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During the past decade the idea that expertise is dead, or at best moribund, has become commonplace. Knowledge resistance appears to be growing more politicized and is increasing across a wide range of science-based topics, such as agriculture, evolution and genetics, vaccination, and climate change; even flat-earth beliefs are undergoing a renaissance. But in many of these areas, denying expert authority is cost-free in everyday behavior, making it more rational for people to prize identity and group affiliation over realism. To probe the health of expertise in a domain with everyday consequences for knowledge resistance, we conducted three incentive-compatible studies of laypeople’s preferences for sources of information they would read about specific medical conditions (e.g., heart disease, cancer, COVID-19). We found quite rational preference patterns, by which people preferred sources based on experts (physicians and scientists) over non-experts (celebrities and politicians) and group consensus (professional societies, polls) over individual opinions. These findings held most strongly for issues of personal medical concern, but were robust for less concerning health conditions, and for the highly politicized topic of COVID-19. Individuals who scored higher in intellectual humility and preferences for rational over experiential thinking were more likely to prefer the most expert sources. Expertise retains broad respect in the medical domain, at least when one’s own health is at stake.

This chapter discusses how differences in social class affect a variety of psychological processes and outcomes. In particular, it discusses how relatively higher class individuals are more likely to focus on the self—that is, emphasizing personal goals, feelings, and interests—compared to working-class individuals, who pay greater attention to the social context and their relationships with close others. In support of this claim, it discusses evidence of social class differences in values, neural processes, and higher level reasoning. It also explores the dynamic nature of the social class construct, looking at the difficulties people encounter when shifting to a relatively higher class and the historical trends that suggest global shifts in social class structure within societies. Taken together, these findings highlight the importance of understanding social class when looking at various psychological outcomes. At the same time, they challenge researchers to consider the complexity of social class when studying its effects.

Reports an error in "Wise reasoning benefits from emodiversity, irrespective of emotional intensity" by Igor Grossmann, Harrison Oakes and Henri C. Santos (

The first opportunities to field test interventions to increase COVID-19 vaccination were among health care workers (HCWs), who were among the first to be offered COVID-19 vaccines. After 1 large Pennsylvania health system sent 36 vaccine-related mass emails to employees over 5 weeks (eAppendix in Supplement 1), 9723 of 23 700 HCWs (41%) had still not scheduled their vaccination. We sought to determine whether individually addressed emails designed with behaviorally informed features1,2,3,4,5 could increase vaccination registration compared with a delayed control group.

How do intraindividual changes in wisdom-related characteristics of cognitive broadening—open-minded reflection on challenging situations, consideration of change, and epistemic humility—relate to subjective well-being over time? To test this relationship, we performed cross-lagged panel analyses from three waves of the national U.S. sample taken across 20 years, utilizing a cross-validation approach: (i) conduct exploratory analyses on a random subset of data, (ii) preregister hypotheses and methods, and (iii) cross-validate preregistered hypotheses on the other random subset of the data. We found that broadening attitudes predicted greater affect balance and life satisfaction in later years, but not vice-versa. The effect was robust when controlling for trait-level broadening well-being associations, as well as sociodemographic characteristics, openness, and general cognitive abilities. The direction of the positive longitudinal relationship between broadening attitudes and subjective well-being has implications for major existing theories of adult development and subjective well-being.

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 148(5) of Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (see record 2019-25114-002). In the original article, all references to Study 6 in the text and Table 5 should be omitted. The resulting corrections are included in the erratum. All versions of this article have been corrected.] The role of emotions in wise reasoning is not well understood. On the one hand, work on emotional regulation suggests that downregulating intense emotions may lead to wiser reasoning. On the other hand, emerging work suggests that recognizing and balancing emotions provides critical insights into life experiences, suggesting an alternative path to wiser reasoning. We present a series of observational, diary, and experimental studies (N = 3,678 participants) addressing these possibilities, examining how wisdom-related characteristics of reasoning-epistemic humility, recognition of a world in flux, self-transcendence, recognition of diverse perspectives on an issue, and search for integration of diverse perspectives/compromise-relate to emotional intensity and to emodiversity (i.e., emotional richness and evenness) in a given situation. Across 5 studies, testing wisdom nominees and examining individual differences and manipulated wise reasoning, wisdom-related characteristics appeared in conjunction with emodiversity, independent of downregulated emotional intensity. The positive association between emodiversity and wisdom-related characteristics occurred consistently for daily challenges, unresolved interpersonal conflicts, as well as political conflicts. The relationship between emotional intensity and wisdom-related characteristics was less systematic, with some studies showing a positive (rather than negative) association between emotional intensity and wisdom. Together, these results demonstrate that wise reasoning does not necessarily require uniform emotional downregulation. Instead, wise reasoning can also benefit from a rich and balanced emotional life. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The notion of individualism plays a central role for various domains of economics and moral and political philosophy, including liberalism, existentialism, and anarchism, among others. Individualism has also been the center of different lines of research in social sciences, including the exploration of dimensions defining cultural differences as well as the study of cohort effects (e.g., the individualistic focus of “hipsters,” “millennials,” or “baby boomers”). The present overview discusses how individualism informs individual psychology, along with the social, cognitive, and emotional processes impacting personal attitudes, values, and behavior. We also touch on how individualism has been changing over time and the macro-social factors contributing toward such changes.