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With the rapid spread of information via social media, individuals are prone to misinformation exposure that they may utilize when forming beliefs. Over five experiments (total N = 815 adults, recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk in the United States), we investigated whether people could ignore quantitative information when they judged for themselves that it was misreported. Participants recruited online viewed sets of values sampled from Gaussian distributions to estimate the underlying means. They attempted to ignore invalid information, which were outlier values inserted into the value sequences. Results indicated participants were able to detect outliers. Nevertheless, participants' estimates were still biased in the direction of the outlier, even when they were most certain that they detected invalid information. The addition of visual warning cues and different task scenarios did not fully eliminate systematic over- and underestimation. These findings suggest that individuals may incorporate invalid information they meant to ignore when forming beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We tested whether children growing up in the Dominican Republic (D.R.), a context with relatively high governmental corruption levels, would support versus distance themselves from widespread unethical practices like bribery. In Experiment 1 (moral judgments; n = 106), D.R. elementary schoolers and adults evaluated judges who accepted gifts from contestants before or after selecting contest winners and predicted whether bribe-taking judges would be secretive. Like adults, older-but not younger-D.R. elementary schoolers differentially condemned judges who accepted gifts before versus after picking contest winners. Unlike adults, children often predicted that judges would disclose receiving gifts. In Experiment 2 (moral behaviors; n = 44), D.R. elementary schoolers could secretly accept or reject a bribe in exchange for 1st place while judging a drawing contest. All but two children rejected the bribe. Together, these findings stand in contrast with U.S. bribery-related developmental trends (Reyes-Jaquez & Koenig, 2021, 2022) and support this contention: When growing up in a more morally heterogeneous context like the D.R., children eventually assume a critical and differentiated stance toward-and will resist or subvert-some of their culture's unethical practices. Greater exposure to a wide range of unethical transactions might hinder aspects of bribery-related moral development early on, depending on how these aspects are measured (moral judgment vs. behavior). Nevertheless, over time, such exposure may strengthen children's capacity to resist unethical cultural practices, indicated by children's overwhelming rejection of bribes. We discuss the importance of including diverse response modalities (verbal, behavioral) when measuring psychological constructs in non-Western societies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

People's concern with maintaining their individual reputation powerfully drives judgment and decision making. But humans also identify strongly with groups. Concerns about group-based reputation may similarly shape people's psychology, perhaps especially in contexts where shifts in group reputation can have strategic consequences. Do individuals allow their concern with their group's reputation to shape their reactions to even large-scale societal suffering versus benefits? Examining both affective responses and financially incentivized behavior of partisans in the United States, five preregistered experiments ( N = 7,534) demonstrate that group-based reputational incentives can weaken-and sometimes nearly eliminate-affective differentiation between present-term societal harms and benefits. This can occur even when these societal harms and benefits are substantial-including economic devastation and national security threats-and when the consequences impact ingroup members. Individuals' sensitivity to group-based reputation can even cause them to divert resources from more effective to less effective charities. We provide evidence that partisans care about group-based reputation in part because it holds strategic value, positioning their group to improve its standing vis-a-vis the outgroup. By allowing group-based reputational incentives to reduce their sensitivity to societal outcomes, partisans may play into the other side's cynical narratives about their disregard for human suffering, damaging bridges to cooperation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Background: Advance healthcare decision-making presumes that a prior treatment preference expressed with sufficient mental capacity ("T1 preference") should trump a contrary preference expressed after significant cognitive decline ("T2 preference"). This assumption is much debated in normative bioethics, but little is known about lay judgments in this domain. This study investigated participants' judgments about which preference should be followed, and whether these judgments differed depending on a first-person (deciding for one's future self) versus third-person (deciding for a friend or stranger) perspective., Methods: A vignette-based survey was conducted ( N  = 1445 US Americans; gender-balanced sample), in a 3 (relationship: self, best friend, stranger) × 2 (T1 preference: treat, do not treat) × 2 (T2 contrary preference: ambiguous, unambiguous) design., Results: Participants were more likely to defer to the incapacitated T2 preference of a third-party, while being more likely to insist on following their own T1 capacitated preference. Further, participants were more likely to conclude that others with substantial cognitive decline were still their "true selves," which correlated with increased deference to their T2 preferences., Conclusions: These findings add to the growing evidence that lay intuitions concerning the ethical entitlement to have decisions respected are not only a function of cognition, as would be expected under many traditional bioethical accounts, but also depend on the relationship of the decision to the decision-maker's true self.

Does believing that "effort doesn't pay" in society shape how people view dishonest-illegal transgressions? Across five studies, we show that when people view societal success as non-meritocratic-that is, more dependent on luck and circumstances than on hard work-they are more lenient in their moral judgements of dishonest-illegal transgressions. Perceiving society as non-meritocratic predicted greater justifiability of dishonest-illegal transgressions in the United States (Study 2), and across 42 countries (N = 49,574; Study 1). And inducing participants to view society as non-meritocratic increased justifiability of others' dishonest-illegal transgressions, via greater feelings of sympathy (Studies 3 and 4). Next, we investigated the contours of these effects. Perceiving societal success as non-meritocratic rather than based on hard work causes people to view dishonest-illegal transgressions as more justifiable if they are perpetrated by the poor, but not the rich (Study 4), and if the dishonest-illegal transgressions are related to economic striving, such as money laundering and dealing illegal drugs (Study 5). In sum, when people see a social system as unfair, they show greater tolerance for dishonest-illegal transgressions perpetrated to circumvent the system., (© 2024 The Authors. British Journal of Social Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Psychological Society.)

