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Publications in Psychology & Cognitive Sciences by NOMIS researchers

Binary climate data visuals amplify perceived impact of climate change

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

April 17, 2025

For much of the global population, climate change appears as a slow, gradual shift in daily weather. This leads many to perceive its impacts as minor and results in apathy (the ‘boiling frog’ effect). How can we convey the urgency of the crisis when its impacts appear so subtle? Here, through a series of large-scale cognitive experiments (N = 799), we find that presenting people with binary climate data (for example, lake freeze history) significantly increases the perceived impact of climate change (Cohen’s d = 0.40, 95% confidence interval 0.26–0.54) compared with continuous data (for example, mean temperature). Computational modelling and follow-up experiments (N = 398) suggest that binary data enhance perceived impact by creating an ‘illusion’ of sudden shifts. Crucially, our approach does not involve selective data presentation but rather compares different datasets that reflect equivalent trends in climate change over time. These findings, robustly replicated across multiple experiments, provide a cognitive basis for the ‘boiling frog’ effect and offer a psychologically grounded approach for policymakers and educators to improve climate change communication while maintaining scientific accuracy.

Research field(s)
Information & Communication Technologies, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Behavioral Science & Comparative Psychology

DOI
10.1038/s41562-025-02183-9

Belief in belief: Even atheists in secular countries show intuitive preferences favoring religious belief

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

March 27, 2025

We find evidence of belief in belief—intuitive preferences for religious belief over atheism, even among atheist participants—across eight comparatively secular countries. Religion is a cross-cultural human universal, yet explicit markers of religiosity have rapidly waned in large parts of the world in recent decades. We explored whether intuitive religious influence lingers, even among nonbelievers in largely secular societies. We adapted a classic experimental philosophy task to test for this intuitive belief in belief among people in eight comparatively nonreligious countries: Canada, China, Czechia, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam (total N = 3,804). Our analyses revealed strong evidence that 1) people intuitively favor religious belief over atheism and that 2) this pattern was not moderated by participants’ own self-reported atheism. Indeed, 3) even atheists in relatively secular societies intuitively prefer belief to atheism. These inferences were robust across different analytic strategies and across other measures of individual differences in religiosity and religious instruction. Although explicit religious belief has rapidly declined in these countries, it is possible that belief in belief may still persist. These results speak to the complex psychological and cultural dynamics of secularization.

Research field(s)
Philosophy & Theology, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences

DOI
10.1073/pnas.2404720122

Trust in scientists and their role in society across 68 countries

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

January 20, 2025

Science is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in scientists can help decision makers act on the basis of the best available evidence, especially during crises. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low public trust in scientists. We interrogated these concerns with a preregistered 68-country survey of 71,922 respondents and found that in most countries, most people trust scientists and agree that scientists should engage more in society and policymaking. We found variations between and within countries, which we explain with individual- and country-level variables, including political orientation. While there is no widespread lack of trust in scientists, we cannot discount the concern that lack of trust in scientists by even a small minority may affect considerations of scientific evidence in policymaking. These findings have implications for scientists and policymakers seeking to maintain and increase trust in scientists.

Research field(s)
Sociology, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Social Psychology

DOI
10.1038/s41562-024-02090-5

Perceptions of science, science communication, and climate change attitudes in 68 countries – the TISP dataset

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

January 20, 2025

Science is integral to society because it can inform individual, government, corporate, and civil society decision-making on issues such as public health, new technologies or climate change. Yet, public distrust and populist sentiment challenge the relationship between science and society. To help researchers analyse the science-society nexus across different geographical and cultural contexts, we undertook a cross-sectional population survey resulting in a dataset of 71,922 participants in 68 countries. The data were collected between November 2022 and August 2023 as part of the global Many Labs study “Trust in Science and Science-Related Populism” (TISP). The questionnaire contained comprehensive measures for individuals’ trust in scientists, science-related populist attitudes, perceptions of the role of science in society, science media use and communication behaviour, attitudes to climate change and support for environmental policies, personality traits, political and religious views and demographic characteristics. Here, we describe the dataset, survey materials and psychometric properties of key variables. We encourage researchers to use this unique dataset for global comparative analyses on public perceptions of science and its role in society and policy-making.

