Greed communication predicts the approval and reach of US senators' tweets.

Social media are at the forefront of modern political campaigning. They allow politicians to communicate directly with constituents and constituents to endorse politicians' messages and share them with their networks. Analyzing every tweet of all US senators holding office from 2013 to 2021 (861,104 tweets from 140 senators), we identify a psycholinguistic factor, greed communication, that robustly predicts increased approval (favorites) and reach (retweets). These effects persist when tested against diverse established psycholinguistic predictors of political content dissemination on social media and various other psycholinguistic variables. We further find that greed communication in the tweets of Democratic senators is associated with greater approval and retweeting compared to greed communication in the tweets of Republican senators, especially when those tweets also mention political outgroups.

The lay of the land: Associations between environmental features and personality.

OBJECTIVE: Personality traits cluster across countries, regions, cities, and neighborhoods. What drives the formation of these clusters? Ecological theory suggests that physical locations shape humans' patterns of behaviors and psychological characteristics. Based on this theory, we examined whether and how differential land-cover relates to individual personality. METHOD: We followed a preregistered three-pronged analysis approach to investigate the associations between personality (N = 2,690,878) and land-cover across the United States. We used eleven land-cover categories to classify landscapes and tested their association with personality against broad physical and socioeconomic factors. RESULTS: Urban areas were positively associated with openness to experience and negatively associated with conscientiousness. Coastal areas were positively associated with openness to experience and neuroticism but negatively associated with agreeableness and conscientiousness. Cultivated areas were negatively associated with openness. Landscapes at the periphery of human activity, such as shrubs, bare lands, or permanent snows, were not reliably associated with personality traits. CONCLUSIONS: Bivariate correlations, multilevel, and random forest models uncovered robust associations between landscapes and personality traits. These findings align with ecological theory suggesting that an individual's environment contributes to their behaviors, thoughts, and feelings.

The Misinformation Susceptibility Test (MIST): A psychometrically validated measure of news veracity discernment.

Interest in the psychology of misinformation has exploded in recent years. Despite ample research, to date there is no validated framework to measure misinformation susceptibility. Therefore, we introduce Verification done, a nuanced interpretation schema and assessment tool that simultaneously considers Veracity discernment, and its distinct, measurable abilities (real/fake news detection), and biases (distrust/naïvité-negative/positive judgment bias). We then conduct three studies with seven independent samples (Ntotal = 8504) to show how to develop, validate, and apply the Misinformation Susceptibility Test (MIST). In Study 1 (N = 409) we use a neural network language model to generate items, and use three psychometric methods-factor analysis, item response theory, and exploratory graph analysis-to create the MIST-20 (20 items; completion time < 2 minutes), the MIST-16 (16 items; < 2 minutes), and the MIST-8 (8 items; < 1 minute). In Study 2 (N = 7674) we confirm the internal and predictive validity of the MIST in five national quota samples (US, UK), across 2 years, from three different sampling platforms-Respondi, CloudResearch, and Prolific. We also explore the MIST's nomological net and generate age-, region-, and country-specific norm tables. In Study 3 (N = 421) we demonstrate how the MIST-in conjunction with Verification done-can provide novel insights on existing psychological interventions, thereby advancing theory development. Finally, we outline the versatile implementations of the MIST as a screening tool, covariate, and intervention evaluation framework. As all methods are transparently reported and detailed, this work will allow other researchers to create similar scales or adapt them for any population of interest.

Openness buffers the impact of Belief in Conspiracy Theories on COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy: Evidence from a large, representative Italian sample.

As COVID-19 continues to incur enormous personal and societal costs, widespread vaccination against the virus remains the most effective strategy to end the pandemic. However, vaccine hesitancy is rampant and has been steadily rising for decades. Seeking to remedy this, personality psychologists have begun to explore psychological drivers of vaccine hesitancy, including the Big Five. Openness to Experience presents itself as a vexing case as previous attempts to study its association with vaccine hesitancy have yielded mixed findings. In this preregistered study, we hypothesise that the impact of Openness to Experience on Vaccine Hesitancy depends on its interplay with other factors, namely conspiracy beliefs. To test this, we apply logistic regressions, simple slopes analyses, and propensity score matching to a nationally representative sample of 2500 Italian citizens, collected in May 2021. Contrary to our original hypothesis (i.e., Openness will have a positive association with Vaccine Hesitancy at high - and a negative at low - levels of Conspiracy Beliefs) we find that high Openness diminishes the impact of Belief in Conspiracy Theories on Vaccine Hesitancy. Consistent with previous research, we propose that Openness serves as a buffer against extreme positions by allowing individuals to be exposed to a greater diversity of information.

