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Religious beliefs are among the most ubiquitous ideological beliefs in the world and often critical to people's worldview. Nonetheless, there is a great deal of variability in the strength and persistence of such beliefs, both across and within cultures. Here, we are interested in what underlying cognitive processes are associated with the phenomena of religious belief change. Although previous research has linked the tendency to engage in analytic thinking with religious dis-belief, this work has missed the potentially larger relationship between analytic thinking and belief change more broadly - that is change in any/either direction over time. Using a cross-sectional correlational study across two large datasets, including 16 countries and 50,827 individuals, we found that roughly 25 % of individuals indicated having substantively changing their beliefs at least once. Further, the relationship between analytic thinking and belief change appears independent from the association between analytic thinking and reported level of belief. Therefore, although analytic thinking is generally associated with a decrease in religious belief, we find some evidence that it may also support an increase in belief among those indicating past change. In total, this work provides evidence for a robust link between analytic thinking and religious belief change over time., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest Data for all studies are available on OSF. The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Competing Interests: Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.

Scholars warn that partisan divisions in the mass public threaten the health of American democracy. We conducted a megastudy ( n = 32,059 participants) testing 25 treatments designed by academics and practitioners to reduce Americans' partisan animosity and antidemocratic attitudes. We find that many treatments reduced partisan animosity, most strongly by highlighting relatable sympathetic individuals with different political beliefs or by emphasizing common identities shared by rival partisans. We also identify several treatments that reduced support for undemocratic practices-most strongly by correcting misperceptions of rival partisans' views or highlighting the threat of democratic collapse-which shows that antidemocratic attitudes are not intractable. Taken together, the study's findings identify promising general strategies for reducing partisan division and improving democratic attitudes, shedding theoretical light on challenges facing American democracy.

Concern over democratic erosion has led to a proliferation of proposed interventions to strengthen democratic attitudes in the United States. Resource constraints, however, prevent implementing all proposed interventions. One approach to identify promising interventions entails leveraging domain experts, who have knowledge regarding a given field, to forecast the effectiveness of candidate interventions. We recruit experts who develop general knowledge about a social problem (academics), experts who directly intervene on the problem (practitioners), and nonexperts from the public to forecast the effectiveness of interventions to reduce partisan animosity, support for undemocratic practices, and support for partisan violence. Comparing 14,076 forecasts submitted by 1,181 forecasters against the results of a megaexperiment (n = 32,059) that tested 75 hypothesized effects of interventions, we find that both types of experts outperformed members of the public, though experts differed in how they were accurate. While academics' predictions were more specific (i.e., they identified a larger proportion of ineffective interventions and had fewer false-positive forecasts), practitioners' predictions were more sensitive (i.e., they identified a larger proportion of effective interventions and had fewer false-negative forecasts). Consistent with this, practitioners were better at predicting best-performing interventions, while academics were superior in predicting which interventions performed worst. Our paper highlights the importance of differentiating types of experts and types of accuracy. We conclude by discussing factors that affect whether sensitive or specific forecasters are preferable, such as the relative cost of false positives and negatives and the expected rate of intervention success., Competing Interests: Competing interests statement:The authors declare no competing interest.

The spread of misinformation online is a global problem that requires global solutions. To that end, we conducted an experiment in 16 countries across 6 continents (N = 34,286; 676,605 observations) to investigate predictors of susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19, and interventions to combat the spread of this misinformation. In every country, participants with a more analytic cognitive style and stronger accuracy-related motivations were better at discerning truth from falsehood; valuing democracy was also associated with greater truth discernment, whereas endorsement of individual responsibility over government support was negatively associated with truth discernment in most countries. Subtly prompting people to think about accuracy had a generally positive effect on the veracity of news that people were willing to share across countries, as did minimal digital literacy tips. Finally, aggregating the ratings of our non-expert participants was able to differentiate true from false headlines with high accuracy in all countries via the 'wisdom of crowds'. The consistent patterns we observe suggest that the psychological factors underlying the misinformation challenge are similar across different regional settings, and that similar solutions may be broadly effective., (© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.)

The highly influential theory of "Motivated System 2 Reasoning" argues that analytical, deliberative ("System 2") reasoning is hijacked by identity when considering ideologically charged issues-leading people who are more likely to engage in such reasoning to be more polarized, rather than more accurate. Here, we fail to replicate the key empirical support for this theory across five contentious issues, using a large gold-standard nationally representative probability sample of Americans. While participants were more accurate in evaluating a contingency table when the outcome aligned with their politics (even when controlling for prior beliefs), we find that participants with higher numeracy were more accurate in evaluating the contingency table, regardless of whether or not the table's outcome aligned with their politics. These findings call for a reconsideration of the effect of identity on analytical reasoning.

