The Spatial Ingroup Bias: Ingroup Teams Are Positioned Where Writing Starts.

In four studies, we test the hypothesis that people, asked to envisage interactions between an ingroup and an outgroup, tend to spatially represent the ingroup where writing starts (e.g., left in Italian) and as acting along script direction.

Motivated reasoning in the prediction of sports outcomes and the belief in the "hot hand".

The present paper explores the role of motivation to observe a certain outcome in people's predictions, causal attributions, and beliefs about a streak of binary outcomes (basketball scoring shots). In two studies we found that positive streaks (points scored by the participants' favourite team) lead participants to predict the streak's continuation (belief in the hot hand), but negative streaks lead to predictions of its end (gambler's fallacy). More importantly, these wishful predictions are supported by strategic attributions and beliefs about how and why a streak might unfold.

Analytic and heuristic processes in the detection and resolution of conflict.

Previous research with the ratio-bias task found larger response latencies for conflict trials where the heuristic- and analytic-based responses are assumed to be in opposition (e.g., choosing between 1/10 and 9/100 ratios of success) when compared to no-conflict trials where both processes converge on the same response (e.

The metacognitive advantage of deliberative thinkers: a dual-process perspective on overconfidence.

We explored whether the thinking mode--deliberative versus intuitive--that people use to solve a problem or make a judgment influences their awareness of their own and others' performance. The results of 7 studies support the hypothesis that deliberative thinkers have a metacognitive advantage over intuitive thinkers: Deliberative thinkers are aware of both the deliberative solution and the intuitive alternative; realizing that the deliberative solution is better, they are likely to feel more confident and be more accurate in how they assess their performance and that of others. Intuitive thinkers, on the other hand, are aware only of the intuitive solution; whenever this solution is incorrect, they are unaware of how poor their performance was and how they rank in comparison to others.

Adjective-noun order as representational structure: native-language grammar influences perception of similarity and recognition memory.

This article describes two experiments linking native-language grammar rules with implications for perception of similarity and recognition memory. In prenominal languages (e.g.

Influence of race and socioeconomic status on the diagnosis of child abuse: a randomized study.

Objectives: To measure empirically the influence of race and socioeconomic status (SES) on the diagnosis of child abuse and willingness to report to child protection services.

Study Design: A total of 5000 pediatricians randomly selected from the American Medical Association's Masterfile received 1 of 4 randomly assigned versions of a fictional clinical presentation of a child (black/white + high SES/low SES) that described an unwitnessed event in a mobile 18-month-old child resulting in an oblique femur fracture. Outcome measures included ranking the degree to which the injury was accidental versus abuse and agreement with reporting the injury to child protection services.

The Role of Motivational and Persuasive Message Factors in Changing Implicit Attitudes Toward Smoking.

The current work examined the extent to which nicotine level affects the receptiveness of cigarette smokers to a compelling (strong) or a specious (weak) antismoking, public service announcement (PSA). The combination of nicotine loading (i.e.

Implicit and explicit attitudes predict smoking cessation: moderating effects of experienced failure to control smoking and plans to quit.

The current study tested implicit and explicit attitudes as prospective predictors of smoking cessation in a Midwestern community sample of smokers. Results showed that the effects of attitudes significantly varied with levels of experienced failure to control smoking and plans to quit. Explicit attitudes significantly predicted later cessation among those with low (but not high or average) levels of experienced failure to control smoking.

Counterfactual potency.

Counterfactual thoughts typically take the form of implied or explicit if-then statements. We propose that the multiplicative combination of "if likelihood" (the degree to which the antecedent condition of the counterfactual is perceived to be likely) and "then likelihood" (the perceived conditional likelihood of the outcome of the counterfactual, given the antecedent condition) determine the strength and impact of counterfactuals. This construct, termed counterfactual potency, is a reliable predictor of the degree of influence of counterfactual thinking upon judgments of regret, causation, and responsibility.

Why Barack Obama is black: a cognitive account of hypodescent.

We propose that hypodescent-the assignment of mixed-race individuals to a minority group-is an emergent feature of basic cognitive processes of learning and categorization. According to attention theory, minority groups are learned by attending to the features that distinguish them from previously learned majority groups. Selective attention creates a strong association between minority groups and their distinctive features, producing a tendency to see individuals who possess a mixture of majority- and minority-group traits as minority-group members.

Perceived entitativity and the black-sheep effect: when will we denigrate negative ingroup members?

Although ingroup favoritism is a robust effect, there are notable exceptions. For example, the outgroup extremity effect indicates outgroup derogation, whereas the black-sheep effect indicates ingroup derogation. We propose that perceived entitativity, the degree to which a group is viewed as a unified social entity, may help explain ingroup derogation.

The Association between Membership in the Sandwich Generation and Health Behaviors: A Longitudinal Study.

The current study examined the association between membership in the sandwich generation, defined as providing care to both children and parents or in-laws, and five health behaviors: checking the food label for health value when buying foods, using a seat belt, choosing foods based on health value, exercising regularly, and cigarette smoking. Participants (N=4943) were from a longitudinal study of a midwestern community-based sample. Regression analyses tested the unique effect of sandwich generation membership on health behaviors above and beyond demographic factors and prior levels of the same behavior.

