Counterintuitive Pseudoscience Propagates by Exploiting the Mind's Communication Evaluation Mechanisms

Epidemiological models of culture posit that the prevalence of a belief depends in part on the fit between that belief and intuitions generated by the mind's reliably developing architecture. Application of such models to pseudoscience suggests that one route via which these beliefs gain widespread appeal stems from their compatibility with these intuitions. For example, anti-vaccination beliefs are readily adopted because they cohere with intuitions about the threat of contagion. However, other varieties of popular pseudoscience such as astrology and parapsychology contain content that violates intuitions held about objects and people. Here, we propose a pathway by which "counterintuitive pseudoscience" may spread and receive endorsement. Drawing on recent empirical evidence, we suggest that counterintuitive pseudoscience triggers the mind's communication evaluation mechanisms. These mechanisms are hypothesized to quarantine epistemically-suspect information including counterintuitive pseudoscientific concepts. As a consequence, these beliefs may not immediately update conflicting intuitions and may be largely restricted from influencing behavior. Nonetheless, counterintuitive pseudoscientific concepts, when in combination with intuitively appealing content, may differentially draw attention and memory. People may also be motivated to seek further information about these concepts, including by asking others, in an attempt to reconcile them with prior beliefs. This in turn promotes the re-transmission of these ideas. We discuss how, during this information-search, support for counterintuitive pseudoscience may come from deference to apparently authoritative sources, reasoned arguments, and the functional outcomes of these beliefs. Ultimately, these factors promote the cultural success of counterintuitive pseudoscience but explicit endorsement of these concepts may not entail tacit commitment.

She told me about a singing cactus: Counterintuitive concepts are more accurately attributed to their speakers than ordinary concepts

Communication is central to human life, yet it leaves humans vulnerable to misinformation and manipulation. Humans have therefore evolved a suite of psychological mechanisms for the evaluation of speakers and their messages. Here, we test a key hypothesized function of these "epistemic vigilance" mechanisms: the selective remembering of links between speakers and messages that are inconsistent with preexisting beliefs. Across four experiments, participants (N = 707) read stories associated with different contexts, with each story containing concepts that violate core knowledge intuitions ("counterintuitive concepts") and ordinary concepts. Experiment 1 revealed that after a brief distractor (2 min) participants more accurately attributed counterintuitive concepts to their speakers than ordinary concepts. Experiments 2a and 2b replicated this finding and found that this attribution accuracy advantage also extended to counterintuitive versus ordinary concepts associated with other contextual details-places and dates. Experiment 3 then tested whether this attribution accuracy advantage was more stable over time for speakers than for places. After a short distractor (20 min), there was a counterintuitive versus ordinary concept attribution accuracy advantage for both speakers and places. However, when participants were tested again after a long delay (48 hr), this attribution accuracy advantage more than doubled for speakers but disappeared entirely for places. We discuss the implications of these findings to the set of psychological mechanisms theorized to monitor and evaluate communication to guard our database of beliefs about the world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The Embodied God: Core Intuitions About Person Physicality Coexist and Interfere With Acquired Christian Beliefs About God, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus

Why are disembodied extraordinary beings like gods and spirits prevalent in past and present theologies? Under the intuitive Cartesian dualism hypothesis, this is because it is natural to conceptualize of minds as separate from bodies; under the counterintuitiveness hypothesis, this is because beliefs in minds without bodies are unnatural-such beliefs violate core knowledge intuitions about person physicality and consequently have a social transmission advantage. We report on a critical test of these contrasting hypotheses. Prior research found that among adult Christian religious adherents, intuitions about person psychology coexist and interfere with theological conceptualizations of God (e.g., infallibility). Here, we use a sentence verification paradigm where participants are asked to evaluate as true or false statements on which core knowledge intuitions about person physicality and psychology and Christian theology about God are inconsistent (true on one and false on the other) versus consistent (both true or both false). We find, as predicted by the counterintuitiveness hypothesis but not the Cartesian dualism hypothesis, that Christian religious adherents show worse performance (lower accuracy and slower response time) on statements where Christian theological doctrines about God's physicality (e.g., incorporeality, omnipresence) conflict with intuitions about person physicality. We find these effects for other extraordinary beings in Christianity-the Holy Spirit and Jesus-but not for an ordinary being (priest). We conclude that it is unintuitive to conceptualize extraordinary beings as disembodied, and that this, rather than inherent Cartesian dualism, may explain the prevalence of beliefs in such beings.

