiveness: self-determination theory, a metatheory of human motivation, and motivational interviewing, a clinical approach for behavior change, to tackle the question of how to improve DEI efforts. We distill these insights for researchers, teachers, practitioners, and leaders wanting to apply motivational principles to their own DEI work. We highlight challenges of using this approach and recommend training takes place alongside larger structural and organizational changes. We conclude that motivation is a necessary (but insufficient) ingredient for effective DEI efforts that can energize personal commitment to DEI.
The Effect of Income and Wealth on Behavioral Strategies, Personality Traits, and Preferences.
Boon-Falleur M, Baumard N, André JB
Perspect Psychol Sci · 2025 Jul · PMID 38261647 · Publisher ↗
Individuals living in either harsh or favorable environments display well-documented psychological and behavioral differences. For example, people in favorable environments tend to be more future-oriented, trust stranger...
Individuals living in either harsh or favorable environments display well-documented psychological and behavioral differences. For example, people in favorable environments tend to be more future-oriented, trust strangers more, and have more explorative preferences. To account for such differences, psychologists have turned to evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology, in particular, the literature on life-history theory and pace-of-life syndrome. However, critics have found that the theoretical foundations of these approaches are fragile and that differences in life expectancy cannot explain vast psychological and behavioral differences. In this article, we build on the theory of optimal resource allocation to propose an alternative framework. We hypothesize that the quantity of resources available, such as income, has downstream consequences on psychological traits, leading to the emergence of behavioral syndromes. We show that more resources lead to more long-term orientation, more tolerance of variance, and more investment in low marginal-benefit needs. At the behavioral level, this translates, among others, into more large-scale cooperation, more investment in health, and more exploration. These individual-level differences in behavior, in turn, account for cultural phenomena such as puritanism, authoritarianism, and innovation.
Interparental Positivity Spillover Theory: How Parents' Positive Relational Interactions Influence Children.
Don BP, Simpson JA, Fredrickson BL … +1 more , Algoe SB
Perspect Psychol Sci · 2025 Jul · PMID 38252555 · Full text
Interparental interactions have an important influence on child well-being and development. Yet prior theory and research have primarily focused on interparental conflict as contributing to child maladjustment, which lea...
Interparental interactions have an important influence on child well-being and development. Yet prior theory and research have primarily focused on interparental conflict as contributing to child maladjustment, which leaves out the critical question of how interparental positive interactions-such as expressed gratitude, capitalization, and shared laughter-may benefit child growth and development. In this article, we integrate theory and research in family, relationship, and affective science to propose a new framework for understanding how the heretofore underexamined positive interparental interactions influence children: interparental positivity spillover theory (IPST). IPST proposes that, distinct from the influence of conflict, interparental positive interactions spill over into children's experiences in the form of their (a) experience of positive emotions, (b) beneficially altered perceptions of their parents, and (c) emulation of their parents' positive interpersonal behaviors. This spillover is theorized to promote beneficial cognitive, behavioral, social, and physiological outcomes in children in the short term (i.e., immediately after a specific episode of interparental positivity, or on a given day) as well as cumulatively across time. As a framework, IPST generates a host of novel and testable predictions to guide future research, all of which have important implications for the mental health, well-being, and positive development of children and families.
The Sound of Emotional Prosody: Nearly 3 Decades of Research and Future Directions.
Larrouy-Maestri P, Poeppel D, Pell MD
Perspect Psychol Sci · 2025 Jul · PMID 38232303 · Full text
Emotional voices attract considerable attention. A search on any browser using "emotional prosody" as a key phrase leads to more than a million entries. Such interest is evident in the scientific literature as well; read...
Emotional voices attract considerable attention. A search on any browser using "emotional prosody" as a key phrase leads to more than a million entries. Such interest is evident in the scientific literature as well; readers are reminded in the introductory paragraphs of countless articles of the great importance of prosody and that listeners easily infer the emotional state of speakers through acoustic information. However, despite decades of research on this topic and important achievements, the mapping between acoustics and emotional states is still unclear. In this article, we chart the rich literature on emotional prosody for both newcomers to the field and researchers seeking updates. We also summarize problems revealed by a sample of the literature of the last decades and propose concrete research directions for addressing them, ultimately to satisfy the need for more mechanistic knowledge of emotional prosody.
