Temporary Self-Deprivation Can Impair Cognitive Control: Evidence From the Ramadan Fast.

During Ramadan, people of Muslim faith fast by not eating or drinking between sunrise and sunset. This is likely to have physiological and psychological consequences for fasters, and societal and economic impacts on the wider population. We investigate whether, during this voluntary and temporally limited fast, reminders of food can impair the fasters' reaction time and accuracy on a non-food-related test of cognitive control.

Folk theories of gender and anti-transgender attitudes: Gender differences and policy preferences.

Transgender rights and discrimination against transgender people are growing public policy issues. Theorizing from social, cognitive, and evolutionary psychology suggests that beyond attitudes, discrimination against transgender people may derive from folk theories about what gender is and where it comes from. Transgender identity is met with hostility, in part, because it poses a challenge to the lay view that gender is determined at birth, and based on observable physical and behavioral characteristics.

Folk theories of nationality and anti-immigrant attitudes.

Nationality governs almost every aspect of our lives, including where we may live and travel, as well as our opportunities for education, healthcare and work. It is a common-sense social category that guides us in making inferences about the social world. Nationalism has been extensively studied within the social and cognitive sciences, but there has been little empirical investigation into folk theories regarding what determines someone's nationality.

Toward a psychology of : Making psychological science more representative of the human population.

Two primary goals of psychological science should be to understand what aspects of human psychology are universal and the way that context and culture produce variability. This requires that we take into account the importance of culture and context in the way that we write our papers and in the types of populations that we sample. However, most research published in our leading journals has relied on sampling WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) populations.

Loss of control is not necessary to induce behavioral consequences of deprivation: The case of religious fasting during Ramadan.

Pepper & Nettle argue that the more present-oriented behavior associated with a low socioeconomic status is an adaptive response to having relatively little control over the future. However, a study of fasters during Ramadan shows that self-imposed deprivation, which carries no implications regarding the ability to realize deferred rewards, is associated with loss and risk aversion.