The psychological imprint of inequality: Economic inequality shapes achievement and power values in human life.

OBJECTIVE: This research investigates how economic inequality shapes basic human values across three cross-national, cross-regional, and longitudinal studies (Ntotal  = 219,697). METHODS: Study 1 examined the relationship between objective economic inequality and values across 77 societies from all five continents (n = 170,525). Study 2 examined the relationship between objective economic inequality and values across 51 regions in the United States (n = 48,559). Study 3 used a two-year longitudinal design to examine the relationship between perceived economic inequality and values (n = 613). RESULTS: Results from multilevel modeling and longitudinal analysis suggested that people who lived in areas with higher economic inequality and who perceived higher economic inequality were more likely to endorse achievement and power values. Moreover, people who perceived higher economic inequality were less likely to endorse benevolence values. These effects were robust in within-country tests (Studies 2 and 3) but not in the cross-country tests (Study 1) when accounting for sociodemographic characteristics. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that economic inequality may act as an antecedent of self-enhancement values, particularly within countries. In a world of rising economic inequality, this may over time lead to an overemphasis on achievement and power which have been shown to erode social cohesion.

The many geographical layers of culture.

Uchiyama et al. present a dual inheritance framework for conceptualizing how behavioural genetics and cultural evolution interact and affect heritability. We posit that to achieve a holistic and nuanced representation of the cultural environment and evolution against which genetic effects should be evaluated, it is imperative to consider the multiple geographic cultural layers impacting individuals and genetic heritability.

Global Behaviors, Perceptions, and the Emergence of Social Norms at the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

We conducted a large-scale survey covering 58 countries and over 100,000 respondents between late March and early April 2020 to study beliefs and attitudes towards citizens' and governments' responses at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most respondents reported holding normative beliefs in support of COVID-19 containment measures, as well as high rates of adherence to these measures. They also believed that their government and their country's citizens were not doing enough and underestimated the degree to which others in their country supported strong behavioral and policy responses to the pandemic. Normative beliefs were strongly associated with adherence, as well as beliefs about others' and the government's response. Lockdowns were associated with greater optimism about others' and the government's response, and improvements in measures of perceived mental well-being; these effects tended to be larger for those with stronger normative beliefs. Our findings highlight how social norms can arise quickly and effectively to support cooperation at a global scale.

Age differences in Machiavellianism across the life span: Evidence from a large-scale cross-sectional study.

OBJECTIVE: Lifespan perspectives on personality development have gained much momentum in recent years, mostly focusing on benevolent and neutral traits such as the Big Five. Despite their strong associations with critical personal outcomes, surprisingly little research has investigated the development of malevolent traits. Addressing this gap, we examined age trends in Machiavellianism across the lifespan. METHODS: Using data from a large-scale cross-sectional sample (n = 1,118,643), we analyzed mean-level changes from age 10 to 67. RESULTS: Age differences in Machiavellianism were most pronounced as a strong upward trend during the transition from late childhood to adolescence, when it peaked. Throughout adulthood it exhibited a steady downward trend, reaching an overall minimum at age 65. Across the lifespan, Machiavellianism tended to be higher in men and high-income participants. Compared to Machiavellianism, the age trends in Agreeableness and-to a lesser extent-Conscientiousness showed almost perfectly polar opposite patterns. CONCLUSIONS: Age trends in malevolent personality conform to established patterns of normative change, indicating temporary disruption in adolescence and social maturation across adulthood. The results advance theory and research on personality trait development across the lifespan and highlight crucial developmental windows that can inform targeted interventions to keep socially aversive traits in check.

Regional variation in courage and entrepreneurship: The contrasting role of courage for the emergence and survival of start-ups in the United States.

