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Children learn a lot from others, but the effectiveness of their social learning depends on the reliability of others' help. How do children adapt their future learning decisions based on the past reliability of receiving help? In two experiments, 4- to 6-year-olds (N = 60 each) interacted with a researcher who either followed through on promised help (Reliable condition) or failed to do so (Unreliable condition). Experiment 1 was inconclusive. However, with an improved design, Experiment 2 found that children in the Unreliable condition were more likely to forego a harder but more rewarding puzzle as their next task and choose an easier, less rewarding puzzle instead compared to those in the Reliable condition. Such decisions, while seemingly maladaptive at face value, likely reflect an adaptive response to the low likelihood of receiving help. These results extend our understanding of social learning across diverse ecological contexts.

Adversity-exposed youth tend to score lower on cognitive tests. However, the hidden talents approach proposes some abilities are enhanced by adversity, especially under ecologically relevant conditions. Two versions of an attention-shifting and working memory updating task--one abstract, one ecological--were administered to 618 youth (M[subscript age] = 13.62, SD[subscript age] = 0.81; 48.22% female; 64.56% White). Measures of environmental unpredictability, violence, and poverty were collected to test adversity × task version interactions. There were no interactions for attention shifting. For working memory updating, youth exposed to violence and poverty scored lower than their peers with abstract stimuli but almost just as well with ecological stimuli. These results are striking compared to contemporary developmental science, which often reports lowered performance among adversity-exposed youth.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

We present a consensus-based checklist to improve and document the transparency of research reports in social and behavioural research. An accompanying online application allows users to complete the form and generate a report that they can submit with their manuscript or post to a public repository.

In situations of poverty, do people take more or less risk? One hypothesis states that poverty makes people avoid risk, because they cannot buffer against losses, while another states that poverty makes people take risks, because they have little to lose. Each hypothesis has some previous empirical support. Here, we test the 'desperation threshold' model, which integrates both hypotheses. We assume that people attempt to stay above a critical level of resources, representing their 'basic needs'. Just above this threshold, people have much to lose and should avoid risk. Below, they have little to lose and should take risks. We conducted preregistered tests of the model using survey data from 472 adults in France and the UK. The predictor variables were subjective and objective measures of current resources. The outcome measure, risk taking, was measured using a series of hypothetical gambles. Risk taking followed a V-shape against subjective resources, first decreasing and then increasing again as resources reduced. This pattern was not observed for the objective resource measure. We also found that risk taking was more variable among people with fewer resources. Our findings synthesize the split literature on poverty and risk taking, with implications for policy and interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: We test whether there is a shared mechanism between many environmental risk factors and delinquency. Youth developing in harsh and unpredictable environments can adopt the belief that the world is chaotic, people are undependable, and they are unable to control their circumstances (i.e., an unpredictability schema). They may then opt to focus on the present (i.e., a short-term mindset), rather than invest in a future that is not stable or guaranteed. Methods: We test this idea by examining whether harsh and unpredictable environments are associated with delinquency—first through unpredictability schemas and then short-term mindsets—using structural equation models of two representative and geographically diverse longitudinal datasets. Results: Results show that many indicators of harsh and unpredictable environments predict unpredictability schemas and short-term mindsets. Their relationships with delinquency are mediated through short-term mindsets, especially sensation-seeking, but less so through unpredictability schemas. Conclusions: Similar findings across the datasets suggest short-term mindsets may be evoked as a response to harsh and unpredictable environments, namely unpredictable parenting and violence among peers. This illuminates the consequences of exposure to adverse environments and lends credence to the idea that short-term mindsets can help explain the link between many risk factors and crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From public policy to the social sciences, parenting in low-resource contexts is often viewed through a lens of deficit: there is a focus on what parents should be doing differently. We challenge this idea, highlighting the deliberate and rational choices parents with low socioeconomic status often make to navigate their circumstances and give their children the best lives possible under significant constraints. These parenting decisions may go beyond simply ensuring children's survival in harsh contexts. In some cases, they might give children the best shot at upward mobility. This view broadens our scientific understanding of good care, and implies that children may be best served when resources are spent on meeting families' needs, rather than instructing parents on how to care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although growing up in stressful conditions can undermine mental abilities, people in harsh environments may develop intact, or even "enhanced," social and cognitive abilities for solving problems in high-adversity contexts (i.e. 'hidden talents'). We examine whether childhood and current exposure to violence are associated with memory (number of learning rounds needed to memorize relations between items) and reasoning performance (accuracy in deducing a novel relation) on transitive inference tasks involving both violence-relevant and violence-neutral social information (social dominance vs. chronological age). We hypothesized that individuals who had more exposure to violence would perform better than individuals with less exposure on the social dominance task. We tested this hypothesis in a preregistered study in 100 Dutch college students and 99 Dutch community participants. We found that more exposure to violence was associated with lower overall memory performance, but not with reasoning performance. However, the main effects of current (but not childhood) exposure to violence on memory were qualified by significant interaction effects. More current exposure to neighborhood violence was associated with worse memory for age relations, but not with memory for dominance relations. By contrast, more current personal involvement in violence was associated with "better" memory for dominance relations, but not with memory for age relations. These results suggest incomplete transfer of learning and memory abilities across contents. This pattern of results, which supports a combination of deficits and 'hidden talents,' is striking in relation to the broader developmental literature, which has nearly exclusively reported deficits in people from harsh conditions. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/e4ePmSzZsuc.

