Magic is frequently employed in high-stakes contexts such as healing and divination, which suggests that its users take it to be efficacious. This poses a puzzle: why would broadly rational agents persist in practices that are, by their ostensible aims, ineffective? Existing accounts divide between intellectualist views, which hold that practitioners genuinely believe in the efficacy of magic, and non-intellectualist views, which argue that magical practices are accompanied by non-doxastic attitudes such as imagination, symbolism, or make-believe. We argue that both positions capture part of the truth. Drawing on ethnography, cognitive science, political psychology, and philosophy, we defend a mixed-attitude account according to which individuals within the same culture—and even the same individual over time—can relate to different magical practices with a range of attitudes, from genuine belief to scepticism, expressive endorsement, or mistaken self-ascription of belief. This framework reconciles evidence cited by both intellectualists and their critics and suggests that belief reports about magic, as well as those concerning conspiracy theories and magic in WEIRD societies, should not be assumed to reflect a single, uniform cognitive attitude.

BACKGROUND:Psychotic-like experiences may reflect disrupted signal discrimination, whereby individuals overinterpret noisy sensory input as meaningful. Drawing on predictive coding accounts, we investigated whether increased sensory precision and reduced data-gathering relate to psychotic-like experiences in a signal discrimination task. METHODS:We fitted drift-diffusion models to Random Dot Motion (RDM) task data completed by 191 participants. We estimated drift rate and decision threshold: (1) across groups differing in psychotic phenotypes, and (2) as outcomes in regression models with psychotic-like experiences as predictors. Drift rate measures evidence gain and, in this task, can be considered an approximate measure of sensory precision. We also tested whether reduced data-gathering on the beads task replicated prior associations with psychotic phenotypes. RESULTS:Hallucination- and delusion-like experiences were associated with increased drift rates. Hallucination-like experiences also predicted lower decision thresholds. In the beads task, psychotic-like experiences correlated with higher confidence ratings but not with reduced data-gathering. CONCLUSIONS:Our findings indicate that psychotic-like phenomenology is linked to increased precision of signal discrimination and reduced decision thresholds. Overprecise signal discrimination and lower decision thresholds may bias perceptual inference toward false positive detections, potentially leading to anomalous experiences.

This 68-country survey (n = 71,922) examines science information diets and communication behavior, identifies cross-country differences, and tests how such differences are associated with sociopolitical and economic conditions. We find that social media are the most used sources of science information in most countries, except those with democratic-corporatist media systems where news media tend to be used more widely. People in collectivist societies are less outspoken about science in daily life, whereas lower education is associated with higher outspokenness. Limited access to digital media is correlated with participation in public protests on science matters. We discuss implications for future research, policy, and practice.

Given ongoing debates about the nature and consequences of religious belief, effective procedures for experimentally controlling such beliefs are highly desirable. To date, however, there are few robust, replicable methods. Here, we show that the "choice blindness" paradigm can be leveraged to directly manipulate religious beliefs and attitudes in a way that avoids demand characteristics. Across three studies, a substantial portion of our participants were prepared to endorse and justify reversals of their originally indicated beliefs about questions such as the existence of life after death and whether religion is a force for good in the world. Moreover, our experimental manipulation had a large effect (d > 1) on subsequently measured religious attitudes, which moved in the manipulated direction. Religious participants were no less likely than their atheistic counterparts to detect manipulations of their attitudes. Our work introduces a powerful paradigm for the experimental control of religious beliefs, a paradigm that holds great promise for illuminating contentious topics in the psychology and cognitive science of religion.

Adolescence is a developmental period of relative volatility, where the individual experiences significant changes to their physical and social environment. The ability to adapt to the volatility of one’s surroundings is an important cognitive ability, particularly while foraging, a near-ubiquitous behaviour across the animal kingdom. As adolescents experience more volatility in their surroundings, we predicted that this age group would be more adept than adults at using exploration to adjust to volatility. We employed a foraging task with a well-validated computational model to characterise the mechanisms of exploration in volatile environments, preregistering the hypothesis that adolescents (aged 16–17; N = 91) would exhibit more optimal adaptation of their learning rate to changes in environmental volatility compared with adults (aged 24+; N = 90). However, surprisingly, both adolescents and adults exhibited suboptimal adjustment of their learning rate to environmental volatility. In contrast to the learning rate, it was instead participants’ stochasticity (i.e., decision variability) that better resembled the adjustment to volatility made by the optimal RL agent. Although heightened stochasticity in the volatile environment led participants to more often trial different responses that facilitated discovery of changes to the environment, we also found that anxiety impaired this adaptive ability. The finding of heightened stochasticity in volatile environments contradicts expectations that the learning rate is responsible for successful adaptation and motivates future work on the deleterious role that anxiety plays when adolescents manage periods of transition.

