Shadows of wisdom: Classifying meta-cognitive and morally grounded narrative content via large language models.

We investigated large language models' (LLMs) efficacy in classifying complex psychological constructs like intellectual humility, perspective-taking, open-mindedness, and search for a compromise in narratives of 347 Canadian and American adults reflecting on a workplace conflict. Using state-of-the-art models like GPT-4 across few-shot and zero-shot paradigms and RoB-ELoC (RoBERTa -fine-tuned-on-Emotion-with-Logistic-Regression-Classifier), we compared their performance with expert human coders. Results showed robust classification by LLMs, with over 80% agreement and F1 scores above 0.85, and high human-model reliability (Cohen's κ Md across top models = .80). RoB-ELoC and few-shot GPT-4 were standout classifiers, although somewhat less effective in categorizing intellectual humility. We offer example workflows for easy integration into research. Our proof-of-concept findings indicate the viability of both open-source and commercial LLMs in automating the coding of complex constructs, potentially transforming social science research.

The wisdom in the story: Clarifying assumptions about radical uncertainty and reasonableness in narrative judgment.

Human lives are radically uncertain. Making sense of such uncertainties is the hallmark of wisdom. Sense-making requires narratives, putting them in the center stage of human everyday decision-making. Yet what if radical uncertainty is a narrative itself? Moreover, do laypeople always consider such narratives irrational? Here we pose these questions to enrich a theory of choice under uncertainty.

Family still matters: Human social motivation across 42 countries during a global pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused drastic social changes for many people, including separation from friends and coworkers, enforced close contact with family, and reductions in mobility. Here we assess the extent to which people's evolutionarily-relevant basic motivations and goals-fundamental social motives such as Affiliation and Kin Care-might have been affected. To address this question, we gathered data on fundamental social motives in 42 countries (N = 15,915) across two waves, including 19 countries (N = 10,907) for which data were gathered both before and during the pandemic (pre-pandemic wave: 32 countries, N = 8998; 3302 male, 5585 female; M age  = 24.43, SD = 7.91; mid-pandemic wave: 29 countries, N = 6917; 2249 male, 4218 female; M age  = 28.59, SD = 11.31). Samples include data collected online (e.g., Prolific, MTurk), at universities, and via community sampling. We found that Disease Avoidance motivation was substantially higher during the pandemic, and that most of the other fundamental social motives showed small, yet significant, differences across waves. Most sensibly, concern with caring for one's children was higher during the pandemic, and concerns with Mate Seeking and Status were lower. Earlier findings showing the prioritization of family motives over mating motives (and even over Disease Avoidance motives) were replicated during the pandemic. Finally, well-being remained positively associated with family-related motives and negatively associated with mating motives during the pandemic, as in the pre-pandemic samples. Our results provide further evidence for the robust primacy of family-related motivations even during this unique disruption of social life.

Social bias insights concern judgments rather than real-world decisions.

Judgments differ from decisions. Judgments are more abstract, decontextualized, and bear fewer consequences for the agent. In pursuit of experimental control, psychological experiments on bias create a simplified, bare-bone representation of social behavior. These experiments resemble conditions in which people judge others, but not how they make real-world decisions.

Training for Wisdom: The Distanced-Self-Reflection Diary Method.

How can people wisely navigate social conflict? Two preregistered longitudinal experiments (Study 1: Canadian adults; Study 2: American and Canadian adults; total N = 555) tested whether encouraging distanced (i.e., third-person) self-reflection would help promote wisdom. Both experiments measured wise reasoning (i.e., intellectual humility, open-mindedness about how situations could unfold, consideration of and attempts to integrate diverse viewpoints) about challenging interpersonal events. In a month-long experiment (Study 1), participants used either a third- or first-person perspective in diary reflections on each day's most significant experience. Compared with preintervention assessments, assessments made after the intervention revealed that participants reflecting in the third person showed a significant increase in wise reasoning about interpersonal challenges. These effects were statistically accounted for by shifts in diary-based reflections toward a broader self-focus. A week-long experiment (Study 2) replicated the third-person self-reflection effect on wise reasoning (vs. first-person and no-pronoun control conditions). These findings suggest an efficient and evidence-based method for fostering wise reasoning.

