This commentary argues that while using popular franchises like Harry Potter can be a helpful tool to make research on personality and career choices salient and engaging to various audiences, results should not be overgeneralised. In particular, we argue that (1) conclusions should not be drawn uncritically from statistically significant relations, (2) capturing personality requires validated assessments and should not be reduced to a single item, and (3) in the specific case of the Harry Potter franchise, the mere preference for a House of the fictional Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry rarely predicts meaningful aspects of personality traits. As such, caution is advised when such fictional elements are used, as they can quickly go viral and may provide potentially harmful advise if shared uncritically.

People’s belief in free will is shown to influence the perception of personal control in self and others. The current study tested the hypothesis that individuals who believe in free will attribute stronger personal blame to obese people and to people with mental illness (schizophrenia) for their adverse health outcomes. Results from a sample of 1110 participants showed that the belief in free will subscale is positively correlated with perceptions of the controllability of these adverse health conditions. The findings suggest that free will beliefs are correlated with attribution of blame to people with obesity and mental health issues. The study contributes to the understanding of the possible negative implications of people’s free will beliefs.

Spending money on time-saving services can improve happiness and reduce stress. Yet many people do not spend money to save time even when they can afford to do so, potentially because they feel guilty about paying other people to complete disliked tasks on their behalf. Consistent with this proposition, we find evidence that individuals are most likely to experience guilt when outsourcing to a salient service provider. Across two large-scale surveys of working adults, including a nationally representative sample of employed Americans (Study 1a & 1b, N = 1,337), individuals reported greater guilt when they thought about outsourcing to a salient (vs. non-salient) service provider. Using a novel lab paradigm, participants felt greater guilt when the service provider was salient, which in turn undermined their willingness to buy time (Study 2, N = 350). In Study 3, these effects were mitigated by emphasizing the benefits of task completion for the service provider ( N = 390). This research points to the potential of simple interventions to help organizations encourage individuals to make time-saving purchases.

Psychological research can be used to understand people’s perceptions and attitudes toward historic environments. Understanding the public’s attitudes toward historic sites can help to improve decisions about the preservation and management of these places. This paper reviews a series of studies examining three historic Catholic Missions in central California: Missions San Miguel, San Luis Obispo, and La Purisima. These missions have very different histories and uses. Mission San Miguel is one of the best preserved of the California Missions; however, its fragility limits use of the Mission by its parish. Mission San Luis Obispo has been substantially rebuilt over the years; it has an active parish and is a focal point for tourism in the city. Mission La Purisima was destroyed by an earthquake in the 1800s and rebuilt as a WPA project in the 1930s. It is currently a state historic park located in a rural setting. The research on these missions examined perceptions of authenticity and sacredness of the places. These perceptions were linked to attitudes about appropriate uses of the missions (for example, the appropriateness of tourism) and how the missions should be managed.

A robust dialogue about the (un)reliability of psychological science findings has emerged in recent years. In response, metascience researchers have developed innovative tools to increase rigor, transparency, and reproducibility, stimulating rapid improvement and adoption of open science practices. However, existing reproducibility guidelines are geared toward purely quantitative study designs. This leaves some ambiguity as to how such guidelines should be implemented in mixed methods (MM) studies, which combine quantitative and qualitative research. Drawing on extant literature, our own experiences, and feedback from 79 self-identified MM researchers, the current paper addresses two main questions: (a) how and to what extent do existing reproducibility guidelines apply to MM study designs; and (b) can existing reproducibility guidelines be improved by incorporating best practices from qualitative research and epistemology? In answer, we offer 10 key recommendations for use within and outside of MM research. Finally, we argue that good science and good ethical practice are mutually reinforcing and lead to meaningful, credible science.

Does belief in free will increase support for economic inequality? Five studies using diverse measures and methods tested this question. Study 1 finds belief in free will is associated with increased support for inequality. Study 2 manipulates belief in free will and does not find evidence that this changes support for inequality. Studies 3 and 4 find that people are more willing to support inequality in a hypothetical universe where free will exists compared to one where it does not ( dz = 0.10–0.13), indicating that people believe the existence of free will justifies inequality. However, a between-subjects design in Study 5 fails to replicate this finding. Overall, our results suggest that if belief in free will increases support for economic inequality, the effect is likely small and potentially sensitive to the methods used to detect it.

