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This project examines people's lay beliefs about artificial intelligence technology that claims to recognize human's emotions.

Judgments are competent if they satisfy certain standards. Economists often view judgmental competence through the standard of rational self-interest. People’s failure to act in accordance with economic self-interest raises doubts whether people internalize this standard. We propose an alternative dual framework of judgmental competence, identifying reasonableness as a distinct and often prioritized standard, which emphasizes context-sensitive adjudication between self-protection and cooperation. According to our dual framework, both standards of self-interested rationality and socially-conscious reasonableness co-exist in the same culture and the same individual and can be activated based on situational demands. Evidence in support of the dual framework of judgmental competence comes from cultural-level analyses of implicit norms found in products and behavioral experiments (N = 5,830) involving economic dilemmas and everyday social transactions. Rational and reasonable standards involve distinct semantic networks in the world’s largest database of online news and TV sources such that rational choice is connected with protecting self-interest, whereas reasonable choice is connected to qualifying self-protective and moral choices by considering interpersonal and intertemporal contingencies. In experiments, selfish actions are viewed as more rational and fair actions are viewed as more reasonable. Rational persons are viewed as agentic but not communal, whereas reasonable persons are viewed as both agentic and communal. Thus, both standards entail competence but they differ in whether competent judgment is deployed exclusively for self-interested ends or balances self-interest with fairness. Moreover, based on situational demands both standards can be activated in the same individual to influence behavioral choices. The present research has implications for theory in economics and political sciences, as well as behavioral and social science models of judgment.

Neoclassical economists define rationality through choices that prioritize self-interest, whereas legal scholars define reasonableness through consideration of fairness and group norms. Have laypeople internalized either standard to guide their practical decision-making or are these distinctions merely of academic interest? Here, we explore folk standards of rationality and reasonableness, demonstrating a robust dissociation between expectations for rational and reasonable choice in seven experiments (N = 2,835) involving classic economic dilemmas and social transactions typical to daily life. Laypeople’s views for a rational choice are consistent with the idea of protecting self-interests. However, this rational choice deviates from their view of the reasonable choice. Moreover, a reasonable agent is preferred to represent opponent’s interests, whereas a rational agent is preferred to represent personal interests. We conclude that folk concept of rationality aligns with the notion of self-serving choice, yet this concept is not the sole standard guiding intuitive decision-making.

When making product choices, consumers are confronted with trade-offs between different product attributes (e.g., price versus volume). More specifically, in the context of food choices, consumers often face a conflict between two goals, a long-term health goal and a short-term indulgent goal (Vohs et al. 2014). In this study, we test the hypothesis that repeated exposure to food choices may lead to the belief that health and taste in food cannot go together.

Judgments are competent if they satisfy certain standards. Economists often view judgmental competence through the standard of rational self-interest. People’s failure to act in accordance with economic self-interest raises doubts whether people internalize this standard. We propose an alternative dual framework of judgmental competence, identifying reasonableness as a distinct and often prioritized standard, which emphasizes context-sensitive adjudication between self-protection and cooperation. According to our dual framework, both standards of self-interested rationality and socially-conscious reasonableness co-exist in the same culture and the same individual and can be activated based on situational demands. Evidence in support of the dual framework of judgmental competence comes from cultural-level analyses of implicit norms found in products and behavioral experiments (N = 5,830) involving economic dilemmas and everyday social transactions. Rational and reasonable standards involve distinct semantic networks in the world’s largest database of online news and TV sources such that rational choice is connected with protecting self-interest, whereas reasonable choice is connected to qualifying self-protective and moral choices by considering interpersonal and intertemporal contingencies. In experiments, selfish actions are viewed as more rational and fair actions are viewed as more reasonable. Rational persons are viewed as agentic but not communal, whereas reasonable persons are viewed as both agentic and communal. Thus, both standards entail competence but they differ in whether competent judgment is deployed exclusively for self-interested ends or balances self-interest with fairness. Moreover, based on situational demands both standards can be activated in the same individual to influence behavioral choices. The present research has implications for theory in economics and political sciences, as well as behavioral and social science models of judgment.

The current pre-registration aims to register our hypothesis, study methods, procedure and data analysis plan prior to conducting data collection.

This study aims to explore the ameliorative effects of deliberative democracy beliefs on the derogation of opponents on public issues in the wake of affective polarization. Both surveys and automatic text analysis will be implemented to test our hypothesis.