OBJECTIVE: There is growing evidence that certain regional personality differences function as important drivers of regional economic development (e.g., via effects on entrepreneurship and innovation activity). The present investigation examines the impact that regional variation in the trait courage has on entrepreneurship. METHOD: Using data from a new large-scale internet-based study, we provide the first psychological map of courage across the United States (N = 390,341 respondents from 283 U.S. metropolitan regions). We apply regression analyses to relate regional courage scores to archival data on the emergence and survival of start-ups across American regions. RESULTS: Our mapping approach reveals comparatively high levels of regional courage in the Eastern and Southern regions of the United States. Regional courage scores were positively related to entrepreneurial activity, but negatively related to start-up survival-even when controlling for a wide variety of standard economic predictors. Several robustness checks corroborated these results. Finally, regional differences in economic risk-taking accounted for significant proportions of variance in the relationship between regional courage and entrepreneurship. CONCLUSION: Our results suggest that regional courage may contribute to a pattern of enterprising and also risky economic behavior, which can lead to high levels of entrepreneurial activity but also shorter start-up survival.

The SAFE Model: State Authenticity as a Function of Three Types of Fit.

The SAFE model asserts that state authenticity stems from three types of fit to the environment. Across two studies of university students, we validated instruments measuring self-concept, goal, and social fit as unique predictors of state authenticity. In Study 1 (N = 969), relationships between fit and state authenticity were robust to controlling for conceptually similar and distinct variables. Using experience sampling methodology, Study 2 (N = 269) provided evidence that fit and authenticity co-vary at the state (i.e., within-person) level, controlling for between-person effects. Momentary variation in each fit type predicted greater state authenticity, willingness to return to the situation, and state attachment to one's university. Each fit type was also predicted by distinct contextual features (e.g., location, activity, company). Supporting a theorized link to cognitive fluency, situations eliciting self-concept fit elicited higher working memory capacity and lower emotional burnout. We discuss the implications of fit in educational contexts.

ecolo-zip: A global, rich and granular characterization of biogeophysical ecology for 1.5 million postal codes.

The inescapable fact that human life is perpetually embedded in a tangible biogeophysical environment - and the consequences that this has for individuals and societies - have long fascinated scholars of all backgrounds. Technological progress and the advent of big data have spurred ever-more precise attempts to quantify our biogeophysical environments. However, many such datasets lack spatial granularity, global coverage, content depth, or accessibility. Here, we introduce ecolo-zip, a novel geospatial dataset that provides a granular-yet-global, parsimonious-yet-rich ecological characterization of over 1.5 million postal codes across 94 countries and regions. Combining two large-scale satellite image resources (ASTER; SRTM, ICC = 0.999) and a customized geospatial sampling model, we provide high-resolution indicators of physical topography (elevation, mountainousness, distance to sea), vegetation (normalized difference vegetation index), and climate (surface temperature). With this resource - featuring methodological details, visualizations, and application suggestions - we hope to contribute towards understanding the multi-faceted interactions between humans and their environments.

Spatial analysis for psychologists: How to use individual-level data for research at the geographically aggregated level.

Psychologists have become increasingly interested in the geographical organization of psychological phenomena. Such studies typically seek to identify geographical variation in psychological characteristics and examine the causes and consequences of that variation. Geo-psychological research offers unique advantages, such as a wide variety of easily obtainable behavioral outcomes. However, studies at the geographically aggregate level also come with unique challenges that require psychologists to work with unfamiliar data formats, sources, measures, and statistical problems. The present article aims to present psychologists with a methodological roadmap that equips them with basic analytical techniques for geographical analysis. Across five sections, we provide a step-by-step tutorial and walk readers through a full geo-psychological research project. We provide guidance for (a) choosing an appropriate geographical level and aggregating individual data, (b) spatializing data and mapping geographical distributions, (c) creating and managing spatial weights matrices, (d) assessing geographical clustering and identifying distributional patterns, and (e) regressing spatial data using spatial regression models. Throughout the tutorial, we alternate between explanatory sections that feature in-depth background information and hands-on sections that use real data to demonstrate the practical implementation of each step in R. The full R code and all data used in this demonstration are available from the OSF project page accompanying this article. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Let the algorithm speak: How to use neural networks for automatic item generation in psychological scale development.

