Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 62
-
ItemAttributions for extreme weather events: science and the people.(Springer Nature, 2022)Both climate scientists and non-scientists (laypeople) attribute extreme weather events to various influences. Laypeople's attributions for these events are important as these attributions likely influence their views and actions about climate change and extreme events. Research has examined laypeople's attribution scepticism about climate change in general; however, few climate scientists are familiar with the processes underpinning laypeople's attributions for individual extreme events. Understanding these lay attributions is important for scientists to communicate their findings to the public. Following a brief summary of the way climate scientists calculate attributions for extreme weather events, we focus on cognitive and motivational processes that underlie laypeople's attributions for specific events. These include a tendency to prefer single-cause rather than multiple-cause explanations, a discounting of whether possible causes covary with extreme events, a preference for sufficient causes over probabilities, applying prevailing causal narratives, and the influence of motivational factors. For climate scientists and communicators who wish to inform the public about the role of climate change in extreme weather events, these patterns suggest several strategies to explain scientists' attributions for these events and enhance public engagement with climate change. These strategies include showing more explicitly that extreme weather events reflect multiple causal influences, that climate change is a mechanism that covaries with these events and increases the probability and intensity of many of these events, that human emissions contributing to climate change are controllable, and that misleading communications about weather attributions reflect motivated interests rather than good evidence.
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableProfiles of an Ideal Society: The Utopian Visions of Ordinary People(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2023)Throughout history, people have expressed the desire for an ideal society—a utopia. These imagined societies have motivated action for social change. Recent research has demonstrated this motivational effect among ordinary people in English-speaking countries, but we know little about the specific content of ordinary people’s utopian visions in different cultures. Here we report that a majority of samples from four countries—Australia, China, the United Kingdom, and the United States—converge on a small number of utopian visions: a Modern Green utopia, a Primitivist utopia, a Futurist utopia, and a Religious utopia. Although the prevalence of these utopia profiles differed across countries, there was a cross-cultural convergence in utopian visions. These shared visions may provide common ground for conversations about how to achieve a better future across cultural borders.
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableDecoding explicit and implicit representations of health and taste attributes of foods in the human brain( 2021)Obesity has become a significant problem word-wide and is strongly linked to poor food choices. Even in healthy individuals, taste perceptions often drive dietary decisions more strongly than healthiness. This study tested whether health and taste representations can be directly decoded from brain activity, both when explicitly considered, and when implicitly processed for decision-making. We used multivariate support vector regression for event-related potentials (as measured by the electroencephalogram) occurring in the first second of food cue processing to predict ratings of tastiness and healthiness. In Experiment 1, 37 healthy participants viewed images of various foods and explicitly rated their tastiness and healthiness, whereas in Experiment 2, 89 healthy participants indicated their desire to consume snack foods, with no explicit instruction to consider tastiness or healthiness. In Experiment 1 both attributes could be decoded, with taste information being available earlier than health. In Experiment 2, both dimensions were also decodable, and their significant decoding preceded the decoding of decisions (i.e., desire to consume the food). However, in Experiment 2, health representations were decodable earlier than taste representations. These results suggest that health information is activated in the brain during the early stages of dietary decisions, which is promising for designing obesity interventions aimed at quickly activating health awareness.
