Over the last ten years, Oosterhof and Todorov's valence-dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgments of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear whether these findings apply to other regions. We addressed this question by replicating Oosterhof and Todorov's methodology across 11 world regions, 41 countries, and 11,570 participants. When we used Oosterhof and Todorov's original analysis strategy, the valence-dominance model generalized across regions. When we used an alternative methodology to allow for correlated dimensions we observed much less generalization. Collectively, these results suggest that, while the valence-dominance model generalizes very well across regions when dimensions are forced to be orthogonal, regional differences are revealed when we use different extraction methods, correlate and rotate the dimension reduction solution.

A theory of political belief system dynamics should incorporate causal connections between elements of the belief system and the possibility that belief systems are influenced by exogenous factors. These necessary components can be satisfied by conceptualizing an individual’s belief system as a network of causally connected attitudes and identities which, via the interactions between the elements and the push of exogenous influences, produces the disparate phenomena in the belief systems literature. We implement this belief systems as networks theory in a dynamic Ising model and demonstrate that the theory can integrate at least six otherwise unrelated phenomenon in the political belief systems literature, including work on attitude consistency, cross-pressures, spillover effects, partisan cues, and ideological differences in attitude consensus. Our findings suggest that belief systems are not just one thing, but emerge from the interactions between the attitudes and identities in the belief system. All code is available: https://osf.io/aswy8/?view_only=99aff77909094bddabb5d382f6db2622 .

A growing body of literature is exploring the link between social support and international students’ psychological adjustment. So far, however, there has been no systematic assessment of the overall relationship, and no indication which types and sources of social support may be most strongly associated with psychological adjustment. Our meta-analysis of 257 effect sizes across 76 studies fills this gap and assesses (a) the magnitude of the overall association between social support and international students’ psychological adjustment, (b) how different types (subjective, objective, and mixed) and sources (host, conational, international, mixed, and unspecified) of social support moderate the relationship between social support and psychological adjustment, and (c) whether the relationship between social support and psychological adjustment holds across different operationalizations of psychological adjustment. We find a positive overall association ( r = .20, 95% confidence interval [CI] = [0.16, 0.23]) between social support and international students’ psychological adjustment. Types and sources of social support matter as well: Subjective social support relates more strongly to psychological adjustment than objective social support. The data revealed that only support from mixed sources (i.e., not distinguishing between internationals, host, or conationals) is associated with a stronger effect of social support than support from conationals or from fellow international students (compared with support from host sources). We find no differences in the relation between social support and positive or negative adjustment. We outline recommendations for future research based on the meta-analysis.

This study explores how researchers’ analytical choices affect the reliability of scientific findings. Most discussions of reliability problems in science focus on systematic biases. We broaden the lens to emphasize the idiosyncrasy of conscious and unconscious decisions that researchers make during data analysis. We coordinated 161 researchers in 73 research teams and observed their research decisions as they used the same data to independently test the same prominent social science hypothesis: that greater immigration reduces support for social policies among the public. In this typical case of social science research, research teams reported both widely diverging numerical findings and substantive conclusions despite identical start conditions. Researchers’ expertise, prior beliefs, and expectations barely predict the wide variation in research outcomes. More than 95% of the total variance in numerical results remains unexplained even after qualitative coding of all identifiable decisions in each team’s workflow. This reveals a universe of uncertainty that remains hidden when considering a single study in isolation. The idiosyncratic nature of how researchers’ results and conclusions varied is a previously underappreciated explanation for why many scientific hypotheses remain contested. These results call for greater epistemic humility and clarity in reporting scientific findings.

Pseudo profound bullshit receptivity is the tendency to perceive meaning in important-sounding, nonsense statements. To understand how bullshit receptivity differs across domains, we developed a scale to measure scientific bullshit receptivity—the tendency to perceive truthfulness in nonsensical scientific statements. Across three studies (total N = 1,948), scientific bullshit receptivity was positively correlated with pseudo profound bullshit receptivity. Both types of bullshit receptivity were positively correlated with belief in science, conservative political beliefs, and faith in intuition. However, compared to pseudo profound bullshit receptivity, scientific bullshit receptivity was more strongly correlated with belief in science, and less strongly correlated with conservative political beliefs and faith in intuition. Finally, scientific literacy moderated the relationship the two types of bullshit receptivity; the correlation between the two types of receptivity was weaker for individuals scoring high in scientific literacy.

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Online peer-to-peer markets, such as Airbnb, often include profile photos of sellers to reduce anonymity. Ert, Fleischer, and Magen (2016) found that more trustworthy-looking, but not more attractive-looking, Airbnb hosts from Stockholm charge higher prices for similar apartments. This suggests that people are willing to pay more for a night in an apartment if the host looks trustworthy. Here, we present a pre-registered replication testing how photo-based impressions of hosts' attractiveness and trustworthiness influence rental prices. We extend previous investigations by (a) controlling for additional features related to price (e.g., the apartment's location value), (b) testing for an influence of other host features, such as race and facial expression, and (c) analyzing a substantially larger sample of apartments. An analysis of 1,020 listings in New York City showed that more attractive-looking, but not more trustworthylooking, hosts charge higher prices for their apartments. Compared to White hosts, Black (but not Asian) hosts charge lower prices for their apartments. Hosts who smile more intensely in their profile photo charge higher prices. Our results support the general conclusion that people rely on profile photos in online markets, though we find that attractiveness is more important than trustworthiness.

A considerable number of studies have explored the relationship between biculturalism and different types of adjustment (psychological, sociocultural, health-related), showing that individuals who are highly engaged in both their heritage and the dominant culture demonstrate positive adjustment outcomes in various life domains. In the present study, we investigated the biculturalism-adjustment hypothesis in different samples from diverse cultural backgrounds, extending the meta-analysis of Nguyen and Benet-Martinez (2013). We conducted an updated meta-analysis that included 90 new studies. We assessed the magnitude of the relation between biculturalism and adjustment, and whether it remains stronger compared to the single cultural orientations (i.e., host, heritage). We further investigated the role of moderators for the association between biculturalism and adjustment: sample characteristics (e.g., gender, migration status, cultural group membership), the manner in which biculturalism is operationalized (unilinear, bilinear typological), and in what way the societal context in which people reside amplifies or dampens the effect size (i.e., degree to which integration policies are benevolent, socioeconomic status indexed by the HDI [Human Development Index], and global fit/distance between host and heritage cultural background). The findings confirmed that there is a positive relationship between biculturalism and adjustment which is stronger than the relationship between adjustment and heritage culture orientation. This relationship was moderated by the way in which biculturalism was assessed and the type of adjustment. Importantly, we did not see indications for the presence of publication bias. We formulated recommendations for future studies on biculturalism.