On the accuracy, media representation, and public perception of psychological scientists' judgments of societal change.

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, psychological scientists frequently made on-the-record predictions in public media about how individuals and society would change. Such predictions were often made outside these scientists' areas of expertise, with justifications based on intuition, heuristics, and analogical reasoning (Study 1; N = 719 statements). How accurate are these kinds of judgments regarding societal change? In Study 2, we obtained predictions from scientists (N = 717) and lay Americans (N = 394) in Spring 2020 regarding the direction of change for a range of social and psychological phenomena. We compared them to objective data obtained at 6 months and 1 year. To further probe how experience impacts such judgments, 6 months later (Study 3), we obtained retrospective judgments of societal change for the same domains (Nscientists = 270; Nlaypeople = 411). Bayesian analysis suggested greater credibility of the null hypothesis that scientists' judgments were at chance on average for both prospective and retrospective judgments. Moreover, neither domain-general expertise (i.e., judgmental accuracy of scientists compared to laypeople) nor self-identified domain-specific expertise improved accuracy. In a follow-up study on meta-accuracy (Study 4), we show that the public nevertheless expects psychological scientists to make more accurate predictions about individual and societal change compared to most other scientific disciplines, politicians, and nonscientists, and they prefer to follow their recommendations. These findings raise questions about the role psychological scientists could and should play in helping the public and policymakers plan for future events. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Individual differences in relational body image: Within-person variability predicts maladaptive trait body image.

Findings have been mixed as to whether individual differences in within-person variability in body image predict maladaptive body image and eating behaviors. The current study aimed to resolve this ambiguity by addressing limitations of past research. First, we measured within-person variability in body image across the context-sensitive domain of relationships. Second, we incorporated the latest statistical methods to increase the robustness of the results. Online, 189 female-identified undergraduates completed seven baseline measures of trait body image. At least three days later, in-lab, participants were guided to generate a list of the most important people in their lives (i.e., friends, family members, close others) using egocentric network methods. Participants then completed a set of three relationship-specific measures in which they reported on their typical body image with 10 people from their list, one by one. Multiverse analysis tested the hypothesis that, across combinations of measures, within-person variability in relational body image would positively predict indicators of maladaptive body image. In 84 regression analyses, permutation testing supported our overall hypothesis (p = .006); however, results varied across different model specifications. Results provide further evidence for the predictive power of within-person variability in body image and yield valuable methodological and statistical recommendations.

Beauty and truth, truth and beauty: Chiastic structure increases the subjective accuracy of statements.

The Keats heuristic suggests that people find esthetically pleasing expressions more accurate than mundane expressions. We test this notion with chiastic statements. Chiasmus is a stylistic phenomenon in which at least two linguistic constituents are repeated in reverse order, conventionally represented by the formula A-B-B-A. Our study focuses on the specific form of chiasmus known as antimetabole, in which the reverse-repeated constituents are words (e.g., All for one and one for all; A = all, B = one). In three out of four experiments (N = 797), we find evidence that people judge antimetabolic statements (e.g., Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.) as more accurate than semantically equivalent nonantimetabolic statements (e.g., Success is getting what you wish. Happiness is wanting what you receive.). Furthermore, we evaluate fluency as a potential mechanism explaining the observed accuracy benefit afforded to antimetabolic statements, finding that the increased speed (i.e., fluency) with which antimetabolic statements were processed predicted judgments of accuracy. Overall, the present work is consistent with the growing literature on stylistic factors biasing assessments of truth, using the distinctive stylistic pattern of antimetabole. We find that information communicated using an antimetabolic structure is judged to be more accurate than nonantimetabolic paraphrases. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).