Alberto Acerbi, Sacha Altay & Hugo Mercier (2022). Research note: Fighting misinformation or fighting for information? Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review, 3 (1), pp. 1-15. doi: 10.37016/mr-2020-87.

Résumé :
A wealth of interventions have been devised to reduce belief in fake news or the tendency to share such news. By contrast, interventions aimed at increasing trust in reliable news sources have received less attention. In this article we show that, given the very limited prevalence of misinformation (including fake news), interventions aimed at reducing acceptance or spread of such news are bound to have very small effects on the overall quality of the information environment, especially compared to interventions aimed at increasing trust in reliable news sources. To make this argument, we simulate the effect that such interventions have on a global information score, which increases when people accept reliable information and decreases when people accept misinformation.

Mélusine Boon-Falleur, Adrien Bouguen, Axelle Charpentier, Yann Algan, Élise Huillery & Coralie Chevallier (2022). Simple questionnaires outperform behavioral tasks to measure socio-emotional skills in students. Sci Rep. 12, 442

Résumé :
Recent empirical research has shown that improving socio-emotional skills such as grit, conscientiousness and self-control leads to higher academic achievement and better life outcomes. However, both theoretical and empirical works have raised concerns about the reliability of the different methods used to measure socio-emotional skills. We compared the reliability and validity of the three leading measurements methods—a student-reported questionnaire, a teacher-reported questionnaire, and a behavioral task—in a sample of 3997 French students. Before analyzing the data, we polled 114 international researchers in cognitive development and education economics; most researchers in both fields predicted that the behavioral task would be the best method. We found instead that the teacher questionnaire was more predictive of students’ behavioral outcomes and of their grade progression, while the behavioral task was the least predictive. This work suggests that researchers may not be using optimal tools to measure socio-emotional skills in children.

Coralie Chevallier, Mathieu Perona (2022). Homo sapiens dans la cité: Comment adapter l'action publique à la psychologie humaine, Odile Jacob

Résumé :
Pourquoi les humains se souviennent-ils d’un visage rencontré cinquante ans plus tôt, mais oublient de payer leurs factures à l’heure ? Pourquoi n’arrive-t-on pas à réduire les émissions de CO2 dans l’atmosphère, alors que nous sommes tous concernés par la survie de la planète ?
Malgré nous, nos contradictions intérieures freinent le changement de nos comportements au service du bien commun. Ces écarts avec le citoyen parfait résultent de l’adaptation extrêmement efficace des humains à leur environnement. Les auteurs expliquent comment l’évolution a conditionné notre psychologie, notre rapport à la décision et à l’action.
L’enjeu n’est donc pas de modifier la nature humaine, mais de concevoir une action publique qui intègre pleinement le fonctionnement réel de la cognition au service d’une plus grande autonomie de chacun.
Illustré par des exemples concrets d’expérimentations en France et à l’étranger, ce livre montre comment les sciences comportementales peuvent redéfinir en profondeur l’action publique pour susciter des changements dans nos manières d’agir.

Anne-Sophie Hacquin, Sacha Altay, Lene Aarøe, Hugo Mercier (2022). Disgust sensitivity and public opinion on nuclear energy, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 101749, ISSN 0272-4944, doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2021.101749.

Résumé :
An increasing number of experts agree that nuclear power should be part of the solution to fight climate change as it emits little greenhouse gases, has had no negative health consequences during normal operation, and even limited consequences after accidents. However, in many countries the population is much more ambivalent about nuclear power, and tends to exaggerate the negative effects on health and the environment. We suggest that this gap between experts and the public stems in part from nuclear power triggering the behavioral immune system: a set of cognitive adaptations that aim at protecting us against pathogens by making us particularly alert to their existence, and attuned to their risks. In line with this suggestion, we find that (i) participants overestimate the risks of nuclear accidents compared to other types of disasters (Experiment 1), except for disasters that should also trigger the behavioral immune system (Experiment 2); (ii) participants were more interested in reading and sharing a news article about a nuclear accident than about other types of accidents (with the same exception, Experiment 2); (iii) participants were less willing to be in contact with an object that had been in a nuclear power plant than in a car manufacturing plant (Experiment 3); (iv) arguments showing that nuclear power plants should not elicit fears of contamination reduced the negative perception of nuclear energy (Experiment 4). This work suggests a cognitive basis for the popular rejection of nuclear power, and ways to bridge the gap between experts and the public on this topic.

Agnès Landemard, Célian Bimbard, Charlie Demené, Shihab Shamma, Sam Norman-Haignere, Yves Boubenec (2022). Distinct higher-order representations of natural sounds in human and ferret auditory cortex. eLife 2021;10:e65566, doi:10.7554/eLife.65566.

Résumé :
Little is known about how neural representations of natural sounds differ across species. For example, speech and music play a unique role in human hearing, yet it is unclear how auditory representations of speech and music differ between humans and other animals. Using functional ultrasound imaging, we measured responses in ferrets to a set of natural and spectrotemporally matched synthetic sounds previously tested in humans. Ferrets showed similar lower-level frequency and modulation tuning to that observed in humans. But while humans showed substantially larger responses to natural vs. synthetic speech and music in non-primary regions, ferret responses to natural and synthetic sounds were closely matched throughout primary and non-primary auditory cortex, even when tested with ferret vocalizations. This finding reveals that auditory representations in humans and ferrets diverge sharply at late stages of cortical processing, potentially driven by higher-order processing demands in speech and music.

Lara Narbona Sabaté, Geoffrey Mesbahi, Guillaume Dezecache, Cristiane Cäsar, Klaus Zuberbühler & Mélissa Berthet (2022). Animal linguistics in the making: the Urgency Principle and titi monkeys’ alarm system. Ethology Ecology & Evolution, doi:10.1080/03949370.2021.2015452

The emergent field of animal linguistics applies linguistics tools to animal data in order to investigate potential linguistic-like properties of their communication. One of these tools is the “Urgency Principle”, a pragmatic principle stating that in an alarm sequence, calls providing information about the nature or location of a threat must come before those that do not. This theoretical principle has helped understand the alarm system of putty-nosed monkeys, but whether it is relevant for animal communication systems more generally remains to be tested. Moreover, while animal communication systems can convey information via a large set of encoding mechanisms, the Urgency Principle was developed for only one encoding mechanism, call ordering. Here, we propose to extend this principle to other encoding mechanisms and empirically test this with the alarm call system of black-fronted titi monkeys (Callicebus nigrifrons). We investigated how information about the context of emission unfolded with the emission of successive calls. Specifically, we analysed how contextual parameters influenced the gradual sequential organization of the first 50 calls in the sequence, using methods borrowed from computational linguistics and random forest algorithms. We hypothesized that, if the extended Urgency Principle reflected the sequential organization of titi monkey alarm call sequences, mechanisms encoding urgent information about the predatory situation should appear before encoding mechanisms that do not. Results supported the hypothesis that mechanisms encoding for urgent information relating to a predator event consistently appeared before mechanisms encoding for less-urgent social information. Our study suggests that the extended Urgency Principle applies more generally to animal communication, demonstrating that conceptual tools from linguistics can successfully be used to study nonhuman communication systems.

AGENDA

Semaine du Cerveau 2022

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