Belief system structure can be investigated by estimating belief systems as networks of interacting political attitudes, but we do not know if these estimates are replicable. In a sample of 31 countries from the World Values Survey (N = 52,826), I find that countries’ belief system networks are relatively replicable in terms of connectivity, proportion of positive edges, some centrality measures (e.g., expected influence), and the estimates of individual edges. Betweenness, closeness, and strength centrality estimates are more unstable. Belief system networks estimated with smaller samples or in countries with more unstable political systems tend to be less replicable than networks estimated with larger samples in stable political systems. Although these analyses are restricted to the items available in the World Values Survey, they show that belief system networks can be replicable, but that this replicability is related to features of the study design and the political system.

Self-regulation refers to effortful control over one’s thoughts, emotions, choices, impulses, and behaviors, and has implications for older adults’ health. Executive function, physiological, and subjective indices have all been proposed to reflect self-regulation. Pairwise associations among these indices have been previously examined; however, a self-regulation constellation encompassing all of these indices has never been tested in older adults. The present study described the relationships among indices of self-regulation and tested their between- and within-person associations with upstream personality factors (conscientiousness) and downstream psychological and physical health in 149 older adults aged 60–93 years, assessed semi-annually for five years (up to 10 waves). Indices of self-regulation were only modestly correlated with each other but were each associated with health. Better executive function was associated with better psychological and physical health between and within people, whereas higher heart rate variability was associated with psychological health within people. Better subjective self-regulation had the most between- and within-person associations with better psychological and physical health. Conscientiousness was associated with subjective self-regulation and better psychological and physical health. These findings support the non-unitary nature of self-regulation in older adults and the health relevance of each of its indices between and within older adults. The aging process may change how the indices relate to each other, and older adults may draw more on certain self-regulatory components over others, given limited resources. Subjective self-regulation may be an important final common pathway to psychological and physical health in older adults.

Reports of experiences of ownership over a fake hand following simple multisensory stimulation (the ‘rubber hand illusion’) have generated an expansive literature. Because such reports might reflect suggestion effects, demand characteristics are routinely controlled for by contrasting agreement ratings for ‘illusion’ and ‘control’ conditions. However, these methods have never been validated, and recent evidence that response to imaginative suggestion (‘phenomenological control’) predicts illusion report prompts reconsideration of their efficacy. A crucial assumption of the standard approach is that demand characteristics are matched across conditions. Here, a quasi-experiment design was employed to test demand characteristics in rubber hand illusion reports. Participants were provided with information about the rubber hand illusion procedure (text description and video demonstration) and recorded expectancies for standard ‘illusion’ and ‘control’ statements. Expectancies for ‘control’ and ‘illusion’ statements in synchronous and asynchronous conditions were found to differ similarly to published illusion reports. Therefore, rubber hand illusion control methods which have been in use for 22 years are not fit for purpose. Because demand characteristics have not been controlled in illusion report in existing studies, the illusion may be, partially or entirely, a suggestion effect. Methods to develop robust controls are proposed. That confounding demand characteristics have been overlooked for decades may be attributable to a lack of awareness that demand characteristics can drive experience in psychological science.

We explore the development of habitual responding within the colour-word contingency learning paradigm, in which participants respond to the colour of neutral words. Each word is most often presented in one colour. Learning is indicated by faster responses to the colour when the word is presented in the expected rather than in the unexpected colour. In Experiment 1, participants took part in two sessions, separated by one day. Critically, one set of words was trained across both days, and other new sets of words were introduced at various time points. Overall performance was faster on trials with overtrained words. Additionally, contingency effects were larger for overtrained words than for words introduced on Day 2. Removing the contingency had a similar impact on the learning effect for overtrained and new words. However, during a counterconditioning phase, where the words were made predictive of new colours, the previous contingency continued to influence performance for overtrained words but not for more recently introduced words. Relatedly, the new contingency was not acquired for the overtrained words. The reverse pattern was observed for recently-introduced words, with the newly-introduced contingency rapidly acquired and the influence of the old contingency quickly extinguished. In Experiments 2 and 3, however, both new and old learning effects were observed for both overtrained and recently-acquired contingencies. The net results suggest that while contingency learning effects are highly pliable during initial and subsequent learning, early-acquired contingency knowledge is maintained after removal of the contingency. Implications for models of learning are discussed.

