The Improvement Default: People Presume Improvement When Lacking Information.

People erroneously think that things they know little about improve over time. We propose that, due to salient cultural narratives, improvement is a highly accessible expectation that leads people to presume improvement in the absence of diagnostic information. Five studies investigated an improvement default: a general tendency to presume improvement even in self-irrelevant domains. Participants erroneously presumed improvement over esoteric historical time periods associated with decline (Study 1). Participants arranged a stranger's experiences to produce trends of improvement (Study 2). Participants presumed improvement for a fictional city when given no diagnostic information about it (Study 3). Finally, participants who perceived more past improvement were less supportive of policies that may precipitate further improvement (Study 4). Implications for consequences, such as complacency toward improving inequality, are discussed.

Evaluating CloudResearch's Approved Group as a solution for problematic data quality on MTurk.

Maintaining data quality on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) has always been a concern for researchers. These concerns have grown recently due to the bot crisis of 2018 and observations that past safeguards of data quality (e.g., approval ratings of 95%) no longer work. To address data quality concerns, CloudResearch, a third-party website that interfaces with MTurk, has assessed ~165,000 MTurkers and categorized them into those that provide high- (~100,000, Approved) and low- (~65,000, Blocked) quality data. Here, we examined the predictive validity of CloudResearch's vetting. In a pre-registered study, participants (N = 900) from the Approved and Blocked groups, along with a Standard MTurk sample (95% HIT acceptance ratio, 100+ completed HITs), completed an array of data-quality measures. Across several indices, Approved participants (i) identified the content of images more accurately, (ii) answered more reading comprehension questions correctly, (iii) responded to reversed coded items more consistently, (iv) passed a greater number of attention checks, (v) self-reported less cheating and actually left the survey window less often on easily Googleable questions, (vi) replicated classic psychology experimental effects more reliably, and (vii) answered AI-stumping questions more accurately than Blocked participants, who performed at chance on multiple outcomes. Data quality of the Standard sample was generally in between the Approved and Blocked groups. We discuss how MTurk's Approval Rating system is no longer an effective data-quality control, and we discuss the advantages afforded by using the Approved group for scientific studies on MTurk.

Implicit Bias Reflects the Company That Words Keep.

In everyday language, concepts appear alongside (i.e., collocate with) related concepts. Societal biases often emerge in these collocations; e.g., female (vs. male) names collocate with art- (vs. science-) related concepts, and African American (vs. White American) names collocate with negative (vs. positive) concepts. It is unknown whether such collocations merely reflect societal biases or contribute to them. Concepts that are themselves neutral in valence but nevertheless collocate with valenced concepts provide a unique opportunity to address this question. For example, when asked, most people evaluate the concept "cause" as neutral, but "cause" is frequently followed by negative concepts (e.g., death, pain, and trouble). We use such semantically prosodic concepts to test the influence of collocation on the emergence of implicit bias: do neutral concepts that frequently collocate with valenced concepts have corresponding implicit bias? In evaluative priming tasks, participants evaluated positive/negative nouns (Study 1) or pictures (Study 2) after seeing verb primes that were (a) strongly valenced (e.g., hate and comfort), (b) neutral in valence but collocated with valenced concepts in corpora (e.g., ease and gain), or (c) neutral in valence and not collocated with valenced concepts in corpora (e.g., reply and describe). Throughout, neutral primes with positive (negative) collocates facilitated the evaluation of positive (negative) targets much like strongly valenced primes, whereas neutral primes without valenced collocates did not. That neutral concepts with valenced collocates parallel the influence of valenced concepts suggests that their collocations in natural language may be sufficient for fostering implicit bias. Societal implications of the causal embedding hypothesis are discussed.

Mother Nature's Fury: Antagonist Metaphors for Natural Disasters Increase Forecasts of Their Severity and Encourage Evacuation.

