Generalizability is not optional: insights from a cross-cultural study of social discounting

To produce or not to produce? Contrasting the effect of substance abuse in social decision-making situations

Substance use disorders (SUD) have been related to high criminal justice costs, expensive healthcare, social impairment, and decision-making deficits. In non-social decision-making tasks, people with SUD tend to take more risks and choose small immediate rewards than controls. However, few studies have explored how people with SUD behave in social decision-making situations where the resources and profits depend directly on participants' real-time interaction, i.e., social foraging situations. To fulfill this gap, we developed a real-time interaction task to (a) compare the proportion of producers (individuals who tend to search for food sources) and scroungers (individuals who tend to steal or join previously discovered food sources) among participants with SUD and controls with respect to the optimal behavior predicted by the Rate Maximization Model, and (b) explore the relationship between social foraging strategies, prosocial behavior, and impulsivity. Here participants with SUD (n = 20) and a non-user control group (n = 20) were exposed to the Guaymas Foraging task (GFT), the Social Discounting task (SD), and the Delay Discounting task (DD). We found that participants in the control group tended to produce more and obtain higher profits in contrast to substance abuser groups. Additionally, SD and DD rates were higher for scroungers than producers regardless of the group. Our results suggest that producers tend to be more altruistic and less impulsive than scroungers. Knowing more about social strategies and producers' characteristics could help develop substance abuse prevention programs.

Monitoring and control processes in mock witnesses in under-represented non-WEIRD samples with high or low educational level

A popular model proposes that metamemory is based on two processes, monitoring and control. The first examines memories and evaluates their quality and the second uses that information to decide on the most appropriate course of action. Monitoring and control processes have been studied mostly with university students, which raises the question of how well do they work in groups of people from under-represented samples such as people with a low educational level. In this research, we tested the monitoring and control processes of three groups of participants from a non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) country (Colombia). Two groups of adults (aged 30-55 years) living in urban or rural areas and with a low educational level and a group of Colombian university students watched a bank robbery video and answered cued recall questions. To measure monitoring ability, participants rated their confidence that they had produced the correct answer, and to measure control they indicated whether they preferred to report or withhold the response were they in a trial. Results showed that the three groups had a functional ability to monitor their memories and control their behaviour, and that university students had better memory and metamemory than the two low education groups. The results support the concept that the basic metamemory processes of monitoring and control are functional in different groups of individuals, but the differences between groups highlight the need to test the generalizability of cognitive processes and phenomena across individuals.

Cross-cultural study of kinship premium and social discounting of generosity

Social discounting predicts that one's concern for others decreases with increasing social distance. Cultural dimensions may influence this social behavior. Here, we used a dictator game, in which the participants and real members of their social entourage profited from the partition of the endowments determined by the participant, to compare how Chinese and French university students shared endowments with people at different social distances. We tested two hypotheses based on the concepts of kinship premium and cultural collectivism. Stronger ties between close family members were expected among Chinese. This may predict a larger "kinship premium," i.e., increased generosity to family members at close social distances, in Chinese relative to French participants. Similarly, because collectivism is thought to be stronger in Asian than western societies, greater generosity at larger social distances might also be expected among Chinese participants. The results showed that Chinese were more generous than French at close social distances but discounted more as social distance increased. This difference between French and Chinese was confined to family members and no significant difference in generosity was observed between French and Chinese for non-family members at any social distance. Our findings evidence a stronger kinship premium among Chinese than French students, and no significant effect of cultural collectivism.

