People often look to what most others are doing for guidance, yet the same majority can be informative in one setting and misleading in another. We examined how people interpret social frequency information when group membership and payoff alignment vary. In an incentivized experiment, demonstrators first learned through private feedback which option maximized their own payoff. Social learners received no outcome feedback and decided only after observing demonstrators' choices. This separation ensured that the social signal reflected demonstrators' private learning rather than mutual influence among simultaneously observing learners. We varied whether demonstrators were ingroup or outgroup members and whether their incentives were aligned or misaligned with the social learner's. The same majority could therefore point to the best option in one context and to the worst option in another. The design thus tested whether people interpreted the same signal differently across contexts. Performance was highest when demonstrators were aligned with the learner's incentives, especially when those demonstrators were also ingroup members, even though group membership was induced by minimal cues. Cognitive load reduced memory performance but did not measurably alter the use of social information. We repeated the design in Switzerland and Kenya to study how findings extend across distinct participant pools. Individual strategies were heterogeneous in both sites but more dispersed in Kenya. These findings show that people do not treat the same social frequency signal as interchangeable across contexts defined by group membership and incentive alignment, and they highlight the value of studying social learning across distinct participant pools. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
The present experiments aim to identify the contexts and constraints that give rise to effective social coordination in a novel division-of-labor task, a gamified model of honey bee nectar processing. Experiment 1 investigated the interaction of task demand and individual effectivities on task efficiency and deterministic movement behavior in dyads. Experiment 2 replicated and extended Experiment 1 by adding a condition related to communicative abilities. Results showed that increasing task demand often resulted in increased coordination and synchronization, regardless of task-switching abilities or communicative abilities. Additionally, restricting individuals' abilities to switch roles during more difficult tasks improved performance. Hypotheses relating to communication were largely unsupported; however, trends suggested that restricting communication could be beneficial for coordination and efficiency if the system were given more time to adjust to their communicative abilities. Together, these constraints and contextual factors provide a starting point for investigating coordination in goal-oriented, division-of-labor settings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Dominance and prestige are two key strategies through which people attain rank and influence within groups. Across three studies, we focus on how the deployment of these strategies shapes follower experiences-an important yet less well-understood question-by addressing how dominant and prestigious leaders satisfy the basic psychological needs of followers as outlined by self-determination theory. Using both observational (N₁ = 250) and experimental designs (N₂ = 277; N₃ = 299), we find that dominant leaders undermine followers' need satisfaction (i.e., their need for competence, relatedness, and autonomy), while prestigious leaders enhance it. Moreover, mediation analyses show that these differential patterns of need fulfillment in turn contribute to followers reporting higher leader-directed turnover intentions with dominant leaders but lower turnover intentions with prestigious leaders. Interestingly, when dominance was directed toward outgroup members-rather than ingroup members-followers report greater need satisfaction and lower desire to quit the leader. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Major political events that happen suddenly and are beyond the scope of day-to-day politics-political shocks-capture the attention of millions, but little is known about how they affect people. We examine political shocks from an affective science lens, considering people's emotions, how they regulate those emotions, and the motivations those emotions drive. We apply this lens to two political shocks in the United States: the Supreme Court confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh (Study 1; initial N = 430; September-October 2018) and the impeachments and acquittals of President Donald Trump (Study 2; initial N = 979; November 2019-February 2021). We documented how affective processes changed as the events unfolded. As expected, Democrats and Republicans experienced divergent emotional peaks and valleys across time that tracked party "wins" and "losses." Then, we examined how people regulated these emotions and the collective implications of that regulation. Both Republicans' and Democrats' use of the emotion regulation strategy cognitive reappraisal predicted greater positive emotion about these political shocks, which in turn was associated with greater motivation for political action. Compared to Republicans, however, Democrats' use of reappraisal more strongly predicted lower negative emotion about these events, with lower negative emotion in turn predicting lower motivation for action. This party difference suggests that regulating emotion during these shocks may have more strongly impaired Democrats' (vs. Republicans') motivations to act. By examining the consequences of political shocks through an affective science lens, we highlight powerful processes that may shape people's psychologies as well as political landscapes at the national level. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Frequency of occurrence is one of the main drivers of children's early vocabularies. However, multiple authors have concluded that it fails to account for one of the most important phenomena in word learning-the order in which children acquire nouns and verbs. Across many languages, there is an early noun bias despite nouns occurring far less frequently than verbs in caregiver speech. In this study we use large-scale caregiver-child corpora and a computational model to reexamine noun and verb learning in English, German, Spanish, and Mandarin. Our results show clear evidence for variations in the strength of the noun bias across languages that can be directly explained by a combination of the number of different nouns and verbs used by caregivers and their sufficient frequency: how often most nouns and verbs need to occur in caregiver speech to be learned. Our findings provide further evidence for frequency shaping early children's language development, in this case mapping onto the relative distributions of nouns and verbs in their mental lexicons. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Prior research shows that narcissists respond to failure by aggressing outward and defensively blaming others, but less is known about their responses to success. In four studies with American adults and Canadian undergraduates (total N = 3,463), participants recalled a real-life success or failure and reported their feelings of pride in response (Studies 1, 2, and 4) or experienced success in a controlled, laboratory experiment and reported pride in the success after receiving either positive or negative social feedback (Study 3). Across studies, two key findings emerged. First, narcissists reported greater pride following failure than those low in narcissism, and this difference was stronger than in a neutral control condition, consistent with prior research on narcissistic defensiveness. Second, in response to success, narcissists' feelings of pride were contingent on their peers' respect and admiration, such that they felt less pride than nonnarcissistic individuals following successes that did not make them feel prestigious in the eyes of their peers. This pattern of emotional responding was unique to narcissism and did not emerge for self-esteem. Results from this multimethod investigation suggest that narcissists show a distinctive pattern of pride in response to success and failure. They respond defensively to failure, reporting greater pride than nonnarcissists, and this pattern cannot be attributed to baseline, trait-level differences. In contrast, following success, narcissists' emotions are contingent upon perceiving respect and admiration from their peers, consistent with recent theoretical perspectives on narcissism that position status striving as narcissists' fundamental motive. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Prior research suggests that asking more questions improves outcomes in cooperative conversations, and a vast wisdom literature espouses the power of asking questions during conflictual conversations, too: negotiation experts suggest that questions invite counterparts to disclose information and, in doing so, put askers at an informational advantage. But is this advice necessary—and is it effective? We analyzed 61,057 speech turns from transcripts of 309 dyadic integrative negotiations and used natural language processing to estimate how often people ask questions, what types of questions they ask, and how well question-asking predicts personal goal attainment (Study 1; n = 618 MBA students). Open-ended questions were rare, occurring about once every four minutes (8% of turns). Yet, asking more open-ended questions was robustly associated with personal goal attainment. Closed-ended questions and non-question statements were not reliably related to goal attainment. We then tested causality in live chat negotiations: participants who were instructed to ask open-ended questions achieved higher personal gains than those instructed to ask closed-ended questions or to only make statements (Study 2; n = 1,452 online participants), and those instructed to prepare open-ended questions before their interactions outperformed those instructed to prepare statements (Study 3; n = 372 online participants). In all studies, the benefits of open-ended questions were tied to increased information elicitation and greater value creation. Collectively, these findings offer empirical support for the widely accepted—but rarely tested—claim that negotiators (and conversationalists broadly) focus excessively on influencing (by making statements) at the expense of learning (by asking questions).
Every day, we face the opposing requirements to flexibly shift between goals and to shield them against distractions. Context-dependent adjustments of cognitive stability and flexibility are a prerequisite for adaptive behavior. A current debate centers on whether these two functions of cognitive control involve a trade-off, manifesting in reciprocal performance benefits and costs, or if cognitive stability and flexibility can be regulated independently. This study aimed to test the assumption of a stability-flexibility trade-off and investigate determinants of control regulations. We examined whether cognitive stability and flexibility can be regulated voluntarily and whether these adjustments are modulated by the task relevance of distracting information. In two task-switching paradigms with varying distractor relevance, we assessed task-switch costs and interference costs as inverse indicators of stability and flexibility. We instructed participants to either focus on the current task or switch flexibly between tasks in within-subjects designs, and monetary rewards were contingent on how well participants succeeded in implementing these instructions. Across both experiments, participants adjusted their task-switch costs but not their interference costs according to the instructions. The distractor relevance further did not moderate these adjustments. Multilevel analyses revealed no correlations between changes in task-switch costs and interference costs in both experiments. Taken together, our results provide evidence that adjustments in task-switch costs are partly under voluntary control. However, they did not provide evidence for the expected trade-off between indicators of cognitive stability and flexibility, at least in the task-switching paradigms we used. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Ensemble perception (the rapid extraction of summary statistics from groups of objects) operates across a range of visual features (e.g., average orientation, average emotion) and stimuli (e.g., triangles and faces). Ensemble displays usually contain identical stimuli, although natural environments are composed of more heterogeneous items. This raises the question of whether ensemble mechanisms can generalize across stimulus types (“internal domain generality”). Across 4 Experiments we examine whether ensemble perception for orientation operates similarly across ensemble displays composed of different stimulus types. In Experiment 1, participants compared average orientation (same/different) across two homogeneous ensembles that were made up of either the same or different stimulus types (faces, shoes, triangles). We found that participants were just as accurate when the stimulus types were the same for both ensembles compared to when they were different, suggesting that ensemble abilities are governed by a domain-general mechanism. In Experiments 2A and 2B, participants were shown a single ensemble that was made up of either one stimulus type (e.g., triangles) (pure) or two (e.g., triangles and faces) (mixed) and then determined whether the direction of a subsequent probe arrow was representative of the average orientation. There were minimal differences in the pure condition. However, in the mixed condition, stimulus specificities emerged. Specifically, when the ensemble contained triangles, participant responses were biased in the direction of those triangles. Further evidence of this triangle bias was found via a continuous report task (Experiment 3). When every item within an ensemble is the same, ability to extract summary statistics is similar across ensembles composed of different stimuli, but having more than one type of stimulus present within a single ensemble interferes with the extraction and subsequent report of summary statistics. This suggests that ensemble perception abilities do show internal domain generality, but specificities do emerge under certain circumstances (e.g., stimulus dependencies in mixed displays). We posit that these dependencies are due to differences in the shape and orientability of the stimuli.