Natural disasters are often described as having antagonistic qualities (e.g., wildfires ravage). The information deficit model presumes that when people assess the risk of weather hazards, they ignore irrelevant metaphoric descriptors. However, metaphoric frames affect reasoning. The current research assessed whether antagonist metaphors for natural disasters affect perceptions of the risk they pose. Three studies (N = 1,936) demonstrated that participants forecasted an antagonist-framed natural hazard as being more severe, and intended to evacuate more often, than a literal-framed natural hazard. Thus, the metaphorical language used to discuss natural disasters deserves consideration in the development of effective risk communication.

The War on Prevention II: Battle Metaphors Undermine Cancer Treatment and Prevention and Do Not Increase Vigilance.

Bellicose metaphors for cancer are ubiquitous. But are they good metaphors for health communicators to use? Because metaphors can guide reasoning about abstract concepts, framing cancer with metaphors of battle, war, and enemies leads people to apply attributes of these concepts to cancer. The current research investigates how this affects inferences about cancer treatment, prevention, and monitoring. Battles and war are usually seen as being difficult. Indeed, reading about a person's "battle" or "fight" against cancer makes cancer treatment seem more difficult (studies 1-4). One way to approach a battle is to surrender and give up control. Consistent with this implication, battle metaphors increase fatalistic beliefs about cancer prevention (e.g. believing that there is little one can do to prevent getting cancer; study 3). Finally, even though battles invoke vigilance and action, Study 4 failed to find that such metaphors motivate people to immediately see their doctor when imagining a cancer scare. These findings suggest that bellicose metaphors for cancer can influence the health beliefs of nonpatients in ways that may make them less willing to enact healthy behaviors.

Social Exclusion Shifts Personal Network Scope.

Social exclusion has the potential to alter subsequent social interactions with the members of personal networks, especially given their online availability in contemporary life. Nonetheless, there is minimal research examining how social challenges such as exclusion alter ensuing interactions with personal ties. Here, we tested whether being excluded during a social interaction changed which relationships are most salient in an ostensibly unrelated, online news sharing task. Across three operationalizations of tie strength, exclusion (vs. inclusion) increased sharing to close friends, but (unexpectedly) decreased sharing to close family members. The findings provide preliminary evidence that negative encounters may shift attention toward certain types of network ties and away from others. Future work is needed to examine how social experiences influence personal network scope - i.e., who comes to mind - in the background of daily life.

Are Manipulation Checks Necessary?

Researchers are concerned about whether manipulations have the intended effects. Many journals and reviewers view manipulation checks favorably, and they are widely reported in prestigious journals. However, the prototypical manipulation check is a verbal (rather than behavioral) measure that always appears at the same point in the procedure (rather than its order being varied to assess order effects). Embedding such manipulation checks within an experiment comes with problems. While we conceptualize manipulation checks as measures, they can also act as interventions which initiate new processes that would otherwise not occur. The default assumption that manipulation checks do not affect experimental conclusions is unwarranted. They may amplify, undo, or interact with the effects of a manipulation. Further, the use of manipulation checks in mediational analyses does not rule out confounding variables, as any unmeasured variables that correlate with the manipulation check may still drive the relationship. Alternatives such as non-verbal and behavioral measures as manipulation checks and pilot testing are less problematic. Reviewers should view manipulation checks more critically, and authors should explore alternative methods to ensure the effectiveness of manipulations.

Semantic prosody and judgment.

Some words tend to co-occur exclusively with a positive or negative context in natural language use, even though such valence patterns are not dictated by definitions or are part of the words' core meaning. These words contain semantic prosody, a subtle valenced meaning derived from co-occurrence in language. As language and thought are heavily intertwined, we hypothesized that semantic prosody can affect evaluative inferences about related ambiguous concepts. Participants inferred that an ambiguous medical outcome was more negative when it was caused, a verb with negative semantic prosody, than when it was produced, a synonymous verb with no semantic prosody (Studies 1a, 1b). Participants completed sentence fragments in a manner consistent with semantic prosody (Study 2), and semantic prosody affected various other judgments in line with evaluative inferences (estimates of an event's likelihood in Study 3). Finally, semantic prosody elicited both positive and negative evaluations of outcomes across a large set of semantically prosodic verbs (Study 4). Thus, semantic prosody can exert a strong influence on evaluative judgment. (PsycINFO Database Record

Attentive Turkers: MTurk participants perform better on online attention checks than do subject pool participants.