-
ItemNo Preview AvailablePapers Please-Predictive Factors of National and International Attitudes Toward Immunity and Vaccination Passports: Online Representative Surveys(JMIR PUBLICATIONS, INC, 2022-07)BACKGROUND: In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, countries are introducing digital passports that allow citizens to return to normal activities if they were previously infected with (immunity passport) or vaccinated against (vaccination passport) SARS-CoV-2. To be effective, policy decision-makers must know whether these passports will be widely accepted by the public and under what conditions. This study focuses attention on immunity passports, as these may prove useful in countries both with and without an existing COVID-19 vaccination program; however, our general findings also extend to vaccination passports. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to assess attitudes toward the introduction of immunity passports in six countries, and determine what social, personal, and contextual factors predicted their support. METHODS: We collected 13,678 participants through online representative sampling across six countries-Australia, Japan, Taiwan, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom-during April to May of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, and assessed attitudes and support for the introduction of immunity passports. RESULTS: Immunity passport support was moderate to low, being the highest in Germany (775/1507 participants, 51.43%) and the United Kingdom (759/1484, 51.15%); followed by Taiwan (2841/5989, 47.44%), Australia (963/2086, 46.16%), and Spain (693/1491, 46.48%); and was the lowest in Japan (241/1081, 22.94%). Bayesian generalized linear mixed effects modeling was used to assess predictive factors for immunity passport support across countries. International results showed neoliberal worldviews (odds ratio [OR] 1.17, 95% CI 1.13-1.22), personal concern (OR 1.07, 95% CI 1.00-1.16), perceived virus severity (OR 1.07, 95% CI 1.01-1.14), the fairness of immunity passports (OR 2.51, 95% CI 2.36-2.66), liking immunity passports (OR 2.77, 95% CI 2.61-2.94), and a willingness to become infected to gain an immunity passport (OR 1.6, 95% CI 1.51-1.68) were all predictive factors of immunity passport support. By contrast, gender (woman; OR 0.9, 95% CI 0.82-0.98), immunity passport concern (OR 0.61, 95% CI 0.57-0.65), and risk of harm to society (OR 0.71, 95% CI 0.67-0.76) predicted a decrease in support for immunity passports. Minor differences in predictive factors were found between countries and results were modeled separately to provide national accounts of these data. CONCLUSIONS: Our research suggests that support for immunity passports is predicted by the personal benefits and societal risks they confer. These findings generalized across six countries and may also prove informative for the introduction of vaccination passports, helping policymakers to introduce effective COVID-19 passport policies in these six countries and around the world.
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableThe acceptability and uptake of smartphone tracking for COVID-19 in Australia(Center for Open Science, 2020)
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many Governments are instituting mobile tracking technologies to perform rapid contact tracing. However, these technologies are only effective if the public is willing to use them, implying that their perceived public health benefits must outweigh personal concerns over privacy and security. The Australian federal government recently launched the `COVIDSafe' app, designed to anonymously register nearby contacts. If a contact later identifies as infected with COVID-19, health department officials can rapidly followup with their registered contacts to stop the virus' spread. The current study assessed attitudes towards three tracking technologies (telecommunication network tracking, a government app, and Apple and Google's Bluetooth exposure notification system) in two representative samples of the Australian public prior to the launch of COVIDSafe. We compared these attitudes to usage of the COVIDSafe app after its launch in a further two representative samples of the Australian public. Using Bayesian methods, we find widespread acceptance for all tracking technologies, however, observe a large intention-behaviour gap between people’s stated attitudes and actual uptake of the COVIDSafe app. We consider the policy implications of these results for Australia and the world at large.
-
ItemHigh Acceptance of COVID-19 Tracing Technologies in Taiwan: A Nationally Representative Survey Analysis(MDPI, 2022-03)Taiwan has been a world leader in controlling the spread of SARS-CoV-2 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Recently, the Taiwan Government launched its COVID-19 tracing app, 'Taiwan Social Distancing App'; however, the effectiveness of this tracing app depends on its acceptance and uptake among the general population. We measured the acceptance of three hypothetical tracing technologies (telecommunication network tracing, a government app, and the Apple and Google Bluetooth exposure notification system) in four nationally representative Taiwanese samples. Using Bayesian methods, we found a high acceptance of all three tracking technologies, with acceptance increasing with the inclusion of additional privacy measures. Modeling revealed that acceptance increased with the perceived technology benefits, trust in the providers' intent, data security and privacy measures, the level of ongoing control, and one's level of education. Acceptance decreased with data sensitivity perceptions and a perceived low policy compliance by others among the general public. We consider the policy implications of these results for Taiwan during the COVID-19 pandemic and in the future.
