Patients often feel intense embarrassment over exams with their doctors and increasingly evidence shows that embarrassment interferes with medical care in a variety of ways. Three studies examined whether previous experience with a physician vs. seeing the physician for the first time affects embarrassment in two types of situations. Participants imagined themselves in six medical embarrassment scenarios in the context of consulting a doctor of their own gender (Studies 1 & 2) or opposite gender (Study 3). Three scenarios related to bodily embarrassment and three related to judgment-concern embarrassment (Consedine, Krivoshekova, & Harris. 2007). Greater familiarity with the doctor induced more judgment-concern embarrassment but less bodily embarrassment. This interaction was evident in both a collegiate sample (n = 384), a US national representative sample (n = 501) with same gender doctor, and a US national representative sample (n = 474) with the opposite gender doctor. Practical suggestions for reducing embarrassment are discussed.

Newman and Cain (Newman, Cain 2014 Psychol. Sci. 25 , 648–655 ( doi:10.1177/0956797613504785 )) reported that observers view a person's choices as less ethical when that person has acted in response to both altruistic and selfish (commercial) motivations, as compared with purely selfish interests. The altruistic component reduces the observers' approval rather than raising it. This puzzling phenomenon termed the ‘tainted altruism’ effect, has attracted considerable interest but no direct replications in prior research. We report direct replications of Newman and Cain's Experiments 2 and 3, using a larger sample ( n = 501) intended to be fairly representative of the US population. The results confirm the original findings in considerable detail.

Abstract The primary focus of the replication movement has been on changing research and analysis practices to enhance the reliability of future research. Much less discussed is what should be done with existing scientific literatures, which are increasingly regarded with suspicion but cannot feasibly be rechecked in their entirety. The problem is vexing because criteria once seen as sufficient markers of validity (such as multiple published “conceptual replications”) are now recognized as wholly unconvincing. We suggest that the discipline needs to adopt a strong truth-in-labeling standard, admitting that all findings not yet confirmed in well-powered preregistered studies need to be regarded as preliminary and merely suggestive. Adopting this conservative standard will help alleviate the catastrophic drop in the public reputation of behavioral science that has begun in recent years, and will focus incentives and resources on finding out what portion of our supposed knowledge base is real and what is not.

This interesting paper by Sherman and Rivers (in press) seems to have a narrower point (which its authors argue for very explicitly) and a broader point (which they argue for much less explicitly.) The narrower point is that the phrase ‘social priming’ (and some other alternative labels that have cropped up in this context recently) are exceptionally poor labels for the body of priming research that has been called into question in a torrent of failed replication attempts appearing within the last 10 years or so (sometimes referred to as “the train wreck”). We agree with this narrower point, with a few important qualifications. Sherman and Rivers’ broader point is a suggestion, which runs through the paper but is never quite explicitly stated, that the onslaught of non-replications has not really brought to light anything terribly worrisome or misguided about the field and its prevailing research practices. The authors’ view seems to be that the field was doing about as well as one should expect of a scientific field, but suffered the misfortune of having a good number of outsiders wander in and stir up trouble in various ways. The biggest problem, they seem to suggest, was basically one of public relations rather than substance (especially, that a Nobel Laureate regrettably used somewhat inflammatory language to describe his frustration with research in the area, an event that got fairly wide coverage). We are one of the groups who have been viewed by some as marauding outsiders, although one of us is a social psychologist. Beginning around 2010, we tried to replicate some of the most (to us) surprising and fascinating priming results coming out of the social cognition field, as did numerous other labs around the same time (e.g., Doyen, Klein, Pichon, & Cleeremans, 2012; Harris, Coburn, Rohrer, & Pashler, 2013, Klein et al., 2014; Pashler, Rohrer, & Harris, 2013; Shanks et al., 2013). Our direct replication attempts, usually with larger n’s than the original studies, resulted in a stream of completely negative results, and left us with a rather different perspective on the situation than Sherman and Rivers. We think that the unreproducibility of such a high fraction of the well-known results on a purported phenomenon (essentially 100%, depending on what is counted) is extremely troubling and should, as it has, engender deep concern about research practices in any field. We see it as reflecting systemic problems that were (and perhaps still are) very widespread in social cognition (and perhaps a far wider swath of research topics), including a lack of recognition of the crucial importance of direct replications, the erroneous belief that conceptual replications offer an adequate substitute for direct replications, and a lack of an ethic of personal responsibility for authors of questioned research to reproduce their own findings and report candidly on their ability or inability to do so whenever possible.

