The Improvement Default: People Presume Improvement When Lacking Information.

People erroneously think that things they know little about improve over time. We propose that, due to salient cultural narratives, improvement is a highly accessible expectation that leads people to presume improvement in the absence of diagnostic information. Five studies investigated an improvement default: a general tendency to presume improvement even in self-irrelevant domains.

Evaluating CloudResearch's Approved Group as a solution for problematic data quality on MTurk.

Maintaining data quality on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) has always been a concern for researchers. These concerns have grown recently due to the bot crisis of 2018 and observations that past safeguards of data quality (e.g.

Implicit Bias Reflects the Company That Words Keep.

In everyday language, concepts appear alongside (i.e., collocate with) related concepts.

Mother Nature's Fury: Antagonist Metaphors for Natural Disasters Increase Forecasts of Their Severity and Encourage Evacuation.

Natural disasters are often described as having antagonistic qualities (e.g., wildfires ravage).

The War on Prevention II: Battle Metaphors Undermine Cancer Treatment and Prevention and Do Not Increase Vigilance.

Bellicose metaphors for cancer are ubiquitous. But are they good metaphors for health communicators to use? Because metaphors can guide reasoning about abstract concepts, framing cancer with metaphors of battle, war, and enemies leads people to apply attributes of these concepts to cancer. The current research investigates how this affects inferences about cancer treatment, prevention, and monitoring.

Social Exclusion Shifts Personal Network Scope.

Social exclusion has the potential to alter subsequent social interactions with the members of personal networks, especially given their online availability in contemporary life. Nonetheless, there is minimal research examining how social challenges such as exclusion alter ensuing interactions with personal ties. Here, we tested whether being excluded during a social interaction changed which relationships are most salient in an ostensibly unrelated, online news sharing task.

Are Manipulation Checks Necessary?

Researchers are concerned about whether manipulations have the intended effects. Many journals and reviewers view manipulation checks favorably, and they are widely reported in prestigious journals. However, the prototypical manipulation check is a verbal (rather than behavioral) measure that always appears at the same point in the procedure (rather than its order being varied to assess order effects).

Semantic prosody and judgment.

Some words tend to co-occur exclusively with a positive or negative context in natural language use, even though such valence patterns are not dictated by definitions or are part of the words' core meaning. These words contain semantic prosody, a subtle valenced meaning derived from co-occurrence in language. As language and thought are heavily intertwined, we hypothesized that semantic prosody can affect evaluative inferences about related ambiguous concepts.

Attentive Turkers: MTurk participants perform better on online attention checks than do subject pool participants.

Participant attentiveness is a concern for many researchers using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Although studies comparing the attentiveness of participants on MTurk versus traditional subject pool samples have provided mixed support for this concern, attention check questions and other methods of ensuring participant attention have become prolific in MTurk studies. Because MTurk is a population that learns, we hypothesized that MTurkers would be more attentive to instructions than are traditional subject pool samples.

The war on prevention: bellicose cancer metaphors hurt (some) prevention intentions.

Cancer health information is dominated by enemy and war metaphors intended to motivate the public to "fight" cancer. However, enemy metaphoric framing may influence understanding of, and responses to, cancer. Cancer prevention benefits from avoiding risk increasing behaviors, yet self-limitation is not closely associated with fighting enemies.

Altruism in the wild: when affiliative motives to help positive people overtake empathic motives to help the distressed.

Psychological theories of human altruism suggest that helping results from an evolved tendency in caregiving mammals to respond to distress or need with empathy and sympathy. However, theories from biology, economics, and social psychology demonstrate that social animals also evolved to affiliate with and help desirable social partners. These models make different predictions about the affect of those we should prefer to help.

What's "up" with God? Vertical space as a representation of the divine.

"God" and "Devil" are abstract concepts often linked to vertical metaphors (e.g., "glory to God in the highest," "the Devil lives down in hell").