The Use of Eye Tracking as a Biomarker of Treatment Outcome in a Pilot Randomized Clinical Trial for Young Children with Autism

There is a pressing need for objective, quantifiable outcome measures in intervention trials for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The current study investigated the use of eye tracking as a biomarker of treatment response in the context of a pilot randomized clinical trial of treatment for young children with ASD. Participants included 28 children with ASD, aged 18-48 months, who were randomized to one of two conditions: Pivotal Response Intervention for Social Motivation (PRISM) or community treatment as usual (TAU). Eye-tracking and behavioral assessment of developmental functioning were administered at Time 1 (prior to randomization) and at Time 2 (after 6 months of intervention). Two well-established eye-tracking paradigms were used to measure social attention: social preference and face scanning. As a context for understanding relationships between social attention and developmental ability, we first examined how scanning patterns at Time 1 were associated with concurrent developmental functioning and compared to those of 23 age-matched typically developing (TD) children. Changes in scanning patterns from Time 1 to Time 2 were then compared between PRISM and TAU groups and associated with behavioral change over time. Results showed that the social preference paradigm differentiated children with ASD from TD children. In addition, attention during face scanning was associated with language and adaptive communication skills at Time 1 and change in language skills from Time 1 to Time 2. These findings highlight the importance of examining targeted biomarkers that measure unique aspects of child functioning and that are well-matched to proposed mechanisms of change. Autism Research 2019, 12: 779-793. © 2019 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: Biomarkers have the potential to provide important information about how and why early interventions effect positive change for young children with ASD. The current study suggests that eye-tracking measures of social attention can be used to track change in specific areas of development, such as language, and points to the need for targeted eye-tracking paradigms designed to measure specific behavioral changes. Such biomarkers could inform the development of optimal, individualized, and adaptive interventions for young children with ASD.

Core Intuitions About Persons Coexist and Interfere With Acquired Christian Beliefs About God

This study tested the hypothesis that in the minds of adult religious adherents, acquired beliefs about the extraordinary characteristics of God coexist with, rather than replace, an initial representation of God formed by co-option of the evolved person concept. In three experiments, Christian religious adherents were asked to evaluate a series of statements for which core intuitions about persons and acquired Christian beliefs about God were consistent (i.e., true according to both [e.g., "God has beliefs that are true"] or false according to both [e.g., "All beliefs God has are false"]) or inconsistent (i.e., true on intuition but false theologically [e.g., "God has beliefs that are false"] or false on intuition but true theologically [e.g., "All beliefs God has are true"]). Participants were less accurate and slower to respond to inconsistent versus consistent statements, suggesting that the core intuitions both coexisted alongside and interfered with the acquired beliefs (Experiments 1 and 2). In Experiment 2 when responding under time pressure participants were disproportionately more likely to make errors on inconsistent versus consistent statements than when responding with no time pressure, suggesting that the resolution of interference requires cognitive resources the functioning of which decreases under cognitive load. In Experiment 3 a plausible alternative interpretation of these findings was ruled out by demonstrating that the response accuracy and time differences on consistent versus inconsistent statements occur for God-a supernatural religious entity-but not for a natural religious entity (a priest).

Automatic Mechanisms for Social Attention Are Culturally Penetrable

Are mechanisms for social attention influenced by culture? Evidence that social attention is triggered automatically by bottom-up gaze cues and is uninfluenced by top-down verbal instructions may suggest it operates in the same way everywhere. Yet considerations from evolutionary and cultural psychology suggest that specific aspects of one's cultural background may have consequence for the way mechanisms for social attention develop and operate. In more interdependent cultures, the scope of social attention may be broader, focusing on more individuals and relations between those individuals. We administered a multi-gaze cueing task requiring participants to fixate a foreground face flanked by background faces and measured shifts in attention using eye tracking. For European Americans, gaze cueing did not depend on the direction of background gaze cues, suggesting foreground gaze alone drives automatic attention shifting; for East Asians, cueing patterns differed depending on whether the foreground cue matched or mismatched background cues, suggesting foreground and background gaze information were integrated. These results demonstrate that cultural background influences the social attention system by shifting it into a narrow or broad mode of operation and, importantly, provides evidence challenging the assumption that mechanisms underlying automatic social attention are necessarily rigid and impenetrable to culture.

Specialized mechanisms for theory of mind: are mental representations special because they are mental or because they are representations?

