Believing in nothing and believing in everything: The underlying cognitive paradox of anti-COVID-19 vaccine attitudes.

A major reason why some people oppose the COVID-19 vaccine is the influence of misinformation. This study suggests that the cognitive paradox of simultaneously believing known facts less and new, "alternative facts" more is the outcome of a distrust mindset, characterized by spontaneous consideration of alternatives, including misinformation. We captured this paradox and its correlates in a scale that measures individuals' ability to distinguish between the truth value of well-established facts ("Earth rotates eastward around its own axis, completing a full rotation once in about 24 h") and baseless "alternative facts" ("Earth can change its rotation direction and flip its axis, and we will never notice it"). Assuming that an anti-COVID-19 vaccine attitude arises from a chronically distrusting mindset, we sampled participants on Prolific who were pre-screened for their COVID-19 vaccine attitude based on earlier responses. We found that people who rejected COVID-19 vaccines believed well-established facts less, and "alternative facts" more, compared to supporters of the vaccine. Less discernment between truths and falsehoods was correlated with less intellectual humility, more distrust and greater reliance on one's intuition. This observed thought pattern offers insights into theoretical understanding of the antecedents of belief in "alternative facts" and conspiracy theories.

Trust or distrust? Neither! The right mindset for confronting disinformation.

A primary explanation for why individuals believe disinformation is the truth bias, a predisposition to accept information as true. However, this bias is context-dependent, as research shows that rejection becomes the predominant process in a distrust mindset. Consequently, trust and distrust emerge as pivotal factors in addressing disinformation. The current review offers a more nuanced perspective by illustrating that whereas distrust may act as an antidote to the truth bias, it can also paradoxically serve as a catalyst for belief in disinformation. The review concludes that mindsets other than those rooted solely in trust (or distrust), such as an evaluative mindset, may prove to be more effective in detecting and refuting disinformation.

Correction of evident falsehood requires explicit negation.

The danger of receiving false information is omnipresent, and people might be highly vigilant against being influenced by falsehoods. Yet, as research on misinformation reveals, people are often biased by false information, even when they know the valid alternative. The question is: why? The current research explores the relative encoding strength of 2 opposing alternatives involved in the correction of falsehood: the false concept and the valid concept. These encoding strengths may be critical for what people remember and how they act upon receiving false information. We compared 2 triggers for the correction of falsehood-a sentence consisting of clearly false information (e.g., honey is made by butterflies) and a sentence consisting of an explicit negation of this information (e.g., honey is not made by butterflies). The general pattern of results from 5 experiments demonstrates that the valid concept (e.g., bees) exhibits a weaker presence in memory than the false concept (e.g., butterflies) following the comprehension of evidently false information as compared to its explicit negation. Thus, the current research provides an answer to the riddle of the persistence of false information: False information is less likely to be mentally corrected if it is not explicitly negated. Even when people detect that a sentence is false, they tend to focus on the false concept rather than on the valid concept. These findings shed new light on extant research and offer fresh insights about the processing of false information and related phenomena such as the reliance on misinformation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Thinking of oneself as an object of observation reduces reliance on metacognitive information.

This research explores the consequences of two states of mind on judgment: a subjective state, looking at the world from one's own eyes, and an objective state, in which one thinks of oneself from the imagined perspective of an external observer. In six experiments, we show that judgments people make while they are in a subjective state of mind are more influenced by metacognitive experience compared with judgments people make when they are in an objective state of mind. This is demonstrated in Experiments 1-3, using two different manipulations for the two states of mind and two different fluency tasks. Experiment 4 explores the underlying mechanism and demonstrates that an objective state does not lessen the metacognitive experience itself; rather, it affects the reliance on this experience as a relevant source of information. Finally, in Experiments 5 and 6 we investigate implications of our hypothesis for doing experimental research in psychology. We find that taking part in a laboratory experiment resembles the experimental condition of an objective state of mind, as participants rely less on their metacognition compared with conditions aimed to restore the subjective state of mind within the lab setting. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings regarding social influences on judgments and decisions in psychology labs and in the real world. (PsycINFO Database Record

When both the original study and its failed replication are correct: Feeling observed eliminates the facial-feedback effect.

This article suggests a theoretically driven explanation for a replication failure of one of the basic findings in psychology: the facial-feedback effect. According to the facial-feedback hypothesis, the facial activity associated with particular emotional expressions can influence people's affective experiences. Recently, a replication attempt of this effect in 17 laboratories around the world failed to find any support for the effect. We hypothesize that the reason for the failure of replication is that the replication protocol deviated from that of the original experiment in a critical factor. In all of the replication studies, participants were alerted that they would be monitored by a video camera, whereas the participants in the original study were not monitored, observed, or recorded. Previous findings indicate that feeling monitored or observed reduces reliance on internal cues in making judgments. Therefore, we hypothesize that recording the participants in the replication experiments reduced their reliance on the facial-feedback. To test the hypothesis, we replicated the facial-feedback experiment in 2 conditions: one with a video-camera and one without it. The results revealed a significant facial-feedback effect in the absence of a camera, which was eliminated in the camera's presence. These findings suggest that minute differences in the experimental protocol might lead to theoretically meaningful changes in the outcomes. In our view, the theoretical and methodological approach advocated by our study changes failed replications from being the "end of the road" regarding entire fields of study into a new road for growth regarding our understanding of human nature. (PsycINFO Database Record

We look like our names: The manifestation of name stereotypes in facial appearance.