Effectively addressing public health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic requires persuading the mass public to change their behavior in significant ways. Many efforts to encourage behavior change-such as public service announcements, social media posts, and billboards-involve short, persuasive appeals, yet the effectiveness of these messages is unclear. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, we tested whether short messages could increase intentions to comply with public health guidelines. To identify promising messages, we conducted two pretests (n = 1,596) in which participants rated the persuasiveness of 56 unique messages: 31 based on the persuasion and social influence literatures and 25 drawn from a pool of crowdsourced messages generated by online respondents. The four top-rated messages emphasized: (1) civic responsibility to reciprocate the sacrifices of health care workers, (2) caring for the elderly and vulnerable, (3) a specific, sympathetic victim, and (4) limited health care system capacity. We then conducted three well-powered, pre-registered experiments (total n = 3,719) testing whether these four top-rated messages, and a standard public health message based on language from the CDC, increased intentions to comply with public health guidelines, such as masking in public spaces. In Study 1, we found the four messages and the standard public health message significantly outperformed a null control. In Studies 2 and 3, we compared the effects of persuasive messages to the standard public health message, finding that none consistently out-performed the standard message. This is in line with other research showing minimal persuasive effects of short messages after the very early stages of the pandemic. Across our studies, we found that (1) short messages can increase intentions to comply with public health guidelines, but (2) short messages featuring persuasive techniques from the social science literature did not substantially outperform standard public health messages., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2023 Pink et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

There is widespread concern that rising affective polarization-particularly dislike for outpartisans-exacerbates Americans' anti-democratic attitudes. Accordingly, scholars and practitioners alike have invested great effort in developing depolarization interventions that reduce affective polarization. Critically, however, it remains unclear whether these interventions reduce anti-democratic attitudes, or only change sentiments towards outpartisans. Here we address this question with experimental tests (total n = 8,385) of three previously established depolarization interventions: correcting misperceptions of outpartisans, priming inter-partisan friendships and observing warm cross-partisan interactions between political leaders. While these depolarization interventions reliably reduced affective polarization, we do not find compelling evidence that these interventions reduced support for undemocratic candidates, support for partisan violence or prioritizing partisan ends over democratic means. Thus, future efforts to strengthen pro-democratic attitudes may do better if they target these outcomes directly. More broadly, these findings call into question the previously assumed causal effect of affective polarization on anti-democratic attitudes., (© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.)

Whitehouse's model explains when people engage in self-sacrifice, but not who is most likely to do so. We propose incorporating individual differences, such as cognitive style (one's inclination toward intuition versus deliberation), and argue that individuals who rely on intuition may be more likely to (1) develop group identity fusion after an emotional experience and (2) engage in pro-social self-sacrifice.

What makes people willing to pay costs to help others, and to punish others' selfishness? Why does the extent of such behaviors vary markedly across cultures? To shed light on these questions, we explore the role of formal institutions in shaping individuals' prosociality and punishment. In Study 1 (N=707), American participants who reported living under higher quality cooperation-enforcing institutions (police and courts) gave significantly more in a Dictator Game (DG), but did not punish significantly more in a Third-Party Punishment Game (TPPG). In Study 1R (N=1705), we replicated the positive relationship between reported institutional quality and DG giving observed in Study 1. In Study 2 (N=516), we experimentally manipulated institutional quality in a repeated Public Goods Game with a centralized punishment institution. Consistent with the correlational results of Study 1 and 1R, we found that centralized punishment led to significantly more prosociality in a subsequent DG compared to a no-punishment control, but had no significant direct effect on subsequent TPPG punishment (only an indirect effect via increased DG giving). Thus we present convergent evidence that the quality of institutions one is exposed to "spills over" to subsequent prosociality but not punishment. These findings support a theory of social heuristics, suggest boundary conditions on spillover effects of cooperation, and demonstrate the power of effective institutions for instilling habits of virtue and creating cultures of cooperation., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The authors describe the auscultatory percussion method, easy to perform and reliable in early bed-side diagnosis of osteoporosis, even if asymptomatic. In addition, the great importance of early diagnosis in preventing fractures complicating osteoporosis is underlined. The results obtained with prompt administration of current therapy in 25 cases, diagnosed with the aid of auscultatory percussion, are reported. Finally, practical use of this method for both therapeutic monitoring and individual prescription of drugs, is emphasized.