Self-distancing promotes positive emotional change after adversity: Evidence from a micro-longitudinal field experiment.

OBJECTIVE: This research examines changes in emotionality following adverse experiences in daily life. We tested whether daily self-distancing (vs. self-immersing) in reflections on adversity results in positive change in emotionality. Additionally, we probed the "dosage" effect of repeated self-distancing. METHOD: A micro-longitudinal field experiment combined 4-week daily diary and experimental manipulation of perspective during diary-based reflections on adverse experiences to explore the trajectory of change in emotionality. Each day, participants (N = 149) described and reflected on one significant event from that day and rated emotionality. We randomly assigned participants to reflect from a self-immersed or self-distanced perspective. RESULTS: Self-distanced participants showed a change toward positive emotionality while maintaining the same level of negative emotionality, whereas self-immersed participants did not show changes in positive or negative emotionality. We also observed that self-distancing reached its maximum effect ("dosage") for positive emotionality in the third week of the diary. CONCLUSIONS: Repeated self-distanced reflections can promote positive change in emotionality in the face of everyday adversity. Notably, repeated self-distancing effectiveness has a saturation point. In contrast, self-immersed reflections on adversity do not promote positive emotional change. Together, these observations raise the question how the default self-immersed reflection on traumatic experiences impacts personal growth.

Post-traumatic growth as positive personality change: Challenges, opportunities, and recommendations.

OBJECTIVE: Post-traumatic growth typically refers to enduring positive psychological change experienced as a result of adversity, trauma, or highly challenging life circumstances. Critics have challenged insights from much of the prior research on this topic, pinpointing its significant methodological limitations. In response to these critiques, we propose that post-traumatic growth can be more accurately captured in terms of personality change-an approach that affords a more rigorous examination of the phenomenon. METHOD: We outline a set of conceptual and methodological questions and considerations for future work on the topic of post-traumatic growth. RESULTS: We provide a series of recommendations for researchers from across the disciplines of clinical/counseling, developmental, health, personality, and social psychology and beyond, who are interested in improving the quality of research examining resilience and growth in the context of adversity. CONCLUSION: We are hopeful that these recommendations will pave the way for a more accurate understanding of the ubiquity, durability, and causal processes underlying post-traumatic growth.

COVID-19 and Its Global Economic Impact.

Pandemics are enormous threats to the world that impact all aspects of our lives, especially the global economy. The COVID-19 pandemic has emerged since December 2019 and has affected the global economy in many ways. As the world becomes more interconnected, the economic impacts of the pandemic become more serious. In addition to increased health expenditures and reduced labor force, the pandemic has hit the supply and demand chain massively and caused trouble for manufacturers who have to fire some of their employees or delay their economic activities to prevent more loss. With the closure of manufacturers and companies and reduced travel rates, usage of oil after the beginning of the pandemic has decreased significantly that was unprecedented in the last 30 years. The mining industry is a critical sector in several developing countries, and the COVID-19 pandemic has hit this industry too. Also, world stock markets declined as investors started to become concerned about the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The tourism industry and airlines have also experienced an enormous loss too. The GDP has reduced, and this pandemic will cost the world more than 2 trillion at the end of 2020.

Culture and personality revisited: Behavioral profiles and within-person stability in interdependent (vs. independent) social orientation and holistic (vs. analytic) cognitive style.

