Enhanced Community Through Augmented Reality: Social Benefits of Pokémon Go.

Pokémon Go is an augmented reality game in which players travel through the real world catching fictitious creatures using a smartphone. Based on the game's rewards for social interaction and visiting historical sites, we hypothesized that Pokémon Go would enhance players' sense of belonging to their community. We recruited players to participate in a brief, anonymous survey at Pokémon Go events and via social media. The survey measured personal demographics, game-related demographics, sense of belonging to the community where participants play Pokémon Go, and questions regarding whether participants have met someone, visited a new location, or patronized a new business through playing Pokémon Go. 449 respondents completed the survey. 88% reported meeting someone through playing Pokémon Go, 78% reported visiting a new location, and 35% reported patronizing a new business. Pokémon Go level significantly predicted sense of belonging to the community in which participants play Pokémon Go as well as the odds of meeting someone, visiting a new location, and patronizing a new business. Results suggest that Pokémon Go strengthens players' sense of belonging and engagement with their community.

BDSM in North America, Europe, and Oceania: A Large-Scale International Survey Gauging BDSM Interests and Activities.

BDSM bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism is a widespread and highly prevalent yet stigmatized practice of intimacy and sexuality. In recent years, international interest in BDSM research has grown, mainly resulting in prevalence studies in various countries. To date, however, no research has investigated international and intercontinental differences in the nature of BDSM interests and fantasies, BDSM roles and practicing contexts among BDSM practitioners. In order to explore international discrepancies in BDSM identity, fantasies, and activities among self-identified BDSM practitioners, a group of FetLife (a social network website for BDSM and kink interested individuals) members (N = 1,112) originating from North America (n = 458), Europe (n = 566), Oceania (n = 46), and Other (n = 42) completed the survey. Europeans reported an earlier age of onset of fantasizing about BDSM than did North Americans. More North Americans indicated practicing BDSM in a public context than did Europeans and Oceanians. These differences could in part be explained by different cultural backgrounds, higher levels of religiosity, and current stigmas toward non-traditional sexual interests. Future research should focus on clarifying whether cultural mechanisms underlie these dissimilarities.

Challenge at the Intersection of Race and Kink: Racial Discrimination, Fetishization, and Inclusivity Within the BDSM (Bondage-Discipline, Dominance-Submission, and Sadism-Masochism) Community.

The bondage-discipline, dominance-submission, and sadism-masochism (BDSM) community has achieved diversity with respect to gender identity and sexual orientation yet does so to a lesser extent with respect to race and ethnicity. A total of 398 BDSM practitioners recruited in 2018 and 2019 from BDSM conferences located within the Southern, Midwestern, and Western regions of the U.S., as well as online, completed surveys asking about racial and ethnic discrimination, fetishization, and inclusivity. People of color were 16 times more likely than non-people of color to feel discriminated against at BDSM events and 17 times more likely to feel fetishized. Qualitative results included troubling stories of overt racism and offensive racial slurs, and examples of microaggressions, feelings of isolation, and feelings of being dismissed. The results suggest that organizations can increase inclusivity by understanding the unique costs faced by people of color with an awareness that these costs might be invisible to non-people of color, diversifying positions of authority and leadership, and teaching well-meaning members what types of behaviors could create a hostile environment.

Poison Parasite Counter: Turning Duplicitous Mass Communications Into Self-Negating Memory-Retrieval Cues.

Disinformation in politics, advertising, and mass communications has proliferated in recent years. Few counterargumentation strategies have proven effective at undermining a deceptive message over time. This article introduces the Poison Parasite Counter (PPC), a cognitive-science-based strategy for durably countering deceptive communications. The PPC involves inserting a strong (poisonous) counter-message, just once, into a close replica of a deceptive rival's original communication. In parasitic fashion, the original communication then "hosts" the counter-message, which is recalled on each reexposure to the original communication. The strategy harnesses associative memory to turn the original communication into a retrieval cue for a negating counter-message. Seven experiments (N = 3,679 adults) show that the PPC lastingly undermines a duplicitous rival's original communication, influencing judgments of communicator honesty and favorability as well as real political donations.

Male Sexual Jealousy: Lost Paternity Opportunities?