Manufacturers increasingly adopt health symbols, which translate overall product healthiness into a single symbol, to communicate about the overall healthiness of their grocery products. This study examines how the performance implications of adding a front-of-pack health symbol to a product vary across products. We study the sales impact of a government-supported health symbol program in 29 packaged categories, using over four years of scanner data. The results indicate that health symbols are most impactful when they positively disconfirm pre-existing beliefs that a product is not among the healthiest products within the category. More specifically, we find that health symbols are more effective for (i) products with a front-of-pack taste claim, (ii) lower priced products, and (iii) private label products. Furthermore, these results are more pronounced in healthier categories than in unhealthier categories. Our findings imply that health symbols can help overcome lay beliefs among consumers regarding a product’s overall healthiness. As such, adding a health symbol provides easy-to-process information about product healthiness for the consumer and can increase product sales for the manufacturer. ispartof: Journal Of The Academy Of Marketing Science vol:50 issue:1 pages:108-130 status: published

This article synthesizes recent findings on antecedents of healthy eating. We discuss consumer-related and environment-related forces that influence consumers’ healthy food choices and emphasize the duality of these forces so that they can facilitate but also prevent healthy eating. Specifically, our review documents how consumer lay beliefs, goals, and habits shape eating patterns. We further document the impact of environment-related forces on healthy consumption—focusing on intervention strategies and environmental changes (i.e., the trend towards online retail channels). Finally, we discuss three salient tensions (i.e., an innate craving for unhealthy food, a focus on single decisions, and a selective focus on self-control dilemmas) that emerge when taking a holistic view on existing research.

Background In the Middle East region, the incidence of breast cancer (BC) has substantially increased in the last years. Despite a considerable body of research about BC in Arab countries, how illness perceptions of healthy women about BC may influence risk perception is unknown. Methods A cross-sectional survey was conducted on a sample of 298 young Emirati women. The measures included demographic information, illness perceptions, and risk perception. Descriptive and correlational analyses were performed to assess illness perceptions about BC, perceived individual risk and comparative risk. A structural equation modelling (S.E.M.) was built to investigate the relationship between illness perceptions and perceived individual risk. Results Participants reported negative illness perceptions about BC The individual risk perception and the compared risk perception for BC were low. Participants with a family history of BC reported more negative illness and higher risk perceptions. The relationship between illness perceptions and perceived individual risk was significant and mediated by compared risk. The S.E.M. explained 55.9% of the variance in predicting perceived individual risk for BC. Conclusion Women's views of BC are important factors in risk perception and may provide culturally sensitive clues to promote early screening for BC in Arab countries. This may be important for policymakers to design intervention strategies to lower health risks, considering the different ways in which women perceive their risks for BC.

COVID-19 and its countermeasures have negatively impacted the mental health of populations worldwide. The current paper considers whether the rising incidence of psychiatric symptoms during the pandemic may affect lay beliefs about the cause and course of mental illness. Laypeople’s causal attributions and expectations regarding the trajectory of mental illness have important implications for societal stigma and therapeutic orientations. Two online experimental studies investigated whether reading about fictional cases of mental illness that were explicitly situated during the COVID-19 pandemic, compared with reading about the same cases without any pandemic-related contextualisation, affected attributions and expectations about Generalised Anxiety Disorder (Study 1) and Major Depressive Disorder (Study 2). Study 1 (n = 137) results showed that highlighting the onset of anxiety symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic weakened attributions to biological causes and reduced the anticipated duration of symptoms. However, Study 2 (n = 129) revealed no effects of COVID-19 contextualisation on beliefs about the cause or course of depression. The research provides preliminary evidence that the increased incidence of mental illness during the pandemic may reshape public beliefs about certain mental illnesses. Given the importance of public understandings for the lived experience of mentally unwell persons in society, further evidence of the range and extent of the pandemic’s effects on lay beliefs is important to inform clinical, public health and stigma-reduction initiatives.

Is this food healthy? Understanding how individuals evaluate food healthiness is important because their evaluation can affect their food choices and consumption quantities, potentially leading to obesity and other health problems. However, individuals often find it difficult to process the health information to evaluate food healthiness, so they rely on their intuition or lay beliefs to make the judgment. This article reviews recent empirical findings to highlight how individuals use lay beliefs based on sensory cues (e.g., visual, taste) and cognitive cues (e.g., nutrition label, price) to infer food healthiness and how this perception of food healthiness affects their food consumption. We conclude by discussing possible future opportunities in lay beliefs and food perception. Ministry of Education (MOE) This work was supported by the Tier 1 Grant (RG41/21) funded by the Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE), awarded to Elaine Chan.