A number of methodologists have recently argued that it is inadvisable or even improper to use the same data for exploration (discovering effects) and for confirmation (validating the existence of effects). This has led to suggestions of a two-phased strategy: running an exploratory study (Phase 1) and then performing a Phase 2 validation/confirmation study (ideally pre-registered) that tests just the strongest effect(s) to emerge from Phase 1. Using simulations we ask a simple question: how does this phased strategy compare with the simpler alternative of running "one big study" that combines exploration and confirmation? At any given alpha level, two figures of merit trade off against each other, with the 2-phased strategy offering lower power and greater positive predictive value (PPV). However, a closer comparison of the results show that the "big study" option is strictly dominant in the sense that for any given alpha level used in the two-phased strategy, there is some alpha level for which the "big study" approach yields better power and better PPV. Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons does not affect this result. The implications and their important limitations are discussed.

When people learn perceptual categories, if one feature makes it easy to determine the category membership, learning about other features can be reduced. In three experiments, we asked whether this cue competition effect could be fully eradicated with simple instructions. For this purpose, in a pilot experiment, we adapted a classical overshadowing paradigm into a human category learning task. Unlike previous reports, we demonstrate a robust cue competition effect with human learners. In Experiments 1 and 2, we created a new warning condition that aimed at eradicating the cue competition effect through top-down instructions. With a medium-size overshadowing effect, Experiment 1 shows a weak mitigation of the overshadowing effect. We replaced the stimuli in Experiment 2 to obtain a larger overshadowing effect and showed a larger warning effect. Nevertheless, the overshadowing effect could not be fully eradicated. These experiments suggest that cue competition effects can be a stubborn roadblock in human category learning. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

A highly cited article by Vohs, Mead, and Goode (2006) reported several experiments in which an incidental reminder of money produced large effects on subsequent behaviors unrelated to money. We attempted 2 high-powered direct replications of the first experiment, which found that money-primed subjects worked on a puzzle nearly twice as long as controls before quitting. The replication studies showed no evidence of money priming. Moreover, 25% of the subjects in our studies solved the puzzle correctly or incorrectly, whereas none reportedly did so in the original study. We also list anomalies in the reported results of the original study.

The current upsurge of interest in research replicability (and the exposure of many failures of reproducibility) has led to a much discussion about the possible role of statistical moderation (i.e., variable × variable interactions) in behavioral and social science. These interactions are so widespread and powerful, it is often argued, that we should hardly be surprised when attempts to reproduce important findings frequently lead to failure. Prior literature provides little empirical evidence about how common powerful moderation is. Using five large-scale behavioral research datasets we sought to shed light on the issue. The data reflected several thousand people engaging in a variety of behaviors over considerable periods of time, and included hundreds of demographic and psychological independent variables (IVs). For each outcome variable, we measured the interaction of every pair of IVs. Many IVs had sizable main effects on behavior, but interactions were usually very small in magnitude. While there is no doubt that interactions can occur in behavioral science contexts, the priors revealed here suggest that this should be postulated as a last, not a first resort.

When engaging with a textbook, students are inclined to highlight key content. Although students believe that highlighting and subsequent review of the highlights will further their educational goals, the psychological literature provides no evidence of benefits. Nonetheless, a student’s choice of text for highlighting may serve as a window into their mental state—their level of comprehension, grasp of the key ideas, reading goals, etc. We explore this hypothesis via an experiment in which 198 participants read sections from a college-level biology text, briefly reviewed the text, and then took a quiz on the material. During initial reading, participants were able to highlight words, phrases, and sentences, and these highlights were displayed along with the complete text during the subsequent review. Consistent with past research, the amount of highlighted material is unrelated to quiz performance. However, our main goal is to examine highlighting as a data source for inferring student understanding. We explored multiple representations of the highlighting patterns and tested Bayesian linear regression and neural network models, but we found little or no relationship between a student’s highlights and quiz performance. Our long-term goal is to design digital textbooks that serve not only as conduits of information into the mind of the reader, but also allow us to draw inferences about the reader at a point where interventions may increase the effectiveness of the material.

Are people's perceptions of the newsworthiness of events biased by a tendency to rate as more important any news story that seems likely to lead others to share their own political attitudes? To assess this, we created six pairs of hypothetical news stories, each describing an event that seemed likely to encourage people to adopt attitudes on the opposite side of a particular controversial issue (e.g. affirmative action and gay marriage). In total, 569 subjects were asked to evaluate the importance of these stories 'to the readership of a general-circulation newspaper', disregarding how interesting they happened to find the event. Subjects later indicated their own personal attitudes to the underlying political issues. Predicted crossover interactions were confirmed for all six issues. All the interactions took the form of subjects rating stories offering 'ammunition' for their own side of the controversial issue as possessing greater intrinsic news importance.