Measurement is at the heart of scientific research. As many-perhaps most-psychological constructs cannot be directly observed, there is a steady demand for reliable self-report scales to assess latent constructs. However, scale development is a tedious process that requires researchers to produce good items in large quantities. In this tutorial, we introduce, explain, and apply the Psychometric Item Generator (PIG), an open-source, free-to-use, self-sufficient natural language processing algorithm that produces large-scale, human-like, customized text output within a few mouse clicks. The PIG is based on the GPT-2, a powerful generative language model, and runs on Google Colaboratory-an interactive virtual notebook environment that executes code on state-of-the-art virtual machines at no cost. Across two demonstrations and a preregistered five-pronged empirical validation with two Canadian samples (NSample 1 = 501, NSample 2 = 773), we show that the PIG is equally well-suited to generate large pools of face-valid items for novel constructs (i.e., wanderlust) and create parsimonious short scales of existing constructs (i.e., Big Five personality traits) that yield strong performances when tested in the wild and benchmarked against current gold standards for assessment. The PIG does not require any prior coding skills or access to computational resources and can easily be tailored to any desired context by simply switching out short linguistic prompts in a single line of code. In short, we present an effective, novel machine learning solution to an old psychological challenge. As such, the PIG will not require you to learn a new language-but instead, speak yours. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Regional personality differences predict variation in early COVID-19 infections and mobility patterns indicative of social distancing.

The early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed stark regional variation in the spread of the virus. While previous research has highlighted the impact of regional differences in sociodemographic and economic factors, we argue that regional differences in social and compliance behaviors-the very behaviors through which the virus is transmitted-are critical drivers of the spread of COVID-19, particularly in the early stages of the pandemic. Combining self-reported personality data that capture individual differences in these behaviors (3.5 million people) with COVID-19 prevalence and mortality rates as well as behavioral mobility observations (29 million people) in the United States and Germany, we show that regional personality differences can help explain the early transmission of COVID-19; this is true even after controlling for a wide array of important sociodemographic, economic, and pandemic-related factors. We use specification curve analyses to test the effects of regional personality in a robust and unbiased way. The results indicate that in the early stages of COVID-19, Openness to experience acted as a risk factor, while Neuroticism acted as a protective factor. The findings also highlight the complexity of the pandemic by showing that the effects of regional personality can differ (a) across countries (Extraversion), (b) over time (Openness), and (c) from those previously observed at the individual level (Agreeableness and Conscientiousness). Taken together, our findings support the importance of regional personality differences in the early spread of COVID-19, but they also caution against oversimplified answers to phenomena as complex as a global pandemic. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Small Effects: The Indispensable Foundation for a Cumulative Psychological Science.

We draw on genetics research to argue that complex psychological phenomena are most likely determined by a multitude of causes and that any individual cause is likely to have only a small effect. Building on this, we highlight the dangers of a publication culture that continues to demand large effects. First, it rewards inflated effects that are unlikely to be real and encourages practices likely to yield such effects. Second, it overlooks the small effects that are most likely to be real, hindering attempts to identify and understand the actual determinants of complex psychological phenomena. We then explain the theoretical and practical relevance of small effects, which can have substantial consequences, especially when considered at scale and over time. Finally, we suggest ways in which scholars can harness these insights to advance research and practices in psychology (i.e., leveraging the power of big data, machine learning, and crowdsourcing science; promoting rigorous preregistration, including prespecifying the smallest effect size of interest; contextualizing effects; changing cultural norms to reward accurate and meaningful effects rather than exaggerated and unreliable effects). Only once small effects are accepted as the norm, rather than the exception, can a reliable and reproducible cumulative psychological science be built.

Registered report: Social face evaluation: ethnicity-specific differences in the judgement of trustworthiness of faces and facial parts.

Social face evaluation is a common and consequential element of everyday life based on the judgement of trustworthiness. However, the particular facial regions that guide such trustworthiness judgements are largely unknown. It is also unclear whether different facial regions are consistently utilized to guide judgments for different ethnic groups, and whether previous exposure to specific ethnicities in one's social environment has an influence on trustworthiness judgements made from faces or facial regions. This registered report addressed these questions through a global online survey study that recruited Asian, Black, Latino, and White raters (N = 4580). Raters were shown full faces and specific parts of the face for an ethnically diverse, sex-balanced set of 32 targets and rated targets' trustworthiness. Multilevel modelling showed that in forming trustworthiness judgements, raters relied most strongly on the eyes (with no substantial information loss vis-à-vis full faces). Corroborating ingroup-outgroup effects, raters rated faces and facial parts of targets with whom they shared their ethnicity, sex, or eye color as significantly more trustworthy. Exposure to ethnic groups in raters' social environment predicted trustworthiness ratings of other ethnic groups in nuanced ways. That is, raters from the ambient ethnic majority provided slightly higher trustworthiness ratings for stimuli of their own ethnicity compared to minority ethnicities. In contrast, raters from an ambient ethnic minority (e.g., immigrants) provided substantially lower trustworthiness ratings for stimuli of the ethnic majority. Taken together, the current study provides a new window into the psychological processes underlying social face evaluation and its cultural generalizability. PROTOCOL REGISTRATION: The stage 1 protocol for this Registered Report was accepted in principle on 7 January 2022. The protocol, as accepted by the journal, can be found at: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.18319244 .