Research demonstrates that facial appearance affects social perceptions. The current research investigates the reverse possibility: Can social perceptions influence facial appearance? We examine a social tag that is associated with us early in life-our given name. The hypothesis is that name stereotypes can be manifested in facial appearance, producing a face-name matching effect, whereby both a social perceiver and a computer are able to accurately match a person's name to his or her face. In 8 studies we demonstrate the existence of this effect, as participants examining an unfamiliar face accurately select the person's true name from a list of several names, significantly above chance level. We replicate the effect in 2 countries and find that it extends beyond the limits of socioeconomic cues. We also find the effect using a computer-based paradigm and 94,000 faces. In our exploration of the underlying mechanism, we show that existing name stereotypes produce the effect, as its occurrence is culture-dependent. A self-fulfilling prophecy seems to be at work, as initial evidence shows that facial appearance regions that are controlled by the individual (e.g., hairstyle) are sufficient to produce the effect, and socially using one's given name is necessary to generate the effect. Together, these studies suggest that facial appearance represents social expectations of how a person with a specific name should look. In this way a social tag may influence one's facial appearance. (PsycINFO Database Record

Creative foraging: An experimental paradigm for studying exploration and discovery.

Creative exploration is central to science, art and cognitive development. However, research on creative exploration is limited by a lack of high-resolution automated paradigms. To address this, we present such an automated paradigm, the creative foraging game, in which people search for novel and valuable solutions in a large and well-defined space made of all possible shapes made of ten connected squares. Players discovered shape categories such as digits, letters, and airplanes as well as more abstract categories. They exploited each category, then dropped it to explore once again, and so on. Aligned with a prediction of optimal foraging theory (OFT), during exploration phases, people moved along meandering paths that are about three times longer than the shortest paths between shapes; when exploiting a category of related shapes, they moved along the shortest paths. The moment of discovery of a new category was usually done at a non-prototypical and ambiguous shape, which can serve as an experimental proxy for creative leaps. People showed individual differences in their search patterns, along a continuum between two strategies: a mercurial quick-to-discover/quick-to-drop strategy and a thorough slow-to-discover/slow-to-drop strategy. Contrary to optimal foraging theory, players leave exploitation to explore again far before categories are depleted. This paradigm opens the way for automated high-resolution study of creative exploration.

Regulatory focus and generalized trust: the impact of prevention-focused self-regulation on trusting others.

The current research suggests that taking self-regulatory mechanisms into account provides insights regarding individuals' responses to threats in social interactions. In general, based on the notion that a prevention-focused orientation of self-regulation is associated with a need for security and a vigilant tendency to avoid losses and other types of negative events we advocate that a prevention-focused orientation, both as a disposition as well as a situationally induced state, lowers generalized trust, thus hindering cooperation within social interactions that entail threats. Specifically, we found that the more individuals' habitual self-regulatory orientation is dominated by a prevention focus, the less likely they are to score high on a self-report measure of generalized trust (Study 1), and to express trust in a trust game paradigm as manifested in lower sums of transferred money (Studies 2 and 3). Similar findings were found when prevention focus was situationally manipulated (Study 4). Finally, one possible factor underlying the impact of prevention-focused self-regulation on generalized trust was demonstrated as individuals with a special sensitivity to negative information were significantly affected by a subtle prevention focus manipulation (versus control condition) in that they reacted with reduced trust in the trust game (Study 5). In sum, the current findings document the crucial relevance of self-regulatory orientations as conceptualized in regulatory focus theory regarding generalized trust and responses to threats within a social interaction. The theoretical and applied implications of the findings are discussed.

Accessibility is a matter of trust: Dispositional and contextual distrust blocks accessibility effects.

Distrust poses a challenge to human cognition because it signals that information from the environment should not be taken at face value. Accordingly, in the present research, we argue and show that distrust, both as a chronic disposition and as a contextual factor, blocks accessibility effects. We report five studies in which distrust is either measured (Studies 2 and 3) or manipulated (Studies 1, 4 and 5), and test the "distrust-blocks-accessibility hypothesis" on both verbal and non-verbal accessibility effects. We first elucidate the nature of the distrust mindset and show that distrust inherently entails the activation of alternatives to the original accessible concept thus undermining the preeminence of the prime (Study 1). We then show that distrust blocks accessibility using the "Donald" task (Study 2), the "Halo Effect" task (Study 3), an embodiment paradigm (Study 4), and an applied context of web advertising (Study 5). We conclude that the human mind is sensitive and flexible enough to block any influence from the environment if it seems unreliable. We discuss the novel implications of this perspective for both distrust and accessibility research.

