Alexander C. Walker
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View article: Everyone I don't like is biased: Affective evaluations and the bias blind spot
Everyone I don't like is biased: Affective evaluations and the bias blind spot Open
People commonly exhibit a bias blind spot (BBS), judging themselves as less susceptible to bias than the “average other.” However, less is known about how people attribute bias to familiar others who evoke strong affect. We examined whethe…
View article: Disclosing sample bias fails to fully correct judgments of partisan extremity
Disclosing sample bias fails to fully correct judgments of partisan extremity Open
How do we infer the beliefs of an entire group (e.g., Democrats) after being exposed to the beliefs of only a handful of group members? What if we know that the beliefs we encountered were selected in a biased manner? Across two experiment…
View article: Between Law and Conscience: The Role of Legality in Moral Decision-Making
Between Law and Conscience: The Role of Legality in Moral Decision-Making Open
Does the legal status of an action shape how morally wrong people perceive it to be? Across three experiments (N = 1,226), we find that participants judged actions to be more morally wrong when labelled as “illegal” as opposed to “not ille…
View article: Everyone I don't like is biased: Affective evaluations and the bias blind spot
Everyone I don't like is biased: Affective evaluations and the bias blind spot Open
People commonly exhibit a bias blind spot (BBS), judging themselves as less susceptible to bias than the “average other.” However, less is known about how people attribute bias to familiar others who evoke strong affect. We examined whethe…
View article: Extremely Partisan Samples Distort Perceptions of Group Beliefs
Extremely Partisan Samples Distort Perceptions of Group Beliefs Open
How do we infer the beliefs of an entire group (e.g., Democrats) after being exposed to the beliefs of only a handful of group members? What if we know that the beliefs we encountered were selected in a biased manner? Across two experiment…
View article: Partisan Language in a Polarized World: In-Group Language Provides Reputational Benefits to Speakers while Polarizing Audiences
Partisan Language in a Polarized World: In-Group Language Provides Reputational Benefits to Speakers while Polarizing Audiences Open
We examine the impact of partisan language (language used to support a political agenda), both with regard to peoples’ perceptions of the speakers who use it and their evaluations of events it is used to describe. Two experiments recruited…
View article: Partisan Language in a Polarized World: In-Group Language Provides Reputational Benefits to Speakers While Polarizing Audiences
Partisan Language in a Polarized World: In-Group Language Provides Reputational Benefits to Speakers While Polarizing Audiences Open
View article: Biased Samples Distort Perceptions of Group Beliefs
Biased Samples Distort Perceptions of Group Beliefs Open
View article: Moral Narratives Workshop Proceedings
Moral Narratives Workshop Proceedings Open
The Moral Narratives Workshop (www. moralnarratives.org) was organized in 2022 to kickstart and develop an interdisciplinary, empirical study of stories told about people’s moral actions and characters. Across eight weeks, the workshop fea…
View article: Hypothesized drivers of the bias blind spot—cognitive sophistication, introspection bias, and conversational processes
Hypothesized drivers of the bias blind spot—cognitive sophistication, introspection bias, and conversational processes Open
Individuals often assess themselves as being less susceptible to common biases compared to others. This bias blind spot (BBS) is thought to represent a metacognitive error. In this research, we tested three explanations for the effect: The…
View article: Hypothesized Drivers of the Bias Blind Spot—Cognitive Sophistication, Introspection Bias, and Conversational Processes
Hypothesized Drivers of the Bias Blind Spot—Cognitive Sophistication, Introspection Bias, and Conversational Processes Open
Individuals often assess themselves as being less susceptible to common biases compared to others. This bias blind spot (BBS) is thought to represent a metacognitive error. In this research, we tested three explanations for the effect: The…
View article: Culture as a Moderator of Epistemically Suspect Beliefs
Culture as a Moderator of Epistemically Suspect Beliefs Open
A consistent finding reported in the literature is that epistemically suspect beliefs (e.g., paranormal beliefs) are less frequently endorsed by individuals with a greater tendency to think analytically. However, these results have been ob…
View article: A brief forewarning intervention overcomes negative effects of salient changes in COVID-19 guidance
A brief forewarning intervention overcomes negative effects of salient changes in COVID-19 guidance Open
During the COVID-19 pandemic, public health guidance (e.g., regarding the use of non-medical masks) changed over time. Although many revisions were a result of gains in scientific understanding, we nonetheless hypothesized that making chan…
View article: Improving the Public's Perception of Autonomous Vehicles by Communicating the Consistency of Autonomous Vehicle Algorithms
Improving the Public's Perception of Autonomous Vehicles by Communicating the Consistency of Autonomous Vehicle Algorithms Open
Despite autonomous vehicles (AVs) being safer than human drivers, people are averse to their presence on roads. Across three studies (N = 4,014), we examined peoples’ perceptions of human drivers and AVs acting within a moral dilemma. Scen…
View article: Push Outcomes Bias Perceptions of Scratch Card Games
