Belief perseverance: The staying power of confession evidence

This research examined whether a criminal confession causes people to discount subsequently encountered exculpatory evidence. Participants (N = 238) read a crime report across two phases and judged a suspect\u27s guilt after each phase. In phase 1, the crime report presented circumstantial evidence indicative of the suspect\u27s guilt. In phase 2, exculpatory evidence indicative of the suspect\u27s innocence was added. The crime report manipulated whether participants received confession evidence during phase 1 (confession–early) or phase 2 (confession–late). In addition, some participants publicly committed to their phase 1 guilt judgments prior to receiving the crime report in phase 2 (high commitment), whereas others did not (low commitment). Results provided some support for the hypothesis that a confession biases the way that people use subsequently encountered exculpatory evidence to judge a suspect’s guilt; under conditions of low commitment, participants more often rendered guilty verdicts in the confession–early conditions than the confession–late conditions. The results are discussed in terms of police investigator and juror decision-making

Explicit Attitudes Towards Race: The Impact of Active Learning in Teaching Diversity

The majority of colleges and universities in the United States require students to take at least one diversity-related course to graduate. Considering the current political climate, this is a step in the right direction as it should encourage students to be more accepting and help facilitate an inclusive campus environment. However, these courses typically are not tailored towards addressing current diversity issues impacting Americans (e.g., New Zealand Film counts as a cultural diversity credit at Oberlin College in Ohio). In addition, very little empirical research has been conducted looking at the effectiveness of these courses or at which teaching methods are most beneficial for promoting inclusivity and attitude change. Therefore, we conducted an empirical study looking at the benefits of open discussion and active learning for starting the process of attitude change and to promote understanding of diverse groups and cultures. Results revealed that students were slightly more motivated to control their prejudice and that color-blind racial attitudes decreased. Contrary to expectations, results revealed that students were slightly more discriminatory after engaging with the course content

Persistent preconceptions: The role of implicit weight stigma in belief perseverance

Belief perseverance – the tendency for people to maintain an initial belief even after the foundation for that belief has been discredited – has been documented in relation to a variety of topics (e.g., capital punishment, celebrities, politics; Bui, 2014; Carretta & Moreland, 1982; Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979), but has yet to be evaluated in relation to weight stigma, one of the most prevalent forms of social disgrace (Tomiyama, 2019). Research on belief perseverance has typically utilized the debriefing paradigm, which involves distributing opposing information to two groups of participants before discrediting said information and asking participants to make a related judgment. Such studies have focused on explicit beliefs and have mainly been conducted within a single experimental session (e.g., Ross, Lepper, & Hubbard, 1975). This study expands upon belief perseverance theory and methods by evaluating the potential moderating role of existing (i.e., implicit) weight-stigma beliefs within the standard debriefing paradigm in addition to the inclusion of a prospectively measured follow-up assessment while also examining the possible moderating effects of confirmation bias and anchoring. Participants read a report, which informed them of either a negative or positive correlation between weight and aggression in young adults, before learning that the information provided to them was falsified and randomly assigned. Participants then immediately completed explicit and implicit measures regarding their views on weight, followed by surveys to assess demographics and their level of anchoring, response bias, and confirmation bias. Two days later, participants completed the explicit and implicit measures a second time. Results revealed (1) that belief perseverance did replicate to views on weight, (2) that implicit beliefs about weight did not moderate explicit beliefs, (3) that neither confirmation bias nor anchoring moderated explicit beliefs, and (4) that these findings were consistent as there was a lack of moderation when measured at a two-day follow up