I argue that emotion research needs formal (mathematical) theory to address two central questions. How does evolution shape mechanisms of emotion development across generations, depending on environmental conditions? How do these mechanisms generate emotions, based on lifetime experience and current context? Formal modeling enables researchers to state ideas clearly and precisely, deduce predictions, and evaluate the fit between theory and data.

Children vary in the extent to which their development is shaped by particular experiences (e.g. maltreatment, social support). This variation raises a question: Is there no single level of plasticity that maximizes biological fitness? One influential hypothesis states that when different levels of plasticity are optimal in different environmental states and the environment fluctuates unpredictably, natural selection may favor parents producing offspring with varying levels of plasticity. The current article presents a mathematical model assessing the logic of this hypothesis--specifically, it examines what conditions are required for natural selection to favor parents to bet-hedge by varying their offspring's plasticity. Consistent with existing theory from biology, results show that between-individual variation in plasticity cannot evolve when the environment only varies across space. If, however, the environment varies across time, selection can favor differential plasticity, provided fitness effects are large (i.e. variation in individuals' plasticity is correlated with substantial variation in fitness). Our model also generates a novel restriction: Differential plasticity only evolves when the cost of being mismatched to the environment exceeds the benefits of being well matched. Based on mechanistic considerations, we argue that bet-hedging by varying offspring plasticity, if it were to evolve, would be more likely instantiated via epigenetic mechanisms (e.g. pre- or postnatal developmental programming) than genetic ones (e.g. mating with genetically diverse partners). Our model suggests novel avenues for testing the bet-hedging hypothesis of differential plasticity, including empirical predictions and relevant measures. We also discuss several ways in which future work might extend our model.

This comment aims to contribute to agenda-setting for the study of interpersonal violence over the years to come. Interpersonal violence is a high-profile topic not only in the domain of criminology, but also in public health, medicine, and epidemiology, and across the social sciences (sociology; psychology; economics; and political science). However, interdisciplinary integration between the different perspectives is lacking. This comment takes up the question of how scholars and practitioners in the field of violence can work towards greater integration with other perspectives. It outlines five key priorities for the field going forward, which are intended to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of interpersonal violence. Importantly, the view outlined here arose from a collaboration of researchers from a wide range of academic fields, and as such represents interdisciplinary consensus on the steps required to ensure that the study of interpersonal violence remains an effective and productive research field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has demonstrated an inverse relation between subjective social class (SSC) and performance on emotion recognition tasks. Study 1 (N = 418) involved a preregistered replication of this effect using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task and the Cambridge Mindreading Face-Voice Battery. The inverse relation replicated; however, exploratory analyses revealed a significant interaction between sex and SSC in predicting emotion recognition, indicating that the effect was driven by males. In Study 2 (N = 745), we preregistered and tested the interaction on a separate archival dataset. The interaction replicated; the association between SSC and emotion recognition again occurred only in males. Exploratory analyses (Study 3; N = 381) examined the generalizability of the interaction to incidental face memory. Our results underscore the need to reevaluate previous research establishing the main effects of social class and sex on emotion recognition abilities, as these effects apparently moderate each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A casual look at the literature in social cognition reveals a vast collection of biases, errors, violations of rational choice, and failures to maximize utility. One is tempted to draw the conclusion that the human mind is woefully muddled. We present a three-category evolutionary taxonomy of evidence of biases: biases are (a) heuristics, (b) error management effects, or (c) experimental artifacts. We conclude that much of the research on cognitive biases can be profitably reframed and understood in evolutionary terms. An adaptationist perspective suggests that the mind is remarkably well designed for important problems of survival and reproduction, and not fundamentally irrational. Our analysis is not an apologia intended to place the rational mind on a pedestal for admiration. Rather, it promises practical outcomes including a clearer view of the architecture of systems for judgment and decision making, and exposure of clashes between adaptations designed for the ancestral past and the demands of the present.