A Systematic Review and New Analyses of the Gender-Equality Paradox.
Herlitz A, Hönig I, Hedebrant K … +1 more , Asperholm M
Perspect Psychol Sci · 2025 May · PMID 38170215 · Full text
Some studies show that living conditions, such as economy, gender equality, and education, are associated with the magnitude of psychological sex differences. We systematically and quantitatively reviewed 54 articles and...
Some studies show that living conditions, such as economy, gender equality, and education, are associated with the magnitude of psychological sex differences. We systematically and quantitatively reviewed 54 articles and conducted new analyses on 27 meta-analyses and large-scale studies to investigate the association between living conditions and psychological sex differences. We found that sex differences in personality, verbal abilities, episodic memory, and negative emotions are more pronounced in countries with higher living conditions. In contrast, sex differences in sexual behavior, partner preferences, and math are smaller in countries with higher living conditions. We also observed that economic indicators of living conditions, such as gross domestic product, are most sensitive in predicting the magnitude of sex differences. Taken together, results indicate that more sex differences are larger, rather than smaller, in countries with higher living conditions. It should therefore be expected that the magnitude of most psychological sex differences will remain unchanged or become more pronounced with improvements in living conditions, such as economy, gender equality, and education.
Editorial for the Special Issue on Algorithms in Our Lives.
Bhatia S, Galesic M, Mitchell M
Perspect Psychol Sci · 2024 Sep · PMID 38165782 · Publisher ↗
Abstract loading — click title to view on PubMed.
AI Psychometrics: Assessing the Psychological Profiles of Large Language Models Through Psychometric Inventories.
Pellert M, Lechner CM, Wagner C … +2 more , Rammstedt B, Strohmaier M
Perspect Psychol Sci · 2024 Sep · PMID 38165766 · Full text
We illustrate how standard psychometric inventories originally designed for assessing noncognitive human traits can be repurposed as diagnostic tools to evaluate analogous traits in large language models (LLMs). We start...
We illustrate how standard psychometric inventories originally designed for assessing noncognitive human traits can be repurposed as diagnostic tools to evaluate analogous traits in large language models (LLMs). We start from the assumption that LLMs, inadvertently yet inevitably, acquire psychological traits (metaphorically speaking) from the vast text corpora on which they are trained. Such corpora contain sediments of the personalities, values, beliefs, and biases of the countless human authors of these texts, which LLMs learn through a complex training process. The traits that LLMs acquire in such a way can potentially influence their behavior, that is, their outputs in downstream tasks and applications in which they are employed, which in turn may have real-world consequences for individuals and social groups. By eliciting LLMs' responses to language-based psychometric inventories, we can bring their traits to light. Psychometric profiling enables researchers to study and compare LLMs in terms of noncognitive characteristics, thereby providing a window into the personalities, values, beliefs, and biases these models exhibit (or mimic). We discuss the history of similar ideas and outline possible psychometric approaches for LLMs. We demonstrate one promising approach, zero-shot classification, for several LLMs and psychometric inventories. We conclude by highlighting open challenges and future avenues of research for AI Psychometrics.
The Emerging Science of Interacting Minds.
Wheatley T, Thornton MA, Stolk A … +1 more , Chang LJ
Perspect Psychol Sci · 2024 Mar · PMID 38096443 · Full text
For over a century, psychology has focused on uncovering mental processes of a single individual. However, humans rarely navigate the world in isolation. The most important determinants of successful development, mental...
For over a century, psychology has focused on uncovering mental processes of a single individual. However, humans rarely navigate the world in isolation. The most important determinants of successful development, mental health, and our individual traits and preferences arise from interacting with other individuals. Social interaction underpins who we are, how we think, and how we behave. Here we discuss the key methodological challenges that have limited progress in establishing a robust science of how minds interact and the new tools that are beginning to overcome these challenges. A deep understanding of the human mind requires studying the context within which it originates and exists: social interaction.
The Inversion Problem: Why Algorithms Should Infer Mental State and Not Just Predict Behavior.
