Replay shapes abstract cognitive maps for efficient social navigation.

To make adaptive social decisions, people must anticipate how information flows through their social network. While this requires knowledge of how people are connected, networks are too large to have first-hand experience with every possible route between individuals. How, then, are people able to accurately track information flow through social networks? Here we find that people immediately cache abstract knowledge about social network structure as they learn who is friends with whom, which enables the identification of efficient routes between remotely connected individuals.

Tweeting under uncertainty: The relationship between uncertain language and negative emotions in the wild.

Despite decades of research characterizing the relationship between uncertainty and emotion, little is known about how these constructs interact in the wild. Using naturalistic, large-scale language produced on Twitter, we ask whether increases in environmental uncertainty and associated aversive emotional reactions can be captured by the millions of digital traces of people sharing their thoughts online. Analyzing more than 20 million tweets from more than 7.

Automating weighing of faces and voices based on cue saliency in trustworthiness impressions.

When encountering people, their faces are usually paired with their voices. We know that if the face looks familiar, and the voice is high-pitched, the first impression will be positive and trustworthy. But, how do we integrate these two multisensory physical attributes? Here, we explore 1) the automaticity of audiovisual integration in shaping first impressions of trustworthiness, and 2) the relative contribution of each modality in the final judgment.

Conceptual representations of uncertainty predict risky decision-making.

Decisions made under uncertainty often are considered according to their perceived subjective value. We move beyond this traditional framework to explore the hypothesis that conceptual representations of uncertainty influence risky choice. Results reveal that uncertainty concepts are represented along a dimension that jointly captures probabilistic and valenced features of the conceptual space.

Uncertainty aversion predicts the neural expansion of semantic representations.

Correctly identifying the meaning of a stimulus requires activating the appropriate semantic representation among many alternatives. One way to reduce this uncertainty is to differentiate semantic representations from each other, thereby expanding the semantic space. Here, in four experiments, we test this semantic-expansion hypothesis, finding that uncertainty-averse individuals exhibit increasingly differentiated and separated semantic representations.

Is political extremism supported by an illusion of understanding?

Polarization is rising in most countries in the West. How can we reduce it? One potential strategy is to ask people to explain how a political policy works-how it leads to consequences- because that has been shown to induce a kind of intellectual humility: Explanation causes people to reduce their judgments of understanding of the issues (their "illusion of explanatory depth"). It also reduces confidence in attitudes about the policies; people become less extreme.

Lenience breeds strictness: The generosity-erosion effect in hiring decisions.

In recruitment processes, candidates are often judged one after another. This sequential procedure affects the outcome of the process. Here, we introduce the generosity-erosion effect, which states that evaluators might be harsher in their assessment of candidates after grading previous candidates generously.

Foreign Language Processing Undermines Affect Labeling.

Unlabelled: Identifying emotional states and explicitly putting them into words, known as affect labeling, reduces amygdala activation. Crucially, bilinguals do not only label emotions in their native language; they sometimes do it in their foreign language as well. However, one's foreign languages are less emotional and more cognitively demanding than one's native language.

Emotional responses to prosocial messages increase willingness to self-isolate during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic may be one of the greatest modern societal challenges that requires widespread collective action and cooperation. While a handful of actions can help reduce pathogen transmission, one critical behavior is to self-isolate. Public health messages often use persuasive language to change attitudes and behaviors, which can evoke a wide range of negative and positive emotional responses.

The role of intentions and outcomes in the foreign language effect on moral judgements.

We explore the origin of the foreign language effect on moral judgements by assessing whether language context alters the weight given to intentions and outcomes during moral judgement. Specifically, we investigated whether foreign language contexts, compared with native ones, may lead people to focus more on the outcomes of an action and less on the intentions behind it. We report two studies in which participants read scenarios in which the actor's intentions and the resulting consequences were manipulated.

The limits of the foreign language effect on decision-making: The case of the outcome bias and the representativeness heuristic.

Language context (native vs. foreign) affects people's choices and preferences in a wide variety of situations. However, emotional reactions are a key component driving people's choices in those situations.

Tolerance to ambiguous uncertainty predicts prosocial behavior.

Uncertainty is a fundamental feature of human life that can be fractioned into two distinct psychological constructs: risk (known probabilistic outcomes) and ambiguity (unknown probabilistic outcomes). Although risk and ambiguity are known to powerfully bias nonsocial decision-making, their influence on prosocial behavior remains largely unexplored. Here we show that ambiguity attitudes, but not risk attitudes, predict prosocial behavior: the greater an individual's ambiguity tolerance, the more they engage in costly prosocial behaviors, both during decisions to cooperate (experiments 1 and 3) and choices to trust (experiment 2).