OBJECTIVE: We test the proposition that both social orientation and cognitive style are constructs consisting of loosely related attributes. Thus, measures of each construct should weakly correlate among themselves, forming intraindividually stable profiles across measures over time. METHOD: Study 1 tested diverse samples of Americans (N = 233) and Japanese (N = 433) with a wide range of measures of social orientation and cognitive style to explore correlations among these measures in a cross-cultural context, using demographically heterogeneous samples. Study 2 recruited a new sample of 485 Americans and Canadians and examined their profiles on measures of social orientation and cognitive style twice, one month apart, to assess the stability of individual profiles using these variables. RESULTS: Despite finding typical cross-cultural differences, Study 1 demonstrated negligible correlations both among measures of social orientation and among measures of cognitive style. Study 2 demonstrated stable intraindividual behavioral profiles across measures capturing idiosyncratic patters of social orientation and cognitive style, despite negligible correlations among the same measures. CONCLUSION: The results provide support for the behavioral profile approach to conceptualizing social orientation and cognitive style, highlighting the need to assess intraindividual stability of psychological constructs in cross-cultural research.

The wealth→life history→innovation account of the Industrial Revolution is largely inconsistent with empirical time series data.

Baumard proposes a model to explain the dramatic rise in innovation that occurred during the Industrial Revolution, whereby rising living standards led to slower life history strategies, which, in turn, fostered innovation. We test his model explicitly using time series data, finding limited support for these proposed linkages. Instead, we find evidence that rising living standards appear to have a time-lagged bidirectional relationship with increasing innovation.

The importance of environmental threats and ideology in explaining extreme self-sacrifice.

We argue that Whitehouse's group-based model neglects two key contextual variables: environmental threats and ideology. Environmental threats lead to extremism outside of group settings and predispose individuals toward joining ideologically zealous groups. Ideologies and environmental threats can also explain why certain groups adopt norms that encourage violent self-sacrifice.

Social class and wise reasoning about interpersonal conflicts across regions, persons and situations.

We propose that class is inversely related to a propensity for using wise reasoning (recognizing limits of their knowledge, consider world in flux and change, acknowledges and integrate different perspectives) in interpersonal situations, contrary to established class advantage in abstract cognition. Two studies-an online survey from regions differing in economic affluence (n = 2 145) and a representative in-lab study with stratified sampling of adults from working and middle-class backgrounds (n = 299)-tested this proposition, indicating that higher social class consistently related to lower levels of wise reasoning across different levels of analysis, including regional and individual differences, and subjective construal of specific situations. The results held across personal and standardized hypothetical situations, across self-reported and observed wise reasoning, and when controlling for fluid and crystallized cognitive abilities. Consistent with an ecological framework, class differences in wise reasoning were specific to interpersonal (versus societal) conflicts. These findings suggest that higher social class weighs individuals down by providing the ecological constraints that undermine wise reasoning about interpersonal affairs.

Global Increases in Individualism.

Individualism appears to have increased over the past several decades, yet most research documenting this shift has been limited to the study of a handful of highly developed countries. Is the world becoming more individualist as a whole? If so, why? To answer these questions, we examined 51 years of data on individualist practices and values across 78 countries. Our findings suggest that individualism is indeed rising in most of the societies we tested. Despite dramatic shifts toward greater individualism around the world, however, cultural differences remain sizable. Moreover, cultural differences are primarily linked to changes in socioeconomic development, and to a lesser extent to shifts in pathogen prevalence and disaster frequency.

Socioecological factors are linked to changes in prevalence of contempt over time.

Gervais & Fessler argue that the perceived legitimacy of contempt has declined over time in the United States, citing evidence of a decrease in the frequency of its use in the American English corpus. We argue that this decline in contempt, as reflected in cultural products, is linked to shifts in key socioecological features previously associated with other forms of cultural change.

Divergent life histories and other ecological adaptations: Examples of social-class differences in attention, cognition, and attunement to others.

Many behavioral and psychological effects of socioeconomic status (SES), beyond those presented by Pepper & Nettle cannot be adequately explained by life-history theory. We review such effects and reflect on the corresponding ecological affordances and constraints of low- versus high-SES environments, suggesting that several ecology-specific adaptations, apart from life-history strategies, are responsible for the behavioral and psychological effects of SES.