Kleinberg J, Ludwig J, Mullainathan S … +1 more , Raghavan M
Perspect Psychol Sci · 2024 Sep · PMID 38085919 · Publisher ↗
More and more machine learning is applied to human behavior. Increasingly these algorithms suffer from a hidden-but serious-problem. It arises because they often predict one thing while hoping for another. Take a recomme...
More and more machine learning is applied to human behavior. Increasingly these algorithms suffer from a hidden-but serious-problem. It arises because they often predict one thing while hoping for another. Take a recommender system: It predicts clicks but hopes to identify preferences. Or take an algorithm that automates a radiologist: It predicts in-the-moment diagnoses while hoping to identify their reflective judgments. Psychology shows us the gaps between the objectives of such prediction tasks and the goals we hope to achieve: People can click mindlessly; experts can get tired and make systematic errors. We argue such situations are ubiquitous and call them "inversion problems": The real goal requires understanding a mental state that is not directly measured in behavioral data but must instead be inverted from the behavior. Identifying and solving these problems require new tools that draw on both behavioral and computational science.
New Forms of Collaboration Between the Social and Natural Sciences Could Become Necessary for Understanding Rapid Collective Transitions in Social Systems.
Thurner S
Perspect Psychol Sci · 2024 Mar · PMID 38079519 · Publisher ↗
Human societies are complex systems and as such have tipping points. They can rapidly transit from one mode of operation to another and thereby change the way they function as a whole. Such transitions appear as financia...
Human societies are complex systems and as such have tipping points. They can rapidly transit from one mode of operation to another and thereby change the way they function as a whole. Such transitions appear as financial or economic crises, rapid swings in collective opinion, political regime shifts, or revolutions. In physics collective transitions are known as phase transitions; for example, water exists in states of liquid, ice, and vapor. A few variables determine which state is realized: temperature, pressure, and volume. For social systems it is less clear what determines collective social states. A better understanding of social tipping points would allow us to tackle some of the big challenges more systematically, such as polarization, loss of social cohesion, fragmentation, or the green transition. The physics concept of universality might be key to understanding some tipping points in human societies and why agent-based models (ABMs) might make sense for identifying the transition points. If universality exists in social systems there is hope that relatively simple ABMs will be sufficient for understanding collective social systems in transition; if it does not exist, highly detailed computational models will be unavoidable. Both are possible. Both need new forms of collaboration between the social and natural sciences, and new types of data will be essential.
How Social Media Algorithms Shape Offline Civic Participation: A Framework of Social-Psychological Processes.
Jung H, Dai W, Albarracín D
Perspect Psychol Sci · 2024 Sep · PMID 38060826 · Full text
Even though social media platforms have created opportunities for more efficient and convenient civic participation, they are unlikely to bring about social change if the online actions do not propagate to offline civic...
Even though social media platforms have created opportunities for more efficient and convenient civic participation, they are unlikely to bring about social change if the online actions do not propagate to offline civic participation. This article begins by reviewing the meta-analytic evidence on the relation between social media use and offline civic participation. Following this discussion, we present a theoretical framework that incorporates the attitudinal, motivational, and relational processes that may mediate the effect of social media use on offline civic participation. The framework highlights how social media algorithms may shape attitudes on important societal issues, promote generalized action goals among habitual users, and build social capital. We further discuss factors that may strengthen or undermine each of these processes, suggest ways to design and implement algorithms that may promote offline civic participation, and propose questions for future research.
Do COVID-19 Vaccination Policies Backfire? The Effects of Mandates, Vaccination Passports, and Financial Incentives on COVID-19 Vaccination.
Fayaz-Farkhad B, Jung H
Perspect Psychol Sci · 2024 Jul · PMID 38048051 · Full text
Faced with the challenges of motivating people to vaccinate, many countries have introduced policy-level interventions to encourage vaccination against COVID-19. For example, mandates were widely imposed requiring indivi...