This article investigates how domain-specific executive functions contribute to perspective-taking and prosocial behavior. Across two preregistered experiments, we independently manipulated working memory (WM) and inhibitory control to assess their effects on social cognition. In Experiment 1 (N = 128), WM load was varied using a dual-task paradigm, and participants completed behavioral and eye-tracking measures of perspective-taking and prosociality. WM load impaired perspective-taking, and this effect was larger under nonsocial than social load. Conversely, individual differences in prosocial behavior were associated with higher social (but not nonsocial) WM capacity and larger support cliques, suggesting that dissociable cognitive mechanisms underpin different social outcomes. Notably, WM performance did not vary across social versus nonsocial conditions, indicating that increased social complexity did not impair WM and that the relationship is not bidirectional. In Experiment 2 (N = 122), inhibitory control was manipulated using an ego-depletion task, but no significant effects of load emerged. We discuss the challenges of isolating inhibitory control from WM and highlight the need for improved methods in future research. Overall, these findings provide causal evidence linking WM to social skills, underscore the importance of distinguishing between social and nonsocial domains of executive functioning, and point to key conceptual and methodological priorities for the field. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
This research examines whether physical actions and moral decision making are causally linked. Across five preregistered studies involving 330 preschoolers (Mage = 5.96 years; 166 boys and 164 girls; middle-class Han Chinese), we investigated how distinct types of physical actions influence honesty and cheating behavior. Our findings revealed that children were consistently more honest when they performed an action on the environment (e.g., pulling down a screen on a box) than when they performed the same action on themselves (e.g., pulling down a blindfold they wore on their face). These results establish a robust causal link between physical actions and morality, demonstrating that the direction of action, that is, whether they are oriented toward the external environment or oneself, can significantly impact honesty. They challenge the traditional view that moral decisions are purely cognitive and disembodied processes. Instead, they emphasize the embodied nature of morality, where physical actions play a crucial role in shaping ethical choices from an early age. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Humans are believed to be uniquely motivated to form and pursue joint goals with conspecifics within collaborative activities. In experimental studies, a preference for collaboration emerges early in child development and is considered a cornerstone of sociocognitive development. Whether the human motivation to collaborate is an autapomorphic trait remains debated: Direct comparisons of collaborative motivations across primate species are rare and often fail to capture individuals' flexibility as well as variation in collaborative tendencies within and across species. The present study introduces an adaptive testing paradigm that allows for tailored comparisons of preferences for collaborative versus individual action by adjusting reward payoffs based on participants' prior choices. Human children aged 4-6 years from Leipzig, Germany (n = 64), zoo-housed chimpanzees (n = 3), and orangutans (n = 3) participated in the study. Participants of all three species predominantly acted as rational maximizers, favoring options yielding higher reward payoffs regardless of whether required actions involved joint or individual effort. Among human children, sensitivity to reward disparities increased with age. Chimpanzees' sensitivity to reward disparities was higher than that of orangutans. These findings demonstrate a greater flexibility in children's collaborative tendencies than previously assumed and suggest that, like nonhuman great apes, children may often act as rational maximizers in collaborative contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Morality is central to human nature. Being morally accountable requires an understanding of oneself as existing through time and space and an ability to remember past events. We present the first series of studies systematically examining the frequency and characteristics of autobiographical memories for morally themed events using open-ended sampling of autobiographical memories followed by independent coding for morality, following a predefined coding scheme. Overall, the findings show that autobiographical memory plays a central role in relation to morality. Across three studies, using different cueing methods, a substantial proportion of memories referred to a moral theme, with the theme of caring (vs. harming) being especially pronounced. The frequency of memories with moral content increased with greater self-relevance of the memory cue. Across cueing conditions, we found a predominance of memories referring to events in which the person was the agent for a morally good act. Personal misdeeds, being the target for misdeeds, and the target for good deeds were remembered less frequently and dated to have taken place more distant in time. Analyses of self-rated memory characteristics showed a tendency to downplay the narrative importance and self-relevance of memories for personal misdeeds but yielded little support for the idea of impaired memory for such events. The findings are related to evolutionary theory of the development of complex social systems and integrate the study of autobiographical memory with the growing field of moral psychology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Prior research shows that how people interpret their own