How personality and policy predict pandemic behavior: Understanding sheltering-in-place in 55 countries at the onset of COVID-19.

The spread of COVID-19 within any given country or community at the onset of the pandemic depended in part on the sheltering-in-place rate of its citizens. The pandemic led us to revisit one of psychology's most fundamental and most basic questions in a high-stakes context: what determines human behavior? Adopting a Lewinian interactionist lens, we investigate the independent and joint effects of macrolevel government policies and microlevel psychological factors-that is, personality-on whether individuals sheltered-in-place. We analyzed data collected in late March and early April 2020 from 101,005 participants in 55 countries, a time period that coincided with the early and accelerating stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. This time period also contained substantial variation in the stringency of governmental policy toward sheltering-in-place, both between countries and within each country over time. Analyses revealed that personality and the stringency of governmental policies independently predicted sheltering-in-place rates. Policy stringency was positively related to sheltering-in-place. For the personality dimensions, Openness, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism all predicted higher rates of sheltering-in-place, whereas Extraversion was negatively related to staying at home. In addition, two personality traits-Openness to Experience and Neuroticism-interacted with governmental policy to predict whether individuals sheltered-in-place; openness and neuroticism each had weaker effects on sheltering-in-place as governmental policies became stricter. Theoretically, the findings demonstrate that individual differences predict behavior (i.e., sheltering-in-place) even when governments take strong action targeting that behavior. Practically, they suggest that even if governments lift their shelter-in-place restrictions, some individuals will shelter-in-place less than others. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Spending reflects not only who we are but also who we are around: The joint effects of individual and geographic personality on consumption.

Interactionist theories are considered to have resolved the classic person-situation debate by demonstrating that human behavior is most accurately described as a function of both personal characteristics as well as environmental cues. According to these theories, personality traits form part of the personal characteristics that drive behavior. We suggest that psychological theory stands to gain from also considering personality traits as an important environmental characteristic that shapes sociocultural norms and institutions, and, in turn, behavior. Building on research in geographical psychology, we support this proposition by presenting evidence on the relationship of individual and regional personality with spending behavior. Analyzing the spending records of 111,336 participants (31,915,942 unique transactions) across 374 Local Authority Districts (LAD) in the United Kingdom, we first show that geographic regions with higher aggregate scores on a given personality trait collectively spend more money on categories associated with that trait. Shifting the focus to individual level spending as our behavioral outcome (N = 1,716), we further demonstrate that regional personality of a participant's home LAD predicts individual spending above and beyond individual personality. That is, a person's spending reflects both their own personality traits as well as the personality traits of the people around them. We use conditional random forest predictions to highlight the robustness of these findings in the presence of a comprehensive set of individual and regional control variables. Taken together, our findings empirically support the proposition that spending behaviors reflect personality traits as both personal and environmental characteristics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Local housing market dynamics predict rapid shifts in cultural openness: A 9-year study across 199 cities.

Accumulating evidence suggests that culture changes in response to shifting socioecological conditions; economic development is a particularly potent driver of such change. Previous research has shown that economic development can induce slow but steady cultural changes within large cultural entities (e.g., countries). Here we propose that economically driven culture change can occur rapidly, particularly in smaller cultural entities (e.g., cites). Drawing on work in cultural dynamics, urban economics, and geographical psychology, we hypothesize that changes in local housing prices-reflecting changing availability of local amenities-can induce rapid shifts in local cultures of Openness. We propose two mechanisms that might underlie such cultural shifts: selective migration (i.e., people selectively moving to cities that offer certain amenities) and social acculturation (i.e., people adapting to changing amenities in their city). Based on trait Openness scores of 1,946,752 U.S. residents, we track annual changes in local Openness across 199 cities for 9 years (2006-2014). We link these data to annual information on local housing markets, an established proxy for local amenities. To test interdependencies between the time series of local housing markets and Openness, we use Panel Vector Autoregression modeling. In line with our hypothesis, we find robust evidence that rising housing costs predict positive shifts in local Openness but not vice versa. Additional analyses leveraging participants' duration of residence in their city suggest that both selective migration and social acculturation contribute to shifts in local Openness. Our study offers a new window onto the rapid changes of cultures at local levels. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).