William J. Skylark

People With Autism Spectrum Conditions Make More Consistent Decisions.

People with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) show reduced sensitivity to contextual stimuli in many perceptual and cognitive tasks. We investigated whether this also applies to decision making by examining adult participants’ choices between pairs of consumer products that were presented with a third, less desirable “decoy” option. Participants’ preferences between the items in a given pair frequently switched when the third item in the set was changed, but this tendency was reduced among individuals with ASC, which indicated that their choices were more consistent and conventionally rational than those of control participants. A comparison of people who were drawn from the general population and who varied in their levels of autistic traits revealed a weaker version of the same effect. The reduced context sensitivity was not due to differences in noisy responding, and although the ASC group took longer to make their decisions, this did not account for the enhanced consistency of their choices. The results extend the characterization of autistic cognition as relatively context insensitive to a new domain, and have practical implications for socioeconomic behavior.

Facial appearance affects science communication

Significance The dissemination of scientific findings to the wider public is increasingly important to public opinion and policy. We show that this process is influenced by the facial appearance of the scientist. We identify the traits that engender interest in a scientist’s work and the perception that they do high-quality work, and show that these face-based impressions influence both the selection and evaluation of science news. These findings inform theories of person perception and illuminate a potential source of bias in the public’s understanding of science. First impressions based on facial appearance predict many important social outcomes. We investigated whether such impressions also influence the communication of scientific findings to lay audiences, a process that shapes public beliefs, opinion, and policy. First, we investigated the traits that engender interest in a scientist’s work, and those that create the impression of a “good scientist” who does high-quality research. Apparent competence and morality were positively related to both interest and quality judgments, whereas attractiveness boosted interest but decreased perceived quality. Next, we had members of the public choose real science news stories to read or watch and found that people were more likely to choose items that were paired with “interesting-looking” scientists, especially when selecting video-based communications. Finally, we had people read real science news items and found that the research was judged to be of higher quality when paired with researchers who look like “good scientists.” Our findings offer insights into the social psychology of science, and indicate a source of bias in the dissemination of scientific findings to broader society.

Winners and losers: communicating the potential impacts of policies

Individual decision-makers need communications that succinctly describe potential harms and benefits of different options, but policymakers or citizens evaluating a policy are rarely given a balanced and easily understood summary of the potential outcomes of their decision. We review current policy option communication across diverse domains such as taxes, health, climate change, and international trade, followed by reviews of guidance and evidence for communication effectiveness. Our conceptual synthesis identifies four characteristics of policy options that make their communication particularly difficult: heterogeneous impacts on different segments of the population, multiple outcomes, long timescales, and large uncertainties. For communicators that are trying to inform rather than persuade, these complexities reveal a core tension between issue coverage and comprehensibility. We find little empirical evidence for how to communicate policy options effectively. We identify promising current communications, analyze them based on the above synthesis, and suggest priorities for future research. Recognizing the particular challenges of balanced, effective policy option communications could lead to better guidelines and support for policy decision-making.

Further Evidence That the Effects of Repetition on Subjective Time Depend on Repetition Probability

Repeated stimuli typically have shorter apparent duration than novel stimuli. Most explanations for this effect have attributed it to the repeated stimuli being more expected or predictable than the novel items, but an emerging body of work suggests that repetition and expectation exert distinct effects on time perception. The present experiment replicated a recent study in which the probability of repetition was varied between blocks of trials. As in the previous work, the repetition effect was smaller when repeats were common (and therefore more expected) than when they were rare. These results add to growing evidence that, contrary to traditional accounts, expectation increases apparent duration whereas repetition compresses subjective time, perhaps via a low-level process like adaptation. These opposing processes can be seen as instances of a more general “processing principle,” according to which subjective time is a function of the perceptual strength of the stimulus representation, and therefore depends on a confluence of “bottom-up” and “top-down” variables.

The influence of leg-to-body ratio, arm-to-body ratio and intra-limb ratio on male human attractiveness

Human mate choice is influenced by limb proportions. Previous work has focused on leg-to-body ratio (LBR) as a determinant of male attractiveness and found a preference for limbs that are close to, or slightly above, the average. We investigated the influence of two other key aspects of limb morphology: arm-to-body ratio (ABR) and intra-limb ratio (IR). In three studies of heterosexual women from the USA, we tested the attractiveness of male physiques that varied in LBR, ABR and IR, using figures that ranged from −3 to +3 standard deviations from the population mean. We replicated previous work by finding that the optimally attractive LBR is approximately 0.5 standard deviations above the baseline. We also found a weak effect of IR, with evidence of a weak preference for the baseline proportions. In contrast, there was no effect of ABR on attractiveness, and no interactions between the effects of LBR, ABR and IR. Our results indicate that ABR is not an important determinant of human mate choice for this population, and that IR may exert some influence but that this is much smaller than the effects of LBR. We discuss possible reasons for these results, including the limited variability in upper limb proportions and the potentially weak fitness-signal provided by this aspect of morphology.

49 The basis of evidence-informed policymaking: communicating the potential impacts of policies

Objectives We call for a new research area on the effective communication of policy options to support evidence-informed policy making. It is critical to communicate the evidence of potential impacts of different policy options in such a way that individuals can understand them, and then apply their own values and goals in their policy decisions. There has been much research done on how to convey numbers and evidence for individual decisions about, for example, health or finances. In recent decades, communications providing options for individuals have increasingly moved towards showing both potential harms and benefits of options, using principles of clear communication that have been tested empirically. We set out to review communications around policy options – whether by governments, businesses or NGOs – to see whether the same principles were being, or could be, applied. Method We carried out reviews of existing policy option communications from a wide range of domains and sources, of current guidelines for evidence summaries (such as governmental guidelines, and from organisations such as Cochrane), and of empirical studies of effectiveness of such communications in aiding comprehension. Results We identified very little empirical evidence on how policy options are best communicated. However, we did identify some key challenges that we believe makes policy-level communication more complex than individual-level communication: Policies usually have heterogeneous effects across a population which a decision–maker will need to bear in mind (there are winners and losers). The need to display these differential effects in such a way to allow comparison adds complexity Policy outcomes are often measured across many different domains (eg. health, environmental, financial), each with different metrics Policies often have effects over long time periods, and these effects may be variable. The evidence for potential policy impacts often has very large uncertainties around it Although all of these apply to individual-level communication too, we believe that policy-level communication suffers even more greatly, and there is a bigger trade-off to be made between making communications comprehensive and comprehensible. Conclusions In our review we identified examples of formats attempting to summarise policy-level evidence in an ‘at a glance’ summary. However, none of them appear to have been empirically tested on their target audiences. Equally, few organisational guidelines on how to present this kind of evidence cite any empirical research. We suggest that the field of policy-level communication is recognised as having a distinct set of challenges. We also suggest that empirical studies are called for in order to identify which lessons from individual-level communication research can be carried over, and how the specific challenges of policy-level communication are best met.

Research data supporting Farmer, Baron-Cohen, & Skylark "People with autism spectrum conditions make more consistent decisions"

The data comprise responses to individual difference measures of cognitive ability and autistic traits, and to a decsion-making task in which people make a series of choices between consumer products. A description of the files is included in the accompanying readme.txt file, and full details of the tasks and data collection procedures are given in the associated publication.