achievements-whether stemming from effort or natural talent-influences their motivation. Yet little is known about whether attributions for others' achievements shape observers' motivation and performance. Across five studies, we investigate the effects of attributions about the achievements of experts on learners. Studies 1-3 test the motivational impact of effort versus natural talent narratives-stories portraying achievements as driven by hard work or innate ability-using complementary approaches: an observational analysis of "Rate My Professors," the largest publicly available data set of teaching evaluations (N = 1,227); a preregistered lab experiment (N = 791); and a meta-analysis of 12 additional replication experiments (N = 3,563). Effort narratives enhanced learners' self-efficacy and valuation of effort, yielding better learning outcomes. Studies 4 and 5 tested whether effort narratives about experts outperform narratives without attributional cues and whether this advantage varies as a function of expertise level. In Study 4, a large randomized field experiment with Guatemalan high school students (N = 27,791), effort narratives about experts improved learning outcomes relative to no-cue narratives. The results of Study 5, a preregistered lab experiment (N = 1,576), suggest that effort narratives may particularly benefit learners who, in the absence of cues, default to natural talent explanations-a common pattern among participants. The advantages of effort versus no-cue narratives did not extend to peer role models, and among experts, differences in accomplishment did not moderate the effect. Together, our findings extend attribution theories of motivation into the interpersonal domain and suggest that framing experts' achievements as effort-based can be a powerful, low-cost tool to boost motivation and performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
False news-given its capacity to distort public opinion and erode trust-has prompted extensive research on potential countermeasures. Yet, there has been no systematic, comparative, and computational investigation of false news sharing and how best to curb it. To address this gap, we apply a semi-integrative experimental approach that (a) compares multiple existing false news interventions, (b) examines how individual and news-level factors predict false news sharing and shape intervention efficacy, and (c) uses drift-diffusion modeling to uncover the decision-making processes underlying all these effects. We find warning labels and media literacy tips to substantially improve news-sharing quality, whereas social norm cues exert a comparatively modest effect, and accuracy prompts yield only subtle benefits. Although numerous individual factors (e.g., age, political conservatism, social media use) predicted news-sharing quality, the observed intervention effects remained broadly robust across these factors, proving effective even within at-risk populations. Intervention outcomes were likewise robust to news-level variation, such as the believability, sensationalism, and political congruence of news content. Despite this robustness, we find each intervention to operate via distinct decision-making pathways. Warning labels shift initial sharing intentions toward sharing higher quality news, whereas media literacy tips operate later, enhancing the processing of news content and increasing cautiousness before making sharing decisions. By applying a multicomponent experimental framework, this work clarifies the risk factors and decision-making processes driving false news sharing and pinpoints which interventions work best, how they operate at the process level, and in which contexts they should be most effective. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Extensive scholarly attention has focused on how employees with mental illness can face barriers in the workplace (e.g., stigmatizing perceptions, such as perceiving those with mental illness as incompetent, dangerous, or lacking resilience). Drawing on interpersonal emotion regulation motivation theory, we explore whether managers may unintentionally disadvantage employees with mental illness via interpersonal emotion regulation. Our general argument is that managers may perceive that employees with mental illness are less able to regulate negative emotions in challenging situations (e.g., receiving negative performance feedback). This can prompt managers to fear for their employees' well-being and engage in interpersonal emotional regulation by reducing the quality of negative performance feedback that they provide. We also examine whether activating a coaching motive (i.e., enhancing managers' awareness related to the importance of providing all employees with high-quality negative feedback) can overcome these effects. To empirically test our model, we develop and validate scales for our proposed mechanisms: perceived negative emotion regulation inability and fear for well-being. Using samples with managerial experience from the United States and Canada (N = 1,303), we test our hypotheses across three studies. Theoretical and practical implications include recognizing why and how employees with mental illness may face subtle disadvantages in the workplace due to interpersonal emotion regulation, understanding what motivates managers to engage in extrinsic interpersonal emotional regulation for employees with mental illness, and showcasing how reducing the subtle disadvantages employees with mental illness experience may be especially difficult. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Prior knowledge can facilitate the learning of related material, while this new learning can itself modify the memory underlying that prior knowledge. Research on the flexibility of memory has concentrated on episodic memories (Hupbach et al., 2007), fear-related associations (Su et al., 2022), and categorical knowledge (Richter et al., 2019); little is known about the memories for structured action sequences. To address this, we trained participants on two minimal script-like action sequences containing repeated object pairs while manipulating two factors: the similarity between scripts (four vs. six repeated pairs) and the required action linking objects to target boxes into which they were to be moved (click vs. drag). We found that memory intrusions-recalling elements or subsequences from the later sequence when asked to recall the initial sequence-occurred not only for isolated elements but also as linked intrusions involving both object and location. These memory intrusions were more likely with six (vs. four) repeated pairs and when participants used the drag (vs. click) action. Experiment 2 tested whether the results of Experiment 1 could be replicated at the group level and assessed their stability across time at the individual level. While the basic results of Experiment 1 were replicated in Experiment 2, its results were less conclusive regarding whether memory intrusions reflect trait-like stability across time. Together, these findings demonstrated that intrusions into previously learned action sequences occur with new learning, highlighting the plasticity of memories involving script-like behaviors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Navigating complex social environments requires understanding how individuals are connected within social networks. People are highly efficient at integrating dyadic relationships into larger network structures. However, social networks are embedded within different types of groups (e.g., task groups vs. social categories), raising the question of how group typology shapes the learning and representation of social networks. Across four experiments, we demonstrate that group-related network schemas-specifically, expectations that task groups are more interconnected and centralized than social categories-systematically guide social network learning and representation. Participants exhibited prior expectations about the relational structure of different group types, and memory for social relationships was enhanced when the learned network structure aligned with these schematic expectations, producing a matching effect that was correlated with schema strength (Experiment 1). This effect was causally driven by schema strength: Weakening group-related schemas through explicit descriptions attenuated the matching effect (Experiment 2). Critically, the effect was domain specific: When social relationships were replaced with nonsocial connections (airport-flight networks), the matching effect disappeared despite comparable structural properties and task demands (Experiment 3). Computational modeling using the Successor Representation framework further revealed that schema-structure misalignment reduced multistep abstraction, reflected in lower successor discount parameters (γ), yielding less integrated global representations of social networks (Experiment 4). Together, these findings show that social network learning is guided by top-down group-related schemas. It advances our understanding of social network cognition by highlighting the importance of schema-driven abstraction and by bridging local learning mechanisms with global representational structure. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Implicit weight bias-an automatic negative evaluation of individuals with higher weight-is pervasive in society. Intervention efforts to reduce implicit weight bias have been sparse and rarely successful. However, a recent set of studies by Lai and Le Forestier (2025) found supportive evidence for successful modification of weight bias by testing a variety of mechanistic, theoretically grounded interventions based on procedures already shown to be effective in reducing implicit racial bias. In the present study, which extends that work, 1,305 adult participants completed a Weight Implicit Association Test before and after one of five online interventions or a control condition. Four of the five interventions tested yielded reductions in bias, compared to the control condition. We also adopted an inductive, data-driven approach to assess individual differences in response: Results demonstrated that interventions may be particularly impactful to the extent that individuals are optimally matched with procedures that suit their personal characteristics. Overall, this work provides additional evidence for the overall efficacy of interventions that are directed toward the known social cognitive mechanisms of implicit bias and reveals avenues for future research into moderators of intervention outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Previous research provides abundant evidence that variability plays a key role in the process by which a newly encountered face becomes familiar. Theoretical models propose that exposure to variable images improves recognition because such variability is diagnostic (i.e., predicts idiosyncratic within-person variability in appearance). We sought disconfirmatory evidence for such models by examining whether noisy variability also benefits learning. The present study provides compelling evidence that two sources of noisy variability-contextual variability and augmentation (visual noise)-do not improve generalization of learning. Across five preregistered experiments and a total sample of over 1,000 participants, Bayesian statistics revealed no benefit of noisy variability, even when the study phase required active retrieval and even among child participants (i.e., participants with less expertise). These findings support current models of face learning and pave a path toward a deeper understanding of how variability operates. These findings also contribute to recent calls to identify core principles of variability across domains. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
