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Social Neurobiology

New Publication: Testing Explicit Attitudes

With a new method for generating surveys, the Social Neurobiology lab in collaboration with researchers at Mass General Hospital, studies how participants express their explicit biases.

This current approach combines online labor markets with novel experimental manipulations to study social cognition. In our first publication using this methodology, we developed a novel 'Narrative Generative Survey' in which we created unique short narratives to assess various explicit attitudinal biases at the population level. The Narrative Generative approach has good convergent validity. Participants were also found to exhibit strong social contrast effects, except for character's ethnicity. We also found strong moderation by respondents' political attitudes. Surprisingly, conservative respondents showed lower scores for happy characters compared to liberal respondents, among several other measures. 

Link to the scientific publication:https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1412131/full