Abstract

During Ramadan, people of Muslim faith fast by not eating or drinking between sunrise and sunset. This is likely to have physiological and psychological consequences for fasters, and societal and economic impacts on the wider population. We investigate whether, during this voluntary and temporally limited fast, reminders of food can impair the fasters’ reaction time and accuracy on a non-food-related test of cognitive control. Using a repeated measures design in a sample of Ramadan fasters (N = 190), we find that when food is made salient, fasters are slower and less accurate during Ramadan compared with after Ramadan. Control participants perform similarly across time. Furthermore, during Ramadan performances vary by how recently people had their last meal. Potential mechanisms are suggested, grounded in research on resource scarcity, commitment, and thought suppression, as well as the psychology of rituals and self-regulation, and implications for people who fast for religious or health reasons are discussed.

Abstract

Transgender rights and discrimination against transgender people are growing public policy issues. Theorizing from social, cognitive, and evolutionary psychology suggests that beyond attitudes, discrimination against transgender people may derive from folk theories about what gender is and where it comes from. Transgender identity is met with hostility, in part, because it poses a challenge to the lay view that gender is determined at birth, and based on observable physical and behavioral characteristics. Here, in two pre-registered studies (N = 1323), we asked American adults to indicate the gender of a transgender target who either altered their biology through surgical interventions or altered their outward appearance: to what extent is it their birth-assigned gender or their self-identified gender? Responses correlate strongly with affect toward transgender people, measured by feeling thermometers, yet predict views on transgender people’s right to use their preferred bathrooms above and beyond feelings. Compared to male participants, female participants judge the person’s gender more in line with the self-identified gender than the birth-assigned gender. This is consistent with social and psychological theories that posit high status (e.g., men) and low status (e.g., women) members of social classification systems view group hierarchies in more and less essentialist ways respectively. Gender differences in gender category beliefs decrease with religiosity and conservatism, and are smaller in higher age groups. These results suggest that folk theories of gender, or beliefs about what gender is and how it is determined have a unique role in how transgender people are viewed and treated. Moreover, as evident by the demographic variability of gender category beliefs, folk theories are shaped by social and cultural forces and are amenable to interventions. They offer an alternative pathway to measure policy support and possibly change attitude toward transgender people.

Abstract

Two primary goals of psychological science should be to under- stand what aspects of human psychology are universal and the way that context and culture produce variability. This requires that we take into account the importance of culture and context in the way that we write our papers and in the types of populations that we sample. However, most research published in our leading journals has relied on sampling WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) populations. One might expect that our scholarly work and editorial choices would by now reflect the knowledge that Western populations may not be representative of humans generally with respect to any given psychological phenomenon. However, as we show here, almost all research published by one of our leading journals, Psychological Science, relies on Western samples and uses these data in an unreflective way to make inferences about humans in general. To take us for- ward, we offer a set of concrete proposals for authors, journal editors, and reviewers that may lead to a psychological science that is more representative of the human condition.

Abstract

Nationality governs almost every aspect of our lives, including where we may live and travel, as well as our opportunities for education, healthcare and work. It is a common-sense social category that guides us in making inferences about the social world. Nationalism has been extensively studied within the social and cognitive sciences, but there has been little empirical investigation into folk theories regarding what determines someone’s nationality. In experiments carried out in the United States and India (N = 2,745), we used a variant of the switched-at-birth task to investigate the extent to which people believe that nationality is determined by biology or is a malleable social identity that can be acquired. We find that folk theories of nationality seem remarkably flexible. Depending on the framing of the question, people report believing that nationality is either fluid or fixed at birth. Our results demonstrate that people from different cultures with different experiences of migration and different explicit stereotypes of their own nation may share similar folk theories about nationality. Moreover, these theories may shape attitudes towards immigrants—an important public-policy issue. Belief that nationality is malleable is associated with more positive attitudes towards immigrants even when holding ideology constant.

Abstract

Pepper & Nettle argue that the more present-oriented behavior associated with a low socioeconomic status is an adaptive response to having relatively little control over the future. However, a study of fasters during Ramadan shows that self-imposed deprivation, which carries no implications regarding the ability to realize deferred rewards, is associated with loss and risk aversion.