Social structure, infectious diseases, disasters, secularism, and cultural change in America.

Why do cultures change? The present work examined cultural change in eight cultural-level markers, or correlates, of individualism in the United States, all of which increased over the course of the 20th century: frequency of individualist themes in books, preference for uniqueness in baby naming, frequency of single-child relative to multichild families, frequency of single-generation relative to multigeneration households, percentage of adults and percentage of older adults living alone, small family size, and divorce rates (relative to marriage rates). We tested five key hypotheses regarding cultural change in individualism-collectivism. As predicted by previous theories, changes in socioeconomic structure, pathogen prevalence, and secularism accompanied changes in individualism averaged across all measures. The relationship with changes in individualism was less robust for urbanization. Contrary to previous theories, changes in individualism were positively (as opposed to negatively) related to the frequency of disasters. Time-lagged analyses suggested that only socioeconomic structure had a robust effect on individualism; changes in socioeconomic structure preceded changes in individualism. Implications for anthropology, psychology, and sociology are discussed.

Exploring Solomon's paradox: self-distancing eliminates the self-other asymmetry in wise reasoning about close relationships in younger and older adults.

Are people wiser when reflecting on other people's problems compared with their own? If so, does self-distancing eliminate this asymmetry in wise reasoning? In three experiments (N = 693), participants displayed wiser reasoning (i.e., recognizing the limits of their knowledge and the importance of compromise and future change, considering other people's perspectives) about another person's problems compared with their own. Across Studies 2 and 3, instructing individuals to self-distance (rather than self-immerse) eliminated this asymmetry. Study 3 demonstrated that each of these effects was comparable for younger (20-40 years) and older (60-80 years) adults. Thus, contrary to the adage "with age comes wisdom," our findings suggest that there are no age differences in wise reasoning about personal conflicts, and that the effects of self-distancing generalize across age cohorts. These findings highlight the role that self-distancing plays in allowing people to overcome a pervasive asymmetry that characterizes wise reasoning.

Explaining contentious political issues promotes open-minded thinking.

Cognitive scientists suggest that inviting people to explain contentious political issues might reduce intergroup toxicity because it exposes people to how poorly they understand the issue. However, whether providing explanations can result in more open-minded political thinking remains unclear. On one hand, inviting people to explain a political issue might make them more impartial and open-minded in their thinking. On the other hand, an invitation to explain a contentious political issue might lead to myside bias-rationalization of one's default position. Here, we address these contrasting predictions in five experiments (N = 1884; three pre-registered), conducted across a variety of contexts: with graduate students interacting with an actor in a laboratory setting, with US residents at the peak of the 2012 and 2016 U.S. presidential elections, with UK residents before the highly polarized 2019 Brexit vote, and with gun-control partisans. Across studies, we found that explaining politically contentious topics resulted in more open-minded thinking, an effect that generalized across coded (Studies 1-4) and self-report (Studies 3-4) measures. We also observed that participants who were made to feel like their explanations were welcomed felt closer to their discussion partner (Studies 3-4), an effect that generalized to all outgroup members with whom they disagreed with about the politically contentious issue (Study 4). We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings, and the potential for explanations to foster open-minded political engagement.

When expert predictions fail.

We examine the opportunities and challenges of expert judgment in the social sciences, scrutinizing the way social scientists make predictions. While social scientists show above-chance accuracy in predicting laboratory-based phenomena, they often struggle to predict real-world societal changes. We argue that most causal models used in social sciences are oversimplified, confuse levels of analysis to which a model applies, misalign the nature of the model with the nature of the phenomena, and fail to consider factors beyond the scientist's pet theory. Taking cues from physical sciences and meteorology, we advocate an approach that integrates broad foundational models with context-specific time series data. We call for a shift in the social sciences towards more precise, daring predictions and greater intellectual humility.