Numerous studies have shown that men experience relatively greater levels of jealousy in response to the sexual aspects of an infidelity (relative to women), whereas women experience relatively greater levels of jealousy in response to the emotional aspects of an infidelity (relative to men). The traditional explanation for this relationship suggests that men experience this greater level of jealousy due to threats of a loss of paternal certainty. In this article, we present three studies that demonstrate that men's differentially greater jealousy occurs in response to situations that threaten paternity opportunities. These results suggest that a loss of perceived paternity opportunities is the ultimate origin of men's increased jealousy in response to sexual infidelity.

Drawing power of virtual crowds.

In 1969, social psychologist Milgram and his colleagues conducted an experiment on a busy city street where passers-by witnessed a set of actors spontaneously looking up towards a building. The experiment showed that the crowd's propensity to mimic the actor's gaze increased with the number of actors that looked up. This form of behavioural contagion is found in many social organisms and is central to how information travels through large groups. With the advancement of virtual reality and its continued application towards understanding human response to crowd behaviour, it remains to be verified if behavioural contagion occurs in walkable virtual environments, and how it compares with results from real-world experiments. In this study, we adapt Milgram's experiment for virtual environments and use it to reproduce behavioural contagion. Specifically, we construct a replica of an indoor location and combine two established pedestrian motion models to create an interactive crowd of 60 virtual characters that walk through the indoor location. The stimulus group comprised a subset of the characters who look up at a random time as the participants explore the virtual environment. Our results show that the probability of looking up by a participant is dependent on the size of the stimulus group saturating to near certainty when three or more characters look up. The role of stimulus size was also evident when participant actions were compared with survey responses which showed that more participants selected to not look up even though they saw characters redirect their gaze upwards when the size of the stimulus group was small. Participants also spent more time looking up and exhibited frequent head turns with a larger stimulus group. Results from this study provide evidence that behavioural contagion can be triggered in the virtual environment, and can be used to build and test complex hypotheses for understanding human behaviour in a variety of crowd scenarios.

Participating in a Culture of Consent May Be Associated With Lower Rape-Supportive Beliefs.

With the recent national focus on rates of sexual violence, many interventions have been proposed, including those that focus on affirmative consent (e.g., "Yes Means Yes" campaign). The goal of the present study was to test whether individuals within a subculture with long-standing norms of affirmative consent-the bondage and discipline/dominance and submission/sadism and masochism (BDSM) community-report lower rape-supportive attitudes compared to individuals not from within this subculture. BDSM practitioner participants, adult participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), and college student participants completed measures of hostile sexism, benevolent sexism, rape myth acceptance, victim blaming, expectation of sexual aggression, and acceptance of sexual aggression. BDSM practitioners reported significantly lower levels of benevolent sexism, rape myth acceptance, and victim blaming than did college undergraduates and adult MTurk workers. BDSM practitioners did not differ significantly from college undergraduates or adult MTurk workers on measures of hostile sexism, expectations of sexual aggression, or acceptance of sexual aggression. Limitations and implications are discussed.

Extreme rituals in a BDSM context: the physiological and psychological effects of the 'Dance of Souls'.

Participation in extreme rituals (e.g., fire-walking, body-piercing) has been documented throughout history. Motivations for such physically intense activities include religious devotion, sensation-seeking and social bonding. The present study aims to explore an extreme ritual within the context of bondage/discipline, dominance/submission and sadism/masochism (BDSM): the 'Dance of Souls', a 160-person ritual involving temporary piercings with weights or hooks attached and dancing to music provided by drummers. Through hormonal assays, behavioural observations and questionnaires administered before, during and after the Dance, we examine the physiological and psychological effects of the Dance, and the themes of spirituality, connectedness, transformation, release and community reported by dancers. From before to during the Dance, participants showed increases in physiological stress (measured by the hormone cortisol), self-reported sexual arousal, self-other overlap and decreases in psychological stress and negative affect. Results suggest that this group of BDSM practitioners engage in the Dance for a variety of reasons, including experiencing spirituality, deepening interpersonal connections, reducing stress and achieving altered states of consciousness.

Altered States of Consciousness during an Extreme Ritual.