Research field(s)
Social Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Social Psychology, Public Health

DOI
10.1038/s41597-024-04100-7

Stochastic decisions support optimal foraging of volatile environments, and are disrupted by anxiety

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

January 9, 2025

Adolescence is a developmental period of relative volatility, where the individual experiences significant changes to their physical and social environment. The ability to adapt to the volatility of one’s surroundings is an important cognitive ability, particularly while foraging, a near-ubiquitous behaviour across the animal kingdom. As adolescents experience more volatility in their surroundings, we predicted that this age group would be more adept than adults at using exploration to adjust to volatility. We employed a foraging task with a well-validated computational model to characterise the mechanisms of exploration in volatile environments, preregistering the hypothesis that adolescents (aged 16–17; N = 91) would exhibit more optimal adaptation of their learning rate to changes in environmental volatility compared with adults (aged 24+; N = 90). However, surprisingly, both adolescents and adults exhibited suboptimal adjustment of their learning rate to environmental volatility. In contrast to the learning rate, it was instead participants’ stochasticity (i.e., decision variability) that better resembled the adjustment to volatility made by the optimal RL agent. Although heightened stochasticity in the volatile environment led participants to more often trial different responses that facilitated discovery of changes to the environment, we also found that anxiety impaired this adaptive ability. The finding of heightened stochasticity in volatile environments contradicts expectations that the learning rate is responsible for successful adaptation and motivates future work on the deleterious role that anxiety plays when adolescents manage periods of transition.

Research field(s)
Psychology & Cognitive Sciences

DOI
10.3758/s13415-024-01256-y

Biased expectations about future choice options predict sequential economic decisions

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

December 18, 2024

Considerable research has shown that people make biased decisions in “optimal stopping problems”, where options are encountered sequentially, and there is no opportunity to recall rejected options or to know upcoming options in advance (e.g. when flat hunting or choosing a spouse). Here, we used computational modelling to identify the mechanisms that best explain decision bias in the context of an especially realistic version of this problem: the full-information problem. We eliminated a number of factors as potential instigators of bias. Then, we examined sequence length and payoff scheme: two manipulations where an optimality model recommends adjusting the sampling rate. Here, participants were more reluctant to increase their sampling rates when it was optimal to do so, leading to increased undersampling bias. Our comparison of several computational models of bias demonstrates that many participants maintain these relatively low sampling rates because of suboptimally pessimistic expectations about the quality of future options (i.e. a mis-specified prior distribution). These results support a new theory about how humans solve full information problems. Understanding the causes of decision error could enhance how we conduct real world sequential searches for options, for example how online shopping or dating applications present options to users.

Research field(s)
Behavioral Science & Comparative Psychology

DOI
10.1038/s44271-024-00172-8

A leader I can(not) trust: understanding the path from epistemic trust to political leader choices via dogmatism

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

October 31, 2024

There is growing concern about the impact of declining political trust on democracies. Psychological research has introduced the concept of epistemic (mis)trust as a stable disposition acquired through development, which may influence our sociopolitical engagement. Given trust’s prominence in current politics, we examined the relationship between epistemic trust and people’s choices of (un)trustworthy political leaders. In two representative samples in the UK and US (N = 1096), we tested whether epistemic trust predicts political leader choices through three political dimensions: dogmatism, political trust, and ideology. Although epistemic trust did not directly predict choices of political leaders, it predicted dogmatism and political ideology, which in turn predicted choices of political leaders. A network analysis revealed that epistemic trust and political dimensions only interact through their common connection with dogmatism. These findings suggest that cognitive and affective development may underlie an individual’s political ideology and associated beliefs.

Research field(s)
Political Science & Public Administration, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences

DOI
10.1017/pls.2024.11

The Food Socioscope: A new instrument to better understand transitions towards greater sustainability

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

October 15, 2024

The Food Socioscope project aims to understand the systemic transition towards greater sustainability in the food sector. It has two main components: a participatory data collection with a community directory, and a comprehensive research effort. The first component builds a community of practitioners from various sectors (e.g., companies, NGOs, public authorities) who manage initiatives promoting food sustainability. This community, facilitated by the Food Socioscope Netboard, fosters knowledge exchange by publishing key characteristics of these initiatives online. The second component collects qualitative data through in-depth field interviews, site visits and videos with practitioners, following a rigorously tested protocol. This in-depth data, capturing activities from micro to macro levels, feeds into the research project to improve understanding of systemic change in food sustainability. The research spans the entire food supply chain and examines the supporting infrastructure and organizational setups. By analysing 600 initiatives, worldwide, within their broader contexts, the project aims to identify mechanisms of transition, including barriers and success factors. To collect, process and analyse its vast amount of qualitative data, in multiple languages, the project uses novel protocols, AI models, network analysis, and other quantitative methods. This paper presents the project and preliminary findings regarding regulation, the asymmetry of social contracts and the practitioners’ motivations.

