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Stereotypes can exert a powerful influence on our interactions with others, potentially leading to prejudice when factual evidence is ignored. Here, we identify neuroanatomical and developmental factors that influence the real-time integration of stereotypes and factual evidence during live social interactions. The study uses precisely quantified communicative exchanges in a longitudinal cohort of seventeen-year-olds followed since infancy, testing their ability to moderate stereotype tendencies toward children as contrary evidence accumulates. Our results reveal that the impact of stereotypes on communicative behavior is linked to individual variation in the right anterior cingulate gyrus. In contrast, the ability to moderate stereotype tendencies is influenced by early-life exposure to social interactions, beyond the effects of familial environment and social experiences acquired later in life. These findings pinpoint a key brain structure underlying stereotype tendencies and suggest that early-life social experiences have lasting consequences on how individuals integrate factual evidence during interpersonal communication.

Face-to-face communication requires skills that go beyond core language abilities. In dialogue, we routinely make inferences beyond the literal meaning of utterances and distinguish between different speech acts based on, e.g., contextual cues. It is, however, not known whether such communicative skills potentially overlap with core language skills or other capacities, such as theory of mind (ToM). In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study we investigate these questions by capitalizing on individual variation in pragmatic skills in the general population. Based on behavioral data from 199 participants, we selected participants with higher vs. lower pragmatic skills for the fMRI study (N = 57). In the scanner, participants listened to dialogues including a direct or an indirect target utterance. The paradigm allowed participants at the whole group level to (passively) distinguish indirect from direct speech acts, as evidenced by a robust activity difference between these speech acts in an extended language network including ToM areas. Individual differences in pragmatic skills modulated activation in two additional regions outside the core language regions (one cluster in the left lateral parietal cortex and intraparietal sulcus and one in the precuneus). The behavioral results indicate segregation of pragmatic skill from core language and ToM. In conclusion, contextualized and multimodal communication requires a set of interrelated pragmatic processes that are neurocognitively segregated: (1) from core language and (2) partly from ToM.

In this paper, we explored the scientific literacy of a general sample of the Slovak adult population and examined factors that might help or inhibit scientific reasoning, namely the content of the problems. In doing so, we also verified the assumption that when faced with real-life scientific problems, people do not necessarily apply decontextualized knowledge of methodological principles, but reason from the bottom up, i.e. by predominantly relying on heuristics based on what they already know or believe about the topic. One thousand and twelve adults completed three measures of scientific literacy (science knowledge, scientific reasoning, attitudes to science) and several other related constructs (numeracy, need for cognition, PISA tasks). In general, Slovak participants’ performance on scientific reasoning tasks was fairly low and dependent on the context in which the problems were presented—there was a 63% success rate for a version with concrete problems and a 56% success rate for the decontextualized version. The main contribution of this study is a modification and validation of the scientific reasoning scale using a large sample size, which allows for more thorough testing of all components of scientific literacy. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11191-021-00207-0.

IntroductionRisk perception is inevitably biased. For instance, the relationship between benefits and risks is likely to be inversed in the human mind, even though they are usually positively correlated in real-life environment. People tend to believe that beneficial activities and objects involve only low risks, and vice versa (Sunstein, 2002). Typical examples of this tendency are rather controversial topics, such as GMO, stem cell research, tuition payment, possession of handguns, euthanasia, abortions, vaccination or helping refugees. At the same time, such domains often represent major public health and policy issues since refusing child vaccination or engaging in xenophobic reactions are potentially dangerous tendencies.Thus, analyzing how people assess risks and benefits in such public-interest domains has highly important practical implications. Indeed, behavioral (e.g., Brewer et al., 2007; Renner & Reuter, 2012) and neuroscientific evidence (e.g., Chua et al., 2011; Falk, Berkman, Mann, Harrison, & Lieberman, 2010) on how worried or threatened people feel, predicts real-life behavior with severe consequences for both individuals and society.People often evaluate risks and benefits in complex domains, even though they lack the necessary competence, experience, information and time. They engage in heuristic reasoning, using mental shortcuts based on simple rules such as similarity of the cases or ease of example recall from memory (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). Employing these principles, they are able to make accurate judgments and decisions, but only in appropriate environments. However, heuristic reasoning can also lead to illusions and errors, especially when it crowds out more systematic thinking. Two of the many well-documented heuristic mechanisms of human reasoning are confirmation bias and credibility heuristic.Confirmation bias is a tendency to favor, seek, interpret, remember and recall information in a way that corresponds to prior expectations, beliefs or hypotheses of the reasoner (Nickerson, 1998). This is a substantial cognitive difficulty, since open-minded critical thinkers should be capable of decoupling their existing views and attitudes from systematic evaluation of arguments and evidence (Stanovich, West, & Toplak, 2013). Distorted information search, interpretation and recall due to confirmation bias have been suggested to explain several robust phenomena of human cognition, e.g. illusory correlation or belief persistence. Highly relevant consequences of this cognitive deviation range from biased evidenceevaluation of jurors to conservativism among scientists (Nickerson, 1998). Interestingly, susceptibility to confirmation bias is unrelated to intelligence (Stanovich et al., 2013).The concept of credibility has been defined in numerous ways: trustworthiness and attractiveness of a source of influence, its prestige, or the history of its previous accuracy (Nesler, Aguinis, Quigley, & Tedeschi, 1993). An important factor closely related to perceptions of trustworthiness, accuracy and validity, and judgments on credibility, is expertise (Hilligoss & Rieh, 2008). People rely on credibility of the source, especially when they lack prior attitudes toward the issues and knowledge about the phenomena (Kumkale, Albarracin, & Seignourel, 2010). Thus, a rule of thumb suggests: the more credible the source of an argument, the stronger the argument.According to recent studies, the use of particular heuristic principles in processing information on risks and benefits is also closely related to people's cultural worldviews.The Cultural Cognition Thesis of Risk PerceptionAccording to the cultural theory of risk (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1983), individuals form beliefs about risks and benefits in a way that reflects and reinforces their commitments to an idealized form of social order. According to their "group" and "grid" typology, people can be placed on a two-dimensional scale of individualism/communitarianism and hierarchism/egalitarianism, as depicted in Figure 1. …