Propagation of societal gender inequality by internet search algorithms.

Humans increasingly rely on artificial intelligence (AI) for efficient and objective decision-making, yet there is increasing concern that algorithms used by modern AI systems produce discriminatory outputs, presumably because they are trained on data in which societal biases are embedded. As a consequence, their use by human decision makers may result in the propagation, rather than reduction, of existing disparities. To assess this hypothesis empirically, we tested the relation between societal gender inequality and algorithmic search output and then examined the effect of this output on human decision-making. First, in two multinational samples (n = 37, 52 countries), we found that greater nation-level gender inequality was associated with more male-dominated Google image search results for the gender-neutral keyword "person" (in a nation's dominant language), revealing a link between societal-level disparities and algorithmic output. Next, in a series of experiments with human participants (n = 395), we demonstrated that the gender disparity associated with high- vs. low-inequality algorithmic outputs guided the formation of gender-biased prototypes and influenced hiring decisions in novel scenarios. These findings support the hypothesis that societal-level gender inequality is recapitulated in internet search algorithms, which in turn can influence human decision makers to act in ways that reinforce these disparities.

A longitudinal analysis of conspiracy beliefs and Covid-19 health responses.

BACKGROUND: Little is known about how conspiracy beliefs and health responses are interrelated over time during the course of the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic. This longitudinal study tested two contrasting, but not mutually exclusive, hypotheses through cross-lagged modeling. First, based on the consequential nature of conspiracy beliefs, we hypothesize that conspiracy beliefs predict an increase in detrimental health responses over time. Second, as people may rationalize their behavior through conspiracy beliefs, we hypothesize that detrimental health responses predict increased conspiracy beliefs over time. METHODS: We measured conspiracy beliefs and several health-related responses (i.e. physical distancing, support for lockdown policy, and the perception of the coronavirus as dangerous) at three phases of the pandemic in the Netherlands (N = 4913): During the first lockdown (Wave 1: April 2020), after the first lockdown (Wave 2: June 2020), and during the second lockdown (Wave 3: December 2020). RESULTS: For physical distancing and perceived danger, the overall cross-lagged effects supported both hypotheses, although the standardized effects were larger for the effects of conspiracy beliefs on these health responses than vice versa. The within-person change results only supported an effect of conspiracy beliefs on these health responses, depending on the phase of the pandemic. Furthermore, an overall cross-lagged effect of conspiracy beliefs on reduced support for lockdown policy emerged from Wave 2 to 3. CONCLUSIONS: The results provide stronger support for the hypothesis that conspiracy beliefs predict health responses over time than for the hypothesis that health responses predict conspiracy beliefs over time.

The Social Neuroscience of Prejudice.

The social neuroscience approach to prejudice investigates the psychology of intergroup bias by integrating models and methods of neuroscience with the social psychology of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination. Here, we review major contemporary lines of inquiry, including current accounts of group-based categorization; formation and updating of prejudice and stereotypes; effects of prejudice on perception, emotion, and decision making; and the self-regulation of prejudice. In each section, we discuss key social neuroscience findings, consider interpretational challenges and connections with the behavioral literature, and highlight how they advance psychological theories of prejudice. We conclude by discussing the next-generation questions that will continue to guide the social neuroscience approach toward addressing major societal issues of prejudice and discrimination.

Missing context from experimental studies amplifies, rather than negates, racial bias in the real world.

We agree with Cesario's premise but reject his conclusion: Although experimental studies of racial stereotyping, weapons perception, and shoot decisions typically exclude real-world contextual factors and thus have limited relevance to race disparities (e.g., in policing), these excluded factors comprise systemic, institutional, and individual-level biases that are more likely to amplify racial disparities than negate them.

The neuroscience of prejudice and stereotyping.

Despite global increases in diversity, social prejudices continue to fuel intergroup conflict, disparities and discrimination. Moreover, as norms have become more egalitarian, prejudices seem to have 'gone underground', operating covertly and often unconsciously, such that they are difficult to detect and control. Neuroscientists have recently begun to probe the neural basis of prejudice and stereotyping in an effort to identify the processes through which these biases form, influence behaviour and are regulated. This research aims to elucidate basic mechanisms of the social brain while advancing our understanding of intergroup bias in social behaviour.

The Nature and Consequences of Essentialist Beliefs About Race in Early Childhood.

It is widely believed that race divides the world into biologically distinct kinds of people-an essentialist belief inconsistent with reality. Essentialist views of race have been described as early emerging, but this study found that young children (n = 203, Mage  = 5.45) hold only the more limited belief that the physical feature of skin color is inherited and stable. Overall, children rejected the causal essentialist view that behavioral and psychological characteristics are constrained by an inherited racial essence. Although average levels of children's causal essentialist beliefs about race were low, variation in these beliefs was related to children's own group membership, exposure to diversity, as well as children's own social attitudes.

Three strong moves to improve research and replications alike.