When thinking about possibility, one can consider both epistemic and deontic principles (i.e., physical possibility and permissibility). Cultural influences may lead individuals to weigh epistemic and deontic obligations differently; developing possibility conceptions are therefore positioned to be affected by cultural surroundings. Across two studies, 251 U.S. and Chinese 4-, 6-, and 8-year-olds sampled from major metropolitan areas in Texas and the Hubei, Sichuan, Gansu, and Guangdong Provinces judged the possibility of impossible, improbable, and ordinary events. Across cultures and ages, children judged ordinary events as possible and impossible events as impossible; cultural differences emerged in developing conceptions of improbable events. Whereas U.S. children became more likely to judge these events possible with age, Chinese children's judgments remained consistent with age: Chinese 4- to 8-year-olds judged these events to be possible ∼25% of the time. In Study 2, to test whether this difference was attributable to differential prioritization of epistemic versus deontic constraints, children also judged whether each event was an epistemic violation (i.e., required magic to happen) and a deontic violation (i.e., would result in someone getting in trouble). With age, epistemic judgments were increasingly predictive of possibility judgments for improbable events for U.S. children, and decreasingly so for Chinese children. Contrary to our predictions, deontic judgments were not predictive. We propose that cultural valuation of norms might shape children's developing intuitions about possibility. We discuss our findings in light of three accounts of possibility conceptions, suggesting ways to integrate cultural context into each., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest None., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The capacity to leverage information from others' opinions is a hallmark of human cognition. Consequently, past research has investigated how we learn from others' testimony. Yet a distinct form of social information- aggregated opinion -increasingly guides our judgments and decisions. We investigated how people learn from such information by conducting three experiments with participants recruited online within the United States ( N = 886) comparing the predictions of three computational models: a Bayesian solution to this problem that can be implemented by a simple strategy for combining proportions with prior beliefs, and two alternatives from epistemology and economics. Across all studies, we found the strongest concordance between participants' judgments and the predictions of the Bayesian model, though some participants' judgments were better captured by alternative strategies. These findings lay the groundwork for future research and show that people draw systematic inferences from aggregated opinion, often in line with a Bayesian solution.

Political misinformation poses a major threat to democracies worldwide, often inciting intense disputes between opposing political groups. Despite its central role for informed electorates and political decision making, little is known about how aware people are of whether they are right or wrong when distinguishing accurate political information from falsehood. Here, we investigate people's metacognitive insight into their own ability to detect political misinformation. We use data from a unique longitudinal study spanning 12 waves over 6 months that surveyed a representative U.S. sample (N = 1,191) on the most widely circulating political (mis)information online. Harnessing signal detection theory methods to model metacognition, we found that people from both the political left and the political right were aware of how well they distinguished accurate political information from falsehood across all news. However, this metacognitive insight was considerably lower for Republicans and conservatives-than for Democrats and liberals-when the information in question challenged their ideological commitments. That is, given their level of knowledge, Republicans' and conservatives' confidence was less likely to reflect the correctness of their truth judgments for true and false political statements that were at odds with their political views. These results reveal the intricate and systematic ways in which political preferences are linked to the accuracy with which people assess their own truth discernment. More broadly, by identifying a specific political asymmetry-for discordant relative to concordant news-our findings highlight the role of metacognition in perpetuating and exacerbating ideological divides. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Background: Despite the efforts of academic nursing educators to prepare students to make sound clinical judgments, the literature suggests new graduate nurse (NGN) competence with this critical skill continues to decline. This study sought to identify how practicing nurses describe their observations of the use and outcomes of clinical judgment by NGNs in nursing practice., Method: A multisite, cross-sectional survey using multiple-choice, Likert scale, and open response items to identify participants' observations of NGN clinical judgment was sent with snowball sampling and resulted in a sample of 314 participants from 19 U.S. states., Results: Practice partners identified a wide discrepancy between how they expect NGNs to use clinical judgment and what they actually see NGNs do, with resultant negative effects on patients and NGNs., Conclusion: These results provide a beginning understanding of NGNs' specific challenges with clinical judgment. Efforts to improve clinical judgment across nursing education and practice are needed. [ J Contin Educ Nurs. 2024;55(8):399-406.] .

Background: To prepare students for Next Generation National Council Licensure Examination-Registered Nurse (NCLEX-RN), nurse educators need to develop teaching strategies to foster students' clinical judgment., Purpose: This study examined the effects of unfolding case-based learning (CBL) on baccalaureate nursing students' clinical judgment upon graduation., Methods: A prospective cohort design was adopted. Students' self-reported responses to the Lasater Clinical Judgment Rubric were compared between the unfolding CBL (n = 140) and non-CBL (n = 126) cohorts at a school of nursing in the United States., Results: While students' responses were similar between the study cohorts, a trend was noted for improved clinical judgment among students in the unfolding CBL cohort. Furthermore, unfolding CBL significantly enhanced students' perceived proficiency in conducting focused observation., Conclusions: The findings support early introduction and consistent use of the unfolding CBL throughout the undergraduate nursing program so that students have ample opportunities and contexts to cultivate clinical judgment skills in the classroom., Competing Interests: The author declares no conflicts of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. All rights reserved.)

Background The Computer-Based Assessment for Sampling Personal Characteristics (CASPer) is a situational judgment test (SJT) that assesses noncognitive skills like professionalism, communication, and empathy. There are no reports of the effects of race/ethnicity and sex on CASPer scores among residency applicants. Objective We examined the effects of race/ethnicity, sex, and United States vs international medical school attendance on CASPer performance. Methods Our anesthesiology residency program required all applicants for the 2021-2022 Match cycle to complete an online video and text-based SJT (CASPer). We compared these results, reported as z-scores, with self-identified race/ethnicity, sex, United States vs international medical school attendance, and United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) Step 1 scores. Results Of the 1245 applicants who completed CASPer, 783 identified as male. The racial/ethnic distribution was 512 White, 412 Asian, 106 Black, 126 Hispanic, and 89 Other/No Answer. CASPer z-scores did not differ by sex. White candidates scored higher than Black (0.18 vs -0.57, P <.001) and Hispanic (0.18 vs -0.52, P <.001) candidates. Applicants attending US medical schools scored higher than those attending international medical schools (z-scores: 0.15 vs -0.68, P <.001). There was no correlation between CASPer z-scores and USMLE Step 1 scores. Conclusions Our results suggest that CASPer scores favor White applicants over Black and Hispanic ones and applicants attending US medical schools over those attending international medical schools.

