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1. Development of Math Attitudes and Math Self‐Concepts: Gender Differences, Implicit–Explicit Dissociations, and Relations to Math Achievement

   https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13523  

   Cvencek, Dario; Brečić, Ružica; Gaćeša, Dora; Meltzoff, Andrew_N (February 2021, Child Development)

   Three hundred and ninety‐one children (195 girls;M_age = 9.56 years) attending Grades 1 and 5 completed implicit and explicit measures of math attitudes and math self‐concepts. Math grades were obtained. Multilevel analyses showed that first‐grade girls held a strong negative implicit attitude about math, despite no gender differences in math grades or self‐reported (explicit) positivity about math. The explicit measures significantly predicted math grades, and implicit attitudes accounted for additional variance in boys. The contrast between the implicit (negativity for girls) and explicit (positivity for girls and boys) effects suggest implicit–explicit dissociations in children, which have also been observed in adults. Early‐emerging implicit attitudes may be a foundation for the later development of explicit attitudes and beliefs about math. 

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2. Stuck on Intergroup Attitudes: The Need to Shift Gears to Change Intergroup Behaviors

   https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916231185775  

   Brauer, Markus (July 2023, Perspectives on Psychological Science)

   Decades of research on how to improve intergroup relations have primarily examined ways to change prejudiced attitudes. However, this focus on negative intergroup attitudes has yielded few effective solutions. Because intergroup relations are shaped by behavior during intergroup interactions, it is necessary to identify constructs that have a strong causal impact on intergroup behavior change. In this article, I will discuss evidence showing that intergroup attitude change is neither a sufficient nor necessary cause for intergroup behavior change. Empirical research suggests that intergroup attitudes are difficult to change and have a limited effect on intergroup behavior. I also distinguish between constructs that primarily affect intergroup attitude change (e.g., counterstereotypical exemplars, evaluative conditioning) and constructs that primarily affect intergroup behavior change (e.g., social norms, self-efficacy). Further, suggestions for future research will also be provided to advance understanding of the various psychological constructs that influence intergroup behavior change, which will help us develop effective methods of improving intergroup relations. 

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3. Meta-Analytic Use of Balanced Identity Theory to Validate the Implicit Association Test

   https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167220916631  

   Cvencek, Dario; Meltzoff, Andrew N.; Maddox, Craig D.; Nosek, Brian A.; Rudman, Laurie A.; Devos, Thierry; Dunham, Yarrow; Baron, Andrew S.; Steffens, Melanie C.; Lane, Kristin; et al (January 2020, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin)

   This meta-analysis evaluated theoretical predictions from balanced identity theory (BIT) and evaluated the validity of zero points of Implicit Association Test (IAT) and self-report measures used to test these predictions. Twenty-one researchers contributed individual subject data from 36 experiments (total N = 12,773) that used both explicit and implicit measures of the social–cognitive constructs. The meta-analysis confirmed predictions of BIT’s balance–congruity principle and simultaneously validated interpretation of the IAT’s zero point as indicating absence of preference between two attitude objects. Statistical power afforded by the sample size enabled the first confirmations of balance–congruity predictions with self-report measures. Beyond these empirical results, the meta-analysis introduced a within-study statistical test of the balance–congruity principle, finding that it had greater efficiency than the previous best method. The meta-analysis’s full data set has been publicly archived to enable further studies of interrelations among attitudes, stereotypes, and identities. 

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4. Understanding dynamics of polarization via multiagent social simulation

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01626-5  

   Haque, Amanul; Ajmeri, Nirav; Singh, Munindar P. (August 2023, AI & SOCIETY)

   Abstract It is widely recognized that the Web contributes to user polarization, and such polarization affects not just politics but also peoples’ stances about public health, such as vaccination. Understanding polarization in social networks is challenging because it depends not only on user attitudes but also their interactions and exposure to information. We adopt Social Judgment Theory to operationalize attitude shift and model user behavior based on empirical evidence from past studies. We design a social simulation to analyze how content sharing affects user satisfaction and polarization in a social network. We investigate the influence of varying tolerance in users and selectively exposing users to congenial views. We find that (1) higher user tolerance slows down polarization and leads to lower user satisfaction; (2) higher selective exposure leads to higher polarization and lower user reach; and (3) both higher tolerance and higher selective exposure lead to a more homophilic social network. 

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5. Entanglement spread area law in gapped ground states

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01740-7  

   Anshu, Anurag; Harrow, Aram W.; Soleimanifar, Mehdi (September 2022, Nature Physics)

   Ground-state entanglement governs various properties of quantum many-body systems at low temperatures and is the key to understanding gapped quantum phases of matter. Here we identify a structural property of entanglement in the ground state of gapped local Hamiltonians. This property is captured using a quantum information quantity known as the entanglement spread, which measures the difference between Rényi entanglement entropies. Our main result shows that gapped ground states possess limited entanglement spread across any partition of the system, exhibiting an area-law scaling. Our result applies to systems with interactions described by any graph, but we obtain an improved bound for the special case of lattices. These interaction graphs include cases where entanglement entropy is known not to satisfy an area law. We achieve our results first by connecting the ground-state entanglement to the communication complexity of testing bipartite entangled states and then devising a communication scheme for testing ground states using recently developed quantum algorithms for Hamiltonian simulation. 

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