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Perspectives on Psychological Science is a publication of the Association for Psychological Science.
Editor
Barbara A. Spellman University of Virginia School of Law
Associate Editors David A. Sbarra University of Arizona Bethany A. Teachman University of Virginia Special Associate Editors Alex O. Holcombe University of Sydney Alison Ledgerwood University of California, Davis Kristina R. Olson University of Washington Daniel J. Simons University of Illinois Advisory Editors
John T. Cacioppo University of Chicago
Robert W. Levenson University of California, Berkeley
Elizabeth F. Loftus University of California, Irvine
Walter Mischel Columbia University |
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Perspectives on Psychological Science
Volume 10, Number 3
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The links below take you to the journal via the APS website. If not already logged in, you will be redirected to log-in using your last name (Garcia) and Member ID (81665).
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Barbara Mellers, Eric Stone, Terry Murray, Angela Minster, Nick Rohrbaugh, Michael Bishop, Eva Chen, Joshua Baker, Yuan Hou, Michael Horowitz, Lyle Ungar, and Philip Tetlock
Research has shown that people often make poor probabilistic predictions about future events. To determine factors that result in optimal forecasting performance, researchers have taken advantage of a series of forecasting tournaments sponsored by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. An examination of the performance of participants in these tournaments has identified a group of people whose accuracy surpasses the rest. These players -- labeled superforecasters -- differ from more typical performers in cognitive abilities and styles, in task-specific skills, and in their levels of motivation and commitment to the tournament. This has led researchers to conclude that a mix of innate ability and smart operating procedures may lead to the development of super performance in probabilistic predictions.
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Jakob Pietschnig and Martin Voracek
The Flynn effect -- the gradual increase of IQ scores over time -- has been of great interest to psychological scientists and has led to much speculation about the origin of these gains. In a meta-analysis, 219 studies conducted between 1909 and 2013 were examined. Changes in full-scale, fluid, crystalized, and spatial IQ indicated that IQ gains vary by domain, are greater for adults than for children, and have slowed down in recent decades. The findings from this meta-analysis, make it possible to narrow the list of potential factors that account for the Flynn effect, identifying the contribution of biological, environmental, and hybrid factors -- such as life history speed and social multipliers -- to the increase of IQ over time.
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How Can Intergroup Interaction Be Bad If Intergroup Contact Is Good? Exploring and Reconciling an Apparent Paradox in the Science of Intergroup Relations
Cara C. MacInnis and Elizabeth Page-Gould
Studies of intergroup interaction (i.e., studies observing interactions among members of different groups) have found that these interactions produce increased anxiety and intergroup bias. Studies of intergroup contact (i.e., studies taking into account individual differences in the quality and quantity of intergroup social contact), however, have shown intergroup interactions that produce less anxiety and intergroup bias. An examination of the way these two types of social interactions (intergroup interaction and intergroup contact) are studied reveals several methodological differences that may account for these findings. A new model proposing that a threshold level of interaction is needed to reap the positive effects of intergroup social interaction provides a promising way to integrate findings from these two literatures.
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Rebecca A. Ferrer, Paige A. Green, and Lisa Feldman Barrett
Cancer control science brings together basic and applied research from the behavioral, population, and social sciences to try to reduce cancer risk and mortality and improve the quality of life for those with cancer. Although many of the cognitive, physical, and behavioral processes associated with cancer prevention and treatment involve some sort of emotional component, few affective researchers have examined these processes within the context of cancer research. Researching and understanding the affective processes influencing cancer prevention, detection, and treatment choices could help advance knowledge and improve practices in both the cancer prevention and the affective science fields.
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The Psychology of Home Environments: A Call for Research on Residential Space
Lindsay T. Graham, Samuel D. Gosling, and Christopher K. Travis
People in the United States spend more than 62 billion dollars per year on home decor, and home improvement television shows and magazines attract millions of faithful viewers and readers each year. Despite this interest in the home, very few psychological scientists have examined the role it plays in people's lives. A psychological examination of the home could help shed light on romantic partnerships and relationships, creation and maintenance of personal identities, processes involved in development, and differences in practices, values, and behaviors in different cultures. Preliminary findings from a study examining the types of ambiance people prefer in their living spaces hints at the interdisciplinary value of the topic.
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Buy the Book: Review of The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker
Barbara A. Spellman
When papers are submitted to Perspectives on Psychological Science, they are reviewed not just for their scientific quality but also for the quality of their writing. Part of that review is making sure that papers are simply and effectively written, so that anyone with a PhD in psychology is capable of understanding them. If you wish to produce similarly clear, well-written papers, here is one last tip: Read Steven Pinker's new book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
Barbara Spellman will speak in the invited symposium "Distributing Justice: What the Law Intends Versus What the Law Delivers" at the 27th APS Annual Convention in New York, NY, USA.
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 Special Section on Methods: Odds and Ends
During the last 5 years, Perspectives on Psychological Science (PPS) has published several special sections focused on improving research methods and strengthening psychological science. This special section, introduced by Editor Barbara A. Spellman, is an eclectic collection of articles that present new insights into the strength of our science or provide commentary on topics raised in past methodology-based special sections.
Why are some scientists tempted to use questionable research practices, fabricate data, or otherwise cheat in the pursuit of science? Engel explains this temptation -- and how we can reduce it -- using a standard economic model describing both the individual benefits to an investigator that can arise from scientific disintegrity and the potential costs to the investigator and to other scientists.
Not all types of replications are the same. Exact replications seek to directly repeat a past study, whereas critical replications seek to test alternative explanations of past findings. Larzelere, Cox, and Swindle argue that critical replications are especially important when replicating nonrandomized studies, showing how they can prevent the carryover of systematic biases from previous studies.
When conducting a replication, researchers often understand the importance of using a new sample of participants; however, they do not often recognize the importance of applying the same criteria to the stimuli used in the replication. Westfall, Judd, and Kenny discuss the influence of stimuli on the statistical power of a replication and the importance of using new or expanded stimulus sets to protect against the possibility of stimulus-specific effects.
In 2014, the first Registered Replication Report confirmed the much studied verbal overshadowing effect. Although researchers may be tempted to provide law enforcement with recommendations based on these results, Mickes and Wixted* argue that this is premature. They say that without knowing the false ID rate of participants -- something not studied in the replication -- it is difficult to know how verbal descriptions influence the probative value of participants' identifications.
In a 2014 article, Klatzky and Creswell suggested that priming effects may arise from shared perceptual pathways, associative chains, and inferential processes. If the influence of these pathways, chains, and processes is stochastic, then it is not surprising that priming effects are often not replicable. Schwartz suggests that social priming may be an example of a central system operation and explains how these types of phenomena should change the way we view replication failures.
Locke* argues that the field of behavioral priming is in need of theory building. Although there is a strong bias for deductive theory building within our discipline, he suggests that the use of inductive theory-building techniques may prove more fruitful. He provides several guidelines that can be used to create inductive theories and uses these guidelines to describe priming theory as it now stands.
*John Wixted will speak in the invited symposium "Threshold Recognition vs. Continuous Recognition in the Real World" and Edwin Locke will speak in the invited symposium "The Illusion of Determinism" at the 27th APS Annual Convention in New York, NY, USA.
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Perspectives on Psychological Science is a publication of the Association for Psychological Science. Please contact APS by email or by telephone at +1 202.293.9300 with questions or comments. Visit APS on the Web
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