Public health messages within Western cultures often convey that achieving and maintaining a normal weight is centrally important for health. The extent to which lay people internalise this “weight-focused approach to health” is likely to have important implications for a range of outcomes, including people’s engagement with health behaviours, the types of health-related goals that people set for themselves, and how people evaluate the health of themselves and others. Thus, the primary aim of this program of research was to investigate lay people’s beliefs regarding the relationship between weight and health. The first series of studies examined perceptions of the health of target individuals with overweight or obesity. Studies 1 and 2 showed that, although both overweight and obesity were generally viewed as harmful to health, the perceived harmfulness of overweight was influenced by the target’s level of engagement with health behaviours. Studies 3 and 4 found that the perceived harmfulness of overweight (but not obesity) was lessened when the weight was described as being caused by a medical condition, rather than by unhealthy behaviours. Finally, Study 5 found that participants viewed substantial, but not modest, weight loss as benefitting the health of obese targets. The second series of studies (Studies 6 - 8) examined how lay endorsement of the weight-focused approach to health and the alternative weight-neutral approach to health (which emphasises health behaviours over weight management) were related to participants’ own intentions to engage in health-related behaviours, self-esteem, and body satisfaction. Whereas weight-focused beliefs were associated with a mix of positive and negative health outcomes, weight-neutral beliefs consistently predicted stronger intentions to engage in healthy behaviours, higher self-esteem, and greater body satisfaction. The results of this thesis suggest that lay theories about weight largely align with public health messages (i.e., “excess weight is harmful,” “weight loss is beneficial”), but that adopting a weight-focused approach may not be beneficial for physical or mental health. One implication of this research is that future public health campaigns may be more effective by reducing their focus on weight and instead encouraging all individuals to engage in healthy behaviours regardless of their weight.

Only recently research in social psychology has started to systematically investigate intergroup attitudes among members of stigmatized minority groups. In particular, the study of the way people with mental health problems perceive the social groups around them is so far very scarce. In this work, we focused on people with schizophrenia, analyzing their attitudes toward another stigmatized group, namely Black individuals. In Study 1, the attitudes toward White and Black people were assessed in a sample of respondents with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and in a sample of non-clinical individuals. Results showed the presence of less negative attitudes toward the minority outgroup (i.e., Black people) among the clinical sample. In Study 2, we aimed at investigating what members belonging to the majority group (i.e., White non-clinical people) believe about the attitudes toward Black people held by individuals with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. In general, results suggested a general awareness in lay persons that people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, as compared to people with no history of mental disorders, hold reduced negative attitudes toward Black individuals. Overall, these results may help to enrich our knowledge about social cognition among members of stigmatized groups in general and, more specifically, among individuals with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Highlights • Consistent patterns of sensory beliefs about pathogen detection exist • With people, sight & sound are believed the most used and effective senses • With food, sight, smell, & taste are believed the most used and effective senses • Beliefs also depend on the evaluation context (e.g., threat vs. other perception) • Patterns generally support prioritization of “safer” senses when identifying threat, Do you believe you can tell if people are sick with infectious diseases by looking at, listening to, or smelling them? Research on pathogen detection and avoidance suggests that perceivers respond with caution both to true signs of infection and to cues only heuristically associated with infection threat. But what do perceivers actually believe about the effectiveness and use of specific sensory modalities for infection detection? In several studies, participants reported perceptions of effectiveness and likelihood of using each of the major senses to identify infection threat in two types of targets: people and food. Results revealed prioritization of sight and sound with person targets and prioritization of sight and smell with food targets. These patterns appear consistent with the use of “safe senses” (avoidance of cues involving high perceived transmission risk). Beliefs about sensory use also varied depending on the specific feature being examined, with different patterns of sensory beliefs associated with evaluation of pathogenic danger than with evaluation of desirability and fit with normative standards. We discuss these lay beliefs in the context of recent calls for descriptive research in psychology as well as their implications for current and future work on the behavioral immune system., Graphical abstract Image, graphical abstract

ObjectiveThe present study aims to describe and compare causal attributions for type 1 diabetes (T1D) and type 2 diabetes (T2D) among affected and unaffected individuals and to investigate the relationships among attributions, attitudes, and beliefs.Research design and methodsAdults with no diabetes (N=458), T1D (N=192), or T2D (N=207) completed an online survey. Measures assessed diabetes conceptual knowledge, causal attributions for T1D and T2D, perceived control over diabetes onset, and favorability judgements of individuals affected by each type.ResultsResults indicate general agreement on causal attributions for T1D and T2D among all respondent groups, with some divergences by disease status. All respondents attributed both T1D and T2D to genetics, and genetic attributions were positively associated with favorability judgements of individuals with T2D, but not those with T1D.ConclusionsThis report sets the stage for investigations into how and why attributions for T1D and T2D differ and the implications of these differences including stigmatization of individuals with diabetes and diabetes-related self-concept. Additionally, this work can inform efforts towards clinical and public health education to prevent and optimize treatment of T1D and T2D.