Publications by authors named "Jordan Axt"

Article Synopsis
  • Discrimination in evaluations contributes significantly to social inequality, yet there is limited knowledge about psychological interventions to combat biased assessments.
  • A research contest tested 30 interventions aimed at reducing discrimination based on physical attractiveness, revealing two effective strategies that reduced both decision noise and bias.
  • The findings highlight the need for concrete strategies that focus on relevant criteria in decision-making and emphasize the challenge of developing scalable interventions to effectively change discriminatory behaviors across various contexts.
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A great deal of research in dual-process models has been devoted to highlighting differences in the structure and function of the implicit and explicit attitude constructs. However, the two forms of attitudes can also demonstrate important shared properties, and prior work suggests that one similarity may be in factors that determine measurement reliability. To better explore this issue, Study 1 analyzed the test-retest reliability in measures of both implicit and explicit attitudes within a single study session across 75 topics ( > 35,000).

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Scientists studying intergroup biases are often concerned with lessening discrimination (unequal treatment of one social group versus another), but many interventions for reducing such biased behavior have weak or limited evidence. In this review article, we argue one productive avenue for reducing discrimination comes from adapting interventions in a separate field-judgment and decision-making-that has historically studied "debiasing": the ways people can lessen the unwanted influence of irrelevant information on decision-making. While debiasing research shares several commonalities with research on reducing intergroup discrimination, many debiasing interventions have relied on methods that differ from those deployed in the intergroup bias literature.

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Using a newly developed measure of implicit transgender attitudes, we investigate the association between state-level antitransgender policies and individual-level attitudes about transgender people among residents. In a large sample of U.S.

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Failures to replicate evidence of new discoveries have forced scientists to ask whether this unreliability is due to suboptimal implementation of methods or whether presumptively optimal methods are not, in fact, optimal. This paper reports an investigation by four coordinated laboratories of the prospective replicability of 16 novel experimental findings using rigour-enhancing practices: confirmatory tests, large sample sizes, preregistration and methodological transparency. In contrast to past systematic replication efforts that reported replication rates averaging 50%, replication attempts here produced the expected effects with significance testing (P < 0.

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Increasing workplace diversity is a common goal. Given research showing that minority applicants anticipate better treatment in diverse workplaces, we ran a field experiment (N = 1,585 applicants, N = 31,928 website visitors) exploring how subtle organizational diversity cues affected applicant behaviour. Potential applicants viewed a company with varying levels of racial/ethnic or gender diversity.

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Although measures of implicit associations are influential in the prejudice literature, comparative tests of the predictive power of these measures are lacking. A large-scale ( > 100,000) analysis of four commonly used measures-the Implicit Association Test (IAT), Single-Category IAT (SC-IAT), evaluative priming task (EPT), and sorting paired features task (SPF)-across 10 intergroup domains and 250 outcomes found clear evidence for the superiority of the SC-IAT in predictive and incremental predictive validity. Follow-up analyses suggested that the SC-IAT benefited from an exclusive focus on associations toward stigmatized group members, as associations toward non-stigmatized group members diluted the predictive strength of relative measures like the IAT, SPF, and EPT.

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Transgender women's access to women-only spaces is controversial. Arguments against trans-inclusive policies often focus on cisgender women's safety from male violence, despite little evidence to suggest that such policies put cisgender women at risk. Across seven studies using U.

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Racial attitudes, beliefs, and motivations lie at the center of many influential theories of prejudice and discrimination. The extent to which such theories can meaningfully explain behavior hinges on accurate measurement of these latent constructs. We evaluated the validity properties of 25 race-related scales in a sample of 910,066 respondents using various tools, including dynamic fit indices, item response theory, and nomological nets.

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Individuals and organizations are increasing efforts to address discrimination. Nonexperts may lack awareness of, or are resistant to, scientifically informed strategies for reducing discrimination, instead relying on intuition. Five studies investigated the accuracy of nonexperts' intuitions about reducing discrimination concerning physical attractiveness.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has created objectively threatening situations in everyday life (e.g., unemployment, risk of infection), and researchers have begun to ask whether threats from the pandemic are linked to people's political attitudes.

