Norbert Schwarz

As we sail through the normalcy of the post-pandemic period, it is easy to forget that at this time in 2020, governments all over the world were scrambling to decide how to trace and control the spread of infections, what to communicate to the public, for how long to close schools, and what vaccination policies to implement, all while scientists were cooperating to produce vaccines and treatments against a backdrop of political polarization and intergroup conflict in many countries. In many cases, health, education, and related policies were enacted with little if any acknowledgment of the psychological principles that drive human behavior. The difficulties using psychological knowledge in these decisions stemmed in part from the emergency created by the pandemic. In addition, the body of knowledge relevant to policies during a pandemic was dispersed, and our scientists and scientific societies had not led efforts to …

The COVID-19 pandemic challenged the public health system to respond to an emerging, difficult-to-understand pathogen through demanding behaviors, including staying at home, masking for long periods, and vaccinating multiple times. We discuss key challenges of the pandemic health communication efforts deployed in the United States from 2020 to 2022 and identify research priorities. One priority is communicating about uncertainty in ways that prepare the public for disagreement and likely changes in recommendations as scientific understanding advances: How can changes in understanding and recommendations foster a sense that “science works as intended” rather than “the experts are clueless” and prevent creating a void to be filled by misinformation? A second priority concerns creating a culturally fluent framework for asking people to engage in difficult and novel actions: How can health messages …

Can a large language model produce humor? Past research has focused on finding examples of these models succeeding or failing at producing humor in the eyes of the authors, without surveying peoples’ actual judgments of its output. These examples, while interesting, do not shed light on exactly how funny ChatGPT is to the general public, nor do they analyze ChatGPT’s humor production abilities in comparison to humans’ abilities. To explore this question, we gave the same comedic prompts to ChatGPT 3.5 and laypeople, and asked them to generate humorous responses (Study 1). We also asked ChatGPT 3.5 to generate humorous satirical headlines and compared them to published examples from professional comedy writers at The Onion (Study 2). Other participants rated the funniness of the human and AI-produced responses in each study. ChatGPT 3.5-produced jokes were rated as equally funny or funnier than human-generated responses regardless of the comedic task and the expertise of the human comedy writer.

Ballantyne’s (2023) review of the intellectual humility literature includes the proposal to conceptualize intellectual humility as evidence-based inquiry. I discuss the implications of this proposal for the scope of intellectual humility and address variables known to influence evidence-based inquiry, highlighting the role of feelings and metacognitive experiences.

Conviction narrative theory holds that reasoners adopt “a narrative that feels ‘right’to explain the available data” and use “that narrative to imagine plausible futures”(p. 1). Drawing on feelings-asinformation theory, this commentary reviews the role of metacognitive experiences of ease or difficulty and highlights that fluently processed narratives are more likely to “feel right.” Central to Johnson, Bilovich, and Tuckett’s (in press) conviction narrative theory (CNT) is the assumption that reasoners adopt “a narrative that feels ‘right’to explain the available data” and use “that narrative to imagine plausible futures”(p. 1). Their discussion of what makes a narrative “feel right” focuses on structural aspects of the narrative and neglects the role of metacognitive experiences in the construction and evaluation of narratives. This commentary addresses this gap, drawing on feelings-asinformation theory (Schwarz, 2012; Schwarz & Clore, 2007).

We like people and objects more when they are described in positive than in negative terms. But even seemingly neutral words can elicit positive or negative responses. This is the case for words that predominantly occur alongside positive (or negative) words in natural language. Despite lacking positivity/negativity when evaluated in isolation, such semantically prosodic words activate the evaluative associations of their usual company, which can color judgment in unrelated domains. For example, people are more likely to infer that “endocrination” (a fictional medical outcome) is negative when it is “caused” (a word with negative semantic prosody) rather than “produced” (a synonymous word without semantic prosody). We review what is known about the influence of semantically prosodic words and highlight their importance for judgment and decision making.

Given its centrality in scholarly and popular discourse, morality should be expected to figure prominently in everyday talk. We test this expectation by examining the frequency of moral content in three contexts, using three methods: (a) Participants’ subjective frequency estimates (N = 581); (b) Human content analysis of unobtrusively recorded in-person interactions (N = 542 participants; n = 50,961 observations); and (c) Computational content analysis of Facebook posts (N = 3822 participants; n = 111,886 observations). In their self-reports, participants estimated that 21.5% of their interactions touched on morality (Study 1), but objectively, only 4.7% of recorded conversational samples (Study 2) and 2.2% of Facebook posts (Study 3) contained moral content. Collectively, these findings suggest that morality may be far less prominent in everyday life than scholarly and popular discourse, and laypeople …

Six preregistered studies show that the degree of similarity of two objects biases people’s spatial memory of these objects. When objects are high in similarity, people remember having seen them closer together in space than when they are low in similarity. All six studies provide correlational evidence, showing that the more similar participants rated two stimuli, the smaller they remembered the distance between them. This was true for both conceptual and perceptual similarity (Study 3). Furthermore, Studies 2, 4A, and 4B provide evidence of causality by manipulating similarity experimentally. Replicating the correlational findings, highly similar stimuli were remembered as closer together than stimuli low in similarity. This pattern was found across different stimulus categories and similarity dimensions. Overall, these findings show that the similarity of stimuli influences perceivers’ reconstruction of their spatial locations.