This study examines whether engaging in science work and work that is substantively complex (e.g. requiring independent thought and judgment) is related to interest in science, science knowledge, and confidence in the scientific community in the United States. It also examines whether the conditions of work mediate the relationship between education and these science-related outcomes. Occupation-level data from O*NET are merged with survey data from the General Social Survey. Results indicate that science work is related to interest in science and science knowledge and that work complexity is related to confidence in the scientific community. Results offer only limited evidence of mediation-science work mediates the relationship between educational attainment and science knowledge but not the relationships involving interest or confidence. In sum, results indicate that the conditions of work are associated with science attitudes, and that researchers should examine these connections in future research.

Individuals unvaccinated against COVID-19 (C19) experienced prejudice and blame for the pandemic. Because people vastly overestimate C19 risks, we examined whether these negative judgements could be partially understood as a form of scapegoating (ie, blaming a group unfairly for an undesirable outcome) and whether political ideology (previously shown to shape risk perceptions in the USA) moderates scapegoating of the unvaccinated. We grounded our analyses in scapegoating literature and risk perception during C19. We obtained support for our speculations through two vignette-based studies conducted in the USA in early 2022. We varied the risk profiles (age, prior infection, comorbidities) and vaccination statuses of vignette characters (eg, vaccinated, vaccinated without recent boosters, unvaccinated, unvaccinated-recovered), while keeping all other information constant. We observed that people hold the unvaccinated (vs vaccinated) more responsible for negative pandemic outcomes and that political ideology moderated these effects: liberals (vs conservatives) were more likely to scapegoat the unvaccinated (vs vaccinated), even when presented with information challenging the culpability of the unvaccinated known at the time of data collection (eg, natural immunity, availability of vaccines, time since last vaccination). These findings support a scapegoating explanation for a specific group-based prejudice that emerged during the C19 pandemic. We encourage medical ethicists to examine the negative consequences of significant C19 risk overestimation among the public. The public needs accurate information about health issues. That may involve combating misinformation that overestimates and underestimates disease risk with similar vigilance to error., Competing Interests: Competing interests: None declared., (© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2024. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.)