People display systematic priorities to self-related stimuli. As the self is not a unified entity, however, it remains unclear which aspects of the self are crucial to producing this stimulus prioritization. To explore this issue, we manipulated the valence of the self-concept (good me vs. bad me) — a core identity-based facet of the self — using a standard shape-label association task in which participants initially learned the associations (e.g., circle/good-self, triangle/good-other, diamond/bad-self, square/bad-other), after which they completed shape-label matching and shape-categorization tasks, such that attention was directed to different aspects of the stimuli (i.e., self-relevance and valence). The results revealed that responses were more efficient to the good-self shape (vs. other shapes), regardless of the task that was undertaken. A hierarchical drift diffusion model (HDDM) analysis indicated that this good-self prioritization effect was underpinned by differences in the rate of information uptake. These findings demonstrate that activation of the good-self representation exclusively facilitates perceptual decision-making, thereby furthering understanding of the self-prioritization effect.

It is well-established that decision makers bias their estimates of unknown quantities in the direction of a salient numerical anchor. Some standard anchoring paradigms have been shown to yield pervasive biases, such as Tversky and Kahneman’s ( 1974 ) classic 2-step task which includes a comparative question followed by an estimation question. In contrast there is much less evidence for the claim that incidental environmental anchors can produce assimilative effects on judgments, such as the amount people are willing to pay for a meal being greater at a restaurant called Studio 97 compared to one called Studio 17 . Three studies are reported in which the basic incidental environmental anchoring method of Critcher and Gilovich ( 2008 ) is employed to measure consumer price estimations. No statistically significant evidence of incidental anchoring was obtained. In contrast, robust standard anchoring effects were found. The results suggest that anchoring is limited to situations which require explicit thinking about the anchor.

When individuals are exposed to their own image in a mirror, known to increase self-awareness, they may show increased accessibility of suicide-related words (a phenomenon labeled “the mirror effect”; Selimbegović & Chatard, 2013 ). We attempted to replicate this effect in a pre-registered study (N = 150). As in the original study, self-awareness was manipulated using a mirror and recognition latencies for accurately detecting suicide-related words, negative words, and neutral words in a lexical decision task were assessed. We found no evidence of the mirror effect in pre-registered analyses. A multiverse analysis revealed a significant mirror effect only when excluding extreme observations. An equivalence TOST test did not yield evidence for or against the mirror effect. Overall, the results suggest that the original effect was a false positive or that the conditions for obtaining it (in terms of statistical power and/or outlier detection method) are not yet fully understood. Implications for the mirror effect and recommendations for pre-registered replications are discussed.

We tested the pre-registered hypotheses that receiving threatening health feedback would lead participants to disparage the health-assessment tool used to generate it and that quality of the assessment would moderate this effect. In Studies 1–3, undergraduate students completed a questionnaire including both unambiguous and ambiguous health-assessment items and were randomly assigned to receive either negative health feedback or no feedback. In Study 4, participants were randomly assigned to a control condition or to one of two experimental conditions that entailed receiving negative feedback about enduring or fleeting consequences of their health behaviors. Across all studies, contrary to our predictions, there were no significant effects of feedback on participants’ ratings of the accuracy of the assessment procedures. These findings have implications for understanding the specific conditions under which people disparage sources of threatening feedback in the domain of health.

Parenting behaviors and decisions play an important role in determining children’s early environment. Are these behaviors driven by an intuitive theory of parenting – a coherent set of beliefs about child development and parent-child relationships? In exploratory work, we asked adults on Amazon Mechanical Turk to endorse a set of propositions about parenting and conducted exploratory factor analyses of their responses. Three distinct factors appeared in responses: an Affection and Attachment factor, an Early Learning factor, and a Rules and Respect factor. In an iterative process, we created a scale of items with subscales designed to measure these factors, which we call the Early Parenting Attitudes Questionnaire (EPAQ). We next conducted two studies with groups of parents (on Mechanical Turk and from the membership of a local museum) to estimate the validity of the new scale. We asked whether agreement with each subscale varied based on demographic factors and whether intuitive theories predicted self-reported parenting behaviors. The EPAQ provides an instrument to assess attitudes about parenting and child development, facilitating investigation of and intervention on parenting behaviors.