Extreme rituals (body-piercing, fire-walking, etc.) are anecdotally associated with altered states of consciousness-subjective alterations of ordinary mental functioning (Ward, 1984)-but empirical evidence of altered states using both direct and indirect measures during extreme rituals in naturalistic settings is limited. Participants in the "Dance of Souls", a 3.5-hour event during which participants received temporary piercings with hooks or weights attached to the piercings and danced to music provided by drummers, responded to measures of two altered states of consciousness. Participants also completed measures of positive and negative affect, salivary cortisol (a hormone associated with stress), self-reported stress, sexual arousal, and intimacy. Both pierced participants (pierced dancers) and non-pierced participants (piercers, piercing assistants, observers, drummers, and event leaders) showed evidence of altered states aligned with transient hypofrontality (Dietrich, 2003; measured with a Stroop test) and flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; measured with the Flow State Scale). Both pierced and non-pierced participants also reported decreases in negative affect and psychological stress and increases in intimacy from before to after the ritual. Pierced and non-pierced participants showed different physiological reactions, however, with pierced participants showing increases in cortisol and non-pierced participants showing decreases from before to during the ritual. Overall, the ritual appeared to induce different physiological effects but similar psychological effects in focal ritual participants (i.e., pierced dancers) and in participants adopting other roles.

The prevalence and prevention of crosstalk: a multi-institutional study.

It is a common problem in psychology subject pools for past study participants to inform future participants of key experimental details (also known as crosstalk). Previous research (Edlund, Sagarin, Skowronski, Johnson, & Kutter, 2009) demonstrated that a combined classroom and laboratory treatment could significantly reduce crosstalk. The present investigation tested a laboratory-only treatment for the prevention of crosstalk at five universities, along with institutional-level moderators of crosstalk. Results indicated the presence of crosstalk at all universities and that the laboratory-based treatment was effective in reducing crosstalk. Importantly, crosstalk rates were higher (but successfully neutralized) in research pools with higher research credit requirements. Therefore, this research provides valuable guidance regarding crosstalk prevalence and its minimization by researchers.

Treatment noncompliance in randomized experiments: statistical approaches and design issues.

Treatment noncompliance in randomized experiments threatens the validity of causal inference and the interpretability of treatment effects. This article provides a nontechnical review of 7 approaches: 3 traditional and 4 newer statistical analysis strategies. Traditional approaches include (a) intention-to-treat analysis (which estimates the effects of treatment assignment irrespective of treatment received), (b) as-treated analysis (which reassigns participants to groups reflecting the treatment they actually received), and (c) per-protocol analysis (which drops participants who did not comply with their assigned treatment). Newer approaches include (d) the complier average causal effect (which estimates the effect of treatment on the subpopulation of those who would comply with their assigned treatment), (e) dose-response estimation (which uses degree of compliance to stratify participants, producing an estimate of a dose-response relationship), (f) propensity score analysis (which uses covariates to estimate the probability that individual participants will comply, enabling estimates of treatment effects at different propensities), and (g) treatment effect bounding (which calculates a range of possible treatment effects applicable to both compliers and noncompliers). The discussion considers the areas of application, the quantity estimated, the underlying assumptions, and the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.

Effects of subjective sexual arousal on sexual, pathogen, and moral disgust sensitivity in women and men.

The present experiment tested a novel method of manipulating subjective sexual arousal to examine the effects of sexual arousal on disgust sensitivity. Participants were instructed to employ their own preferred methods of achieving sexual or physiological arousal in the privacy of their own home to reach a target state of arousal. Participants then completed the Three-Domain Disgust Scale (Tybur, Lieberman, & Griskevicius, 2009), which measures sensitivity to sexual, pathogen, and moral disgust. The sexual arousal manipulation caused large, homogenous increases in sexual arousal in women and men. In women, sexual arousal (but not physiological arousal) significantly reduced sensitivity to sexual disgust and marginally increased sensitivity to pathogen disgust. In men, sexual arousal did not decrease disgust sensitivity in any domain. Findings support the evolutionary hypothesis that sexual arousal inhibits sexual disgust, which facilitates an organism's willingness to engage in high-risk, but evolutionarily necessary, reproductive behaviors, an effect that could be particularly important for women.

An Ethical Approach to Peeking at Data.