Recruiters increasingly cybervet job applicants by checking their social media profiles. Theory (i.e., the political affiliation model, PAM) and research show that during cybervetting, recruiters are exposed to job-unrelated information such as political affiliation, which might trigger similarity-attraction effects and bias hireability judgments. However, as the PAM was developed in a more polarized two-party political system, it is pivotal to test and refine the PAM in a multiparty context. Therefore, we asked working professionals from the United States (two-party context, N = 266) and Germany (multiparty context, N = 747) to rate an applicant's hireability after cybervetting a LinkedIn profile that was manipulated in a between-subjects design (party affiliation by individuating information). Key tenets of the PAM could be transferred to multiparty contexts: The political similarity-attraction effect predicted hireability judgments beyond job-related individuating information, especially regarding organizational citizenship behavior. In addition, in a multiparty context, these biasing effects of political similarity and liking were not attenuated. Yet, there were also differences: In a multiparty context, political similarity had to be operationalized in terms of political value similarity and recruiters' political interest emerged as a significant moderator of the effects. So, this study refines the PAM by showing in multiparty contexts the importance of (a) a values-based perspective (instead of a behavioral political affiliation perspective) and (b) political interest (instead of identification). Accordingly, we provide a more nuanced understanding of when political affiliation similarity contributes to perceived overall similarity in affecting liking and hireability judgments in cybervetting. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Chinese and American children aged 5-11 years (total N = 144) heard two child informants make conflicting empirical claims about each of 4 scenarios. For example, one informant claimed that a ball would float when dropped in water whereas the other informant claimed that it would sink. Children were asked to judge whether each informant could be right, and to justify their overall judgment. In both samples, there was a change with age. Older children often said that each informant could be right whereas younger children, especially in China, were more likely to say that only one informant could be right. Nevertheless, in the wake of decisive empirical evidence (e.g., the ball was shown to sink when dropped in water), almost all children, irrespective of age, drew appropriate conclusions about which of the two informants had been right. Thus, with increasing age, children differ in their prospective - but not in their retrospective - appraisal of empirical disagreement. Absent decisive evidence, older children are more likely than younger children to suspend judgment by acknowledging that either of two conflicting claims could be right. We argue that children's tendency to suspend judgment is linked to their developing awareness of empirical uncertainty, as expressed both in the justifications they give when judging the disagreement and in their own beliefs about the scenarios. Implications for children's understanding of disagreement are discussed., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest We have no conflicts of interests to disclose., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Objectives: The clinical assessment of older adults' judgment is important for mitigating safety risks that often precipitate loss of independence. Our national survey of geriatric healthcare providers (N = 496; M years of experience = 17.11 ± 10.60) indicated that formal judgment tests are underutilized in clinical practice. We developed the Verbal Test of Practical Judgment (VPJ) as a new test of judgment for older adults intended to identify difficulty performing instrumental activities of daily living (IADL). Method: In two prospective studies, participants were long-term care facility residents (age ≥ 50) in Maryland, USA (Study 1, N = 51; Study 2, N = 110) referred to licensed psychologists for neuro-cognitive and mood evaluation by facility attending physicians. Psychometric analyses were performed to examine the construct validity of the VPJ. Results: The VPJ evidenced adequate reliability and strong construct validity across both studies. Receiver operating characteristic analysis yielded an optimal VPJ cut score for identifying impaired judgment. The VPJ significantly predicted IADL performance beyond clinician and participant ratings. Conclusion: The VPJ appears to be a valid tool for assessing judgment among older adults with suspected cognitive impairment. VPJ score inferences can inform clinicians on the odds of requiring assistance for specific IADLs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of a meta-analysis of 51 studies, Ditto et al. (this issue, p. 273) conclude that ideological bias is equivalent on the left and right of U.S. politics. In this commentary, we contend that this conclusion does not follow from the review and that Ditto and his colleagues are too quick to embrace a false equivalence between the liberal left and the conservative right. For one thing, the issues, procedures, and materials used in the studies reviewed by Ditto and his colleagues were selected for purposes other than the inspection of ideological asymmetries. Consequently, methodological choices made by researchers were systematically biased to avoid producing differences between liberals and conservatives. We also consider the broader implications of a normative analysis of judgment and decision making and demonstrate that the bias examined by Ditto and his colleagues is not, in fact, an irrational bias, and that it is incoherent to discuss bias in the absence of standards for assessing accuracy and consistency. Other conclusions about domain-general asymmetries in motivated social cognition have suggested that epistemic virtues are more prevalent among liberals than conservatives, and these conclusions are closer to the truth of the matter when it comes to current American politics. Finally, we question the notion that the research literature in psychology is necessarily characterized by liberal bias, as several authors have claimed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intent is a psychological quality that threat assessors view as a required step on a threatener's pathway to action. Recognizing the presence of intent in threatening language is therefore crucial to determining whether a threat is credible. Nevertheless, a 'lack of empirical guidance' (p. 326) is available concerning how violent intent is expressed linguistically. Using the subsystem of judgment in Appraisal analysis, this study compares realized with non-realized 'pledges to harm', revealing occasionally counterintuitive patterns of stancetaking by both author types – for example, that the non-realized texts are both prosodically more violent and more threatening, while the realized pledges are more ethically nuanced – which may begin to shed light on which attitudinal markers reliably correlate with an author's intention to do future harm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many domains of social life, people risk wrongly accusing an innocent person (i.e., false alarm error) or failing to catch a guilty person (i.e., miss error). Do liberals and conservatives differ in their concern about these types of errors? Across six studies, we found that conservatives were more bothered by miss errors than liberals, whereas liberals were more bothered by false alarm errors than conservatives. These associations were driven by social as opposed to economic ideology (Studies 1b-3b). Further, conservatives were more bothered by less threatening miss errors than liberals, but liberals and conservatives were equally bothered by clearly threatening miss errors (Studies 2a & 2b), suggesting that threat is a mechanism for the association between conservatism and miss concern. In Study 3a, social conservatism related to increased concern about miss errors when they occurred in authoritative contexts, but not when they occurred in authority-void contexts. In contrast, social liberalism related to increased concern about false alarm errors regardless of authoritative context. Studies 3a and 3b also demonstrated that belief in retributive justice, moralization of respect for authority, and threat sensitivity statistically mediated the association between social conservatism and miss concern, whereas moralization of fairness and egalitarian concerns mediated the association between social liberalism and false alarm concern. Together these studies provide a nuanced examination of the role of political ideology in responses to errors in determinations of guilt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American political parties continue to grow more polarized, but the extent of ideological polarization among the public is much less than the extent of perceived polarization (what the ideological gap is believed to be). Perceived polarization is concerning because of its link to interparty hostility, but it remains unclear what drives this phenomenon. We propose that a tendency for individuals to form broad generalizations about groups on the basis of inconsistent evidence may be partly responsible. We study this tendency by measuring the interpretation, endorsement, and recall of category-referring statements, also known as generics (e.g., "Democrats favor affirmative action"). In study 1 ( n = 417), perceived polarization was substantially greater than actual polarization. Further, participants endorsed generics as long as they were true more often of the target party (e.g., Democrats favor affirmative action) than of the opposing party (e.g., Republicans favor affirmative action), even when they believed such statements to be true for well below 50% of the relevant party. Study 2 ( n = 928) found that upon receiving information from political elites, people tended to recall these statements as generic, regardless of whether the original statement was generic or not. Study 3 ( n = 422) found that generic statements regarding new political information led to polarized judgments and did so more than nongeneric statements. Altogether, the data indicate a tendency toward holding mental representations of political claims that exaggerate party differences. These findings suggest that the use of generic language, common in everyday speech, enables inferential errors that exacerbate perceived polarization.

Face ensemble coding is the perceptual ability to create a quick and overall impression of a group of faces, triggering social and behavioral motivations towards other people (approaching friendly people or avoiding an angry mob). Cultural differences in this ability have been reported, such that Easterners are better at face ensemble coding than Westerners are. The underlying mechanism has been attributed to differences in processing styles, with Easterners allocating attention globally, and Westerners focusing on local parts. However, the remaining question is how such default attention mode is influenced by salient information during ensemble perception. We created visual displays that resembled a real-world social setting in which one individual in a crowd of different faces drew the viewer's attention while the viewer judged the overall emotion of the crowd. In each trial, one face in the crowd was highlighted by a salient cue, capturing spatial attention before the participants viewed the entire group. American participants' judgment of group emotion more strongly weighed the attended individual face than Korean participants, suggesting a greater influence of local information on global perception. Our results showed that different attentional modes between cultural groups modulate social-emotional processing underlying people's perceptions and attributions., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Background: Situational judgment tests (SJT) are hypothetical but realistic scenario-based assessments that allow residency programs to measure judgment and decision-making among future trainees. A surgery-specific SJT was created to identify highly valued competencies among residency applicants. We aim to demonstrate a stepwise process for validation of this assessment for applicant screening through exploration of two often-overlooked sources of validity evidence - relations with other variables and consequences., Methods: This was a prospective multi-institutional study involving 7 general surgery residency programs. All applicants completed the SurgSJT, a 32-item test aimed to measure 10 core competencies: adaptability, attention to detail, communication, dependability, feedback receptivity, integrity, professionalism, resilience, self-directed learning, and team orientation. Performance on the SJT was compared to application data, including race, ethnicity, gender, medical school, and USMLE scores. Medical school rankings were determined based on the 2022 U.S. News & World Report rankings., Results: In total, 1491 applicants across seven residency programs were invited to complete the SJT. Of these, 1454 (97.5%) candidates completed the assessment. Applicants were predominantly White (57.5%), Asian (21.6%), Hispanic (9.7%), Black (7.3%), and 52% female. A total of 208 medical schools were represented, majority were allopathic (87.1%) and located in United States (98.7%). Less than a quarter of applicants (22.8%; N=337) were from a top 25 school based on U.S. News & World Report rankings for primary care, surgery, or research. Average USMLE Step 1 score was 235 (SD 37) and Step 2 score was 250 (SD 29). Sex, race, ethnicity, and medical school ranking did not significantly impact performance on the SJT. There was no relationship between SJT score and USMLE scores and medical school rankings., Conclusions: We demonstrate the process of validity testing and importance of two specific sources of evidence-consequences and relations with other variables, in implementing future educational assessments., (Copyright © 2023 Association of Program Directors in Surgery. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Racism creates and sustains mental health disparities between Black and White Americans and the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing harassment directed at Black Americans has exacerbated these inequities. Yet, as the mental health needs of Black Americans rise, there is reason to believe the public paradoxically believes that psychopathology hurts Black individuals less than White individuals and these biased distress judgments affect beliefs about treatment needs. Four studies (two pre-registered) with participants from the American public and the field of mental health support this hypothesis. When presented with identical mental illnesses (e.g., depression, anxiety, schizophrenia), both laypeople and clinicians believed that psychopathology would be less distressing to Black relative to White individuals. These distress biases mediate downstream treatment judgments. Across numerous contexts, racially-biased judgments of psychological distress may negatively affect mental healthcare and social support for Black Americans., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2023 Kunstman et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

