The roots of polarization in the individual reward system.

Polarization raises concerns for democracy and society, which have expanded in the internet era where (mis)information has become ubiquitous, its transmission faster than ever, and the freedom and means of opinion expressions are expanding. The origin of polarization however remains unclear, with multiple social and emotional factors and individual reasoning biases likely to explain its current forms. In the present work, we adopt a principled approach and show that polarization tendencies can take root in biased reward processing of new information in favour of choice confirmatory evidence. Through agent-based simulations, we show that confirmation bias in individual learning is an independent mechanism and could be sufficient for creating polarization at group level independently of any additional assumptions about the opinions themselves, a priori beliefs about them, information transmission mechanisms or the structure of social relationship between individuals. This generative process can interact with polarization mechanisms described elsewhere, but constitutes an entrenched biological tendency that helps explain the extraordinary resilience of polarization against mitigating efforts such as dramatic informational change in the environment.

Promoting Erroneous Divergent Opinions Increases the Wisdom of Crowds.

The aggregation of many lay judgments generates surprisingly accurate estimates. This phenomenon, called the "wisdom of crowds," has been demonstrated in domains such as medical decision-making and financial forecasting. Previous research identified two factors driving this effect: the accuracy of individual assessments and the diversity of opinions. Most available strategies to enhance the wisdom of crowds have focused on improving individual accuracy while neglecting the potential of increasing opinion diversity. Here, we study a complementary approach to reduce collective error by promoting erroneous divergent opinions. This strategy proposes to anchor half of the crowd to a small value and the other half to a large value before eliciting and averaging all estimates. Consistent with our mathematical modeling, four experiments (N = 1,362 adults) demonstrated that this method is effective for estimation and forecasting tasks. Beyond the practical implications, these findings offer new theoretical insights into the epistemic value of collective decision-making.

Digital contact does not promote wellbeing, but face-to-face contact does: A cross-national survey during the COVID-19 pandemic.

With restricted face-to-face interactions, COVID-19 lockdowns and distancing measures tested the capability of computer-mediated communication to foster social contact and wellbeing. In a multinational sample (n = 6436), we investigated how different modes of contact related to wellbeing during the pandemic. Computer-mediated communication was more common than face-to-face, and its use was influenced by COVID-19 death rates, more so than state stringency measures. Despite its legal and health threats, face-to-face contact was still positively associated with wellbeing, and messaging apps had a negative association. Perceived household vulnerability to COVID-19 reduced the positive effect of face-to-face communication on wellbeing, but surprisingly, people's own vulnerability did not. Computer-mediated communication was particularly negatively associated with the wellbeing of young and empathetic people. Findings show people endeavored to remain socially connected, yet however, maintain a physical distance, despite the tangible costs to their wellbeing.

The clear and not so clear signatures of perceptual reality in the Bayesian brain.

In a Bayesian brain, every perceptual decision will take into account internal priors as well as new incoming evidence. A reality monitoring system-eventually providing the agent us with a subjective sense of reality avoids us them being confused about whether our experience is perceptual or imagined. Yet not all confusions we experience mean that we wonder wonder whether we may be imagining: some confused experiences feel clearly perceptual but still feel not right. What happens in such confused perceptions, and can the Bayesian brain explain this kind of confusion? In this paper, we offer a characterisation of perceptual confusion and argue that it requires our subjective sense of reality to be a composite of several subjective markers, including a categorical one that can clearly identify an experience as perceptual and connecting us to reality. Our composite account makes new predictions regarding the robustness, the non-linear development and the possible breakdowns of the sense of reality in perception.

Augmenting perception: How artificial intelligence transforms sensory substitution.

What happens when artificial sensors are coupled with the human senses? Using technology to extend the senses is an old human dream, on which sensory substitution and other augmentation technologies have already delivered. Laser tactile canes, corneal implants and magnetic belts can correct or extend what individuals could otherwise perceive. Here we show why accommodating intelligent sensory augmentation devices not just improves but also changes the way of thinking and classifying former sensory augmentation devices. We review the benefits in terms of signal processing and show why non-linear transformation is more than a mere improvement compared to classical linear transformation.

Social alignment matters: Following pandemic guidelines is associated with better wellbeing.