Does theory of mind depend on a capacity to reason about representations generally or on mechanisms selective for the processing of mental state representations? In four experiments, participants reasoned about beliefs (mental representations) and notes (non-mental, linguistic representations), which according to two prominent theories are closely matched representations because both are represented propositionally. Reaction times were faster and accuracies higher when participants endorsed or rejected statements about false beliefs than about false notes (Experiment 1), even when statements emphasized representational format (Experiment 2), which should have favored the activation of representation concepts. Experiments 3 and 4 ruled out a counterhypothesis that differences in task demands were responsible for the advantage in belief processing. These results demonstrate for the first time that understanding of mental and linguistic representations can be dissociated even though both may carry propositional content, supporting the theory that mechanisms governing theory of mind reasoning are narrowly specialized to process mental states, not representations more broadly. Extending this theory, we discuss whether less efficient processing of non-mental representations may be a by-product of mechanisms specialized for processing mental states.

Theory of mind in the wild: toward tackling the challenges of everyday mental state reasoning

A complete understanding of the cognitive systems underwriting theory of mind (ToM) abilities requires articulating how mental state representations are generated and processed in everyday situations. Individuals rarely announce their intentions prior to acting, and actions are often consistent with multiple mental states. In order for ToM to operate effectively in such situations, mental state representations should be generated in response to certain actions, even when those actions occur in the presence of mental state content derived from other aspects of the situation. Results from three experiments with preschool children and adults demonstrate that mental state information is indeed generated based on an approach action cue in situations that contain competing mental state information. Further, the frequency with which participants produced or endorsed explanations that include mental states about an approached object decreased when the competing mental state information about a different object was made explicit. This set of experiments provides some of the first steps toward identifying the observable action cues that are used to generate mental state representations in everyday situations and offers insight into how both young children and adults processes multiple mental state representations.

The scope of social attention deficits in autism: prioritized orienting to people and animals in static natural scenes

A central feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is an impairment in 'social attention'--the prioritized processing of socially relevant information, e.g. the eyes and face. Socially relevant stimuli are also preferentially attended in a broader categorical sense, however: observers orient preferentially to people and animals (compared to inanimate objects) in complex natural scenes. To measure the scope of social attention deficits in autism, observers viewed alternating versions of a natural scene on each trial, and had to 'spot the difference' between them--where the difference involved either an animate or inanimate object. Change detection performance was measured as an index of attentional prioritization. Individuals with ASD showed the same prioritized social attention for animate categories as did control participants. This could not be explained by lower level visual factors, since the effects disappeared when using blurred or inverted images. These results suggest that social attention - and its impairment in autism - may not be a unitary phenomenon: impairments in visual processing of specific social cues may occur despite intact categorical prioritization of social agents.

Developmental changes in information central to artifact representation: evidence from ?functional fluency? tasks

Research suggests that while information about design is a central feature of older children's artifact representations it may be less important in the artifact representations of younger children. Three experiments explore the pattern of responses that 5- and 7-year-old children generate when asked to produce multiple uses for familiar (Experiments 1, 2) and novel (Experiment 3) named objects. Results showed that while older children tended to produce responses based on the known design function of the object, younger children's responses were more flexible, though still constrained by the mechanical structure of the object. Only when ignorant of a novel object's design function did older children produce more varied functions than did younger children. These results suggest that representations supporting object function undergo change across this period of development, with information about design assuming more importance later than it does earlier.

Kentucky pharmacists' opinions and practices related to the sale of cigarettes and alcohol in pharmacies

The objective of the study was to augment important findings from a 1996 statewide survey of Indiana pharmacists regarding their opinions and practices related to the sale of cigarettes and alcohol in pharmacies. More specifically, this study was designed (1) to determine opinions and practices of Kentucky pharmacists' related to the sale of cigarettes and alcohol; (2) compare these findings with results from the Indiana study; and (3) to gather information on health promotion activities by Kentucky pharmacists. A structured survey questionnaire was designed and reviewed by a jury of experts and subsequently administered to half of the 1182 pharmacies in Kentucky. Collected data were analyzed by using descriptive and inferential statistical methods. Findings reveal that 45 percent of responding pharmacists sell cigarettes in their stores even though 88 percent think that their stores should not sell cigarettes. Approximately 34 percent of the pharmacies in non-dry counties sell alcoholic beverages while more than four-fifths of the pharmacists (81%) think pharmacies should not sell alcoholic beverages. After adjusting by type of pharmacy, no statistical difference was found in retail-chain pharmacy sales of cigarettes and alcohol in either Kentucky or Indiana. However, independent pharmacies in Kentucky were less likely to sell cigarettes and alcohol compared to independent Indiana pharmacies. Study results also revealed that most pharmacists agree the use of cigarettes and alcohol are important causes of morbidity and pre-mature mortality and that pharmacists should play a role in health promotion and disease prevention through their relationship with the public. However, the majority do not ask their patients about their smoking and alcohol habits and do not participate in health education/promotion programs for the general community.