Joseph Billingsley

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Assistant) at North Carolina State University

COVID‐19 poses a considerable threat to adolescent mental health. We investigated depression rates in teens from pre to post‐COVID. We also explored if leveraging a growth mindset intervention (“Healthy Minds”) could improve adolescent mental health outcomes during the pandemic, especially for adolescents experiencing the most distress. In Study 1,...

Growth mindset interventions, which seek to teach the belief that attributes can change, are increasing in popularity and being leveraged to improve health. As these interventions expand in scope, there is a critical need for a systematic review of existing implementation practices to help move the field towards more robust, impactful, and replicab...

Belief systems, which can feed, or diminish, stigma are important predictors of poverty reduction efforts. In the current work, we focused on mindsets, which are beliefs about the changeability (growth mindsets) or the stability (fixed mindsets) of the level of poverty in society. We conducted six studies, two preregistered, using both cross‐sectio...

As growth mindset interventions increase in scope and popularity, scientists and policymakers are asking: Are these interventions effective? To answer this question properly, the field needs to understand the meaningful heterogeneity in effects. In the present systematic review and meta-analysis, we focused on two key moderators with adequate data...

Psychologists are uniquely positioned to help with our collective obligation to advance scientific knowledge in ways that help individuals to flourish. Growth mindsets may offer one such tool for improving lives, yet some research questions the potential to replicate key findings. The aims in the current work are to help explain mixed results and o...

Believing anxiety can change is a predictor of wellbeing, in part, because such beliefs – known as growth mindsets – predict weaker threat appraisals, which in turn improves psychological functioning. However, feeling a sense of personal threat facilitates social activism, and thus growth mindsets may undermine such action. Across six studies (N =...

What should researchers say when recruiting entrepreneurs to participate in their study? Using a sample of entrepreneurs (N=1,450) who were being asked to participate in an academic research project, we conducted an experiment to determine recruitment message efficacy. Drawing on best practices from the behavioral insights literature, we developed...

We review the logic of an evolutionary perspective on forgiveness, highlighting how insight into the likely function of forgiveness--solving adaptive problems related to acquiring and maintaining social relationships--has productively guided research and theory. A combination of experimental, longitudinal, cross-sectional, and cross-cultural eviden...

We review the logic of an evolutionary perspective on forgiveness, highlighting how insight into the likely function of forgiveness--solving adaptive problems related to acquiring and maintaining social relationships--has productively guided research and theory. A combination of experimental, longitudinal, cross-sectional, and cross-cultural eviden...

What should researchers say when recruiting entrepreneurs to participate in their study? Using a sample of entrepreneurs (N = 1450) who were being asked to participate in an academic research project, we conducted an experiment to determine recruitment message efficacy. Drawing on best practices from the behavioral insights literature, we developed...

Discerning adaptations from by-products is a defining feature of evolutionary science. Mehr, Krasnow, Bryant, and Hagen posit that music is an adaptation that evolved to function as a credible signal. We counter this claim, as we are not convinced they have dispelled the possibility that music is an elaboration of extant features of language.

Motivated by the poorly understood nature of the term “mindsets” in the domain of entrepreneurship, we embarked on an exploration encompassing three research goals: a) defining and assessing growth mindsets in entrepreneurship, b) investigating how growth mindsets in entrepreneurship correlate with personality constructs, and c) exploring how growt...

Robust evidence supports the importance of apologies for promoting forgiveness. Yet less is known about how apologies exert their effects. Here, we focus on their potential to promote forgiveness by way of increasing perceptions of relationship value. We used a method for directly testing these causal claims by manipulating both the independent var...

Researchers commonly conceptualize forgiveness as a rich complex of psychological changes involving attitudes, emotions, and behaviors. Psychometric work with the measures developed to capture this conceptual richness, however, often points to a simpler picture of the psychological dimensions in which forgiveness takes place. In an effort to better...

Research into the cognitive capacities of infants has revealed a rich assortment of competencies that help to structure inferences across multiple content domains. Despite these advances, researchers have paid relatively little attention to a domain crucial to social life: kinship. One recent exception is a set of studies by Spokes and Spelke (2017...

Researchers commonly conceptualize forgiveness as a rich complex of psychological changes involving attitudes, emotions, and behaviors. Psychometric work with the measures developed to capture this conceptual richness, however, often point to a simpler picture of the latent psychological dimensions along which forgiveness takes place. In an effort...

Does religion promote prosocial behaviour? Despite numerous publications that seem to answer this question affirmatively, divergent results from recent meta-analyses and pre-registered replication efforts suggest that the issue is not yet settled. Uncertainty lingers around (i) whether the effects of religious cognition on prosocial behaviour were...

Why is disgust sensitivity associated with socially conservative political views? Is it because socially conservative ideologies mitigate the risks of infectious disease, whether by promoting out-group avoidance or by reinforcing norms that sustain antipathogenic practices? Or might it be because socially conservative ideologies promote moral stand...

Does religious cognition motivate generosity toward strangers? Divergent results from recent meta-analyses and pre-registered replication efforts suggest the issue is not yet settled. Additional uncertainty lingers around whether (a) the effects of religious cognition on prosocial behaviour obtain through implicit cognitive processes, explicit cogn...

Disgust is an emotion intimately linked to pathogen avoidance. Building on prior work, we suggest disgust is an output of programmes that evolved to address three separate adaptive problems: what to eat, what to touch and with whom to have sex. We briefly discuss the architecture of these programmes, specifying their perceptual inputs and the conte...

What happens in the human mind when someone forgives? Recent theoretical work predicts that the psychological mechanisms underlying forgiveness consult the victim’s perceptions of the transgressor’s relationship value and exploitation risk, and that apologies influence forgiveness by changing these perceptions. To date, however, there has been no d...

Despite the profound influence of relatedness on mating and cooperative behavior in humans, the cues men use to assess paternity and guide offspring-directed behavior have yet to be fully resolved. According to leading theories of kin detection, kinship cues should influence both sexual and altruistic motivations because of fitness consequences ass...

Evolution-minded researchers posit that the suite of human cognitive adaptations may include forgiveness systems. According to these researchers, forgiveness systems regulate interpersonal motivation toward a transgressor in the wake of harm by weighing multiple factors that influence both the potential gains of future interaction with the transgre...

Genetic relatedness is a fundamental determinant of social behavior across species. Over the last few decades, researchers have been investigating the proximate psychological mechanisms that enable humans to assess their genetic relatedness to others. Much of this work has focused on identifying cues that predicted relatedness in ancestral environm...

Over the past century, we have learned much about how humans learn to categorize individuals as close genetic relatives. In the late 1800s Edward Westermarck sparked psychological and anthropological research into the role coresidence duration plays as a cue to siblingship and as an important factor regulating sexual attraction. Since then, researc...