Are actions better than inactions? Positivity, outcome, and intentionality biases in judgments of action and inaction

How Social Media Algorithms Shape Offline Civic Participation: A Framework of Social-Psychological Processes

Even though social media platforms have created opportunities for more efficient and convenient civic participation, they are unlikely to bring about social change if the online actions do not propagate to offline civic participation. This article begins by reviewing the meta-analytic evidence on the relation between social media use and offline civic participation. Following this discussion, we present a theoretical framework that incorporates the attitudinal, motivational, and relational processes that may mediate the effect of social media use on offline civic participation. The framework highlights how social media algorithms may shape attitudes on important societal issues, promote generalized action goals among habitual users, and build social capital. We further discuss factors that may strengthen or undermine each of these processes, suggest ways to design and implement algorithms that may promote offline civic participation, and propose questions for future research.

How does Go/No-Go training lead to food devaluation? Separating the effects of motor inhibition and response valence

Palatable, unhealthy food stimuli can be devalued via Go/No-Go (GNG) training that consistently pairs such stimuli with motor inhibition. However, it remains unclear whether this devaluation is caused via learned associations with motor inhibition or via inferential learning based on the valence of emitted motor responses. The present research disentangles the effects of motor assignment and response valence in GNG training through task instructions. In two studies, chocolate stimuli were consistently paired with motor inhibition ("no-go") or with motor excitation ("go"). Task instructions indicated that no-go responses were negatively valenced ("do not take") and that go responses were positively valenced ("take"), or identified no-go responses as positively valenced ("keep") and go as negatively valenced ("throw away"). The results show an effect of response valence on chocolate evaluations, but no effect of motor assignment: Chocolate stimuli were consistently devalued following pairings with a negatively valenced response, regardless of whether this response entailed motor inhibition or excitation. These findings align best with an inferential account of GNG training, suggesting that devaluation effects critically depend on inferential processes regarding motor response valence. GNG training procedures may, therefore, be optimised by disambiguating the valence of go and no-go motor responses prior to training.

It's time to do more research on the attitude-behavior relation: A commentary on implicit attitude measures

The recent exchange about implicit attitudes is an acute reminder of the need to pay research attention to the correlation between implicit attitudes and overt behavior. Current implicit measures are excellent to detect evaluatively relevant associations arising from specific and variable internal states and predict judgments when people lack the motivation and ability to control those judgments. However, there is no convincing evidence of a strong correlation between such implicit attitudes and overt behavior when people's ability and motivation to control the influence of these attitudes is low. Researchers should improve implicit measures by better integrating action, target, level, and context into the measurement procedures and then reexamine if these improved measures predict socially undesirable behaviors when ability and motivation to control behavior are low. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Theory and Methods Neuroscience > Behavior Neuroscience > Cognition.