Amid increasing political polarization, individuals can signal adherence to partisan norms to engender trust among peers. On politically contested subjects, we hypothesise that this incentive to signal will: i.) bias how novel information is processed and ii.) bias the updating of beliefs with iii.) the effect of the latter mediated by the former. We test these hypotheses with two pre-registered online experiments utilizing a trust game. Respondents play as receivers and can signal trustworthiness to senders by evaluating a description of a study on a politicised issue. We manipulate respondents’ knowledge of their peer's partisan identity, with a subset aware of that identity and another unaware. We find those aware of their peer's partisanship give evaluations more aligned with that partisanship, compared to those unaware. Moreover, those aware also maintain more aligned political beliefs after the exchange, an effect potentially mediated through the evaluation of evidence.

Following the 2016 EU Referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union, many people described themselves as ‘Leavers’ or ‘Remainers’. Here, we examine the emotional responses associated with Brexit identities using survey data collected from two nationally representative samples of the British public in 2019 (N = 638) and 2021 (N = 2,058). Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that many in both samples had coherent Leave or Remain identities. Remain and, to a lesser extent, Leave identities (regardless of how people actually voted in the referendum) predicted distress about Brexit-related events and clinical symptoms of depression and anxiety at both time points. Structural equation models suggested that the effect of identities on symptoms was largely mediated by distress about Brexit-related events. We demonstrate a lasting impact of Brexit on the mental health of UK citizens and that the formation of novel political identities has been more important in this process than voting behaviour.

Considerable research has shown that people make biased decisions in "optimal stopping problems", where options are encountered sequentially, and there is no opportunity to recall rejected options or to know upcoming options in advance (e.g. when flat hunting or choosing a spouse). Here, we used computational modelling to identify the mechanisms that best explain decision bias in the context of an especially realistic version of this problem: the full-information problem. We eliminated a number of factors as potential instigators of bias. Then, we examined sequence length and payoff scheme: two manipulations where an optimality model recommends adjusting the sampling rate. Here, participants were more reluctant to increase their sampling rates when it was optimal to do so, leading to increased undersampling bias. Our comparison of several computational models of bias demonstrates that many participants maintain these relatively low sampling rates because of suboptimally pessimistic expectations about the quality of future options (i.e. a mis-specified prior distribution). These results support a new theory about how humans solve full information problems. Understanding the causes of decision error could enhance how we conduct real world sequential searches for options, for example how online shopping or dating applications present options to users.

This study examined the impact of industrial development on the land use practices of the Saulteau First Nations (SFN) in northeastern British Columbia. Using household surveys and spatial data analysis, we identify ex-ante the point(s) at which the cumulative environmental changes brought about by industrial activities induce tipping points in First Nations land use. Used here, tipping point is a threshold at which incremental or immediate ecological impacts stemming from industrial disturbance leads to a non-linear change in the social and economic systems of the SFN. These tipping points may be the result of a series of cumulative impacts (i.e., culmination of roads, seismic lines, well pads) or a single and abrupt disturbance (i.e., coal mine) that results in immediate displacement. Findings indicate that when industrial density approaches >= 0.044 km2/km2, SFN land use may continue but under duress. However, once the industrial density exceeds 0.084 km2/km2, SFN members are forced to abandon traditionally used areas for other less disturbed areas outside the core of their territory. This research was conducted under the auspices of the Regional Strategic Environmental Assessment (RSEA) for northeast British Columbia, which intends to use the results of this study as a vehicle for collaboration and speculative forecasting that balances development against the rights and needs of First Nations.

Abstract Delusions are pathological beliefs, often with bizarre content. They feature in neurological disorders and in psychoses associated with psychiatric disorders (e.g., schizophrenia). This chapter reviews two apparently opposing ways that the research literature characterizes delusions. While delusions are often defined as beliefs that are rigid and unaffected by evidence, they are also frequently conceptualized as beliefs that are unduly swayed by minimal, insufficient evidence. The authors review empirical studies and theory from psychology, neuroscience, and computational psychiatry which embody this contrast. Prevailing perspectives, they show, frame belief formation as a process of integrating new evidence into existing beliefs. This view tends to sculpt hypotheses about delusions (and other psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations) into two types. First, relevant evidence fails to affect prior beliefs, which are too entrenched. Second, evidence overly dominates prior beliefs, which have too weak an influence. This paradox calls for a profound rethinking of these perplexing and distressing symptoms.