-
ItemCulture and Intergroup Relations(Guilford Press, 2021-10-01)
-
ItemA History of Cultural Psychology: Cultural Psychology as a Tradition and a Movement(Guilford Press, 2019-04-30)Cultural psychology that the current Handbook of Cultural Psychology embodies is an intellectual movement located in cultural psychology as an intellectual tradition whose historical roots can be found in the Enlightenment and Romantic schools of thought, and their conceptions of the person, in the 18th and 19th Century Western Europe. The chapter traces their influence in the history of psychology as an academic discipline in the form of natural scientific versus cultural scientific models of psychological investigation – emergence, entrenchment, and ebbing of this structure – in interaction with global history, and describes the historical context in which contemporary cultural psychology appeared as an approach that regards humans as meaning seeking and meaning making beings. The chapter then observes an emerging conception of the person that challenges the Enlightenment-Romantic assumption that separates culture from nature, and notes its reflection in cultural psychology’s recent push to naturalize culture in the early 21st century against the backdrop of the global challenges to humanity including climate change and intergroup conflict. The chapter concludes with a call for new conceptions of the person that regard culture in nature, which can help orient cultural psychology for the future. Cultural psychology has two senses. In one sense, it is an intellectual movement that has come into prominence in the late 20th century; in the other sense, it is a primarily Western European intellectual tradition that has continued since the 19th century. The publication of Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development (Stigler, Shweder, & Herdt, 1990) marked the start of the former with Richard Sheweder’s (1990) essay, Cultural Psychology – What is It? The first edition of The Handbook of Cultural Psychology (Kitayama & Cohen, 2007) was very much a product of this movement. However, it finds its inspiration in the early writings of the Romantics of the 19th century. To wit, Shweder’s (1984a) essay, Anthropology’s romantic rebellion against the enlightenment, or there is more to thinking than reason and evidence, links Shweder’s thinking on psychological anthropology to the Romantic intellectual tradition, which cultural psychology as a tradition draws from. In many ways, these two senses of cultural psychology – movement and tradition – are thematically intertwined despite the time that separates them. Yet, their implications for the future of psychology may differ a great deal. Believing that a reconstruction of history is most useful when conducted in order to understand the present and contemplate a future, I will attempt to outline a history of cultural psychology in these two senses, while bringing out their thematic continuities and discontinuities, so as to point to risks and opportunities for cultural psychology. To anticipate, it is my contention that the role of cultural psychology in the future of psychology depends on how culture, nature, and the person are construed, and how the conception of the person inform the practice of cultural psychology. The conceptions of the person underlying much of the history of cultural psychology, and indeed psychology more generally in the past, assumed that nature and culture are separate, and even in conflict; however, the concept of culture is now beginning to be naturalized – culture is no longer in opposition to nature, but a critical aspect of human nature – and the changing conception of the person implies that being naturally cultured is what it means to be human. But for now, we need to go upstream in the latter half of the 19th century Central Europe to begin this time travel.
-
ItemImagining better societies: A social psychological framework for the study of utopian thinking and collective action(Wiley, 2020-01-01)We present an integrative theoretical model that specifies social psychological mechanisms by which utopian thinking, which activates the social imagination, may enhance collective action intentions oriented toward social change and human progress. The model synthesizes complementary insights from interdisciplinary research programs on utopianism, hope, construal level, and system justification to identify mechanisms by which imagining better societies: (a) increases social hope, (b) yields an abstract mindset that bridges the psychological distance between the status quo (“here and now”) and a better possible future, (c) decreases system justification motivation, and (d) promotes social justice-oriented forms of collective action.
-
ItemGeneral and specific graphic health warning labels reduce willingness to consume sugar-sweetened beverages(ACADEMIC PRESS LTD- ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD, 2021-06-01)Sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) consumption is associated with obesity and other severe negative health consequences. The present study examined the effectiveness of two types of health warning labels (HWLs) in modulating dietary choices for SSBs: specific HWLs, presenting health consequences associated with consuming SSBs, and general HWLs, presenting health consequences of an unhealthy diet and obesity. While electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded, 63 participants completed a computer-based task in which they were first randomly allocated to view either SBB-specific, general, or non-warning control HWLs. They then viewed images of a range of SSB products, varying on perceived healthiness and tastiness, and rated their willingness to consume (WTC) each one. Linear mixed-effect model analyses revealed that general and specific HWLs both decreased WTC SSBs perceived as tasty, compared to the control condition. For general HWLs, this effect was reduced for SSBs perceived to be healthy, suggesting that specific HWLs may be more effective at reducing SSB consumption. The EEG data showed that SSBs considered unhealthy elicited greater N1 amplitudes, and tasty SSBs elicited greater late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes, possibly reflecting attentional allocation and craving responses, respectively. However, no strong differences between HWL types were found. Taken together, the results suggest that graphic HWLs, both general and specific, have the potential to reduce SSB consumption, but they do not strongly modulate craving-related neural responses to SSBs.