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Tag: Association for Psychological Science

  • Diversity Training for Police Officers: One-and-Done Efforts Aren’t Enough

    Diversity Training for Police Officers: One-and-Done Efforts Aren’t Enough

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    Newswise — What explains persistent racial disparities in policing, despite police departments’ repeated investments in bias-training programs? A wide range of data indicate that police in the United States tend to stop, arrest, injure, or kill more Black people than White people. Calvin K. Lai (Washington University in St. Louis) and Jaclyn A. Lisnek (University of Virginia) analyzed the effectiveness of a day-long implicit-bias-oriented diversity training session designed to increase U.S. police officers’ knowledge of bias, concerns about bias, and use of evidence-based strategies to mitigate bias. Their findings, recently published in Psychological Science, suggest that “diversity trainings as they are currently practiced are unlikely to change police behavior.” 

    Immediately after these trainings, police officers have strong intentions to use the strategies they’ve learned, explained Lai in a forthcoming interview on Under the Cortex, the APS podcast. But “one month later there wasn’t that kind of follow through.” 

    In 2020 and 2021, Lai and Lisnek evaluated 251 training sessions (in-person or remote) in which 24 different educators taught the Managing Bias program—developed by the Anti-Defamation League to reduce the influence of biases in the behaviors of police officers, improve the relationship between the community and the police, and increase safety—to different police departments with a history of Black–White racial disparities in policing. This day-long training consists of an interactive workshop, led by two educators, that uses activities to educate officers about the origins and differences between explicit and implicit bias, how biases may affect their behavior, and gaps in understanding between police and the community. After learning about biases, officers were trained on strategies and skills to reduce biased behavior.  

    Lai, a recipient of the APS 2023 Janet Taylor Spence Award for Early Career Contributions, and Lisnek surveyed police officers immediately before the training to establish a baseline, assessing knowledge and concern about bias, usage of strategies to manage bias, and characteristics relevant to police training (e.g., centrality of police identity, expectations of respect from community members). A second survey, administered immediately after the training, evaluated knowledge and concern about bias plus the intention to use the strategies to manage bias.  

    Results indicated that before the training, officers showed low understanding of and concern about bias, but the training immediately increased their knowledge and concern about bias. Right after the training, officers reported feeling empowered and motivated to use the strategies they learned to manage bias. However, another survey one month later found that officers’ concerns about bias had returned to pre-intervention levels and their use of these strategies had declined compared with their reported intentions immediately after training. Nevertheless, their general understanding of biases remained as high as immediately after the training. 

    Future research, Lai said, will attempt “to close that gap between officers really being motivated but not finding ways to follow through using some of these bias mitigation strategies.”  

    The researchers also identified characteristics of diversity training that might affect its efficacy. For instance, previous literature has suggested embedding such efforts with other organizational initiatives, having managers reinforce them, and evaluating expected behavior as a part of job performance. The training examined in this study was implemented and administered by an external organization. Adding booster sessions instead of a one-and-done training model could also increase effectiveness, Lai and Lisnek said.  

    Finally, the strategies taught could have had low applicability outside of a lab in real-world policing, another factor that can also undermine training effectiveness. “One of the things we’re finding is that there might not be these great one-size-fits-all solutions for combating bias at work,” said Lai. It may be necessary “to think very concretely and specifically” about the daily work activities where police officers may be inclined to discriminate—and then provide “super-tailored strategies” to mitigate those behaviors. 

    Journalists: email [email protected] for a copy of this research article.

    Reference  

    Lai, C. K., & Lisnek, J. A. (2023). The impact of implicit-bias-oriented diversity training on police officers’ beliefs, motivations, and actions. Psychological Science. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09567976221150617 

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  • Events Serve as “Stepping Stones” en Route to Retrieved Memories

    Events Serve as “Stepping Stones” en Route to Retrieved Memories

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    Newswise — “Dang it, I lost my keys!” 

    One solution to this frustratingly common scenario is to retrace your steps. This can be done by physically moving through the space where you suspect your elusive keychain is hiding or, as explored in recent research in Psychological Science, scanning your memory to find them. 

    Humans structure memories of these kinds of continuous experiences using event boundaries, according to lead author Sebastian Michelmann, who conducted this research with Uri Hasson and APS Fellow Kenneth A. Norman (Princeton University). 