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The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is one of the most popular measures in psychological research. A lack of standardization across IATs has resulted in significant variability among stimuli used by researchers, including the positive and negative words used in evaluative IATs. Does the variability in attribute words in evaluative IATs produce unwanted variability in measurement quality across studies? The present work investigated the effect of evaluative stimuli across three studies using 13 IATs and over 60,000 participants.

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The term is increasingly used to discredit information from reputable news organizations. We tested the possibility that fake-news claims are appealing because they satisfy the need to see the world as structured. Believing that news organizations are involved in an orchestrated disinformation campaign implies a more orderly world than believing that the news is prone to random errors.

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Surprisingly little is known about transgender attitudes, partly due to a need for improved measures of beliefs about transgender people. Four studies introduce a novel Implicit Association Test (IAT) assessing implicit attitudes toward transgender people. Study 1 ( = 294) found significant implicit and explicit preferences for cisgender over transgender people, both of which correlated with transphobia and transgender-related policy support.

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Article Synopsis
  • The text discusses two common concepts of a good life: hedonic (pleasure-focused) and eudaimonic (meaning-focused) well-being, suggesting that psychological richness is also important but often overlooked.
  • In a cross-cultural study, participants from 9 nations were asked about their ideal life, with 7-17% opting for a psychologically rich life.
  • A follow-up study revealed that 28% of Americans and 35% of Koreans believed their lives could be psychologically richer if they could undo their biggest regrets.
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Using a novel technique known as network meta-analysis, we synthesized evidence from 492 studies (87,418 participants) to investigate the effectiveness of procedures in changing implicit measures, which we define as response biases on implicit tasks. We also evaluated these procedures' effects on explicit and behavioral measures. We found that implicit measures can be changed, but effects are often relatively weak (|s| < .

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Discrimination can occur when people fail to focus on outcome-relevant information and incorporate irrelevant demographic information into decision-making. The magnitude of discrimination then depends on (a) how many errors are made in judgment and (b) the degree to which errors disproportionately favor one group over another. As a result, discrimination can be reduced through two routes: reducing noise-lessening the total number of errors but not changing the proportion of remaining errors that favor one group-or reducing bias-lessening the proportion of errors that favor one group but not changing the total number of errors made.

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Using data from 217 research reports (N = 36,071, compared to 3,471 and 5,433 in previous meta-analyses), this meta-analysis investigated the conceptual and methodological conditions under which Implicit Association Tests (IATs) measuring attitudes, stereotypes, and identity correlate with criterion measures of intergroup behavior. We found significant implicit-criterion correlations (ICCs) and explicit-criterion correlations (ECCs), with unique contributions of implicit (β = .14) and explicit measures (β = .

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Social judgment is shaped by multiple biases operating simultaneously, but most bias-reduction interventions target only a single social category. In seven preregistered studies (total > 7,000), we investigated whether asking participants to avoid one social bias affected that and other social biases. Participants selected honor society applicants based on academic credentials.

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Background: Previous work indicates widespread preference for White over Black people in attitudes and behaviour. However, there are instances where Black people receive preferential treatment over White people.

Aims: This study aimed to investigate whether a sample of education professionals would favour Black or White applicants to an academic honour society, and the extent to which any biases were related to conscious intentions.

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Implicit preferences are malleable, but does that change last? We tested 9 interventions (8 real and 1 sham) to reduce implicit racial preferences over time. In 2 studies with a total of 6,321 participants, all 9 interventions immediately reduced implicit preferences. However, none were effective after a delay of several hours to several days.

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Replication is vital for increasing precision and accuracy of scientific claims. However, when replications "succeed" or "fail," they could have reputational consequences for the claim's originators. Surveys of United States adults (N = 4,786), undergraduates (N = 428), and researchers (N = 313) showed that reputational assessments of scientists were based more on how they pursue knowledge and respond to replication evidence, not whether the initial results were true.

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Black Americans are systematically undertreated for pain relative to white Americans. We examine whether this racial bias is related to false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites (e.g.

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Are people who live in more walkable areas healthier and more satisfied with life? This study investigates that question by using the 2005 Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey, the largest telephone survey on health in the US (302,841 respondents from 989 metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas [MSA]; 177,524 respondents from 703 MSAs had complete data). Using multilevel random coefficient modeling, we found that people living in walkable areas reported being generally healthier than people living in less walkable areas. In addition, aside from higher self-reported health, people living in walkable areas also had a lower body mass index (BMI).

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