Typhoid Pollyanna: The effect of category valence on retrieval order of positive and negative category members

Too Much Information! The Interplay of Argument Quality and Subjective Difficulty in Attitude Judgment

Paradoxically, people sometimes express weaker attitudes after generating more supporting arguments, a phenomenon usually attributed to subjective difficulty of generating them. We propose, however, that generating too many arguments compromises their evidentiary quality, which additionally explains attitude change. In Studies 1 and 2, Mechanical Turk participants generated 12 arguments supporting social issues. The results showed that, as more arguments were generated, the time of generating them increased, but the self-perceived argument quality declined. Although both correlated with attitudes, and each other, only argument quality uniquely predicted attitudes. Study 3 applied these insights to the “ease of retrieval paradigm,” showing that attitude change associated with generating 12 (versus 3) arguments was mediated by argument quality and its relationship with difficulty, although a main effect of argument number was not observed. The results show how reasoning involves an interplay of cognitive and metacognitive dynamics that produce self-generated attitude change in counterintuitive ways.

Invisibility of Black women: Drawing attention to individuality

We examine nonprototypicality as an antecedent to invisibility ( lack of individuation) of Black women. Study 1 varied numerical representation of Black women within the group “women” to be low/equal to White women, and Study 2 varied the trait overlap of Black women to be low/high relative to White women and/or Black men. Invisibility was measured by a face recognition task. Rather than invisibility being reduced under conditions of equal numerical representation and high trait overlap, low numerical representation and low trait overlap increased recognition for Black female faces. In Studies 3–4 participants primed to focus on differences showed better recognition for Black women’s faces than those primed to focus on similarities. We suggest a difference focus reduces reliance on categorical information, increasing individuation and visibility. But nonprototypicality matters: Study 5 perceivers who saw less overlap between “women” and “Black women” on gender stereotypes showed worse recognition of Black women.