BACKGROUND: In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, most countries implemented physical distancing measures. Many mental health experts warned that through increasing social isolation and anxiety, these measures could negatively affect psychosocial wellbeing. However, socially aligning with others by adhering to these measures may also be beneficial for wellbeing. METHODS: We examined these two contrasting hypotheses using cross-national survey data (N = 6675) collected fortnightly from participants in 115 countries over 3 months at the beginning of the pandemic. Participants reported their wellbeing, perceptions of how vulnerable they were to Covid-19 (i.e., high risk of infection) and how much they, and others in their social circle and country, were adhering to the distancing measures. RESULTS: Linear mixed-effects models showed that being a woman, having lower educational attainment, living alone and perceived high vulnerability to Covid-19 were risk factors for poorer wellbeing. Being young (18-25) was associated with lower wellbeing, but longitudinal analyses showed that young people's wellbeing improved over 3 months. In contrast to widespread views that physical distancing measures negatively affect wellbeing, results showed that following the guidelines was positively associated with wellbeing even for people in high-risk groups. CONCLUSIONS: These findings provide an important counterpart to the idea that pandemic containment measures such as physical distancing negatively impacted wellbeing unequivocally. Despite the overall burden of the pandemic on psychosocial wellbeing, social alignment with others can still contribute to positive wellbeing. The pandemic has manifested our propensity to adapt to challenges, particularly highlighting how social alignment can forge resilience.

Racial bias in face perception is sensitive to instructions but not introspection.

Faces with typically African features are perceived as darker than they really are. We investigated how early in processing the bias emerges, whether participants are aware of it, and whether it can be altered by explicit instructions. We presented pairs of faces sequentially, manipulated the luminance and morphological features of each, and asked participants which was lighter, and how confident they were in their responses. In Experiment 1, pre-response mouse cursor trajectories showed that morphology affected motor output just as early as luminance did. Furthermore, participants were not slower to respond or less confident when morphological cues drove them to give a response that conflicted with the actual luminance of the faces. However, Experiment 2 showed that participants could be instructed to reduce their reliance on morphology, even at early stages of processing. All stimuli used, code to run the experiments reported, raw data, and analyses scripts and their outputs can be found at https://osf.io/brssn.

Co-perceiving: Bringing the social into perception.

Humans and other animals possess the remarkable ability to effectively navigate a shared perceptual environment by discerning which objects and spaces are perceived by others and which remain private to themselves. Traditionally, this capacity has been encapsulated under the umbrella of joint attention or joint action. In this comprehensive review, we advocate for a broader and more mechanistic understanding of this phenomenon, termed co-perception. Co-perception encompasses the sensitivity to the perceptual engagement of others and the capability to differentiate between objects perceived privately and those perceived commonly with others. It represents a distinct concept from mere simultaneous individual perception. Moreover, discerning between private and common objects doesn't necessitate intricate mind-reading abilities or mutual coordination. The act of perceiving objects as either private or common provides a comprehensive account for social scenarios where individuals simply share the same context or may even engage in competition. This conceptual framework encourages a re-examination of classical paradigms that demonstrate social influences on perception. Furthermore, it suggests that the impacts of shared experiences extend beyond affective responses, also influencing perceptual processes. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Attention Philosophy > Foundations of Cognitive Science Philosophy > Psychological Capacities.

Choice enhances touch pleasantness.

We value what we choose more than what is imposed upon us. Choice-induced preferences are extensively demonstrated using behavioural and neural methods, mainly involving rewarding objects such as money or material goods. However, the impact of choice on experiences, especially in the realm of affective touch, remains less explored. In this study, we specifically investigate whether choice can enhance the pleasure derived from affective touch, thereby increasing its intrinsic rewarding value. We conducted an experiment in which participants were being touched by an experimenter and asked to rate how pleasant their experience of touch was. They were given either a choice or no choice over certain touch stimulus variables which differed in their relevance: some were of low relevance (relating to the colour of the glove that the experimenter would use to touch them), while others were of high relevance (relating to the location on their arm where they would be stroked). Before and during touching, pupillometry was used to measure the level of arousal. We found that having a choice over aspects of tactile stimuli-especially those relevant to oneself-enhanced the pleasant perception of the touch. In addition, having a choice increases arousal in anticipation of touch. Regardless of how relevant it is to the actual tactile stimulus, allowing one to choose may positively enhance a person's perception of the physical contact they receive.

How automatic are crossmodal correspondences?