This 68-country survey (n = 71,922) examines how people encounter information about science and communicate about it with others, identifies cross-country differences, and tests the extent to which economic and sociopolitical conditions predict such differences. We find that social media are the most used sources of science information in most countries, except those with democratic-corporatist media systems where news media tend to be used more widely. People in collectivist societies are less outspoken about science in daily life, whereas low education is associated with higher outspokenness. Limited access to digital media is correlated with participation in public protests on science matters.

Full-information best choice problems typify many real-world decisions. Participants face a sequence of decision options and must accept or reject each option at the time it is encountered. The challenge is to use prior knowledge of the distribution of option values to predict whether continued sampling might result in a higher-valued option than the one currently on offer. On these tasks, biases are apparent when human decisions are compared against mathematical optimality solutions. Specifically, tasks involving choices about options presented as images appear to evoke an oversampling bias, in which participants perform suboptimally by rejecting optimal choices and continuing to sample new ones. Using computational modelling of ten datasets spanning five choice domains, we demonstrate two dominant sampling strategies. These strategies, which explained the overly long searches, involved a combination of overly optimistic predictions about future option values and an intrinsic perception that sampling itself has reward value. These strategies, and their associated systematic biases, could manifest in real-world decisions such as shopping, choosing dating partners or trustworthy job candidates.

People’s estimates are biased toward previously considered numbers (anchoring). We have aggregated all available data from anchoring studies that included at least two anchors into one large dataset. Data were standardized to comprise one estimate per row, coded according to a wide range of variables, and are available for download and analyses online (https://metaanalyses.shinyapps.io/OpAQ/). Because the dataset includes both original and meta-data it allows for fine-grained analyses (e.g., correlations of estimates for different tasks) but also for meta-analyses (e.g., effect sizes for anchoring effects).

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the psychological wellbeing of some people, there is evidence that many have been much less affected. The Ecological Model of Resilience (EMR) may explain why some individuals are not resilient whilst others are. In this study we test the EMR in a comparison of UK survey data collected from the COVID-19 Psychological Research Consortium (C19PRC) longitudinal study of a representative sample of the United Kingdom (UK) adult population and data from an Italian arm of the study. We first compare data from the third wave of the UK arm of the study, collected in July/August 2020, with data from an equivalent sample and stage of the pandemic in Italy in July 2020. Next, using UK longitudinal data collected from C19PRC Waves 1, 3 and 5, collected between March 2020 and April 2021 we identify the proportion of people who were resilient. Finally, we examine which factors, drawn from the EMR, predict resilient and non-resilient outcomes. We find that the 72% of the UK sample was resilient, in line with the Italian study. In the cross-sectional logistic regression model, age and self-esteem were significantly associated with resilience whilst death anxiety thoughts, neuroticism, loneliness, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms related to COVID-19 were significantly associated with Non-Resilient outcomes. In the longitudinal UK analysis, at Wave 5, 80% of the sample was Resilient. Service use, belonging to wider neighbourhood, self-rated health, self-esteem, openness, and externally generated death anxiety were associated with Resilient outcomes. In contrast, PTSD symptoms and loneliness were associated with Non-Resilient outcomes. The EMR effectively explained the results. There were some variables which are amenable to intervention which could increase resilience in the face of similar future challenges.

In countries such as Britain and the US, court witnesses must declare they will provide truthful evidence and are often compelled to publicly choose between religious ("oath") and secular ("affirmation") versions of this declaration. Might defendants who opt to swear an oath enjoy more favourable outcomes than those who choose to affirm? Two preliminary, pre-registered survey studies using minimal vignettes (Study 1, N = 443; Study 2, N = 913) indicated that people associate choice of the oath with credible testimony; and that participants, especially religious participants, discriminate against defendants who affirm. In a third, Registered Report study (Study 3, N = 1821), we used a more elaborate audiovisual mock trial paradigm to better estimate the real-world influence of declaration choice. Participants were asked to render a verdict for a defendant who either swore or affirmed, and were themselves required to swear or affirm that they would try the defendant in good faith. Overall, the defendant was not considered guiltier when affirming rather than swearing, nor did mock-juror belief in God moderate this effect. However, jurors who themselves swore an oath did discriminate against the affirming defendant. Exploratory analyses suggest this effect may be driven by authoritarianism, perhaps because high-authoritarian jurors consider the oath the traditional (and therefore correct) declaration to choose. We discuss the real-world implications of these findings and conclude the religious oath is an antiquated legal ritual that needs reform.