Evan Orticio

Title: Social prevalence is rationally integrated in belief updating

Abstract: The amount of data required to construct all of our real-world beliefs “from scratch” is intractable given the limitations of our attention and the complexity of the world. We thus rely heavily on social information to inform our beliefs. How is this social information integrated? We ask whether and to what degree the perceived prevalence of a belief influences belief adoption. In two experiments, we show that increases in a person’s estimated prevalence of a belief led to increased endorsement of said belief, even for low-probability pseudoscientific and conspiratorial claims. Belief endorsement rose when impressions of the belief’s prevalence were increased and when initial beliefs were uncertain, as predicted by a Bayesian cue integration framework. Thus, people weigh social information rationally. These results have clear implications for online misinformation: social engagement metrics that prompt inflated prevalence estimates in users risk increasing the believability and adoption of viral misinformation posts.

Victoria Keating

Title: Intuitive Theories of Asian Racial Socialization

Abstract: In the United States, about one third of Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) report having personally experienced discrimination (Discrimination in America, 2017). This discrimination occurs not only in adulthood but even as young as childhood. In 2021, nearly 1 in 3 AAPI parents reported that their child had experienced an Anti-Asian hate incident in school (Jeung et al., 2021). Nonetheless, little research has investigated how AAPI parents decide when to discuss racial bias with their children and what factors may affect such decisions.

In this talk, I briefly review current literature on racial socialization. I will then discuss a preliminary study we have conducted looking into AAPI racial socialization. In our preliminary study, AAPI college students who reflected on AAPI parents’ racial socialization (N=113) indicated that many AAPI parents are hesitant to begin discussions of racial bias. Moreover, this hesitancy may be heavily influenced by such factors as immigration status, language barriers, and certain cultural ideas such as the American Dream, the Model Minority Myth, and the Perpetual Foreigner Myth. This work provides initial evidence that AAPI racial socialization is heterogeneous, and future work should consider more in-depth investigations into the consequences of different socialization practices for children. Finally, I will describe future directions in our research of racial socialization.