When data analyses produce encouraging but nonsignificant results, researchers often respond by collecting more data. This may transform a disappointing dataset into a publishable study, but it does so at the cost of increasing the Type I error rate. How big of a problem is this, and what can we do about it? To answer the first question, we estimate the Type I error inflation based on the initial sample size, the number of participants used to augment the dataset, the critical value for determining significance (typically .05), and the maximum p value within the initial sample such that the dataset would be augmented. With one round of augmentation, Type I error inflation maximizes at .0975 with typical values from .0564 to .0883. To answer the second question, we review methods of adjusting the critical value to allow augmentation while maintaining p < .05, but we note that such methods must be applied a priori. For the common occurrence of post-hoc dataset augmentation, we develop a new statistic, paugmented , that represents the magnitude of the resulting Type I error inflation. We argue that the disclosure of post-hoc dataset augmentation via paugmented elevates such augmentation from a questionable research practice to an ethical research decision.

A reproductive threat-based model of evolved sex differences in jealousy.

Although heterosexual women and men consistently demonstrate sex differences in jealousy, these differences disappear among lesbians and gay men as well as among heterosexual women and men contemplating same-sex infidelities (infidelities in which the partner and rival are the same sex). Synthesizing these past findings, the present paper offers a reproductive threat-based model of evolved sex differences in jealousy that predicts that the sexes will differ only when the jealous perceivers' reproductive outcomes are differentially at risk. This model is supported by data from a web-based study in which lesbians, gay men, bisexual women and men, and heterosexual women and men responded to a hypothetical infidelity scenario with the sex of the rival randomly determined. After reading the scenario, participants indicated which type of infidelity (sexual versus emotional) would cause greater distress. Consistent with predictions, heterosexual women and men showed a sex difference when contemplating opposite-sex infidelities but not when contemplating same-sex infidelities, whereas lesbians and gay men showed no sex difference regardless of whether the infidelity was opposite-sex or same-sex.

Figural vividness and persuasion: capturing the "elusive" vividness effect.

Despite the widespread belief that the use of vividness in persuasive communications is effective, many laboratory studies have failed to find vividness effects. A possible explanation for this discrepancy is that many laboratory tests have not vivified solely the central thesis of the message but have vivified irrelevant portions of the message as well or instead. Two experiments examined the effect of vivifying the central ("figure") or noncentral ("ground") features of a message on persuasion. In both experiments, the formerly "elusive vividness effect" of superior persuasion was found, but only in vivid-figure communications. A mediation analysis revealed the salutary role of supportive cognitive elaborations, rather than memory for the communication, in mediating the vividness effect. The findings caution against attempts to persuade by increasing overall message vividness because off-thesis vividness has the unintended and undercutting consequence of distracting recipients from the point of the communication.

Psychological antecedents of heterosexuals' pro-gay activism behavior.

Previous research on heterosexuals' attitudes toward gays is characterized by a focus on negative attitudes and minimal use of behavioral dependent variables. In an attempt to rectify this situation, the present study explored the psychological antecedents of heterosexuals' pro-gay activism behavior in an undergraduate sample using the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991). Findings suggest that intentions predict activism behavior (in the form of signing an online petition supporting the construction of a new lesbian, gay, and bisexual resource center on their campus). In addition, attitudes toward the possible outcomes of the behavior, attitudes toward the behavior itself, and self-identity were found to predict intentions. Directions for future research on pro-gay activism are discussed.

Whatever happens in the laboratory stays in the laboratory: the prevalence and prevention of participant crosstalk.

Foreknowledge in research participants can undermine the validity of psychological research. Three studies examined a potentially major source of foreknowledge: participant crosstalk in an undergraduate subject pool. Participants in all three studies attempted to win extra experimental credit by guessing the number of beans in a jar-a nearly impossible task without foreknowledge of the answer. Participants guessing incorrectly were told the correct answer by the experimenter. In Study 1, 23 of 809 participants showed clear evidence of having received the correct answer from a prior participant. In Study 2, a classroom-based treatment asking students not to talk about experiments to other students significantly reduced crosstalk rates. In Study 3, a laboratory-based treatment supplemented the classroom-based treatment. After revealing the number of beans in the jar, the experimenter obtained a verbal commitment from participants that they would not tell anyone about the experiment. The combined treatment nearly eliminated crosstalk.