To analyze the development and nature of essentialist beliefs about race in earlychildhood, we replicated Mandalaywala and colleagues’ original study on the topic, in which a “switched-at-birth” task was used to test participants’ beliefs about the heritability of skin color and behavioral/psychological traits. We accessed their data through OSF and implemented quasibinomial and linear regression models using RStudio. As an extension to the original study, models were modified to incorporate participant sex as a variable. Overall, children judged skin color to be more heritable when the race of the birth mother was white but neither participant race nor sex was a strong predictor of general beliefs about the heritability of skin color. As expected, greater outgroup exposure was associated with a decrease in racial essentialism. Additionally, we found that Black participants exhibited higher levels of racial essentialism, and both Black participants and female participants displayed greater warmth toward Blacks. Despite children viewing skin color as a highly heritable factor, they do not hold strong causal essentialist beliefs of race, and these beliefs are further affected by the level of outgroup exposure that participants experience. Upon extending this model to compare across participant sexes, the results suggest that emotion-based judgments such as warmth toward Blacks differ more greatly between sexes, while general essentialist beliefs were not as differentiable. Essentialist beliefs may form more on the basis of intellectual development, in which there is a minimal distinction between males and females, rather than emotional experiences. The reason for certain variations across participant sex is hard to pinpoint but all in all, sex was not a significant determining factor in developing essentialist beliefs about race in children.
The mental model theory (MMT) proposes that reasoners mentally construct iconic representations of the information they have processed (Johnson-Laird, 2020). This study focuses on the mental model theory to explore the effect of working memory on reasoning, how mental models are represented internally, and how these features of reasoning vary across developmental stages. We referred to Demiddele et al.’s (2019) methods as the foundation of our analysis of the mental model theory in schoolchildren. The main finding of this study was that when note-taking is available, participants spontaneously draw iconic representations of the information consistent with MMT. Their performances varied with and without notes, with participants generally scoring more points when they took notes. In our replication, we attempted to recreate the results of the original study through an in-depth analysis of the statistical models utilized that assessed the implications and the application of the mental model theory in schoolchildren. In our extension, we discovered that when taking into consideration the number of notes taken by the children working through the various problem types, the results yielded another perspective with regards to the mental model theory, essentially showing that note-taking for some problems was not beneficial. The trends also aligned with the original study when considering the groups that were allowed to take notes compared to those that weren't. The findings of this study will allow future researchers to build upon the mental model theory and apply it in other areas of study.
The self-congruity effect of music is the tendency of listeners to choose music based on how similar they are to the artist. The personality traits of both the artist and fan can be measured using the Big Five personality traits. Developed in the 1980s to group together personality traits, these traits include openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Openness describes an individual’s curiosity, conscientiousness describes being organized or dependable, extraversion describes a person’s inclination to seek stimulation from the outside world, agreeableness describes a person’s tendency to put others’ needs ahead of their own, and neuroticism describes being anxious or irritable. A 2021 study ran a series of three tests that measured the kind of musical preference, demographics, and perception the participants attained (Greenberg et al.). They concluded that there is statistical significance between the personality of an artist and those who self-identified as fans. The original research was reaffirmed through the programming language R. Further manipulation of the data allowed us to correlate the age of participants with the age of the band that most closely resembles their main personality traits. Furthermore, gender was another factor that displayed the self-congruity effect.
Declining cognition, physical health, and mental health are common yet major publichealth challenges. However, research connecting declining cognition and health to common social stressors is limited. This paper aims to replicate Lindert et al. (2021), who used the MIDUS data set, a national sample of non-institutionalized, English-speaking respondents aged 25-74 living throughout the United States, to investigate the decline in episodic memory and executive function with social stress variables. The subsequent extension of the original study seeks to predict various physical and mental health outcomes from different community trust variables. In both the replication and extension, multivariate linear regression models were used to analyze the effect of social stressors and trust on cognition and health. We replicated the results reported in the original study, which suggested greater levels of perceived inequality in the family, marital stress, lifetime discrimination, and daily discrimination were significantly associated with more cognitive decline. Additionally, we found that lower levels of trust in neighbors and friends, as well as having few trusting relationships, were significantly associated with worse physical and mental health in both men and women.
