Evidence for the Upward Spiral Stands Steady: A Response to Heathers, Brown, Coyne, and Friedman (2015)
Source: Association for Psychological Science
Modality and Morphology: What We Write May Not Be What We Say
Written language is an evolutionarily recent human invention; consequently, its neural substrates cannot be determined by the genetic code. How, then, does the brain incorporate skills of this type? One possibility is that written language is dependent on evolutionarily older skills, such as spoken language; another is that dedicated substrates develop with expertise. If written [...]
You Call It "Self-Exuberance"; I Call It "Bragging": Miscalibrated Predictions of Emotional Responses to Self-Promotion
People engage in self-promotional behavior because they want others to hold favorable images of them. Self-promotion, however, entails a trade-off between conveying one’s positive attributes and being seen as bragging. We propose that people get this trade-off wrong because they erroneously project their own feelings onto their interaction partners. As a consequence, people overestimate the [...]
Money Earlier or Later? Simple Heuristics Explain Intertemporal Choices Better Than Delay Discounting Does
Heuristic models have been proposed for many domains involving choice. We conducted an out-of-sample, cross-validated comparison of heuristic models of intertemporal choice (which can account for many of the known intertemporal choice anomalies) and discounting models. Heuristic models outperformed traditional utility-discounting models, including models of exponential and hyperbolic discounting. The best-performing models predicted choices by [...]
Small Telescopes: Detectability and the Evaluation of Replication Results
This article introduces a new approach for evaluating replication results. It combines effect-size estimation with hypothesis testing, assessing the extent to which the replication results are consistent with an effect size big enough to have been detectable in the original study. The approach is demonstrated by examining replications of three well-known findings. Its benefits include [...]
Assessing the Robustness of Power Posing: No Effect on Hormones and Risk Tolerance in a Large Sample of Men and Women
Source: Association for Psychological Science
Did Shakespeare Write Double Falsehood? Identifying Individuals by Creating Psychological Signatures With Text Analysis
More than 100 years after Shakespeare’s death, Lewis Theobald published Double Falsehood, a play supposedly sourced from a lost play by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Since its release, scholars have attempted to determine its true authorship. Using new approaches to language and psychological analysis, we examined Double Falsehood and the works of Theobald, Shakespeare, and [...]
Bilingualism Modulates Infants' Selective Attention to the Mouth of a Talking Face
Infants growing up in bilingual environments succeed at learning two languages. What adaptive processes enable them to master the more complex nature of bilingual input? One possibility is that bilingual infants take greater advantage of the redundancy of the audiovisual speech that they usually experience during social interactions. Thus, we investigated whether bilingual infants’ need [...]
Income Inequality and Status Seeking: Searching for Positional Goods in Unequal U.S. States
It is well established that income inequality is associated with lower societal well-being, but the psychosocial causes of this relationship are poorly understood. A social-rank hypothesis predicts that members of unequal societies are likely to devote more of their resources to status-seeking behaviors such as acquiring positional goods. We used Google Correlate to find search [...]
Does Entering Adulthood in a Recession Affect Narcissism? Robust Evidence Is Still Needed
Source: Association for Psychological Science