Melis Muradoglu

Stanford University | SU · Department of Psychology

Mixed-effects models are an analytic technique for modeling repeated measurement or nested data. This paper explains the logic of mixed-effects modeling and describes two examples of mixed-effects analyses using R (R Development Core Team, 2020). The intended audience of the paper is psychologists who specialize in cognitive development research. T...

In certain domains, people represent some of an individual’s properties (e.g., a tiger’s ferocity), but not others (e.g., a tiger’s being in the zoo), as stemming from the assumed “essence” of the individual’s category. How do children identify which properties of an individual are essentialized and which are not? Here, we examine whether formal ex...

Beliefs about the malleability of intellectual ability—mindsets—shape achievement. Recent evidence suggests that even young children hold such mindsets; yet, no reliable and valid instruments exist for measuring individual differences in young children’s mindsets. Here, we developed an instrument for this purpose—the Growth Mindset Scale for Childr...

Women are underrepresented in fields where success is believed to require brilliance, but the reasons for this pattern are poorly understood. We investigate perceptions of a “masculinity contest culture,” an organizational environment of ruthless competition, as a key mechanism whereby a perceived emphasis on brilliance discourages female participa...

Feeling like an impostor is common among successful individuals, but particularly among women and early-career professionals. Here, we investigated how gender and career-stage differences in impostor feelings vary as a function of the contexts that academics have to navigate. In particular, we focused on a powerful but underexplored contextual feat...

How do children reason about academic performance across development? A classic view suggests children’s intuitive theories in this domain undergo qualitative changes. According to this view, older children and adults consider both effort and skill as sources of performance (i.e., a “performance = effort + skill” theory), but younger children can o...

Understanding how people explain is a core task for cognitive science. In this Opinion article, we argue that research on explanation would benefit from more engagement with how the cognitive systems involved in generating explanations (e.g., attention, long-term memory) shape the outputs of this process. Although it is clear that these systems do...

The neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) has been implicated in a wide range of affiliative processes. OT exerts its functions via OT receptors, which are encoded by the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR). Epigenetic modification of OXTR through the process of DNA methylation has been associated with individual differences in behavioral phenotypes. Specifically,...

Spear phishing emails are key in many cyber attacks. Successful emails employ psychological weapons of influence and relevant life domains. This paper investigates spear phishing susceptibility as a function of Internet user age (old vs young), weapon of influence, and life domain. A 21-day study was conducted with 158 participants (younger and old...