Background: Currently, there are no guidelines for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) tailored to the context of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Adaptation of guidelines accounts for contextual factors and becomes more efficient than de novo guideline development when relevant, good quality, and up-to-date guidelines are available. The objective of this study is to describe the methodology used for the adolopment of the 2021 American College of Rheumatology (ACR) guidelines for the treatment of RA in the KSA., Methods: We followed the 'Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation' (GRADE)-ADOLOPMENT methodology. The adolopment KSA panel included relevant stakeholders and leading contributors to the original guidelines. We developed a list of five adaptation-relevant prioritization criteria that the panelists applied to the original recommendations. We updated the original evidence profiles with newly published studies identified by the panelists. We constructed Evidence to Decision (EtD) tables including contextual information from the KSA setting. We used the PanelVoice function of GRADEPro Guideline Development Tool (GDT) to obtain the panel's judgments on the EtD criteria ahead of the panel meeting. Following the meeting, we used the PANELVIEW instrument to obtain the panel's evaluation of the process., Results: The KSA panel prioritized five recommendations, for which one evidence profile required updating. Out of five adoloped recommendations, two were modified in terms of direction, and one was modified in terms of certainty of the evidence. Criteria driving the modifications in direction were valuation of outcomes, balance of effects, cost, and acceptability. The mean score on the 7-point scale items of the PANELVIEW instrument had an average of 6.47 (SD = 0.18) across all items., Conclusion: The GRADE-ADOLOPMENT methodology proved to be efficient. The panel assessed the process and outcome positively. Engagement of stakeholders proved to be important for the success of this project., (© 2023. BioMed Central Ltd., part of Springer Nature.)

Contradicting our earlier claims of American moral exceptionalism, recent self-replication evidence from our laboratory indicates that implicit puritanism characterizes the judgments of people across cultures. Implicit cultural evolution may lag behind explicit change, such that differences between traditional and non-traditional cultures are greater at a deliberative than an intuitive level. Not too deep down, perhaps we are all implicit puritans.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an incurable, progressive deterioration that ends, eventually, in death. For many years, AD's hallmark etiological feature was beta-amyloid plaque accumulation in the brain, but, to date, costly drugs designed to reduce beta-amyloid levels offer only marginal clinical benefit and pose significant risk of harm. Thus, there is strong interest in finding alternative AD-modifying interventions, and, despite controversy, aducanumab-an antibody-recently received approval by the US Food and Drug Administration. This article considers how ethical issues in the care of patients with AD could influence, for better or worse, clinicians' judgment about whether and when to recommend aducanumab., (Copyright 2023 American Medical Association. All Rights Reserved.)

Play is critical for children's development but is the target of significant gender stereotyping. Early in life, parents must navigate these stereotypes on behalf of their children. This study examined typologies of caregivers' judgments toward their infants' future engagement with toys and activities considered typical of same- and different-gender peers, and whether these judgments indicated qualities of the child-rearing environment. We conducted a latent profile analysis on a sample of 501 families with infant children in a large city in the Western United States (501 mothers, 388 fathers; 69% White, 16% Latinx, 8% African American). Results showed that parents could be classified as androgynous, stereotyped, counterstereotyped, or gender-impartial in their preferences for their child's toys and activities. Mothers who displayed androgynous and counterstereotyped preferences-primarily conveying approval different-gender-typed play-were rated higher on objective assessments of the quality of the home environment and parent-child interactions. How parents orient to cultural gendered messages for children's play may have implications for the overall parenting environment. We discuss implications for research and practice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Complex assembly tasks with multiple manual operations and steps often require rapid judgment and action under time pressure and cause most human-related errors. The task switching and action transitions are major sources of these errors. This study intends to implement an electroencephalography (EEG) approach to quantitatively evaluate the mental workload during task switching and transition. The time-frequency and spectrum analysis were utilized to compute and reflect the task demand between the intervals of individual tasks. This study developed an experiment to validate the proposed assessment approach and benchmark the results with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration task load index (NASA-TLX) subjective evaluation scale analysis. The results show that the average value of the power spectral densities (PSDs) of the gamma band signal of the AF4 channel and the beta band signal of Channel F3 show distinctive signal patterns among task stages and intervals. During the interval between the idling stage and the part selection stage, the peak of the PSD envelope increased from 18 to 27 Hz, suggesting advanced cognition increases the mental workload of the interval between different tasks. Therefore, the task switching period cannot be regarded as rest and need to be optimized with better task organization., (© 2023. Springer Nature Limited.)