The last couple of years have seen a rapid growth of interest (especially amongst cognitive psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, and developmental researchers) in the study of crossmodal correspondences - the tendency for our brains (not to mention the brains of other species) to preferentially associate certain features or dimensions of stimuli across the senses. By now, robust empirical evidence supports the existence of numerous crossmodal correspondences, affecting people's performance across a wide range of psychological tasks - in everything from the redundant target effect paradigm through to studies of the Implicit Association Test, and from speeded discrimination/classification tasks through to unspeeded spatial localisation and temporal order judgment tasks. However, one question that has yet to receive a satisfactory answer is whether crossmodal correspondences automatically affect people's performance (in all, or at least in a subset of tasks), as opposed to reflecting more of a strategic, or top-down, phenomenon. Here, we review the latest research on the topic of crossmodal correspondences to have addressed this issue. We argue that answering the question will require researchers to be more precise in terms of defining what exactly automaticity entails. Furthermore, one's answer to the automaticity question may also hinge on the answer to a second question: Namely, whether crossmodal correspondences are all 'of a kind', or whether instead there may be several different kinds of crossmodal mapping (e.g., statistical, structural, and semantic). Different answers to the automaticity question may then be revealed depending on the type of correspondence under consideration. We make a number of suggestions for future research that might help to determine just how automatic crossmodal correspondences really are.

Olfactory abstraction: a communicative and metacognitive account.

The usual puzzle raised about olfaction is that of a deficit of abstraction: smells, by contrast notably with colours, do not easily lend themselves to abstract categories and labels. Some studies have argued that the puzzle is culturally restricted and that abstraction is more common outside urban Western societies. Here, I argue that the puzzle is misconstrued and should be reversed: given that odours are constantly changing and that their commonalities are difficult for humans to identify, what is surprising is not that abstract terms are rare, but that they should be used at all for olfaction. Given the nature of the olfactory environment and our cognitive equipment, concrete labels referring to sources seem most adaptive. To explain the use and presence of abstract terms, we need to examine their social and communicative benefits. Here these benefits are spelt out as securing a higher agreement among individuals varying in their olfactory experiences as well as the labels they use, as well as feeling a heightened sense of confidence in one's naming capacities. This article is part of the theme issue 'Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences'.

Ordinary citizens are more severe towards verbal than nonverbal hate-motivated incidents with identical consequences.

Do we judge hate incidents similarly when they are performed using words or bodily actions? Hate speech incidents are rarely reported by bystanders, and whether or how much they should be punished remains a matter of legal, theoretical and social disagreement. In a pre-registered study (N = 1309), participants read about verbal and nonverbal attacks stemming from identical hateful intent, which created the same consequences for the victims. We asked them how much punishment the perpetrator should receive, how likely they would be to denounce such an incident and how much harm they judged the victim suffered. The results contradicted our pre-registered hypotheses and the predictions of dual moral theories, which hold that intention and harmful consequences are the sole psychological determinants of punishment. Instead, participants consistently rated verbal hate attacks as more deserving of punishment, denunciation and being more harmful to the victim than nonverbal attacks. This difference is explained by the concept of action aversion, suggesting that lay observers have different intrinsic associations with interactions involving words compared to bodily actions, regardless of consequences. This explanation has implications for social psychology, moral theories, and legislative efforts to sanction hate speech, which are considered. PROTOCOL REGISTRATION: The Stage 1 protocol for this Registered Report was accepted in principle on 29/06/2022. The protocol, as accepted by the journal, can be found at: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/Z86TV .

Intelligence brings responsibility - Even smart AI assistants are held responsible.

People will not hold cars responsible for traffic accidents, yet they do when artificial intelligence (AI) is involved. AI systems are held responsible when they act or merely advise a human agent. Does this mean that as soon as AI is involved responsibility follows? To find out, we examined whether purely instrumental AI systems stay clear of responsibility. We compared AI-powered with non-AI-powered car warning systems and measured their responsibility rating alongside their human users. Our findings show that responsibility is shared when the warning system is powered by AI but not by a purely mechanical system, even though people consider both systems as mere tools. Surprisingly, whether the warning prevents the accident introduces an outcome bias: the AI takes higher credit than blame depending on what the human manages or fails to do.

Interindividual differences in Pavlovian influence on learning are consistent.

