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Objective. Weight gain was common during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, potentially creating a new descriptive norm about weight gain. The unique context of a global pandemic may have influenced situational attributions for weight gain that were not typical prior to the pandemic. We examined the effects of the new norm on people's views about responsibility and blame for weight gain. Methods. In two preregistered surveys, we aimed to manipulate the salience of weight gain during COVID-19, and measured views about responsibility and blame for weight gain. Results. Among participants who gained weight, the more common they perceived weight gain to be, the more they felt their own weight gain was understandable (b = 0.09, se = 0.04, p = 0.02), but perceived commonness didn't relate to their feelings of responsibility and blame for weight gain. For participants who didn't gain weight, the perceived commonness of weight gain was associated with less blame towards people who gained weight (b = 0.11, se= 1.46, p = 0.044), but not with responsibility for weight gain. Conclusion. Participants believed weight gain was common during COVID, but this descriptive norm had mixed associations with attributions for one's own and others' weight gain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children often infer that descriptive group norms (i.e., how a group is) are prescriptive (i.e., how group members "should be"), and this descriptive-to-prescriptive tendency, which biases children against non-conformity, declines with age. We tested whether this age-related decline diverged across different types of processing. Children (ages 4 to 13) were randomly assigned to one of two conditions in which they evaluated conforming and non-conforming individuals from novel and third-person groups. In one condition, children made fast judgments, and in the other, judgments were slow. Replicating past work, children were biased toward non-conformity, and this bias declined with age, through the rate of this decline was strongest among children who made fast judgments, suggesting that encouraging children to think slowly does not necessarily undermine their descriptive-to-prescriptive tendency.

The average prices of foods vary across cuisines but do these differences reflect the value people assign to different cuisines or how much they are willing to pay? Across four preregistered randomized experiments (total N=1,083), we manipulated the cuisine-of-origin (French, Thai) and authenticity (low, high) descriptions for analogous dishes across cuisines (e.g., two seafood stews: French bouillabaisse and Thai kaeng som) and restaurant review pages in Studies 2-4. Participants estimated the price in U.S. dollars (Studies 1-3) or indicated the price they would be willing to pay (Study 4). Although we did not find evidence of an authenticity effect, we observed large effects of cuisine-labeling, as dishes were estimated to be $4.47 more expensive (Studies 1-3) and participants reported being willing to pay an average of $3.83 more (Study 4) when the dish was labeled as French, rather than Thai. These findings suggest that the value assigned to different cuisines and the price that consumers are willing to pay are not based solely on objective attributes of the food, but instead may reflect and reinforce existing systemic disparities in the ways that cuisines are perceived and portrayed., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest None., (Copyright © 2025. Published by Elsevier Ltd.)