    “Intuitively, we perceive structure in the form of events in continuous experience. A ‘restaurant visit’ and a ‘train ride’ are examples of such events,” Michelmann said in an interview. “When one event ends and another begins, people perceive an event boundary, and human observers agree substantially on the exact moments when an event boundary happens.” 

    Michelmann and colleagues’ research suggests that people use these event boundaries as “stepping stones” to scan their memories when attempting to recall certain facts or bits of information. In the case of the lost keys, he said, this might involve reaching back to the last moment you clearly remember having your keys—say, as you walked in the front door—before skipping ahead to a “phone call” event and then a “watching TV” event, at which point you might recall placing the keys next to the remote. 

    “When people search through continuous memories, they can do that slowly and thoroughly, but they can also skip ahead to the next event boundary when they decide that the answer that they are looking for is not in the current event,” Michelmann said. “Event boundaries are important access points for this skipping, which is why we refer to them as stepping stones in the memory search process.” 

    Michelmann, Hasson, and Norman examined this process through a series of three online studies in which participants were tasked with scanning their memories for details about two seven-minute abridged versions of the film Gravity.  

    In the first study, the researchers established event boundaries within each short film by having 104 participants press a button each time they perceived an event to have ended. As in previous research, the participants’ perceptions of event boundaries were highly consistent. 

    In the second study, 180 participants answered questions about the events in both short films. Each question started by identifying an anchor event in the film before asking the participant to recall information that occurred after this point. For example, “In the space station, we see little flames flying into the hallway. When is the next time we see fire?” The questions were designed to involve either a single isolated event or a specific number of event boundaries with a set run time. After being presented with the question, participants were instructed to click a “Respond” button as soon as they remembered the answer. 

    By comparing the actual run time of each event or set of events with how long it took participants to click the response button, Michelmann and colleagues determined that individuals were able to scan 1 second of an event in about 48 milliseconds. Participants scanned, on average, just 1.9 second of an event before skipping ahead to the next one if they did not find the information they were looking for. The researchers found their stepping-stones model of memory scanning, which accounts for the time at which the target information appears within an event and, consequently, the target’s distance to event boundaries, to be a better fit for participants’ responses than a model based only on the length of each event being scanned. 

    “The stepping-stones model predicts that the target’s distance to the previous event boundary makes a high relative contribution to [response times] because a low skipping threshold ensures that little time is spent within each event; the final event, however, is searched without skipping,” Michelmann and colleagues wrote. 

    The researchers further tested this model through a third study of 100 participants. This time, participants were asked to mentally simulate or “replay” everything that happened between two event boundaries in each film. Although participants still engaged in some amount of temporal compression, they took more time to review fully simulated events than participants did when looking for information, suggesting that we recall events with a higher skipping threshold when simulating versus scanning our memories. 

    “Search time can be explained using a model in which participants skip through all events except the last one, which needs to be played through in its entirety to find the sought-after memory that it contains,” Michelmann and colleagues wrote. 

    In future work, Michelmann would like to explore how schematic knowledge about information in our environment interacts with episodic memory to support recall of specific versus typical experiences. Remembering what a typical birthday party is like could support recall of specific details about an individual’s 30th birthday celebration, for example, but relying too much on these schemata could also cloud our memories of unique details, he said. 

    Reference 

    Michelmann, S., Hasson, U., & Norman, K. A. (2023). Evidence that event boundaries are access points for memory retrieval. Psychological Science. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976221128206 

    Journalists: Request a copy of this article by emailing [email protected]

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  • Similarities in Human and Chimpanzee Behavior Support Evolutionary Basis for Risk Taking

    Similarities in Human and Chimpanzee Behavior Support Evolutionary Basis for Risk Taking

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    Newswise — Many important decisions boil down to a choice between the supposed safety of sticking with what we know and the risk of going out on a limb for a chance at getting something even better. Though risk-taking preferences vary between individuals, research with humans points toward several key findings: Young people like to take more risks, males tend toward more risky behaviors than females, and we’re all generally less willing to take risks in situations with more ambiguous outcomes. 