Pavlovian influences impair instrumental learning. It is easier to learn to approach reward-predictive signals and avoid punishment-predictive cues than their contrary. Whether the interindividual variability in this Pavlovian influence is consistent across time has been examined by a number of recent studies and met with mixed results. Here we introduce an open-source, web-based instance of a well-established Go-NoGo paradigm for measuring Pavlovian influence. We closely replicated the previous laboratory-based results. Moreover, the interindividual differences in Pavlovian influence were consistent across a two-week time window at the level of (i) raw measures of learning (i.e. performance accuracy), (ii) linear, descriptive estimates of Pavlovian bias (test-retest reliability: 0.40), and (iii) parameters obtained from reinforcement learning model fitting and model selection (test-retest reliability: 0.25). Nonetheless, the correlations reported here are still lower than the standards (i.e. 0.7) employed in psychometrics and self-reported measures. Our results provide support for trusting Pavlovian bias as a relatively stable individual characteristic and for using its measure in the computational understanding of human mental health.

Social metacognition drives willingness to commit.

Showing or telling others that we are committed to cooperate with them can boost social cooperation. But what makes us willing to signal our cooperativeness, when it is costly to do so? In two experiments, we tested the hypothesis that agents engage in social commitments if their subjective confidence in predicting the interaction partner's behavior is low. In Experiment 1 (preregistered), 48 participants played a prisoner's dilemma game where they could signal their intentions to their co-player by enduring a monetary cost. As hypothesized, low confidence in one's prediction of the co-player's intentions was associated with a higher willingness to engage in costly commitment. In Experiment 2 (31 participants), we replicate these findings and moreover provide causal evidence that experimentally lowering the predictability of others' actions (and thereby confidence in these predictions) motivates commitment decisions. Finally, across both experiments, we show that participants possess and demonstrate metacognitive access to the accuracy of their mentalizing processes. Taken together, our findings shed light on the importance of confidence representations and metacognitive processes in social interactions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Erratum: Touching with the eyes: Oculomotor self-touch induces illusory body ownership.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.106180.].

Compromising improves forecasting.

Predicting the future can bring enormous advantages. Across the ages, reliance on supernatural foreseeing was substituted by the opinion of expert forecasters, and now by collective intelligence approaches which draw on many non-expert forecasters. Yet all of these approaches continue to see individual forecasts as the key unit on which accuracy is determined. Here, we hypothesize that compromise forecasts, defined as the average prediction in a group, represent a better way to harness collective predictive intelligence. We test this by analysing 5 years of data from the Good Judgement Project and comparing the accuracy of individual versus compromise forecasts. Furthermore, given that an accurate forecast is only useful if timely, we analyze how the accuracy changes through time as the events approach. We found that compromise forecasts are more accurate, and that this advantage persists through time, though accuracy varies. Contrary to what was expected (i.e. a monotonous increase in forecasting accuracy as time passes), forecasting error for individuals and for team compromise starts its decline around two months prior to the event. Overall, we offer a method of aggregating forecasts to improve accuracy, which can be straightforwardly applied in noisy real-world settings.

Touching with the eyes: Oculomotor self-touch induces illusory body ownership.

Self-touch plays a central role in the construction and plasticity of the bodily self. But which mechanisms support this role? Previous accounts emphasize the convergence of proprioceptive and tactile signals from the touching and the touched body parts. Here, we hypothesise that proprioceptive information is not necessary for self-touch modulation of body-ownership. Because eye movements do not rely on proprioceptive signals as limb movements do, we developed a novel oculomotor self-touch paradigm where voluntary eye movements generated corresponding tactile sensations. We then compared the effectiveness of eye versus hand self-touch movements in generating an illusion of owning a rubber hand. Voluntary oculomotor self-touch was as effective as hand-driven self-touch, suggesting that proprioception does not contribute to body ownership during self-touch. Self-touch may contribute to a unified sense of bodily self by binding voluntary actions toward our own body with their tactile consequences.

You, me, and us: Maintaining self-other distinction enhances coordination, agency, and affect.

Coordinating our actions with others changes how we behave and feel. Here, we provide evidence that interacting with others rests on a balance between self-other integration and segregation. Using a group walking paradigm, participants were instructed to synchronize with a metronome while listening to the sounds of 8 virtual partners. By manipulating the similarity and synchronicity of the partners' steps to the participant's own, our novel auditory task disentangles the effects of synchrony and self-other similarity and examines their contribution to both collective and individual awareness. We measured temporal coordination (step timing regularity and synchrony with the metronome), gait patterns, and subjective reports about sense of self and group cohesion. The main findings show that coordination is best when participants hear distinct but synchronous virtual others, leading to greater subjective feelings of agency, strength, dominance, and happiness.