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Replication Attempt

This project presents a conceptual replication of studies by Kunz (2000) and Kunz and Woolcott (1976). Both studies revealed that 20% of participants sent a return Christmas Card after receiving one from a complete stranger.

Previous research (Hopkins et al., 2016) suggests that the presentation of reductive information influences people’s ability to judge the quality of a scientific explanation. For instance, people who are presented with neuroscience jargon in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon judge those explanations more favorably than explanations without the jargon, even if that information is logically irrelevant. While previous research has demonstrated that these persuasive effects exist for a wide range of apolitical scientific topics (e.g., why bacteria protect certain squid from predators or why attentional blinks occur), it is unclear whether these effects also occur for politically-charged scientific issues (e.g., COVID-19). It is possible that the influence of logically-irrelevant reductive information may not influence people as strongly for scientific phenomena that have become polarized in the current political climate. It is also possible that the persuasive effects of reductive information may not be the same for all individuals. That is, given previous research demonstrating that political affiliation (i.e., Democrats/liberals vs. Republican/conservatives) significantly affects acceptance of scientific evidence, it is possible that the persuasive effects of reductive information may differ as a functional of political affiliation. Therefore, in the proposed study described below, we will ask the following two research questions: Question #1: Does reductive information have the same persuasive effect in the context of politically charged topics like COVID-19 as it does for apolitical scientific phenomena? Question #2: Do the persuasive effects of reductive information vary as a function of political affiliation?

Previous research (Hopkins et al., 2016) suggests that the presentation of reductive information influences people’s ability to judge the quality of a scientific explanation. For instance, people who are presented with neuroscience jargon in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon judge those explanations more favorably than explanations without the jargon, even if that information is logically irrelevant. In a previously pre-registered (osf.io/hvm8q) attempt to replicate and extend Hopkins et al. (2016), we were unable to replicate this basic reductive explanation effect across three scientific disciplines that were included in the original study (Psychology, Neuroscience, Biology). That is, participants in our study did not rate reductive explanations significantly higher than horizontal explanations in any of these three scientific disciplines, even though we used the same testing materials and procedure as Hopkins et al. (2016). One possible explanation for our inability to replicate the reductive allure effect observed by Hopkins et al. (2016) is that we employed a different participant pool. Specifically, we recruited our participants from Prolific.co, whereas Hopkins et al. recruited participants through Amazon Mechanical Turk. Thus, in order to rule out the different participant pools as the reason for the discrepant results, we will conduct an abbreviated replication of Hopkins et al. (2016) using only their original descriptions of psychological phenomena (the scientific discipline that showed the largest reductive explanation effect) with a participant pool selected from Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Objective: Road traffic injuries (RTI) cause ∼1.2 million deaths and 50 million injuries annually, disproportionately occurring in low- and middle-income countries. Although policy changes and infrastructural developments have continued to contribute to the decrease in RTI-related deaths, limited studies have investigated the relationship between motorcycle taxi driver behaviors and RTIs in Rwanda. This study aims to describe the safety behaviors of commercial motorcyclists in Kigali, Rwanda. Methods: We surveyed 609 commercial motorcyclists in January 2014 then conducted a cross-sectional analysis of the results, including descriptive and bivariate logistic regression analyses. Results: We found that 38.7% of surveyed motorcycle drivers experienced a crash during their lifetime, of which, more than half (n = 134, 56.8%) suffered injuries. Of all injuries, 38.8% (n = 52) resulted in hospitalization, and 14.2% (n = 19) in disability. Among motorcyclists, 100% reported always wearing a helmet, 99% reported always wearing a chin strap, and 98.8% reported always having a passenger helmet. There was an association between sustaining a crash and believing that helmets (p = 0.08) and chin straps (p = 0.05) reduced crash risk. Conclusions: Rwandan commercial motorcyclists demonstrate generally proper safety behaviors, but remain a high-risk occupational group. Road safety policy initiatives have been effective in changing driver behavior regardless of driver safety beliefs.

There is increasing evidence that automatic mental processes contribute to self-regulation failures such as eating high-fat foods despite being on a diet and getting trapped in old ways of thinking about problems that require a novel response. Mindfulness meditation, which was developed to overcome habitual patterns of the mind that contribute to human suffering, holds great promise as a strategy to improve self-regulation. This chapter examines the idea that mindfulness may facilitate self-regulation by influencing automatic processes and their relation with subsequent cognition and behavior. After beginning with a discussion of the functional value of automatic processes, the chapter continues with a review of how these processes contribute to self-regulation failure. Next, a theoretical discussion is presented concerning mindfulness and how it might moderate automatic processes. After presenting a review of research addressing this topic, the chapter concludes with suggestions for future work.