    “Risk preference is central to human activity and has the potential to influence the entire course of our lives and therefore present wide-ranging consequences for society,” write Lou M. Haux (Max Planck Institute for Human Development) and colleagues Jan M. Engelmann (University of California, Berkeley), Ruben C. Arslan, APS Fellow Ralph Hertwig (Max Planck Institute for Human Development), and Esther Herrmann (University of Portsmouth) in research newly published in Psychological Science. “However, the evolutionary roots of human risk preference remain poorly understood.” 

    Research by Haux and colleagues suggests that these findings also apply to risk-taking in chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary ancestor in the animal kingdom, and that individual chimps’ risk preference is stable and trait-like across situations. 

    “It’s really fascinating because in humans it’s not clear if someone who is financially risk-taking would also do more risk-taking with something like bungee jumping,” Haux said in an interview. “Our study also suggests that risk preference has deeper evolutionary roots which should be taken into account.” 

    Haux and colleagues examined the risk-taking behavior of 86 chimpanzees living in sanctuaries in Uganda and Kenya, through a combination of behavioral experiments and observational reports from their human caregivers. The caregivers, who had known each chimpanzee for an average of 12 years in Uganda and 20 years in Kenya, reported on each animal’s specific behaviors and perceived comfort with risk. These behaviors included how frequently the chimpanzee engaged in risky foraging, interacted with snakes, escaped from their enclosure, and competed with other chimpanzees to increase their position in the hierarchy, along with their willingness to interact with strangers. 

    The chimpanzees’ caregiver ratings were found to correlate with one another. The strongest relationship was between foraging and general risk-taking preference; a weaker relationship was between the chimps’ tendency to escape and competing aimed at hierarchy climbing. 

    “Our results showed that chimpanzees’ willingness to take risks appears to manifest as a traitlike preference,” Haux and colleagues write. 

    One exception to this trend, however, was chimpanzees’ willingness to interact with strangers, which was found to be only weakly related to their other risk-taking behaviors. This supports previous findings suggesting that chimpanzees may process social risk differently than resource-related economic risks, the researchers write. 

    Fifty-five of the chimpanzees also completed a task that measured their preference for risky and ambiguous choices in an experimental setting. In each trial, they chose a ball from one of two urns. One urn was always safe because it contained two balls filled with one peanut each. In the risky condition, the second urn also contained two balls, but one was filled with two peanuts and the other with nothing. In the ambiguous condition, the balls in the second urn still contained two rewards or nothing, but the urn was entirely opaque, hiding its contents from view. This made it more difficult for the chimpanzees to infer probability information about the reward they would receive, Haux said. 

    On average, chimpanzees chose the risky urn over the safe urn 55% of the time but chose the ambiguous urn over the safe urn in just 25% of trials. This suggests that chimpanzees, like humans, prefer to avoid situations with ambiguous versus known risks, Haux and colleagues write. 

    This preference differed slightly with the chimpanzees’ sex, however. While males chose 55% of risky urns and 20% of ambiguous urns, females chose 50% of risky urns and 25% of ambiguous urns. Caregivers also rated male chimpanzees as having higher risk preferences, and young adult males’ experimental and observed risk-taking behavior was found to be higher than chimpanzees in other age groups. 

    “Structural similarities in risk preferences of humans and one of our closest living relatives are likely to reflect adaptations to similar dynamics in primate life histories,” Haux and colleagues write. While socialization experiences also influence human risk-taking preferences, the parallels between human and chimpanzee behavior suggest that evolutionary adaptions have helped set a consistent baseline, Haux said. 

    Future work should compare how the risk-taking preferences of chimpanzees living in sanctuaries may differ from those living in zoos or in the wild, as well as how they compare to those of bonobos, another close evolutionary relative of humans, she added. 

    “Bonobos have a different social structure, so for a complete reconstruction of our last common ancestor it would also be essential to look at bonobos,” Haux said. 

    Reference: Haux, L. M., Engelmann, J. M., Arslan, R. C., Hertwig, R., Herrmann, E. (2022) Chimpanzee and human risk preferences show key similarities. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976221140326 

    Journalists: Request a copy of this research article by emailing ne[email protected] 

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  • Empathizing With the Opposition May Make You More Politically Persuasive 

    Empathizing With the Opposition May Make You More Politically Persuasive 

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    Newswise — Trying to understand people we disagree with can feel like an effort hardly worth making, particularly in contentious political environments in which offering even the smallest olive branch to the opposition can be perceived as betraying our own side. Research in Psychological Science, however, suggests that cross-partisan empathy may actually make our political arguments more persuasive, rather than softening our convictions. This holds true for even the most politically partisan among us. 