Abstract: The violence and death in Charlottesville on August 14, 2017 led to a national and even international barrage of condemnations of white supremacy along with condemnations of those who were slow to condemn. Why do we like to judge and condemn? And why do we do it with such passion and zeal? If the biblical gospel proclaims that we are justified before God by grace and not via self‐justification through condemnation, could we turn our attention more directly to those victimized by the conflict at hand? Specifically, could we listen to the voices of African Americans, Jews, America's Deep South, America's Southwest, and the disenfranchised white working class? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ebola was the most widely followed news story in the United States in October 2014. Here, we ask what members of the U.S. public learned about the disease, given the often chaotic media environment. Early in 2015, we surveyed a representative sample of 3,447 U.S. residents about their Ebola-related beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Where possible, we elicited judgments in terms sufficiently precise to allow comparing them to scientific estimates (e.g., the death toll to date and the probability of dying once ill). Respondents' judgments were generally consistent with one another, with scientific knowledge, and with their self-reported behavioral responses and policy preferences. Thus, by the time the threat appeared to have subsided in the United States, members of the public, as a whole, had seemingly mastered its basic contours. Moreover, they could express their beliefs in quantitative terms. Judgments of personal risk were weakly and inconsistently related to reported gender, age, education, income, or political ideology. Better educated and wealthier respondents saw population risks as lower; females saw them as higher. More politically conservative respondents saw Ebola as more transmissible and expressed less support for public health policies. In general, respondents supported providing 'honest, accurate information, even if that information worried people.' These results suggest the value of proactive communications designed to inform the lay public's decisions, thoughts, and emotions, and informed by concurrent surveys of their responses and needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rhetorical studies has long worried about its identity as a critical discipline and a practical art. Since the Great Recession of 2008, a myriad of social and political forces has provoked a discourse about the vitality of the liberal arts, which brings this identity crisis to the fore. Defenders of the liberal arts have deployed a negative critical stance, positing the liberal arts as external to liberalism as a public culture. This stance limits criticism’s political potential because it ignores the productive role of liberal cultural constraints in forming social bonds and creating self-understandings. As the liberal arts grapple with an evolving liberty to learn, so too might the rhetorical arts commit to the productive possibilities of simulation and judgment. This path would respond to the needs of students, who find themselves between structural constraints and contingent possibilities for change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite calls recognizing the need for culturally sensitive responses to minimize the occurrence of secondary victimization for African American women following an experience of sexual assault, few studies have focused on hearing from African American women survivors about their experiences receiving healthcare services in a hospital setting following sexual assault. Employing critical ethnography as our methodology and using intersectionality theory as a lens, we centered the voices of African American women survivors about their experiences receiving nursing care in urban acute care or hospital settings in the Upper Midwest of the United States following sexual assault. In this qualitative study, 30 African American women survivors were interviewed using in-depth, semi-structured interviews about their post-sexual assault care. Interviews were analyzed using thematic analysis. An important theme identified focused on survivors' experiences of dehumanization when receiving healthcare services following sexual assault. These experiences included: discrediting, dismissing, shaming, and blaming. To mitigate and prevent secondary victimization in the future, we present practice and education change recommendations for nurses, and healthcare providers more broadly, based on the voices of African American female survivors of sexual assault., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Purpose: We examined the grammaticality judgments of tense and agreement (T/A) structures by children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) within African American English (AAE). The children's judgments of T/A forms were also compared to their judgments of two control forms and, for some analyses, examined by surface form (i.e., overt, zero) and type of structure (i.e., BE, past tense, verbal - s )., Method: The judgments were from 91 AAE-speaking kindergartners (DLD = 34; typically developing = 57), elicited using items from the Rice/Wexler Test of Early Grammatical Impairment. The data were analyzed twice, once using General American English as the reference and A' scores and once using AAE as the reference and percentages of acceptability., Results: Although the groups differed using both metrics, the percentages of acceptability tied the DLD T/A deficit to judgments of the overt forms, while also revealing a general DLD weakness judging sentences that are ungrammatical in AAE. Judgments of the overt T/A forms by both groups correlated with their productions of these forms and their language test scores, and both groups showed structure-specific form preferences ("is": overt > zero vs. verbal - s : overt = zero)., Conclusion: The findings demonstrate the utility of grammaticality judgment tasks for revealing weaknesses in T/A within AAE-speaking children with DLD, while also calling for more studies using AAE as the dialect reference when designing stimuli and coding systems., Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.22534588.

Childfree individuals, who are also described as 'childless by choice' or 'voluntarily childless', have decided they do not want biological or adopted children. This is an important population to understand because its members have unique reproductive health and end-of-life needs, and they encounter challenges managing work-life balance and with stereotypes. Prior estimates of childfree adults' prevalence in the United States, their age of decision, and interpersonal warmth judgements have varied widely over time and by study design. To clarify these characteristics of the contemporary childfree population, we conduct a pre-registered direct replication of a recent population-representative study. All estimates concerning childfree adults replicate, boosting confidence in earlier conclusions that childfree people are numerous and decide early in life, and that parents exhibit strong in-group favoritism while childfree adults do not., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2023 Watling Neal, Neal. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

A social contract exists between medicine and society. In fulfilling the social contract to our patients and society, physicians have an obligation to provide the evidence-based care that patients want and need. What do the data regarding knowledge, judgment, and skills required to practice obstetrics and gynecology show? Obstetrics and gynecology job task analyses assess the importance of knowledge, judgment, and skills through surveys asking practicing physicians about the criticality and frequency of a variety of task statements to create an importance score. Excerpts from a 2018 practice analysis survey clearly indicate that reproductive health care and abortion are important components of the knowledge, judgment, and skills to practice obstetrics and gynecology in the United States. These standards help to assure the knowledge, judgment, and skills of current and future generations of ob-gyns, so their patients and the public can be provided the comprehensive reproductive health care they want and need. It is sometimes important to restate principles and standards that have become ingrained in thoughts and practices that guide physicians and serve to protect our patients. This concept is important now, as our country, health care professionals, and patients examine the future of reproductive health care, including abortion., Competing Interests: Financial Disclosure Susan M. Ramin reports that she is the Associate Executive Director and full-time employee of the ABOG and a non-voting member of the ABOG Board of Directors. She is also a volunteer member and the Secretary-Treasurer of the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) Board of Directors for which she receives a yearly honorarium. George A. Macones serves a volunteer member of the ABOG Board of Directors and is the President of the Board of Directors. The non-employee directors of ABOG receive a yearly honorarium for their time and effort to serve as directors. George D. Wendel disclosed that he is the Executive Director and full-time employee of the ABOG and Secretary and non-voting member of the ABOG Board of Directors. He is also a Member of the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) Board of Directors representing the ABOG and an ex-officio member of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) Review Committee for Obstetrics and Gynecology. The other authors did not report any potential conflicts of interest., (Copyright © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc.)

