Beware 'persuasive communication devices' when writing and reading scientific articles.

Authors rely on a range of devices and techniques to attract and maintain the interest of readers, and to convince them of the merits of the author's point of view. However, when writing a scientific article, authors must use these 'persuasive communication devices' carefully. In particular, they must be explicit about the limitations of their work, avoid obfuscation, and resist the temptation to oversell their results. Here we discuss a list of persuasive communication devices and we encourage authors, as well as reviewers and editors, to think carefully about their use.

Effects on the Affect Misattribution Procedure are strongly moderated by influence awareness.

The Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) is used in many areas of psychological science based on the assumption that it not only taps into attitudes and biases but does so without a person's awareness. Across eight preregistered studies (N = 1603) plus meta-analyses, we reexamined the 'implicitness' of AMP effects, and in particular, the idea that people are unaware of the prime's influence on their evaluations. Results indicated that AMP effects and their predictive validity are primarily moderated by a subset of influence-aware trials (within individuals), and high rates of influence awareness (between individuals). Interestingly, an individual's influence-awareness rate on one AMP predicted how they performed on an earlier AMP, even when the two assessed different attitude domains. Taken together, our results suggest that AMP effects are not implicit in the way that has been claimed, a finding that has implications for the procedure, past findings, and theory. All materials and data are available at osf.io/gv7cm.

Best research practices for using the Implicit Association Test.

Interest in unintended discrimination that can result from implicit attitudes and stereotypes (implicit biases) has stimulated many research investigations. Much of this research has used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure association strengths that are presumed to underlie implicit biases. It had been more than a decade since the last published treatment of recommended best practices for research using IAT measures. After an initial draft by the first author, and continuing through three subsequent drafts, the 22 authors and 14 commenters contributed extensively to refining the selection and description of recommendation-worthy research practices. Individual judgments of agreement or disagreement were provided by 29 of the 36 authors and commenters. Of the 21 recommended practices for conducting research with IAT measures presented in this article, all but two were endorsed by 90% or more of those who felt knowledgeable enough to express agreement or disagreement; only 4% of the totality of judgments expressed disagreement. For two practices that were retained despite more than two judgments of disagreement (four for one, five for the other), the bases for those disagreements are described in presenting the recommendations. The article additionally provides recommendations for how to report procedures of IAT measures in empirical articles.

Exposure to and experience of self-harm and self-harm related content: An exploratory network analysis.

Exposure to the self-harm behaviour of others plays a role in individuals' own self-harm thoughts and behaviours, but there has been little consideration of the broader range of mediums through which exposure to self-harm related content may occur. N = 477 participants completed an online study, including questions regarding lifetime history of self-harm thoughts and behaviours and the frequency with which they had been exposed to self-harm via various mediums. Gaussian Markov random field network models were estimated using graphical LASSO and extended Bayesian information criterion. Bootstrapping revealed that exposure mediums with a direct connection to self-harm thoughts and behaviours were the internet (rrp = .34, 95% CI [.26, .42]) and in-passing 'miscellaneous' exposure (rrp = .14, 95% CI [.00, .23]). However, stability of the network centrality was low (expected influence stability = 0.52). The node with the greatest increase in expected influence within the network was miscellaneous "in-passing" exposure. In-passing exposure is an understudied exposure medium. Our results may suggest new types of exposure mediums for future research. Data were cross-sectional, so temporal relationships between exposure and behaviour could not be determined. Low stability of the networks suggests that future similar studies would benefit from larger sample sizes.

Incidental Attitude Formation via the Surveillance Task: A Preregistered Replication of the Olson and Fazio (2001) Study.

Evaluative conditioning is one of the most widely studied procedures for establishing and changing attitudes. The surveillance task is a highly cited evaluative-conditioning paradigm and one that is claimed to generate attitudes without awareness. The potential for evaluative-conditioning effects to occur without awareness continues to fuel conceptual, theoretical, and applied developments. Yet few published studies have used this task, and most are characterized by small samples and small effect sizes. We conducted a high-powered (N = 1,478 adult participants), preregistered close replication of the original surveillance-task study (Olson & Fazio, 2001). We obtained evidence for a small evaluative-conditioning effect when "aware" participants were excluded using the original criterion-therefore replicating the original effect. However, no such effect emerged when three other awareness criteria were used. We suggest that there is a need for caution when using evidence from the surveillance-task effect to make theoretical and practical claims about "unaware" evaluative-conditioning effects.

The influence of extinction and counterconditioning procedures on operant evaluative conditioning and intersecting regularity effects.