Push Outcomes Bias Perceptions of Scratch Card Games Open
In the domain of scratch card gambling, “pushes” refer to outcomes in which a prize is won that is equal to the cost of a scratch card game. Despite resulting in no net monetary gain, these outcomes are categorized as wins by lottery opera…
View article: Bullshit Ability as an Honest Signal of Intelligence
Bullshit Ability as an Honest Signal of Intelligence Open
Navigating social systems efficiently is critical to our species. Humans appear endowed with a cognitive system that has formed to meet the unique challenges that emerge for highly social species. Bullshitting, communication characterised …
View article: Controlling the narrative: Euphemistic language affects judgments of actions while avoiding perceptions of dishonesty
Controlling the narrative: Euphemistic language affects judgments of actions while avoiding perceptions of dishonesty Open
The present work (N = 1906 U.S. residents) investigates the extent to which peoples' evaluations of actions can be biased by the strategic use of euphemistic (agreeable) and dysphemistic (disagreeable) terms. We find that participants' eva…
View article: Unclaimed prize information increases the appeal of scratch card games
Unclaimed prize information increases the appeal of scratch card games Open
Previous research suggests that intuitively appealing, yet uninformative unclaimed prize information is capable of biasing gambling-related judgments when people compare scratch cards that vary in the number of unclaimed prizes. However, i…
View article: Reducing the number of non-naïve participants in Mechanical Turk samples
Reducing the number of non-naïve participants in Mechanical Turk samples Open
Using participants who have been previously exposed to experimental stimuli (referred to as non-naïveté) can reduce effect sizes. The workforce of Amazon's Mechanical Turk is particularly vulnerable to this problem and solutions are usuall…
View article: Culture and Epistemically Suspect Beliefs
Culture and Epistemically Suspect Beliefs Open
The current study explores various individual difference factors known to predict epistemically suspect beliefs across Western and Eastern cultures. While Western individuals scoring higher on measures of analytic thinking endorsed less ep…
View article: Beauty and truth, truth and beauty: Chiastic structure increases the subjective accuracy of statements
Beauty and truth, truth and beauty: Chiastic structure increases the subjective accuracy of statements Open
The Keats heuristic suggests that people find aesthetically pleasing expressions more accurate than mundane expressions. We test this notion with chiastic statements. Chiasmus is a stylistic phenomenon in which at least two linguistic cons…
View article: Better the Two Devils You Know, Than the One You Don’t: Predictability Influences Moral Judgments of Immoral Actors
Better the Two Devils You Know, Than the One You Don’t: Predictability Influences Moral Judgments of Immoral Actors Open
Across six studies (N = 2,646), we demonstrate the role that perceptions of predictability play in judgments of moral character, finding that people demonstrate a moral preference for more predictable immoral actors. Participants judged ag…
View article: The environmental malleability of base-rate neglect
The environmental malleability of base-rate neglect Open
View article: Bullshit makes the art grow profounder
Bullshit makes the art grow profounder Open
Across four studies participants ( N = 818) rated the profoundness of abstract art images accompanied with varying categories of titles, including: pseudo-profound bullshit titles (e.g., The Deaf Echo ), mundane titles (e.g., Canvas 8 ), a…
View article: Graphical Depiction of Statistical Information Improves Gambling-Related Judgments
Graphical Depiction of Statistical Information Improves Gambling-Related Judgments Open
The domain of gambling is rife with both diagnostic and non-diagnostic information. Previous studies examining scratch card gambling have demonstrated that people are often biased by intuitively appealing, yet non-diagnostic information (i…
View article: Graphical Depiction of Statistical Information Improves Gambling-Related Judgments
Graphical Depiction of Statistical Information Improves Gambling-Related Judgments Open
The domain of gambling is rife with both diagnostic and non-diagnostic information. Previous studies examining scratch card gambling have demonstrated that people are often biased by intuitively appealing, yet non-diagnostic information (i…
View article: Intuition speed as a predictor of choice and confidence in point spread predictions
Intuition speed as a predictor of choice and confidence in point spread predictions Open
Previous research has revealed that intuitive confidence is an important predictor of how people choose between an intuitive and non-intuitive alternative when faced with information that opposes the intuitive response. In the current stud…
Finding meaning in the clouds: Illusory pattern perception predicts receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit Open
View article: Bullshit Makes the Art Grow Profounder
Bullshit Makes the Art Grow Profounder Open
View article: Finding meaning in the clouds: Illusory pattern perception predicts receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit
Finding meaning in the clouds: Illusory pattern perception predicts receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit Open
Previous research has demonstrated a link between illusory pattern perception and various irrational beliefs. On this basis, we hypothesized that participants who displayed greater degrees of illusory pattern perception would also be more …