Analogical transfer, or the ability to use similar solutions to solve seemingly dissimilar problems, has been studied in children using tasks that require the support of long-term memory. However, the transfer of solutions that require the use of tools, or objects with certain functional parts, has not been studied in great depth. This paper replicates and extends upon data collected from a novel study that investigated the role of age and memory on analogical transfer across children who attend public preschools in southern Sweden (Bobrowicz et al., 2020). The purpose of this study was to integrate analogical transfer with functional tool-dependent problem solving and study how both skills develop in toddlerhood. The replication yielded similar results to the original experiment in all five hypotheses tested, with the main finding being that age is not a significant predictor of being able to display analogical transfer from task to task. As an extension to the variables examined in the study, two additional models were created to see whether spending more time with the functional tool or with the relevant apparatus leads to a greater percentage of successes in solving the test task, but there were no significant differences found in this model.
Intuitive metacognitive processes such as metaperception surprisingly have a lot moreinfluence on the intersectionality between interpersonal relations and health than one thinks. Of the many forms of metaperception, this paper aims to further explore the overblown implications effect (OIE), which is a prevalent metaperception error where one overestimates how much other people think of their successes or failures. We conducted a mixed ANOVA analysis and found further support for the statistically significant discrepancy between actors’ metaperception ratings and observers’ social perception ratings. For the extension, we continue to explore whether a longer rating duration for the actors would result in more accurate predictions of observers’ ratings compared to observers’ actual ratings by running a mixed ANOVA analysis. We hypothesized that increasing the rating duration would decrease the difference between the actors’ metaperception ratings and the observers’ social perception ratings, but our results show that there is no statistical significance between the two variables. However, it is important to note that we could not use the whole data provided due to statistical limitations. Hence, this makes it even more essential that future studies work with more representative samples to further understand the correlative factors that influence the OIE.
Previous research has documented that infants as young as six months have intuitions about affiliations regarding shared preferences as well as an understanding of homophily. Homophily ultimately influences friendships, marriages, hiring decisions — the interactions of everyday life. Moreover, understanding shared preferences is relevant to predicting human behavior, as well as guiding child development and socialization.The present study aims to (1) replicate earlier work proving the infants’ understanding of homophily and (2) extend our understanding of infant homophily in regards to characterizing the differences in homophily by sex. Both the replication and extension support the original study by proving the original theory that infants can recognize homophilic attractions. The extension, however, explores the roles that sex and test trial type play in homophily, which the original researchers did not observe. Ultimately, the extension provides preliminary evidence that there is a preference to affiliate with the same sex.
Previous research in moral psychology has shown that the willingness to protect a criminal an offender from punishment is influenced by emotional closeness to that offender (Weidman et al., 2020). Research has yet to examine cognitive mechanisms and the information considered whendeciding between protecting or reporting the offender. We replicated Experiment 2a of Berg Kitayama, & Kross (2021), which investigated how closeness to the offender and crime severity influence the willingness to protect the offender, as well as the attentional mechanisms informing that decision. Using Berg & colleagues’ (2021) data, we also explored whether familial vs. non-familial and romantic vs. non-romantic close relationships with the transgressorinfluenced the willingness to protect them. The findings from our replication of Experiment 2a revealed that people were (1) more likely to protect emotionally close transgressors than distant transgressors; (2) more likely to protect the transgressor for low severity than high severitycrimes, although the difference between willingness to protect close vs. distant transgressors for high severity crimes was larger than the difference of the willingness to protect a close (vs. distant) transgressor for a low severity crime; (3) paid more attention to details about the personwhen the transgressor was close to them but paid more attention to details about the crime when the offender was distant from them. Additional analysis revealed that familial vs. non-familial and romantic vs. non-romantic relationships with the transgressor predicted no significantdifferences in the willingness to protect them. Further investigation into situational or social factors that influence the link between relationship types and the willingness to protect the transgressor could help us gain greater insight into our behaviors when the expectations about the moral character of close loved ones are violated.