Social value at a distance: Higher identification with all of humanity is associated with reduced social discounting

How much we value the welfare of others has critical implications for the collective good. Yet, it is unclear what leads people to make more or less equal decisions about the welfare of those from whom they are socially distant. The current research sought to explore the psychological mechanisms that might underlie welfare judgements across social distance. Here, a social discounting paradigm was used to measure the tendency for the value of a reward to be discounted as the social distance of its recipient increased. Across two cohorts (one discovery, one replication), we found that a more expansive identity with all of humanity was associated with reduced social discounting. Additionally, we investigated the specificity of this association by examining whether this relationship extended to delay discounting, the tendency for the value of a reward to be discounted as the temporal distance to its receipt increases. Our findings suggest that the observed association with identity was unique to social discounting, thus underscoring a distinction in value-based decision-making processes across distances in time and across social networks. As data were collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, we also considered how stress associated with this global threat might influence welfare judgements across social distances. We found that, even after controlling for COVID-19 related stress, correlations between identity and social discounting held. Together, these findings elucidate the psychological processes that are associated with a more equal distribution of generosity.

Construct validity of international literacy measures: implications for dyslexia across cultures

Construct validity is essential to evaluate the generalizability of findings on literacy and dyslexia. Operational definitions of reading literacy determine the measurement method, yielding territory or country-wide literacy rates. This practice echoes the norm in diagnosis and prevalence estimates of dyslexia. International Large-Scale Assessments (ILSA) of literacy such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) compare countries' performances in relation to how well their students are reading. In this paper, we reexamine the validity claims and evidence using the examples of countries in Southeast Asia-Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, purported to have high proportions of poor readers. The challenge of characterizing reading performance and designing suitable measures for valid international comparisons is similar across phases of reading development and proficiency. The importance of the specificity of scripts and languages for reading abilities and impairments is highlighted. We suggest ways in which researchers can approach the assessment of reading proficiency from a cross-cultural and an interdisciplinary perspective. These can foster contextual caveats for generating and interpreting evidence.

The Benefits, Barriers, and Risks of Big-Team Science

Progress in psychology has been frustrated by challenges concerning replicability, generalizability, strategy selection, inferential reproducibility, and computational reproducibility. Although often discussed separately, these five challenges may share a common cause: insufficient investment of intellectual and nonintellectual resources into the typical psychology study. We suggest that the emerging emphasis on big-team science can help address these challenges by allowing researchers to pool their resources together to increase the amount available for a single study. However, the current incentives, infrastructure, and institutions in academic science have all developed under the assumption that science is conducted by solo principal investigators and their dependent trainees, an assumption that creates barriers to sustainable big-team science. We also anticipate that big-team science carries unique risks, such as the potential for big-team-science organizations to be co-opted by unaccountable leaders, become overly conservative, and make mistakes at a grand scale. Big-team-science organizations must also acquire personnel who are properly compensated and have clear roles. Not doing so raises risks related to mismanagement and a lack of financial sustainability. If researchers can manage its unique barriers and risks, big-team science has the potential to spur great progress in psychology and beyond.

Generalization Bias in Science

Many scientists routinely generalize from study samples to larger populations. It is commonly assumed that this cognitive process of scientific induction is a voluntary inference in which researchers assess the generalizability of their data and then draw conclusions accordingly. We challenge this view and argue for a novel account. The account describes scientific induction as involving by default a generalization bias that operates automatically and frequently leads researchers to unintentionally generalize their findings without sufficient evidence. The result is unwarranted, overgeneralized conclusions. We support this account of scientific induction by integrating a range of disparate findings from across the cognitive sciences that have until now not been connected to research on the nature of scientific induction. The view that scientific induction involves by default a generalization bias calls for a revision of the current thinking about scientific induction and highlights an overlooked cause of the replication crisis in the sciences. Commonly proposed interventions to tackle scientific overgeneralizations that may feed into this crisis need to be supplemented with cognitive debiasing strategies against generalization bias to most effectively improve science.

A Causal Framework for Cross-Cultural Generalizability

Behavioral researchers increasingly recognize the need for more diverse samples that capture the breadth of human experience. Current attempts to establish generalizability across populations focus on threats to validity, constraints on generalization, and the accumulation of large, cross-cultural data sets. But for continued progress, we also require a framework that lets us determine which inferences can be drawn and how to make informative cross-cultural comparisons. We describe a generative causal-modeling framework and outline simple graphical criteria to derive analytic strategies and implied generalizations. Using both simulated and real data, we demonstrate how to project and compare estimates across populations and further show how to formally represent measurement equivalence or inequivalence across societies. We conclude with a discussion of how a formal framework for generalizability can assist researchers in designing more informative cross-cultural studies and thus provides a more solid foundation for cumulative and generalizable behavioral research.