Research field(s)
Sociology, Social Psychology

DOI
10.5281/zenodo.13935390

The Economics of Child Mental Health: Introducing the Causes and Consequences of Child Mental Health Special Issue

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

April 1, 2024

This special issue of the Journal of Human Resources showcases an emerging literature on the economics of child mental health. Until recently, the severe stigma associated with mental health issues meant that few people felt comfortable talking about them or realized how very prevalent they are (Bharadwaj, Pai, and Suziedelyte 2017). Arguably, this changed with the COVID-19 pandemic, which precipitated widespread discussions of a child and youth mental health crisis (United States Public Health Service, Office of the Surgeon General 2021).

Research field(s)
Economics, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences

DOI
10.3368/jhr.2023SI-intro-child-mental-health

Uncovering the potential of evaluative conditioning in shaping attitudes toward sustainable product packaging

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

March 14, 2024

Introduction: The necessity to promote pro-environmental behavior change in individuals and society is increasingly evident. This study aimed to investigate the effect of evaluative conditioning on consumers’ perception of product packaging.

Methods: We first produced two stimulus sets: one including images of supermarket products with different packaging and the other containing affective images of healthy nature (positive) and climate change impact (negative). These images were then paired in an evaluative conditioning experiment where respondents were informed about the impact of product packaging.

Results: We found an effect of conditioning depending on the initial sustainability perception that participants had toward product packaging. Pairing products for which participants were uncertain about their sustainability with negative or positive affective images had a significant effect on the sustainable associations of the consumers in a negative or positive direction, respectively. However, the impact of conditioning on products that clearly had (un)sustainable packaging was not that strong.

Discussion: These results provide new tools and evidence to further investigate the power of evaluative conditioning in pro-environmental attitude and behavior change.

Research field(s)
Psychology & Cognitive Sciences

DOI
10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1284422

Publish or perish: Simulating the impact of publication policies on science

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

February 26, 2024

Science can be viewed as a collective, epistemic endeavor. However, a variety of factors- such as the publish-or-perish culture, institutional incentives, and publishers who favor novel and positive findings- may challenge the ability of science to accurately aggregate information about the world. Evidence of the shortcomings in the current structure of science can be seen in the replication crisis that faces psychology and other disciplines. We analyze scientific publishing through the lens of cultural evolution, framing the scientific process as a multi-generational interplay between scientists and publishers in a multi-armed bandit setting. We examine the dynamics of this model through simulations, exploring the effect that different publication policies have on the accuracy of the published scientific record. Our findings highlight the need for replications and caution against behaviors that prioritize factors uncorrelated with result accuracy.

Research field(s)
Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences

Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

February 7, 2024

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions’ effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior—several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people’s initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors.

Research field(s)
Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Public Health

DOI
10.1126/sciadv.adj5778

From the Viscera to First Impressions: Phase-Dependent Cardio-Visual Signals Bias the Perceived Trustworthiness of Faces

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

November 2, 2023

When we see new people, we rapidly form first impressions. Whereas past research has focused on the role of morphological or emotional cues, we asked whether transient visceral states bias the impressions we form. Across three studies (N = 94 university students), we investigated how fluctuations of bodily states, driven by the interoceptive impact of cardiac signals, influence the perceived trustworthiness of faces. Participants less often chose faces presented in synchrony with their own cardiac systole as more trustworthy than faces presented out of synchrony. Participants also explicitly judged faces presented in synchrony with their cardiac systole as less trustworthy. Finally, the presentation of faces in synchrony with participants’ cardiac diastole did not modulate participants’ perceptions of the faces’ trustworthiness, suggesting that the systolic phase is necessary for such interoceptive effects. These findings highlight the role of phasic interoceptive information in the processing of social information and provide a mechanistic account of the role of visceroception for social perception. © The Author(s) 2022.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology

DOI
10.1177/09567976221131519

Delusion-Like Beliefs and Data Quality: Are Classic Cognitive Biases Artifacts of Carelessness?

