Main factors influencing the perceived health risk of endocrine-disrupting chemicals: A systematic literature review.

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are linked to rising health issues such as infertility, childhood obesity, and asthma. While some research exists on health risk perceptions of EDCs, a comprehensive understanding across different populations and contexts is needed. We performed a systematic literature review, examining 45 articles published between 1985 and 2023, focusing on both the risk perception of EDCs as a whole as well as individual EDCs found in the environment (e.g., pesticides, bisphenol A, and phthalates). We identified four major categories of factors influencing EDC risk perception: sociodemographic factors (with age, gender, race, and education as significant determinants), family-related factors (highlighting increased concerns in households with children), cognitive factors (indicating that increased EDC knowledge generally led to increased risk perception), and psychosocial factors (with trust in institutions, worldviews, and health-related concerns as primary determinants). This review highlights the complex nature of EDC risk perception, shaped by sociodemographic, family, cognitive, and psychosocial factors, essential for policymakers in crafting educational and communication strategies. Future research should expand to cover more EDCs, use representative samples, and explore the influence of psychosocial factors on risk perception more deeply.

Implicit Statistical Learning in Real-World Environments Leads to Ecologically Rational Decision Making.

Ecological rationality results from matching decision strategies to appropriate environmental structures, but how does the matching happen? We propose that people learn the statistical structure of the environment through observation and use this learned structure to guide ecologically rational behavior. We tested this hypothesis in the context of organic foods. In Study 1, we found that products from healthful food categories are more likely to be organic than products from nonhealthful food categories. In Study 2, we found that consumers' perceptions of the healthfulness and prevalence of organic products in many food categories are accurate. Finally, in Study 3, we found that people perceive organic products as more healthful than nonorganic products when the statistical structure justifies this inference. Our findings suggest that people believe organic foods are more healthful than nonorganic foods and use an organic-food cue to guide their behavior because organic foods are, on average, 30% more healthful.

Morality in minimally deceptive environments.

Psychologists, economists, and philosophers have long argued that in environments where deception is normative, moral behavior is harmed. In this article, we show that individuals making decisions within minimally deceptive environments do not behave more dishonestly than in nondeceptive environments. We demonstrate the latter using an example of experimental deception within established institutions, such as laboratories and institutional review boards. We experimentally manipulated whether participants received information about their deception. Across three well-powered studies, we empirically demonstrate that minimally deceptive environments do not affect downstream dishonest behavior. Only when participants were in a minimally deceptive environment and aware of being observed, their dishonest behavior decreased. Our results show that the relationship between deception and dishonesty might be more complicated than previous interpretations have suggested and expand the understanding of how deception might affect (im)moral behavior. We discuss possible limitations and future directions as well as the applied nature of these findings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Covert attention leads to fast and accurate decision-making.

Decision-makers are regularly faced with more choice information than they can directly gaze at in a limited amount of time. Many theories assume that because decision-makers attend to information sequentially and overtly, that is, with direct gaze, they must respond to information overload by trading off between speed and decision accuracy. By reanalyzing five published studies, we show that participants, besides using overt attention, also use covert attention. That is, without being instructed to do so, participants attend to information without direct gaze to evaluate choice attributes that lead them to either choose the best or reject the worst option. We show that the use of covert attention is common for most participants and more so when information is easily identifiable in the peripheral visual field due to being large or visually salient. Covert attention is associated with faster decision times suggesting that participants might process multiple pieces of information simultaneously using distributed attention. Our findings highlight the importance of covert attention in decision-making and show how decision-makers may be gaining speed while retaining high levels of decision accuracy. We discuss how harnessing covert attention can benefit consumer decision-making of healthy and sustainable products. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The perception of food products in adolescents, lay adults, and experts: A psychometric approach.

Almost 40% of global mortality is attributable to an unhealthy diet, and adolescents and young adults are particularly affected by growing obesity rates. How do (young) people conceptualize and judge the healthiness of foods and how are the judgments embedded in people's mental representations of the food ecology? We asked respondents to rate a large range of common food products on a diverse set of characteristics and then applied the psychometric paradigm to identify the dimensions structuring people's mental representations of the foods. Respondents were also asked to rate each food in terms of its healthiness, and we used the foods' scores on the extracted dimensions to predict the healthiness judgments. We compared three groups of respondents: adolescents, lay adults, and nutrition experts. Naturalness levels (e.g., processing, artificial additives) and cholesterol and protein content emerged as the two central dimensions structuring respondents' mental representations of the foods. Relative to the other two groups, the adolescents' representations were less differentiated. Judged food healthiness was determined by multiple factors, but naturalness was the strongest predictor across all groups. Overall, the adolescents' responses showed considerable heterogeneity, suggesting a lack of solid food knowledge and the need for tailored nutrition education on specific food products and content characteristics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).