Hadza hunter-gatherers with greater exposure to other cultures share more with generous campmates

Humans are motivated to compete for access to valuable social partners, which is a function of their willingness to share and ability to generate resources. However, relative preferences for each trait should be responsive to socioecological conditions. Here, we test the flexibility of partner choice psychology among Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. Ninety-two Hadza ranked their campmates on generosity and foraging ability and then shared resources with those campmates. We found Hadza with greater exposure to other cultures shared more with campmates ranked higher on generosity, whereas Hadza with lower exposure showed a smaller preference for sharing with generous campmates. This moderating effect was specific to generosity-regardless of exposure, Hadza showed only a small preference for sharing with better foragers. We argue this difference in preferences is due to high exposure Hadza having more experience cooperating with others in the absence of strong norms of sharing, and thus are exposed to greater variance in willingness to cooperate among potential partners increasing the benefits of choosing partners based on generosity. As such, participants place a greater emphasis on choosing more generous partners, highlighting the flexibility of partner preferences.

Credibility Beyond Replicability: Improving the Four Validities in Psychological Science

Psychological science’s “credibility revolution” has produced an explosion of metascientific work on improving research practices. Although much attention has been paid to replicability (reducing false positives), improving credibility depends on addressing a wide range of problems afflicting psychological science, beyond simply making psychology research more replicable. Here we focus on the “four validities” and highlight recent developments—many of which have been led by early-career researchers—aimed at improving these four validities in psychology research. We propose that the credibility revolution in psychology, which has its roots in replicability, can be harnessed to improve psychology’s validity more broadly.

Associations of LGBTQ+ Identities With Acceptability and Efficacy of Online Single-Session Youth Mental Health Interventions

Barriers such as stigma, financial costs, and provider shortages prevent large portions of youth with depression and related difficulties from accessing treatment; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning sexual orientation, or other non-heterosexual identity (LGBTQ+) youth are burdened with additional barriers related to minority stress. Single-session interventions (SSIs) have been found to benefit youth and help reduce depression symptoms, and since many SSIs are brief, cost-free, and accessible online, they may circumvent several access barriers. However, prior to recommending non-community-tailored SSIs as a useful resource for minoritized youths, we first assessed whether LGBTQ+ youth respond as positively to SSIs as do cisgender heterosexual youth. In a subsample of youths recruited via online advertisements from September 2019 to August 2020 (N = 258, 81.4% female-assigned sex at birth, 60.5% LGBTQ+, 47.3% youth of color), we investigated whether changes in hopelessness, agency, and self-hate from before to after completing online self-directed SSIs differed as a function of LGBTQ+ identity. We also quantitatively and qualitatively compared intervention acceptability ratings and feedback across LGBTQ+ and cisgender heterosexual youths. Analyses revealed no significant differences between cisgender LGBQ+, trans and gender diverse, and cisgender heterosexual youths for any intervention outcomes. Likewise, no group differences emerged in intervention acceptability ratings or written program feedback. Self-selection bias and underrepresentation of certain populations, such as American Indian and Alaskan Native youths, may limit generalizability of results. Results suggest that online mental health SSIs are equally acceptable and useful to LGBTQ+ and cisgender heterosexual youth alike, even prior to culturally specific tailoring.