We suggest three additional improvements to replication practices. First, original research should include concrete checks on validity, encouraged by editorial standards. Second, the reasons for replicating a particular study should be more transparent and balance systematic positive reasons with selective negative ones. Third, methodological validity should also be factored into evaluating replications, with methodologically inconclusive replications not counted as non-replications.

Gender Attitudes in Early Childhood: Behavioral Consequences and Cognitive Antecedents.

This study examined factors that predicted children's gender intergroup attitudes at age 5 and the implications of these attitudes for intergroup behavior. Ethnically diverse children from low-income backgrounds (N = 246; Mexican-, Chinese-, Dominican-, and African American) were assessed at ages 4 and 5. On average, children reported positive same-gender and negative other-gender attitudes. Positive same-gender attitudes were associated with knowledge of gender stereotypes. In contrast, positive other-gender attitudes were associated with flexibility in gender cognitions (stereotype flexibility, gender consistency). Other-gender attitudes predicted gender-biased behavior. These patterns were observed in all ethnic groups. These findings suggest that early learning about gender categories shape young children's gender attitudes and that these gender attitudes already have consequences for children's intergroup behavior at age 5.

Economic scarcity alters the perception of race.

When the economy declines, racial minorities are hit the hardest. Although existing explanations for this effect focus on institutional causes, recent psychological findings suggest that scarcity may also alter perceptions of race in ways that exacerbate discrimination. We tested the hypothesis that economic resource scarcity causes decision makers to perceive African Americans as "Blacker" and that this visual distortion elicits disparities in the allocation of resources. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated that scarcity altered perceptions of race, lowering subjects' psychophysical threshold for seeing a mixed-race face as "Black" as opposed to "White." In studies 3 and 4, scarcity led subjects to visualize African American faces as darker and more "stereotypically Black," compared with a control condition. When presented to naïve subjects, face representations produced under scarcity elicited smaller allocations than control-condition representations. Together, these findings introduce a novel perceptual account for the proliferation of racial disparities under economic scarcity.

Cognitive control modulates attention to food cues: Support for the control readiness model of self-control.

Self-control in one's food choices often depends on the regulation of attention toward healthy choices and away from temptations. We tested whether selective attention to food cues can be modulated by a newly developed proactive self-control mechanism-control readiness-whereby control activated in one domain can facilitate control in another domain. In two studies, we elicited the activation of control using a color-naming Stroop task and tested its effect on attention to food cues in a subsequent, unrelated task. We found that control readiness modulates both overt attention, which involves shifts in eye gaze (Study 1), and covert attention, which involves shift in mental attention without shifting in eye gaze (Study 2). We further demonstrated that individuals for whom tempting food cues signal a self-control problem (operationalized by relatively higher BMI) were especially likely to benefit from control readiness. We discuss the theoretical contributions of the control readiness model and the implications of our findings for enhancing proactive self-control to overcome temptation in food choices.

Ten years of Nature Reviews Neuroscience: insights from the highly cited.

To celebrate the first 10 years of Nature Reviews Neuroscience, we invited the authors of the most cited article of each year to look back on the state of their field of research at the time of publication and the impact their article has had, and to discuss the questions that might be answered in the next 10 years. This selection of highly cited articles provides interesting snapshots of the progress that has been made in diverse areas of neuroscience. They show the enormous influence of neuroimaging techniques and highlight concepts that have generated substantial interest in the past decade, such as neuroimmunology, social neuroscience and the 'network approach' to brain function. These advancements will pave the way for further exciting discoveries that lie ahead.

Transmission of social bias through observational learning.

People often rely on social learning-learning by observing others' actions and outcomes-to form preferences in advance of their own direct experiences. Although typically adaptive, we investigated whether social learning may also contribute to the formation and spread of prejudice. In six experiments (n = 1550), we demonstrate that by merely observing interactions between a prejudiced actor and social group members, observers acquired the prejudices of the actor. Moreover, observers were unaware of the actors' bias, misattributing their acquired group preferences to the behavior of group members, despite identical behavior between groups. Computational modeling revealed that this effect was due to value shaping, whereby one's preferences are shaped by another's actions toward a target, in addition to the target's reward feedback. These findings identify social learning as a potent mechanism of prejudice formation that operates implicitly and supports the transmission of intergroup bias.

Race effects on impression formation in social interaction: An instrumental learning account.

How does race influence the impressions we form through direct interaction? In two preregistered experiments (N = 239/179), White American participants played a money-sharing game with Black and White players, based on a probabilistic reward reinforcement learning task, in which they chose to interact with players and received feedback on whether a player shared. We found that participants formed stronger reward preferences for White relative to Black players despite equivalent reward feedback between groups-a pattern that was stronger among participants with low internal motivation to respond without prejudice and high explicit prejudice. This race effect in reward learning was evident in participants' behavioral choice preferences, but not in their self-reported perceptions of group members' reward rates. Computational modeling suggested two mechanisms through which race affected instrumental learning: race (a) influenced White participants' initial expectancies (i.e., priors) about Black compared with White players' behavior and (b) led participants to update reward representations of Black and White players according to separate learning rates. These findings demonstrate that race can influence the formation of impressions through direct social interaction and introduce an instrumental learning framework to understand the effects of bias in intergroup interactions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Neural Basis of Prejudice and Prejudice Reduction.