Encoding under trust and distrust: the spontaneous activation of incongruent cognitions.

Past studies of strategic thinking have shown that the encoding of the message information becomes more complex under distrust. Receivers process the information as if they are trying to protect themselves from being misled by testing alternative potential interpretations. The present study investigates the possibility that when people are mistrustful they spontaneously activate associations that are incongruent with the given message. Findings from 3 experiments suggest that, even when the distrust is unrelated in any meaningful way to the message and even when receivers are unable to prepare a strategic response, the cognitive system reacts to distrust by automatically inducing the consideration of incongruent associations--it seems designed to ask, "and what if the information were false?" The theoretical implications of the results for theories of social perception and persuasion are discussed.

If I imagine it, then it happened: the Implicit Truth Value of imaginary representations.

Imagination sometimes leads people to behave, feel, and think as though imagined events were real even when they know they were not. In this paper, we suggest that some understanding of these phenomena can be achieved by differentiating between Implicit Truth Value (ITV), a spontaneous truth evaluation, and Explicit Truth Value (ETV), a self-reported truth judgment. In three experiments, we measure ITV using the autobiographical Implicit Association Test (Sartori, Agosta, Zogmaister, Ferrara, & Castiello, 2008), which has been used to assess which of two autobiographical events is true. Our findings demonstrate that imagining an event, like experiencing an event, increases its ITV, even when people explicitly acknowledge the imagined event as false (Experiments 1a and 1b). Furthermore, we show that imagined representations generated from a first-person perspective have higher ITV than imagined representations generated from a third-person perspective (Experiment 2). Our findings suggest that implicit and explicit measures of truth differ in their sensitivity to properties underlying truth judgment. We discuss the contribution of characterizing events according to both ITV and ETV to the understanding of various psychological phenomena, such as lying and self-deception.

If you negate, you may forget: negated repetitions impair memory compared with affirmative repetitions.

One of the most robust laws of memory is that repeated activation improves memory. Our study shows that the nature of repetition matters. Specifically, although both negated repetition and affirmative repetition improve memory compared with no repetition, negated repetition hinders memory compared with affirmative repetition. After showing participants different entities, we asked them about features of these entities, leading to either "yes" or "no" responses. Our findings show that correctly negating an incorrect feature of an entity elicits an active forgetting effect compared with correctly affirming its true features. For example, after seeing someone drink a glass of white wine, answering "no" to "was it red wine?" may lead one to greater memory loss of the individual drinking wine at all compared with answering "yes" to "was it white wine?" We find this negation-induced forgetting effect in 4 experiments that differ in (a) the meaning given for the negation, (b) the type of stimuli (visual or verbal), and (c) the memory measure (recognition or free recall). We discuss possible underlying mechanisms and offer theoretical and applied implications of the negation-induced forgetting effect in relation to other known inhibition effects.

Distrust and the positive test heuristic: dispositional and situated social distrust improves performance on the Wason rule discovery task.

Feelings of distrust alert people not to take information at face value, which may influence their reasoning strategy. Using the Wason (1960) rule identification task, we tested whether chronic and temporary distrust increase the use of negative hypothesis testing strategies suited to falsify one's own initial hunch. In Study 1, participants who were low in dispositional trust were more likely to engage in negative hypothesis testing than participants high in dispositional trust. In Study 2, trust and distrust were induced through an alleged person-memory task. Paralleling the effects of chronic distrust, participants exposed to a single distrust-eliciting face were 3 times as likely to engage in negative hypothesis testing as participants exposed to a trust-eliciting face. In both studies, distrust increased negative hypothesis testing, which was associated with better performance on the Wason task. In contrast, participants' initial rule generation was not consistently affected by distrust. These findings provide first evidence that distrust can influence which reasoning strategy people adopt.

Negating in order to be negative: the relationship between depressive rumination, message content and negation processing.

The current research explored the interaction between brooding, a maladaptive subtype of depressive rumination, and content valence, in a basic cognitive process of negation. Following presentation of positive and negative trait descriptions, phrased affirmatively or negatively (e.g., "Liz is/is not a smart person"), participants' associations were examined for congruency with the schema (e.g., "smart") or with its negation (e.g., "stupid"). We predicted that brooders' processing of negations would enhance the accessibility of negative content. Consistent with our prediction, brooders generated schema-congruent associations for negatively valenced schemas, but negation-congruent associations for positively valenced schemas, thus, maintaining negative content in both cases. In contrast, nonbrooders generated associations congruent with the negation regardless of schema valence. This processing pattern is suggestive of a possible pathway for negative content perseveration in rumination, and it attests to the context and person sensitivity of the negation process.