Participant attentiveness is a concern for many researchers using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Although studies comparing the attentiveness of participants on MTurk versus traditional subject pool samples have provided mixed support for this concern, attention check questions and other methods of ensuring participant attention have become prolific in MTurk studies. Because MTurk is a population that learns, we hypothesized that MTurkers would be more attentive to instructions than are traditional subject pool samples. In three online studies, participants from MTurk and collegiate populations participated in a task that included a measure of attentiveness to instructions (an instructional manipulation check: IMC). In all studies, MTurkers were more attentive to the instructions than were college students, even on novel IMCs (Studies 2 and 3), and MTurkers showed larger effects in response to a minute text manipulation. These results have implications for the sustainable use of MTurk samples for social science research and for the conclusions drawn from research with MTurk and college subject pool samples.

The war on prevention: bellicose cancer metaphors hurt (some) prevention intentions.

Cancer health information is dominated by enemy and war metaphors intended to motivate the public to "fight" cancer. However, enemy metaphoric framing may influence understanding of, and responses to, cancer. Cancer prevention benefits from avoiding risk increasing behaviors, yet self-limitation is not closely associated with fighting enemies. If so, the metaphor may hurt prevention intentions involving self-limitation. Participants read messages with minute wording variations that established different metaphoric frames. Results show that metaphorically framing cancer as an enemy lessens the conceptual accessibility of (Study 1) and intention for self-limiting prevention behaviors while not increasing intention for monitoring and treatment behaviors (Studies 2 and 3). Framing self-limiting prevention behaviors in terms of fighting an enemy increases their appeal, illustrating the benefits of metaphor matching (Study 3). Overall, these results suggest that enemy metaphors in cancer information reduce some prevention intentions without increasing others, making their use potentially harmful for public health.

Altruism in the wild: when affiliative motives to help positive people overtake empathic motives to help the distressed.

Psychological theories of human altruism suggest that helping results from an evolved tendency in caregiving mammals to respond to distress or need with empathy and sympathy. However, theories from biology, economics, and social psychology demonstrate that social animals also evolved to affiliate with and help desirable social partners. These models make different predictions about the affect of those we should prefer to help. Empathic models predict a preference to help sad, distressed targets in need, while social affiliative models predict a preference for happy, positive, successful targets. We compared these predictions in 3 field studies that measured the tendency to help sad, happy, and neutral confederates in a real-world, daily context: holding the door for a stranger in public. People consistently held the door more for happy over sad or neutral targets. To allow empathic motivations to compete more strongly against social affiliative ones, a 4th study examined a more consequential form of aid for hypothetical hospital patients in clear need. These conditions enhanced the preference to help a sad over a happy patient, because sadness made the patient appear sicker and in greater need. However, people still preferred the happy patient when the aid required a direct social interaction, attesting to the strength of social affiliation motives, even for sick patients. Theories of prosocial behavior should place greater emphasis on the role of social affiliation in motivating aid, particularly in everyday interpersonal contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).

What's "up" with God? Vertical space as a representation of the divine.

"God" and "Devil" are abstract concepts often linked to vertical metaphors (e.g., "glory to God in the highest," "the Devil lives down in hell"). It is unknown, however, whether these metaphors simply aid communication or implicate a deeper mode of concept representation. In 6 experiments, the authors examined the extent to which the vertical dimension is used in noncommunication contexts involving God and the Devil. Experiment 1 established that people have implicit associations between God-Devil and up-down. Experiment 2 revealed that people encode God-related concepts faster if presented in a high (vs. low) vertical position. Experiment 3 found that people's memory for the vertical location of God- and Devil-like images showed a metaphor-consistent bias (up for God; down for Devil). Experiments 4, 5a, and 5b revealed that people rated strangers as more likely to believe in God when their images appeared in a high versus low vertical position, and this effect was independent of inferences related to power and likability. These robust results reveal that vertical perceptions are invoked when people access divinity-related cognitions.