One of the most effective methods of influencing what people like and dislike is to expose them to systematic patterns (or 'regularities') in the environment, such as the repeated presentation of a single stimulus (mere exposure), two or more stimuli (evaluative conditioning (EC)) or to relationships between stimuli and behaviour (approach/avoidance). Hughes et al. (2016) J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 145, 731-754. (doi:10.1037/xge0000100) found that evaluations also emerge when regularities in the environment intersect with one another. In this paper, we examined if evaluations established via operant EC and intersecting regularities can be undermined via extinction or revised via counterconditioning. Across seven pre-registered studies (n = 1071), participants first completed a learning phase designed to establish novel evaluations followed by one of multiple forms of extinction or counterconditioning procedures designed to undo them. Results indicate that evaluations were-in general-resistant to extinction and counterconditioning. Theoretical and practical implications along with future directions are discussed.

Cultural pressure and biased responding in free will attitudes.

Whether you believe free will exists has profound effects on your behaviour, across different levels of processing, from simple motor action to social cognition. It is therefore important to understand which specific lay theories are held in the general public and why. Past research largely focused on investigating free will beliefs (FWB, 'Do you think free will exists?'), but largely ignored a second key aspect: free will attitudes (FWA, 'Do you like/value will?'). Attitudes are often independently predictive of behaviour, relative to beliefs, yet we currently know very little about FWAs in the general public. One key issue is whether such attitudes are subject to biased, socially desirable responding. The vast majority of the general public strongly believes in the existence of free will, which might create cultural pressure to value free will positively as well. In this registered report, we used a very large (N = 1100), open available dataset measuring implicit and explicit attitudes towards free will and determinism to address this issue. Our results indicate that both explicit and implicit attitudes towards free will are more positive than attitudes towards determinism. We also show that people experience cultural pressure to value free will, and to devalue determinism. Yet, we found no strong evidence that this cultural pressure affected either implicit or explicit attitudes in this dataset.

The shared features principle: If two objects share a feature, people assume those objects also share other features.

In this article we introduce the shared features principle, which refers to the idea that when 2 stimuli share 1 feature, people often assume that they share other features as well. This principle can be recognized in several known psychological phenomena, most of which were until now never considered to be related in this way. To illustrate the generative power of the principle, we report 8 preregistered studies (n = 1,614) in which participants completed an acquisition phase containing 3 stimuli: a neutral target, a positive source, and a negative source. Our results indicate that behavioral intentions, automatic evaluations, and self-reported ratings of a target object were influenced by the source object with which the target shared a feature. This was even the case when participants were told that there was no relation between source and target objects. Taken together, the shared features principle appears to be general, reliable, and replicable across a range of measures in the attitude domain. We close with a discussion of its theoretical implications, relevance to many areas of psychological science, as well as its heuristic and predictive value. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Implicit Association Test as an Analogical Learning Task.

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is a popular tool for measuring attitudes. We suggest that performing an IAT could, however, also change attitudes via analogical learning. For instance, when performing an IAT in which participants categorize (previously unknown) Chinese characters, flowers, positive words, and negative words, participants could infer that Chinese characters relate to flowers as negative words relate to positive words. This analogy would imply that Chinese characters are opposite to flowers in terms of valence and thus that they are negative. Results from three studies (N = 602) confirmed that evaluative learning can occur when completing an IAT, and suggest that this effect can be described as analogical. We discuss the implications of our findings for research on analogy and research on the IAT as a measure of attitudes.

The functional-cognitive meta-theoretical framework: Reflections, possible clarifications and how to move forward.

The functional-cognitive meta-theoretical framework has been offered as a conceptual basis for facilitating greater communication and cooperation between the functional/behavioural and cognitive traditions within psychology, thus leading to benefits for both scientific communities. The current article is written from the perspective of two functional researchers, who are also proponents of the functional-cognitive framework, and attended the "Building Bridges between the Functional and Cognitive Traditions" meeting at Ghent University in the summer of 2014. The article commences with a brief summary of the functional approach to theory, followed by our reflections upon the functional-cognitive framework in light of that meeting. In doing so, we offer three ways in which the framework could be clarified: (a) effective communication between the two traditions is likely to be found at the level of behavioural observations rather than effects or theory, (b) not all behavioural observations will be deemed to be of mutual interest to both traditions, and (c) observations of mutual interest will be those that serve to elaborate and extend existing theorising in the functional and/or cognitive traditions. The article concludes with a summary of what we perceive to be the strengths and weaknesses of the framework, and a suggestion that there is a need to determine if the framework is meta-theoretical or is in fact a third theoretical approach to doing psychological science.