It is often assumed that implicit learning of skills based on predictive relationships proceeds independently of awareness. To test this idea, four groups of subjects played a game in which a fast-moving “demon” made a brief appearance at the bottom of the computer screen, then disappeared behind a V-shaped occluder, and finally re-appeared briefly on either the upper-left or upper-right quadrant of the screen. Points were scored by clicking on the demon during the final reappearance phase. Demons differed in several visible characteristics including color, horn height and eye size. For some subjects, horn height perfectly predicted which side the demon would reappear on. For subjects not told the rule, the subset who demonstrated at the end of the experiment that they had spontaneously discovered the rule showed strong evidence of exploiting it by anticipating the demon's arrival and laying in wait for it. Those who could not verbalize the rule performed no better than a control group for whom the demons moved unpredictably. The implications of this tight linkage between conscious awareness and implicit skill learning are discussed.

Chapter 11 Suspiciously High Correlations in Brain Imaging Research Edward Vul, Edward VulSearch for more papers by this authorHarold Pashler, Harold PashlerSearch for more papers by this author Edward Vul, Edward VulSearch for more papers by this authorHarold Pashler, Harold PashlerSearch for more papers by this author Book Editor(s):Scott O. Lilienfeld, Scott O. LilienfeldSearch for more papers by this authorIrwin D. Waldman, Irwin D. WaldmanSearch for more papers by this author First published: 03 February 2017 https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119095910.ch11Citations: 7 AboutPDFPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShareShare a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Summary Blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) activity in a small region of the brain accounted for the great majority of the variance in speed with which subjects walk out of the experiment. While trying to estimate the maximum plausible population correlation between fMRI measures and social behavior based on psychometric considerations, it seemed that the upper bound should be around 0.75. A single massively multivariate analysis in a whole-brain, across-subject fMRI experiment is analogous to a whole field carrying out many experiments. Publication bias inflates the effect sizes in a given field by filtering many executed studies to get just those that passed a significance threshold. The challenge of whole-brain fMRI parallels the challenge faced by genetics and domains in which the candidate pool of variables exceeds the number of independent measurements. In non-independent whole-brain correlation studies, instead of reporting the average correlation of a detected cluster, the investigators instead report the "peak voxel" from that cluster. Citing Literature Psychological Science Under Scrutiny: Recent Challenges and Proposed Solutions RelatedInformation

We outline an array of journal policies that JPSP:ASC could adopt to further promote transparent and responsible research practices; in turn, these practices will increase the reliability of research findings published in JPSP:ASC.

The idea that people learn detailed probabilistic generative models of the environments they interact with is intuitively appealing, and has received support from recent studies of implicit knowledge acquired in daily life. The goal of this study was to see whether people efficiently induce a probability distribution based upon incidental exposure to an unknown generative process. Subjects played a ‘whack-a-mole’ game in which they attempted to click on objects appearing briefly, one at a time on the screen. Horizontal positions of the objects were generated from a bimodal distribution. After 180 plays of the game, subjects were unexpectedly asked to generate another 180 target positions of their own from the same distribution. Their responses did not even show a bimodal distribution, much less an accurate one (Experiment 1). The same was true for a pre-announced test (Experiment 2). On the other hand, a more extreme bimodality with zero density in a middle region did produce some distributional learning (Experiment 3), perhaps reflecting conscious hypothesis testing. We discuss the challenge this poses to the idea of efficient accurate distributional learning.

A recent paper by Chatterjee, Rose, and Sinha (2013) reported impressively large "money priming" effects: incidental exposure to concepts relating to cash or credit cards made participants much less generous with their time and money (after cash primes) or much more generous (after credit card primes). Primes also altered participants' choices in a word-stem completion task. To explore these effects, we carried out re-analyses of the raw data. A number of strange oddities were brought to light, including a dramatic similarity of the filler word-stem completion responses produced by the 20 subjects who contributed most to the priming effects. We suggest that these oddities undermine the credibility of the paper and require further investigation.

In our reanalysis of Chatterjee, Rose, and Sinha (2012), which appears earlier in this issue (Pashler, Rohrer, Abramson, Wolfson, & Harris, 2016/this issue), we brought to light two strange and (in...

What happens to memories as we forget? They might gradually lose fidelity, lose their associations (and thus be retrieved in response to the incorrect cues), or be completely lost. Typical long-term memory studies assess memory as a binary outcome (correct/incorrect), and cannot distinguish these different kinds of forgetting. Here we assess long-term memory for scalar information, thus allowing us to quantify how different sources of error diminish as we learn, and accumulate as we forget. We trained subjects on visual and verbal continuous quantities (the locations of objects and the distances between major cities, respectively), tested subjects after extended delays, and estimated whether recall errors arose due to imprecise estimates, misassociations, or complete forgetting. Although subjects quickly formed precise memories and retained them for a long time, they were slow to learn correct associations and quick to forget them. These results suggest that long-term recall is especially limited in its ability to form and retain associations.