    “Empathizing across differences can not only help us better understand people’s perspectives but also make us more convincing advocates of our own beliefs,” said Luiza A. Santos, who conducted this research with Jan G. Voelkel, Robb Willer, and Jamil Zaki (Stanford University). People who are encouraged to value empathy across party lines are also more likely to support bipartisan cooperation and less likely to report hating people on the other side of a political issue, Santos added. 

    To explore how belief in the utility of empathy can decrease partisan animosity and increase political persuasiveness, Santos and colleagues conducted a series of four studies involving 3,650 Democrat and Republican participants in the United States. 

    In the first study of 411 participants, the researchers found that people who placed more value on cross-partisan empathy were also more likely to desire bipartisan cooperation and to hold less animosity toward the other political party. A follow-up study of 688 college freshmen revealed that students with more cross-partisan empathy were likelier than less empathetic students to report having more friends with different political beliefs. 

    Cross-partisan empathy isn’t a static trait, however—and Santos and colleagues’ work suggests that even the most politically partisan individuals may be open to walking in the opposition’s shoes.  

    A third study involved 1,551 participants using Amazon Mechanical Turk. When they read text arguing for or against the value of cross-partisan empathy, participants reacted as you might expect: Those in the high-utility condition, which emphasized increased understanding of the opposition, reported a greater desire for bipartisan cooperation and less out-party animosity, moral superiority, and desire to socially distance from political out-group members. Those in the low-utility condition, which emphasized the threat to their own beliefs, had the opposite response. 

    The strength of this response wasn’t the same for everyone, though. Whereas the effects were relatively small for participants with mild political beliefs, staunch Democrats and Republicans in the high-utility condition reported significantly larger decreases in animosity and moral superiority toward out-group members. 

    “These findings indicate that strong partisans can be moved by beliefs about cross-partisan empathy. If anything, our manipulations had, in some cases, stronger effects on more partisan individuals,” Santos and colleagues wrote. 

    Finally, the researchers put these findings to the test by having 1,000 participants read a high- or low-utility argument on the value of empathy before writing a message to a member of the opposing party intended to change their beliefs about gun control laws. Each of these messages was then shared with a participant who identified with that party, so that Democrats read messages written by Republicans and vice versa. 

    Through analyzing the text of each message, the researchers found that participants in the high-utility condition were nearly twice as likely to use conciliatory language to express cross-partisan empathy. This included trying to find common ground, represented by terms like “we all want” and “I agree,” as well as using perspective-taking language like “I understand that” to acknowledge the reader’s existing beliefs. They were also more likely to focus on common goals such as safety and on institutions like the U.S. Constitution rather than directly discussing more contentious concepts like crime and violence. Despite the more empathetic tone of the high-utility participants’ messages, condition-blind coders rated these messages as arguing for similarly strong political positions as those in the low-utility condition.  

    Readers from the opposing party rated the high-utility writers as being more likable and persuasive than low-utility writers and reported less animosity toward high-utility writers’ political parties after reading those messages. They were also more likely to soften their views on gun laws after reading a high-utility message, Santos added. 

    “In other words, people’s belief in the utility of empathizing not only improved intergroup feelings but also helped create greater common ground,” she said. 

    It remains to be seen how long the effects of cross-partisan empathy may last after an interaction, she noted. There may also be differences in how empathy influences asynchronous communication, such as letter writing, versus face-to-face conversations. 

    “Believing in cross-partisan empathy’s usefulness helps people attain shared goals of decreasing partisan animosity and building consensus around critical issues. In this light, cross-partisan empathy can be a valuable resource—an instrumental tool for not only connecting minds but also changing them,” Santos and colleagues concluded. 

    Reference 

    Santos, L. A., Voelkel, J. G., Willer, R., & Zaki, J. (2022). Belief in the utility of cross-partisan empathy reduces partisan animosity and facilitates political persuasion. Psychological Science, 33(9), 1557–1573. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976221098594  

    Request a copy of this article by emailing [email protected] 

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