Faced with the challenges of motivating people to vaccinate, many countries have introduced policy-level interventions to encourage vaccination against COVID-19. For example, mandates were widely imposed requiring individuals to vaccinate to work and attend school, and vaccination passports required individuals to show proof of vaccination to travel and access public spaces and events. Furthermore, some countries also began offering financial incentives for getting vaccinated. One major criticism of these policies was the possibility that they would produce reactance and thus undermine voluntary vaccination. This article therefore reviews relevant empirical evidence to examine whether this is indeed the case. Specifically, we devote separate sections to reviewing and discussing the impacts of three major policies that were implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic: vaccination mandates, vaccination passports, and the provision of financial incentives. A careful analysis of the evidence provides little support that these policies backfire but instead can effectively promote vaccination at the population level. The policies are not without limitations, however, such as their inability to mobilize those that are strongly hesitant to vaccines. Finally, we discuss how policy-level interventions should be designed and implemented to address future epidemics and pandemics.
The Spread of Beliefs in Partially Modularized Communities.
Goldstone RL, Dubova M, Aiyappa R … +1 more , Edinger A
Perspect Psychol Sci · 2024 Mar · PMID 38019565 · Publisher ↗
Many life-influencing social networks are characterized by considerable informational isolation. People within a community are far more likely to share beliefs than people who are part of different communities. The sprea...
Many life-influencing social networks are characterized by considerable informational isolation. People within a community are far more likely to share beliefs than people who are part of different communities. The spread of useful information across communities is impeded by echo chambers (far greater connectivity within than between communities) and filter bubbles (more influence of beliefs by connected neighbors within than between communities). We apply the tools of network analysis to organize our understanding of the spread of beliefs across modularized communities and to predict the effect of individual and group parameters on the dynamics and distribution of beliefs. In our Spread of Beliefs in Modularized Communities (SBMC) framework, a stochastic block model generates social networks with variable degrees of modularity, beliefs have different observable utilities, individuals change their beliefs on the basis of summed or average evidence (or intermediate decision rules), and parameterized stochasticity introduces randomness into decisions. SBMC simulations show surprising patterns; for example, increasing out-group connectivity does not always improve group performance, adding randomness to decisions can promote performance, and decision rules that sum rather than average evidence can improve group performance, as measured by the average utility of beliefs that the agents adopt. Overall, the results suggest that intermediate degrees of belief exploration are beneficial for the spread of useful beliefs in a community, and so parameters that pull in opposite directions on an explore-exploit continuum are usefully paired.
Individuals, Collectives, and Individuals in Collectives: The Ineliminable Role of Dependence.
Hahn U
Perspect Psychol Sci · 2024 Mar · PMID 38010950 · Publisher ↗
Our beliefs are inextricably shaped through communication with others. Furthermore, even conversation we conduct in pairs may itself be taking place across a wider, connected social network. Our communications, and with...
Our beliefs are inextricably shaped through communication with others. Furthermore, even conversation we conduct in pairs may itself be taking place across a wider, connected social network. Our communications, and with that our thoughts, are consequently typically those of individuals in collectives. This has fundamental consequences with respect to how our beliefs are shaped. This article examines the role of dependence on our beliefs and seeks to demonstrate its importance with respect to key phenomena involving collectives that have been taken to indicate irrationality. It is argued that (with the benefit of hindsight) these phenomena no longer seem surprising when one considers the multiple dependencies that govern information acquisition and the evaluation of cognitive agents in their normal (i.e., social) context.
A Normative Framework for Assessing the Information Curation Algorithms of the Internet.
Lazer D, Swire-Thompson B, Wilson C
Perspect Psychol Sci · 2024 Sep · PMID 38010888 · Publisher ↗
It is critical to understand how algorithms structure the information people see and how those algorithms support or undermine society's core values. We offer a normative framework for the assessment of the information c...
It is critical to understand how algorithms structure the information people see and how those algorithms support or undermine society's core values. We offer a normative framework for the assessment of the information curation algorithms that determine much of what people see on the internet. The framework presents two levels of assessment: one for individual-level effects and another for systemic effects. With regard to individual-level effects we discuss whether (a) the information is aligned with the user's interests, (b) the information is accurate, and (c) the information is so appealing that it is difficult for a person's self-regulatory resources to ignore ("agency hacking"). At the systemic level we discuss whether (a) there are adverse civic-level effects on a system-level variable, such as political polarization; (b) there are negative distributional or discriminatory effects; and (c) there are anticompetitive effects, with the information providing an advantage to the platform. The objective of this framework is both to inform the direction of future scholarship as well as to offer tools for intervention for policymakers.
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