Why Hypothesis Testers Should Spend Less Time Testing Hypotheses

For almost half a century, Paul Meehl educated psychologists about how the mindless use of null-hypothesis significance tests made research on theories in the social sciences basically uninterpretable. In response to the replication crisis, reforms in psychology have focused on formalizing procedures for testing hypotheses. These reforms were necessary and influential. However, as an unexpected consequence, psychological scientists have begun to realize that they may not be ready to test hypotheses. Forcing researchers to prematurely test hypotheses before they have established a sound "derivation chain" between test and theory is counterproductive. Instead, various nonconfirmatory research activities should be used to obtain the inputs necessary to make hypothesis tests informative. Before testing hypotheses, researchers should spend more time forming concepts, developing valid measures, establishing the causal relationships between concepts and the functional form of those relationships, and identifying boundary conditions and auxiliary assumptions. Providing these inputs should be recognized and incentivized as a crucial goal in itself. In this article, we discuss how shifting the focus to nonconfirmatory research can tie together many loose ends of psychology's reform movement and help us to develop strong, testable theories, as Paul Meehl urged.

Cultural Evolution of Genetic Heritability

Behavioral genetics and cultural evolution have both revolutionized our understanding of human behavior-largely independent of each other. Here we reconcile these two fields under a dual inheritance framework, offering a more nuanced understanding of the interaction between genes and culture. Going beyond typical analyses of gene-environment interactions, we describe the cultural dynamics that shape these interactions by shaping the environment and population structure. A cultural evolutionary approach can explain, for example, how factors such as rates of innovation and diffusion, density of cultural sub-groups, and tolerance for behavioral diversity impact heritability estimates, thus yielding predictions for different social contexts. Moreover, when cumulative culture functionally overlaps with genes, genetic effects become masked, unmasked, or even reversed, and the causal effects of an identified gene become confounded with features of the cultural environment. The manner of confounding is specific to a particular society at a particular time, but a WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) sampling problem obscures this boundedness. Cultural evolutionary dynamics are typically missing from models of gene-to-phenotype causality, hindering generalizability of genetic effects across societies and across time. We lay out a reconciled framework and use it to predict the ways in which heritability should differ between societies, between socioeconomic levels and other groupings within some societies but not others, and over the life course. An integrated cultural evolutionary behavioral genetic approach cuts through the nature-nurture debate and helps resolve controversies in topics such as IQ.

Small-scale utilitarianism: High acceptance of utilitarian solutions to Trolley Problems among a horticultural population in Nicaragua

Researchers often use moral dilemmas to investigate the specific factors that influence participants’ judgments of the appropriateness of different actions. A common construction of such a dilemma is the Trolley Problem, which pits an obvious utilitarian solution against a common deontological dictum to not do harm to others. Cross-cultural studies have validated the robustness of numerous contextual biases, such as judging utilitarian decisions more negatively if they require contact with other individuals (contact bias), they force others to serve as a means to an end (means bias), and if they require direct action rather than inaction (omission bias). However, such cross-cultural research is largely limited to studies of industrialized, nation-state populations. Previous research has suggested that the more intimate community relationships that characterize small-scale populations might lead to important differences, such as an absence of an omission bias. Here we contribute to this literature by investigating perceptions of Trolley Problem solutions among a Mayangna/Miskito community, a small-scale indigenous population in Nicaragua. Compared to previously sampled populations, the Mayangna/Miskito participants report higher levels of acceptance of utilitarian solutions and do not exhibit an omission bias. We also examine the justifications participants offered to explore how Mayangna/Miskito culture might influence moral judgments.

All Human, yet Different

Abstract. Only little social psychological research is conducted outside so-called WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies) cultures (e.g., in the “Global South”). Although cross-cultural replication of social psychological theorizing and findings is thus essential for higher external validity of the field, valid cross-cultural replications are not straightforward to do. Indeed, they require more than “copy-and-pasting” the same research design in different countries. To facilitate valid cross-cultural replications, we present a collection of concrete recommendations that integrate emic and etic approaches: (1) establishing an egalitarian and respectful partnership with representatives of the local community, (2) examining whether constructs carry the same meaning are relevant in and across contexts, and (3) preparing culture-sensitive research materials and procedures. These recommendations aim to inform and improve purely “etic” approaches.