Social prejudices, based on race, ethnicity, gender, or other identities, pervade how we perceive, think about, and act toward others. Research on the neural basis of prejudice seeks to illuminate its effects by investigating the neurocognitive processes through which prejudice is formed, represented in the mind, expressed in behavior, and potentially reduced. In this article, we review current knowledge about the social neuroscience of prejudice regarding its influence on rapid social perception, representation in memory, emotional expression and relation to empathy, and regulation, and we discuss implications of this work for prejudice reduction interventions.

Context-dependent learning in social interaction: Trait impressions support flexible social choices.

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 123(4) of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (see record 2023-02979-001). In the error, the Study 2 heading Computational Mode of Learning should instead appear as Computational Model of Learning. All versions of this article have been corrected.] How do humans learn, through social interaction, whom to depend on in different situations? We compared the extent to which inferred trait attributes-as opposed to learned reward associations previously examined as part of feedback-based learning-could adaptively inform cross-context social decision-making. In four experiments, participants completed a novel task in which they chose to "hire" other players to solve math and verbal questions for money. These players varied in their trait-level competence across these contexts and, independently, in the monetary rewards they offered to participants across contexts. Results revealed that participants chose partners primarily based on context-specific traits, as opposed to either global trait impressions or material rewards. When making choices in novel contexts-including determining who to choose for social and emotional support-participants generalized trait knowledge from past contexts that required similar traits. Reward-based learning, by contrast, demonstrated significantly weaker context-sensitivity and generalization. These findings suggest that people form context-dependent trait impressions from interactive feedback and use this knowledge to make flexible social decisions. These results support a novel theoretical account of how interaction-based social learning can support context-specific impression formation and adaptive decision-making. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Predicting attitudinal and behavioral responses to COVID-19 pandemic using machine learning.

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multinational data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution-individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar results were found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, and collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-neglible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic.

Seeing race: N170 responses to race and their relation to automatic racial attitudes and controlled processing.

We examined the relation between neural activity reflecting early face perception processes and automatic and controlled responses to race. Participants completed a sequential evaluative priming task, in which two-tone images of Black faces, White faces, and cars appeared as primes, followed by target words categorized as pleasant or unpleasant, while encephalography was recorded. Half of these participants were alerted that the task assessed racial prejudice and could reveal their personal bias ("alerted" condition). To assess face perception processes, the N170 component of the ERP was examined. For all participants, stronger automatic pro-White bias was associated with larger N170 amplitudes to Black than White faces. For participants in the alerted condition only, larger N170 amplitudes to Black versus White faces were also associated with less controlled processing on the word categorization task. These findings suggest that preexisting racial attitudes affect early face processing and that situational factors moderate the link between early face processing and behavior.

Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism.

Political scientists and psychologists have noted that, on average, conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty. We tested the hypothesis that these profiles relate to differences in general neurocognitive functioning using event-related potentials, and found that greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern.

Effects of high and low power on the visual encoding of faces.

The experience of power is typically associated with social disengagement, yet power has also been shown to facilitate configural visual encoding - a process that supports the initial perception of a human face. To investigate this apparent contradiction, we directly tested whether power influences the visual encoding of faces. Two experiments, using neural and psychophysical assessments, revealed that low power impeded both first-order configural processing (the encoding of a stimulus as a face, assessed by the N170 event-related potential) and second-order configural processing (the encoding of feature distances within configuration, assessed using the face inversion paradigm), relative to high-power and control conditions. Power did not significantly affect facial feature encoding. Results reveal an early and automatic effect of low power on face perception, characterized primarily by diminished face processing. These findings suggest a novel interplay between visual and cognitive processes in power's influence on social behavior.

A computational reward learning account of social media engagement.

Social media has become a modern arena for human life, with billions of daily users worldwide. The intense popularity of social media is often attributed to a psychological need for social rewards (likes), portraying the online world as a Skinner Box for the modern human. Yet despite such portrayals, empirical evidence for social media engagement as reward-based behavior remains scant. Here, we apply a computational approach to directly test whether reward learning mechanisms contribute to social media behavior. We analyze over one million posts from over 4000 individuals on multiple social media platforms, using computational models based on reinforcement learning theory. Our results consistently show that human behavior on social media conforms qualitatively and quantitatively to the principles of reward learning. Specifically, social media users spaced their posts to maximize the average rate of accrued social rewards, in a manner subject to both the effort cost of posting and the opportunity cost of inaction. Results further reveal meaningful individual difference profiles in social reward learning on social media. Finally, an online experiment (n = 176), mimicking key aspects of social media, verifies that social rewards causally influence behavior as posited by our computational account. Together, these findings support a reward learning account of social media engagement and offer new insights into this emergent mode of modern human behavior.