Slaughterlevesque8418

Partisan disagreement over policy-relevant facts is a salient feature of contemporary American politics. Perhaps surprisingly, such disagreements are often the greatest among opposing partisans who are the most cognitively sophisticated. A prominent hypothesis for this phenomenon is that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically motivated reasoning-commonly defined as reasoning driven by the motivation to reach conclusions congenial to one's political group identity. Numerous experimental studies report evidence in favor of this hypothesis. However, in the designs of such studies, political group identity is often confounded with prior factual beliefs about the issue in question; and, crucially, reasoning can be affected by such beliefs in the absence of any political group motivation. This renders much existing evidence for the hypothesis ambiguous. To shed new light on this issue, we conducted three studies in which we statistically controlled for people's prior factual beliefs-attempting to isolate a direct effect of political group identity-when estimating the association between their cognitive sophistication, political group identity, and reasoning in the paradigmatic study design used in the literature. We observed a robust direct effect of political group identity on reasoning but found no evidence that cognitive sophistication magnified this effect. In contrast, we found fairly consistent evidence that cognitive sophistication magnified a direct effect of prior factual beliefs on reasoning. Our results suggest that there is currently a lack of clear empirical evidence that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically motivated reasoning as commonly understood and emphasize the conceptual and empirical challenges that confront tests of this hypothesis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).In English, unfair treatment and social injustice are often described as "bitter" experiences, whereas "eating bitterness" refers to endurance in the face of hardship in Chinese. see more suggests that bitter taste may ground experiences of adversity in both cultures, but in culture-specific forms. We tested this possibility by assessing Canadian and Chinese participants' responses to fairness and achievement scenarios after incidental exposure to bitter or neutral tastes. Tasting something bitter increased self-reported motivation and intention to invest effort for Chinese participants, but not Anglo-Canadian participants (Studies 1, 4, 5). Tasting something bitter decreased perceived fairness for Anglo-Canadian participants (Studies 1-3) but not Chinese participants living in China (Study 2). The fairness judgments of Chinese participants living in Canada shed light on adaptation to the host culture Bitter taste decreased these participants' fairness judgments after living in Canada for 4 years or more (Study 4), provided they were tested in English (Studies 3-4), but exerted no influence when they were tested in Chinese (Study 4). The observed cultural differences are compatible with a relatively higher emphasis on self-improvement in China versus self-enhancement in Canada. Supporting this conjecture, the fairness judgments of Chinese students in Canada followed the Anglo-Canadian pattern when primed with a self-enhancement motive and the effort judgments of Anglo-Canadian students followed the Chinese pattern when primed with a self-improvement motive (Study 5). This suggest that a universal aversive experience (bitter taste) grounds thought about adversity in ways compatible with cultural orientations and reflected in culture-specific metaphors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).Aversion to uncertainty about the future has been proposed as a transdiagnostic trait underlying psychiatric diagnoses including obsessive-compulsive disorder and generalized anxiety. #link# This association might explain the frequency of pathological information-seeking behaviors such as compulsive checking and reassurance-seeking in these disorders. Here we tested the behavioral predictions of this model using a noninstrumental information-seeking task that measured preferences for unusable information about future outcomes in different payout domains (gain, loss, and mixed gain/loss). We administered this task, along with a targeted battery of self-report questionnaires, to a general-population sample of 146 adult participants. Using computational cognitive modeling of choices to test competing theories of information valuation, we found evidence for a model in which preferences for costless and costly information about future outcomes were independent, and in which information preference was modulated by both outcome mean and outcome variance. Critically, we also found positive associations between a model parameter controlling preference for costly information and individual differences in latent traits of both anxiety and obsessive-compulsion. These associations were invariant across different payout domains, providing evidence that individuals high in obsessive-compulsive and anxious traits show a generalized increase in willingness-to-pay for unusable information about uncertain future outcomes, even though this behavior reduces their expected future reward. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).Research suggests that some people, particularly those on the political right, tend to blatantly dehumanize low-status groups. However, these findings have largely relied on self-report measures, which are notoriously subject to social desirability concerns. To better understand just how widely blatant forms of intergroup dehumanization might extend, the present article leverages an unobtrusive, data-driven perceptual task to examine how U.S. respondents mentally represent "Americans" versus "Arabs" (a low-status group in the United States that is often explicitly targeted with blatant dehumanization). Data from 2 reverse-correlation experiments (original N = 108; preregistered replication N = 336) and 7 rating studies (N = 2,301) suggest that U.S. respondents' mental representations of Arabs are significantly more dehumanizing than their representations of Americans. Furthermore, analyses indicate that this phenomenon is not reducible to a general tendency for our sample to mentally represent Arabs more negatively than Americans.