The Intergenerational Transmission of Implicit and Explicit Attitudes Toward Smoking.

This study examined the intergenerational transmission of implicit and explicit attitudes toward smoking, as well as the role of these attitudes in adolescents' smoking initiation. There was evidence of intergenerational transmission of implicit attitudes. Mothers who had more positive implicit attitudes had children with more positive implicit attitudes.

Cognition and native-language grammar: the organizational role of adjective--noun word order in information representation.

In the present research, we investigated the influence of native-language adjective-noun word order on category accessibility for nouns and adjectives by comparing Portuguese speakers (in whose language nouns precede adjectives) with English speakers (in whose language adjectives precede nouns). In two studies, we presented participants with different numbers of verbal or pictorial stimuli, and subsequently they answered questions about noun- and adjective-conditioned frequencies. The results demonstrated a primacy effect of native-language word order.

Attentional processes in stereotype formation: a common model for category accentuation and illusory correlation.

Stereotype formation may be based on the exaggeration of real group differences (category accentuation) or the misperception of group differences that do not exist (illusory correlation). This research sought to account for both phenomena with J. K.

Construal level and procrastination.

According to construal-level theory, events that are distant in time tend to be represented more abstractly than are events that are close in time. This mental association between level of abstractness and temporal distance is proposed to be a bidirectional relationship, such that level of representation of an event should also have effects on the time when the activity is performed. In the present studies, participants were asked to respond to a questionnaire via e-mail within 3 weeks.

Multiple trajectories of cigarette smoking and the intergenerational transmission of smoking: a multigenerational, longitudinal study of a Midwestern community sample.

Objective: To investigate the relation between developmental phenotypes of parental smoking (trajectories of smoking from adolescence to adulthood) and the intergenerational transmission of smoking to their adolescent children.

Design: A longitudinal, multigenerational study of a midwestern community sample followed individuals from adolescence into adulthood and was combined with Web-based assessment of participants' spouses and adolescent children. Mixture modeling identified multiple trajectories of smoking, and path analyses related these trajectories to adolescents' smoking (beyond both parents' current smoking).

The effects of superficial and structural information on online problem solving for good versus poor anagram solvers.

The two experiments reported here tested two predictions concerning the sensitivity of good and poor problem solvers to superficial and structural information during online problem solving: (a) Superficial features have a greater effect on solution difficulty for poor problem solvers, whereas (b) structural features have a greater effect on solution difficulty for good problem solvers. The tests were conducted in the domain of anagram solution by manipulating or measuring several superficial and structural characteristics in this domain. The results supported both predictions.

The loyal member effect: on the preference for ingroup members who engage in exclusive relations with the ingroup.

The goal of this article was to investigate an indirect form of intergroup differentiation in children in the context of racial attitudes: the preference for ingroup members who interact positively with other ingroup members rather than with outgroup members. Study 1 confirmed this general hypothesis with preschool and 1st-grade children, demonstrating that respondents preferred the ingroup member who played only with other ingroup members, evaluated this child more positively, and felt more similar to him or her. Studies 2 and 3 tested the boundary conditions of the phenomenon.

A latent class typology of young women smokers.

Aims: Despite aggressive anti-smoking campaigns, smoking rates are increasing among young women, suggesting the need for new approaches to reach this population. Segmenting audiences can facilitate targeting interventions to specific populations, based on association of smoking behaviors with other health behaviors and psychological and social antecedents. Using latent class analysis, we sought to profile patterns of behavioral, attitudinal and cognitive variables related to tobacco use among young women.

Prospective predictors of long-term abstinence versus relapse among smokers who quit as young adults.

Objectives: We sought to identify prospective predictors of long-term abstinence versus relapse among individuals who quit smoking as young adults.

Methods: Participants from an ongoing longitudinal study of smoking who had quit for at least 1 year between the ages of 18 and 24 years (n=327) were divided into those who later reported not smoking for more than 5 years (long-term abstinence) or reported current smoking, defined as smoking at least monthly (relapse). Logistic regression was used to examine odds ratios (ORs) of prospective predictors of long-term abstinence versus relapse.

The central role of entitativity in stereotypes of social categories and task groups.

Research indicates that people's intuitive beliefs about groups are organized according to a group typology (B. Lickel, D. L.

Automatic and controlled components of judgment and decision making.

The categorization of inductive reasoning into largely automatic processes (heuristic reasoning) and controlled analytical processes (rule-based reasoning) put forward by dual-process approaches of judgment under uncertainty (e.g., K.

What is addiction? Age-related differences in the meaning of addiction.

In a sample of families from a midwestern community study of cigarette smoking, we examined adolescents' and adults' definitions of "addiction", and related these definitions to their perceived addictiveness of cigarette smoking. Both adolescents and adults viewed addiction as multi-faceted, including both appetitive aspects and compulsive aspects. However, for adolescents, the two dimensions were equally important to the overall meaning of addiction, whereas for adults, the compulsive dimension was more important than was the appetitive dimension.