The effects of constructive journalism techniques on mood, comprehension, and trust

The role of news media in the perpetuation of misinformation has faced increasing scrutiny. Concerns have been raised about news media’s negative influence on mental health, increasing news avoidance, and decreasing trust in news. Constructive journalism is proposed to increase engagement with and trust in news media, reduce the mental health impact of news consumption, and provide a more accurate view of the world. However, constructive journalism studies primarily investigate the inclusion of solutions and positive emotions in news stories, to the exclusion of other techniques. Additionally, few studies have investigated constructive journalism’s effects on trust and comprehension. We used a randomised-controlled repeated-measures experimental design to investigate the effects of a comprehensive set of constructive journalism techniques on mood, comprehension, and trust among 238 Australian participants. Participants who read constructive articles reported higher positive emotion, and lower negative emotion, compared to participants who read the same articles without constructive features. However, participants in the constructive condition demonstrated worse comprehension than participants in the control, an effect partially mediated by negative emotion but not effort. No significant differences in trust in journalism as an institution or in article content were present between groups. However, when accounting for interest, constructive journalism demonstrated a significant negative effect on trust in the information, though positive where it increased mood. Further research is needed to calibrate techniques which balance the positive effects of constructive journalism with its ability to convey information

A global experiment on motivating social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic

Finding communication strategies that effectively motivate social distancing continues to be a global public health priority during the COVID-19 pandemic. This cross-country, preregistered experiment (n = 25,718 from 89 countries) tested hypotheses concerning generalizable positive and negative outcomes of social distancing messages that promoted personal agency and reflective choices (i.e., an autonomy-supportive message) or were restrictive and shaming (i.e., a controlling message) compared with no message at all. Results partially supported experimental hypotheses in that the controlling message increased controlled motivation (a poorly internalized form of motivation relying on shame, guilt, and fear of social consequences) relative to no message. On the other hand, the autonomy-supportive message lowered feelings of defiance compared with the controlling message, but the controlling message did not differ from receiving no message at all. Unexpectedly, messages did not influence autonomous motivation (a highly internalized form of motivation relying on one’s core values) or behavioral intentions. Results supported hypothesized associations between people’s existing autonomous and controlled motivations and self-reported behavioral intentions to engage in social distancing. Controlled motivation was associated with more defiance and less long-term behavioral intention to engage in social distancing, whereas autonomous motivation was associated with less defiance and more short- and long-term intentions to social distance. Overall, this work highlights the potential harm of using shaming and pressuring language in public health communication, with implications for the current and future global health challenges

A global experiment on motivating social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic

Finding communication strategies that effectively motivate social distancing continues to be a global public health priority during the COVID-19 pandemic. This cross-country, preregistered experiment (n = 25,718 from 89 countries) tested hypotheses concerning generalizable positive and negative outcomes of social distancing messages that promoted personal agency and reflective choices (i.e., an autonomy-supportive message) or were restrictive and shaming (i.e. a controlling message) compared to no message at all. Results partially supported experimental hypotheses in that the controlling message increased controlled motivation (a poorly-internalized form of motivation relying on shame, guilt, and fear of social consequences) relative to no message. On the other hand, the autonomy-supportive message lowered feelings of defiance compared to the controlling message, but the controlling message did not differ from receiving no message at all. Unexpectedly, messages did not influence autonomous motivation (a highly-internalized form of motivation relying on one’s core values) or behavioral intentions. Results supported hypothesized associations between people’s existing autonomous and controlled motivations and self-reported behavioral intentions to engage in social distancing: Controlled motivation was associated with more defiance and less long-term behavioral intentions to engage in social distancing, whereas autonomous motivation was associated with less defiance and more short- and long-term intentions to social distance. Overall, this work highlights the potential harm of using shaming and pressuring language in public health communication, with implications for the current and future global health challenges

The effects of constructive journalism techniques on mood, comprehension, and trust

Details on the articles, data, and analysis for a randomized controlled trial on the effects of constructive journalism techniques on mood, comprehension, and trust

Clear thinking in deep space: A guide by cognitive scientists

This is a preprint of a chapter published in "Human Uses of Outer Space" - edited by Melissa de Zwart, John Culton, Stacey Henderson, Amit Srivastava, and Deborah Turnbull

Training perceptual experts: feedback, labels, and contrasts

Are strategies for learning in education effective for learning in applied visual domains, such as fingerprint identification? We compare the effect of practice with immediate corrective feedback (feedback training), generating labels for features of matching and mismatching fingerprints (labels training), and contrasting matching and mismatching fingerprints (contrast training). We benchmark these strategies against a baseline of regular practice discriminating fingerprints. We found that all 3 training protocols-feedback, labels, and contrasts-resulted in a significantly greater ability to discriminate new pairs of prints (independent of response bias) than the baseline training protocol. We also found that feedback and labels training produced significantly lower rates of bias (i.e., learners in these groups were less likely to overcall matches) compared with baseline training. Our results demonstrate 3 different ways to boost expertise with matching prints, and have direct application to training perceptual expertise

Raw Data Files

This component contains the merged data for each of the participants as well as data for all of the analyses run across each print

Collective Intelligence in Fingerprint Analysis

When a fingerprint is located at a crime scene, a human examiner is counted upon to manually compare this print to those stored in a database. Several experiments have now shown that these professional analysts are highly accurate, but not infallible, much like other fields that involve high-stakes decision making. One method to offset mistakes in these safety-critical domains is to distribute these important decisions to groups of raters who independently assess the same information. This redundancy in the system allows it to continue operating effectively even in the face of rare and random errors. Here, we extend this “wisdom of crowds” approach to fingerprint analysis by comparing the performance of individuals to crowds of professional analysts. We replicate the previous findings that individual experts greatly outperform individual novices, particularly in their false positive rate, but they do make mistakes. When we pool the decisions of small groups of experts by selecting the decision of the majority, however, their false positive rate decreases by up to 8% and their false negative rate decreases by up to 12%. Pooling the decisions of novices results in a similar drop in false negatives, but increases their false positive rate by up to 11%. Aggregating people’s judgements by selecting the majority decision performs better than selecting the decision of the most confident or the most experienced rater. Our results show that combining independent judgements from small groups of fingerprint analysts can improve their performance and prevent these mistakes from entering courts

Specific Versus Varied Practice in Perceptual Expertise Training

We used a longitudinal randomised control experiment to compare the effect of specific practice (training on one form of a task) and varied practice (training on various forms of a task) on perceptual learning and transfer. Participants practiced a visual search task for ten hours over two- to four-weeks. The specific practice group searched for features only in fingerprints during each session whereas the varied practice group searched for features in five different image categories. Both groups were tested on a series of tasks at four time points: before training, midway through training, immediately after training ended, and six- to eight-weeks later. The specific group improved more during training and demonstrated greater pre-post performance gains than the varied group on a visual search task with untrained fingerprint images. Both groups improved equally on a visual search task with an untrained image category, but only the specific group’s performance dropped significantly when tested several weeks later. Finally, both groups improved equally on a series of untrained fingerprint tasks. Practice with respect to single category (versus many) instils better near transfer, but category-specific and category-general visual search training appear equally effective for developing task-general expertise