There is ample evidence that watching sports induces strong emotions that translate into manifold consequential behaviours. However, it is rather ill-understood how exactly spectators’ emotions unfold during soccer matches and what determines their intensity. To address these questions, we used the 2018 FIFA World Cup as a natural quasi-experiment to conduct a pre-registered study on spectators’ emotional experiences. Employing an app-based experience-sampling design, we tracked 251 German spectators during the tournament and assessed high-resolution changes in core affect (valence, activation) throughout soccer matches. Across the three German matches, multi-level models revealed that all spectators exhibited strong changes on both affective dimensions in response to Germany’s performance. Although fans experienced slightly more intense affect than non-fans, particularly during losses, this moderating effect was very small in comparison to the magnitude of the affective fluctuations that occurred independent of fan identity. Taken together, the findings suggest group emotions (collectively felt emotion irrespective of individual affiliation) rather than group-affiliation based emotions (individually felt emotion because of an affiliated group), as the dominant process underlying spectator affect during the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

Following the publication of our recent article in Collabra: Psychology [ https://www.collabra.org/articles/10.1525/collabra.185/ ] we wish to bring the following corrigendum to your attention.

When working towards goals, the length and frequency of goal pursuit sessions might play a role in individuals’ goal pursuit motivation. We examined whether a more divided (frequent, shorter sessions) or a cumulated (less frequent, longer sessions) goal pursuit schedule increases people’s motivation to work towards personal goals. Across two studies ( N = 448), the underlying reasons for pursuing the goal mattered. A divided schedule was more motivating than a cumulated schedule if participants reported highly autonomous reasons (pursuing a goal due to personal interest or values), but the difference was eliminated for those reporting low autonomous reasons. We discuss how perceiving time spent on goal activities as loss, reward, or investment may explain scheduling preferences and how these may map on to preferences for scheduling financial losses and rewards outlined by prospect theory.

Dishonesty is an intriguing phenomenon, studied extensively across various disciplines due to its impact on people’s lives as well as society in general. To examine dishonesty in a controlled setting, researchers have developed a number of experimental paradigms. One of the most popular approaches in this regard, is the matrix task, in which participants receive matrices wherein they have to find two numbers that sum to 10 (e.g., 4.81 and 5.19), under time pressure. In a next phase, participants need to report how many matrices they had solved correctly, allowing them the opportunity to cheat by exaggerating their performance in order to get a larger reward. Here, we argue, both on theoretical and empirical grounds, that the matrix task is ill-suited to study dishonest behavior, primarily because it conflates cheating with honest mistakes. We therefore recommend researchers to use different paradigms to examine dishonesty, and treat (previous) findings based on the matrix task with due caution.

The performance and well-being of university students is influenced by many factors, including self-control and affect regulation, but little is known about how these factors relate. We therefore analyzed data from a multi-site research project that assessed trait self-control, affect regulation, and anxiety in a longitudinal cohort design ( N = 1314) using structural equation modeling. We specifically tested hypotheses that trait self-control, assessed upon entering school, would predict anxiety outcomes during students’ third year, and this relationship would be mediated by affect regulation styles (adaptive or maladaptive). We found that greater self-control did predict lower third-year anxiety, even after accounting for anxiety levels upon entering school. Furthermore, this relationship was partially mediated by maladaptive affect regulation, where students with greater self-control endorsed less use of maladaptive coping strategies (e.g., denial, self-blame), which in turn predicted less subsequent anxiety. In contrast, adaptive coping strategies did not mediate the relationship between trait self-control and anxiety. These findings highlight trait self-control as an important predictor of anxiety, and they identify maladaptive affect regulation as a target for interventions to promote student well-being and success.