PAYING PARTICIPANTS:THE IMPACT OF COMPENSATION ON DATA QUALITY

Poor-quality data has the potential to increase error variance, reduce statistical power and effect sizes, and produce Type I or Type II errors. Paying participants is one technique researchers may use in an attempt to obtain high-quality data. Accordingly, two secondary datasets were used to examine the relationship between participant payment and data quality. The first dataset revealed that data quality did not differ between paid and unpaid undergraduates. Similarly, the second dataset showed that data quality did not differ between unpaid community participants and MTurkers. A comparison across studies showed that undergraduate students engaged in lower levels of careless responding than the community samples but the unpaid community sample outperformed the MTurk sample and both undergraduate samples. Taken together, the current findings suggest that offering financial incentives to undergraduate or community samples does not improve data quality but may improve data collection rates and increase the diversity of participants.</p

Belief perseverance: The staying power of confession evidence

This research examined whether a criminal confession causes people to discount subsequently encountered exculpatory evidence. Participants (N = 238) read a crime report across two phases and judged a suspect's guilt after each phase. In phase 1, the crime report presented circumstantial evidence indicative of the suspect's guilt. In phase 2, exculpatory evidence indicative of the suspect's innocence was added. The crime report manipulated whether participants received confession evidence during phase 1 (confession–early) or phase 2 (confession–late). In addition, some participants publicly committed to their phase 1 guilt judgments prior to receiving the crime report in phase 2 (high commitment), whereas others did not (low commitment). Results provided some support for the hypothesis that a confession biases the way that people use subsequently encountered exculpatory evidence to judge a suspect’s guilt; under conditions of low commitment, participants more often rendered guilty verdicts in the confession–early conditions than the confession–late conditions. The results are discussed in terms of police investigator and juror decision-making.</p

Persistent preconceptions: The role of implicit weight stigma in belief perseverance

Belief perseverance – the tendency for people to maintain an initial belief even after the foundation for that belief has been discredited – has been documented in relation to a variety of topics (e.g., capital punishment, celebrities, politics; Bui, 2014; Carretta & Moreland, 1982; Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979), but has yet to be evaluated in relation to weight stigma, one of the most prevalent forms of social disgrace (Tomiyama, 2019). Research on belief perseverance has typically utilized the debriefing paradigm, which involves distributing opposing information to two groups of participants before discrediting said information and asking participants to make a related judgment. Such studies have focused on explicit beliefs and have mainly been conducted within a single experimental session (e.g., Ross, Lepper, & Hubbard, 1975). This study expands upon belief perseverance theory and methods by evaluating the potential moderating role of existing (i.e., implicit) weight-stigma beliefs within the standard debriefing paradigm in addition to the inclusion of a prospectively measured follow-up assessment while also examining the possible moderating effects of confirmation bias and anchoring. Participants read a report, which informed them of either a negative or positive correlation between weight and aggression in young adults, before learning that the information provided to them was falsified and randomly assigned. Participants then immediately completed explicit and implicit measures regarding their views on weight, followed by surveys to assess demographics and their level of anchoring, response bias, and confirmation bias. Two days later, participants completed the explicit and implicit measures a second time. Results revealed (1) that belief perseverance did replicate to views on weight, (2) that implicit beliefs about weight did not moderate explicit beliefs, (3) that neither confirmation bias nor anchoring moderated explicit beliefs, and (4) that these findings were consistent as there was a lack of moderation when measured at a two-day follow up.</p

Explicit Attitudes Towards Race: The Impact of Active Learning in Teaching Diversity

The majority of colleges and universities in the United States require students to take at least one diversity-related course to graduate. Considering the current political climate, this is a step in the right direction as it should encourage students to be more accepting and help facilitate an inclusive campus environment. However, these courses typically are not tailored towards addressing current diversity issues impacting Americans (e.g., New Zealand Film counts as a cultural diversity credit at Oberlin College in Ohio). In addition, very little empirical research has been conducted looking at the effectiveness of these courses or at which teaching methods are most beneficial for promoting inclusivity and attitude change. Therefore, we conducted an empirical study looking at the benefits of open discussion and active learning for starting the process of attitude change and to promote understanding of diverse groups and cultures. Results revealed that students were slightly more motivated to control their prejudice and that color-blind racial attitudes decreased. Contrary to expectations, results revealed that students were slightly more discriminatory after engaging with the course content.</p