Introduction: Situational judgment tests have been adopted by medical schools to assess decision-making and ethical characteristics of applicants. These tests are hypothesized to positively affect diversity in admissions by serving as a noncognitive metric of evaluation. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the performance of the Computer-based Assessment for Sampling Personal Characteristics (CASPer) scores in relation to admissions interview evaluations., Methods: This was a cohort study of applicants interviewing at a public school of medicine in the southeastern United States in 2018 and 2019. Applicants took the CASPer test prior to their interview day. In-person interviews consisted of a traditional interview and multiple-mini-interview (MMI) stations. Between subjects, analyses were used to compare scores from traditional interviews, MMIs, and CASPer across race, ethnicity, and gender., Results: 1,237 applicants were interviewed (2018: n = 608; 2019: n = 629). Fifty-seven percent identified as female. Self-identified race/ethnicity included 758 White, 118 Black or African-American, 296 Asian, 20 Native American or Alaskan Native, 1 Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and 44 No response; 87 applicants identified as Hispanic. Black or African-American, Native American or Alaskan Native, and Hispanic applicants had significantly lower CASPer scores than other applicants. Statistically significant differences in CASPer percentiles were identified for gender and race; however, between subjects, comparisons were not significant., Conclusions: The CASPer test showed disparate scores across racial and ethnic groups in this cohort study and may not contribute to minimizing bias in medical school admissions., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2023 Gustafson et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

We examined how observers assess information-poor allegations of harm (e.g., "my word against yours" cases), in which the outcomes of procedurally fair investigations may favor the alleged perpetrator because the evidentiary standards are unmet. Yet this lack of evidence does not mean no harm occurred, and some observers may be charged with deciding whether the allegation is actionable within a collective. On the basis of theories of moral typecasting, procedural justice, and uncertainty management, we hypothesized that observers would be more likely to prioritize the victim's safety (vs. to prioritize due process for the perpetrator) and view the allegation as actionable when the victim-alleged perpetrator dyad members exhibit features that align with stereotypes of victims and perpetrators. We supported our hypothesis with four studies using various contexts, sources of perceived prototypicality, due-process prioritization, and samples (students from New Zealand, N s = 137 and 114; Mechanical Turk workers from the United States; N s = 260 and 336).

Gender disparity persists in the United States; women are still paid less than men and are also subject to discrimination in the workplace based on the fact that they may become mothers. Further, there is evidence to indicate that single mothers are judged more harshly than their married mother counterparts and single fathers. As a form of amelioration, some women self medicate with alcohol and according to the CDC), alcohol use disorder (AUD) is on the rise for women. Although there is research on gender disparity, the motherhood penalty, and AUD, there are no experiments testing socio-cognitive judgments on those combined factors and specifically examining what we term "the single motherhood penalty". Therefore, in two experiments using between-participants designs, participants rated a picture of a person (female or male) paired with a brief description where marital status (single or married) and type of ailment (alcohol or physical) was manipulated. In Experiment 1, a passive AUD manipulation did not show a clear single motherhood penalty. In Experiment 2, the results of an active AUD manipulation supported the predicted single motherhood penalty (Experiment 2a), but did not show an analogous single fatherhood penalty (Experiment 2 b). These findings are the first to offer empirical evidence that socio-cognitive judgments might perpetuate the interplay of the single motherhood penalty and AUD.

