Bayesianism and wishful thinking are compatible

Bayesian principles show up across many domains of human cognition, but wishful thinking-where beliefs are updated in the direction of desired outcomes rather than what the evidence implies-seems to threaten the universality of Bayesian approaches to the mind. In this Article, we show that Bayesian optimality and wishful thinking are, despite first appearances, compatible. The setting of opposing goals can cause two groups of people with identical prior beliefs to reach opposite conclusions about the same evidence through fully Bayesian calculations. We show that this is possible because, when people set goals, they receive privileged information in the form of affective experiences, and this information systematically supports goal-consistent conclusions. We ground this idea in a formal, Bayesian model in which affective prediction errors drive wishful thinking. We obtain empirical support for our model across five studies.

Testing the automaticity features of the affect misattribution procedure: The roles of awareness and intentionality

The affect misattribution procedure (AMP) is a measure of implicit evaluations, designed to index the automatic retrieval of evaluative knowledge. The AMP effect consists in participants evaluating neutral target stimuli positively when preceded by positive primes and negatively when preceded by negative primes. After multiple prior tests of intentionality, Hughes et al. (Behav Res Methods 55(4):1558-1586, 2023) examined the role of awareness in the AMP and found that AMP effects were larger when participants indicated that their response was influenced by the prime than when they did not. Here we report seven experiments (six preregistered; N = 2350) in which we vary the methodological features of the AMP to better understand this awareness effect. In Experiments 1-4, we establish variability in the magnitude of the awareness effect in response to variations in the AMP procedure. By introducing further modifications to the AMP procedure, Experiments 5-7 suggest an alternative explanation of the awareness effect, namely that awareness can be the outcome, rather than the cause, of evaluative congruency between primes and responses: Awareness effects emerged even when awareness could not have contributed to AMP effects, including when participants judged influence awareness for third parties or primes were presented post hoc. Finally, increasing the evaluative strength of the primes increased participants' tendency to misattribute AMP effects to the influence of target stimuli. Together, the present findings suggest that AMP effects can create awareness effects rather than vice versa and support the AMP's construct validity as a measure of unintentional evaluations of which participants are also potentially unaware.

Hoist by its own petard: The ironic and fatal flaws of dual-process theory

By stipulating the existence of a system 1 and a system 2, dual-process theories raise questions about how these systems function. De Neys identifies several such questions for which no plausible answers have ever been offered. What makes the nature of systems 1 and 2 so difficult to ascertain? The answer is simple: The systems do not exist.

Tracking Prejudice: A Mouse-Tracking Measure of Evaluative Conflict Predicts Discriminatory Behavior

Explicit evaluations of racial out-groups often involve conflict between opposing evaluative tendencies. Yet this type of conflict is difficult to capture with standard measures of evaluative processing, which either ignore explicit evaluation or capture only the aspects of explicit evaluation that are consciously accessible and freely reported. A new tool may fill this gap in our ability to measure conflict in racial evaluation. This tool, called the mouse-tracking measure of racial bias (Race-MT), is designed to capture conflict in explicit evaluations of racial groups, even if that conflict is neither consciously accessible nor freely reported. We vetted the Race-MT by exploring whether it predicts discriminatory behavior. Across five studies (four preregistered, N = 1,492), we used the Race-MT to measure conflict in people’s positive, explicit evaluations of racial out-groups versus in-groups. These measures predicted discriminatory behavior in a noisy, naturalistic setting, suggesting that the Race-MT provides theoretically meaningful and predicatively useful insights into racial evaluation.

Gender Disparities in Awards to Neuroscience Researchers

Women in academia receive fewer prestigious awards than their male counterparts. This gender gap may emerge purely from structural factors (e.g., gender differences in time spent in academia, institutional prestige, and academic performance), or from a combination of structural and psychological factors (e.g., gender schemas). To test these competing predictions, we assessed the independent contribution of year of degree, institutional prestige (a composite of prestige of PhD school and current affiliation), academic performance (total publications, total cites, and h-index), and gender to the prestige of awards earned by male (N = 298) and female (N = 134) academic neuroscientists. Award prestige was determined by an independent set of neuroscientists. Men earned more prestigious awards than women after controlling for institutional prestige, year of degree, and total publications. But after controlling for total citations or h-index, no gender difference appeared. Mediation analyses revealed that the gender disparity in awards was mediated by a gender difference in total cites and h-index. There was a reciprocal effect as well, in that the gender disparity in total cites and h-index was partially mediated by awards. These results point to an indirect path by which psychological factors may create gender disparities in academic awards: gender schemas may lead to women's papers receiving fewer citations than men's papers, resulting in more prestigious awards for men than for women. Additionally, our results suggest that gender disparities in awards and citations may reinforce each other. Practical implications for promoting gender equality in academic awards are discussed.