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

August 1, 2023

There is widespread agreement that delusions in clinical populations and delusion-like beliefs in the general population are, in part, caused by cognitive biases. Much of the evidence comes from two influential tasks: the Beads Task and the Bias Against Disconfirmatory Evidence Task. However, research using these tasks has been hampered by conceptual and empirical inconsistencies. In an online study, we examined relationships between delusion-like beliefs in the general population and cognitive biases associated with these tasks. Our study had four key strengths: A new animated Beads Task designed to reduce task miscomprehension, several data-quality checks to identify careless responders, a large sample (n= 1,002), and a preregistered analysis plan. When analyzing the full sample, our results replicated classic relationships between cognitive biases and delusion-like beliefs. However, when we removed 82 careless participants from the analyses (8.2% of the sample) we found that many of these relationships were severely diminished and, in some cases, eliminated outright. These results suggest that some (but not all) seemingly well-established relationships between cognitive biases and delusion-like beliefs might be artifacts of careless responding. © 2023 American Psychological Association

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology

DOI
10.1037/abn0000844

Peripheral Visual Information Halves Attentional Choice Biases

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

July 20, 2023

A growing body of research has shown that simple choices involve the construction and comparison of values at the time of decision. These processes are modulated by attention in a way that leaves decision makers susceptible to attentional biases. Here, we studied the role of peripheral visual information on the choice process and on attentional choice biases. We used an eye-tracking experiment in which participants (N = 50 adults) made binary choices between food items that were displayed in marked screen “shelves” in two conditions: (a) where both items were displayed, and (b) where items were displayed only when participants fixated within their shelves. We found that removing the nonfixated option approximately doubled the size of the attentional biases. The results show that peripheral visual information is crucial in facilitating good decisions and suggest that individuals might be influenceable by settings in which only one item is shown at a time, such as e-commerce. © The Author(s) 2023.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology

DOI
10.1177/09567976231184878

Pluripotent stem cell-derived model of the post-implantation human embryo

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

June 27, 2023

The human embryo undergoes morphogenetic transformations following implantation into the uterus, but our knowledge of this crucial stage is limited by the inability to observe the embryo in vivo. Models of the embryo derived from stem cells are important tools for interrogating developmental events and tissue–tissue crosstalk during these stages 1. Here we establish a model of the human post-implantation embryo, a human embryoid, comprising embryonic and extraembryonic tissues. We combine two types of extraembryonic-like cell generated by overexpression of transcription factors with wild-type embryonic stem cells and promote their self-organization into structures that mimic several aspects of the post-implantation human embryo. These self-organized aggregates contain a pluripotent epiblast-like domain surrounded by extraembryonic-like tissues. Our functional studies demonstrate that the epiblast-like domain robustly differentiates into amnion, extraembryonic mesenchyme and primordial germ cell-like cells in response to bone morphogenetic protein cues. In addition, we identify an inhibitory role for SOX17 in the specification of anterior hypoblast-like cells 2. Modulation of the subpopulations in the hypoblast-like compartment demonstrates that extraembryonic-like cells influence epiblast-like domain differentiation, highlighting functional tissue–tissue crosstalk. In conclusion, we present a modular, tractable, integrated 3 model of the human embryo that will enable us to probe key questions of human post-implantation development, a critical window during which substantial numbers of pregnancies fail. © 2023, The Author(s).

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology

DOI
10.1038/s41586-023-06368-y

Explanations in the wild

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

May 3, 2023

Why do some explanations strike people as highly satisfying while others, seemingly equally accurate, satisfy them less? We asked laypeople to generate and rate thousands of open-ended explanations in response to ‘Why?’ questions spanning multiple domains, and analyzed the properties of these explanations to discover (1) what kinds of features are associated with greater explanation quality; (2) whether people can tell how good their explanations are; and (3) which cognitive traits predict the ability to generate good explanations. Our results support a pluralistic view of explanation, where satisfaction is best predicted by either functional or mechanistic content. Respondents were better able to judge how accurate their explanations were than how satisfying they were to others. Insight problem solving ability was the cognitive ability most strongly associated with the generation of satisfying explanations. © 2023 Elsevier B.V.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology

DOI
10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105464

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