The ability to move upward in social class or economic position (i.e., social mobility) is a defining feature of the American Dream, yet recent public-opinion polls indicate that many Americans are losing confidence in the essential fairness of the system and their opportunities for financial advancement. In two studies, we examined Americans’ perceptions of both current levels of mobility in the United States and temporal trends in mobility, and we compared these perceptions with objective indicators to determine perceptual accuracy. Overall, participants underestimated current mobility and erroneously concluded that mobility has declined over the past four decades. These misperceptions were more pronounced among politically liberal participants than among politically moderate or conservative ones. These perception differences were accounted for by liberals’ relative dissatisfaction with the current social system, social hierarchies, and economic inequality. These findings have important implications for theories of political ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Three experiments demonstrate that in the context of U.S. foreign policy decision making, people infer informational quality from secrecy. In Experiment 1, people weighed secret information more heavily than public information when making recommendations about foreign political candidates. In Experiment 2, people judged information presented in documents ostensibly produced by the Department of State and the National Security Council as being of relatively higher quality when those documents were secret rather than public. Finally, in Experiment 3, people judged a National Security Council document as being of higher quality when presented as a secret document rather than a public document and evaluated others' decisions more favorably when those decisions were based on secret information. Discussion centers on the mediators, moderators, and broader implications of this secrecy heuristic in foreign policy contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many businesses operate long hours that often include nights and weekends to accommodate consumers. However, a few businesses maintain a closed-on-Sunday policy and do so while still operating successfully although closed-on-Sunday policies mean forgoing potential sales hours. As most Christian faiths consider the Sabbath as a day of rest, an oft-used rationalization for the success of businesses maintaining this policy is that they must be supported by consumers with strong religious beliefs, who appreciate the message sent by the company and as a result perceive the company favorably. The purpose of this paper was to investigate whether consumers' religious commitment influences their ethical judgment of a company's closed-on-Sunday policy and to determine whether this ethical judgment impacts a company's corporate or brand image and consumer loyalty intentions. The results suggest that consumers with higher levels of intra-personal religious commitment are more likely to hold favorable ethical judgments of closed-on-Sunday corporate policies. In addition, favorable ethical judgments of closed-on-Sunday corporate policies are likely to positively influence corporate image. A more positive corporate image ultimately results in higher consumer loyalty intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are obvious economic predictors of ability and willingness to invest in environmental sustainability. Yet, given that environmental decisions represent trade-offs between present sacrifices and uncertain future benefits, psychological factors may also play a role in country-level environmental behavior. Gott’s principle suggests that citizens may use perceptions of their country’s age to predict its future continuation, with longer pasts predicting longer futures. Using country- and individual-level analyses, we examined whether longer perceived pasts result in longer perceived futures, which in turn motivate concern for continued environmental quality. Study 1 found that older countries scored higher on an environmental performance index, even when the analysis controlled for country-level differences in gross domestic product and governance. Study 2 showed that when the United States was framed as an old country (vs. a young one), participants were willing to donate more money to an environmental organization. The findings suggest that framing a country as a long-standing entity may effectively prompt proenvironmental behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the realm of electoral politics, a growing number of women, African Americans, and Latinos now serve at the highest levels of government. For many Americans, the bipartisan presence of representatives who are people of color and/or women is proof that we live in a “post-feminist” and “postracial” era in which institutions are now fundamentally fair and accessible. Rather than assuming that racial presence is synonymous with racial justice, this essay turns to aesthetic theory to advocate for a new understanding of presence—not as proof that racial or gender justice has been achieved but as a kind of beauty that is experienced as a form of visible certitude. Drawing on the work of Hannah Pitkin, alongside writings on descriptive representation for Latinos and African Americans, this essay stresses the importance of judgment, arguing that on questions of social justice, a racially diverse elite is simultaneously ethically valuable and politically indeterminate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Discrimination is not only an objective fact but also a subjective judgment. While extensive research has studied discrimination as an objective fact, we study the judgment of discrimination and show that it is malleable while holding objective discrimination constant. We focus on a common situation in real life: the constituent groups in a candidate pool are unequal (e.g., fewer female candidates than male candidates for tech jobs), and observers (e.g., the public) see only one side of the decision outcome (e.g., only the hired applicants, not the rejected ones). Ten experiments reveal a framing effect: people judge the decision-maker (e.g., the tech firm) as more discriminatory against the minority in the candidate pool if people see the composition of the accepted candidates than if they see the composition of the rejected candidates, even though the information in the two frames is equivalent (i.e., knowing the information in one frame is sufficient to infer the information in the other). The framing effect occurs regardless of whether the decision-maker is objectively discriminatory, replicates across diverse samples (Americans, Asians, and Europeans) and types of discrimination (e.g., gender, race, political orientation), and has significant behavioral consequences. We theorize and show that the framing effect arises because, when judging discrimination, people overlook information that they could infer but is not explicitly given, and they expect equality in the composition of the constituent groups in their given frame. This research highlights the fallibility of judged discrimination and suggests interventions to reduce biases and increase accuracy.

Introduction: African American English (AAE) has never been examined through neurophysiological methods in investigations of dual-language variety processing. This study examines whether contrastive and non-contrastive morphosyntactic features in sentences with and without AAE constructions elicit differing neural and/or behavioral responses in bidialectal speakers of AAE and Mainstream American English (MAE), compared to monodialectal MAE speakers. We compared electroencephalographic (EEG) and behavioral (grammatical acceptability judgment) data to determine whether two dialects are processed similarly to distinct languages, as seen in studies of bilingual codeswitching where the P600 event related potential (ERP) has been elicited when processing a switch between language varieties., Methods: Bidialectal AAE-MAE speakers (n = 15) and monodialectal MAE speakers (n = 12) listened to sentences in four conditions, while EEG was recorded to evaluate time-locked brain responses to grammatical differences between sentence types. The maintained verb form in the present progressive tense sentences (e.g., The black cat lap/s the milk) was the morphosyntactic feature of interest for comparing P600 responses as an indicator of error detection. Following each trial, responses and reaction times to a grammatical acceptability judgment task were collected and compared., Results: Findings indicate distinct neurophysiological profiles between bidialectal and monodialectal speakers. Monodialectal speakers demonstrated a P600 response within 500-800ms following presentation of an AAE morphosyntax feature, indicating error detection; this response was not seen in the bidialectal group. Control sentences with non-contrasting grammar revealed no differences in ERP responses between groups. Behaviorally, bidialectal speakers showed greater acceptance of known dialectal variation and error (non-contrastive) sentence types compared to the monodialectal group., Conclusions: ERP and behavioral responses are presented as preliminary evidence of dual-language representation in bidialectal speakers. Increased consideration of AAE language processing would enhance equity in the study of language at large, improving the work of clinicians, researchers, educators and policymakers alike., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022. Published by Elsevier Inc.)

Theories of belief system structure and dynamics assume that belief systems are a person-level construct. However, measures of belief system structure do not measure the structure of person-level belief systems and instead measure aggregated belief system structure (e.g., the belief system in a particular country). In this paper, I show that a measure of conceptual similarity between attitudes and identities of a belief system works as a valid, reliable, flexible, and efficient measure of person-level belief system structure in the United States. In Studies 1 ( N = 387), 2 ( N = 389), and 3 ( N = 598), I show conceptual similarity judgments are reliable and are related to measures of political engagement, political knowledge, attitude consistency, and preference congruence as predicted by computational models of belief system dynamics. In Studies 4 ( N = 981) and 5 ( N = 983), I show that conceptual similarity judgments are affected by partisan frames and that changes in conceptual similarity judgments are associated with attitude change as predicted by computational models of belief system dynamics. Conceptual similarity judgments can be used with a variety of attitudes and identities in easy to administer studies. It provides a tool to fill an empirical gap identified by theories of belief system dynamics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).