Patrick Forscher

Grenoble Alpes University · Department of Psychology

According to the justified true belief (JTB) account of knowledge, people can truly know something only if they have a belief that is both justified and true (i.e., knowledge is JTB). This account was challenged by Gettier, who argued that JTB does not explain knowledge attributions in certain situations, later called “Gettier-type cases,” wherein...

Background: The Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA) recently completed a large-scale moral psychology study using translated versions of the Oxford Utilitarianism Scale (OUS). However, the translated versions have no validity evidence. Objective: The study investigated the structural validity evidence of the OUS across 15 translated versions an...

Mental simulation theories of language comprehension propose that people automatically create mental representations of objects mentioned in sentences. Mental representation is often measured with the sentence-picture verification task, wherein participants first read a sentence that implies the object property (i.e., shape and orientation). Partic...

The trend for large-scale collaboration has the potential to improve researcher, cultural, and participant diversity. Conducting in-person research requires the examination of challenges and payoffs of competing priorities in what constitutes 'good' research. We describe these challenges and potential resolutions and payoffs in advancing big-team s...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Psychological Science Accelerator coordinated three large-scale psychological studies to examine the effects of loss-gain framing, cognitive reappraisals, and autonomy framing manipulations on behavioral intentions and affective measures. The data collected (April to October 2020) included specific measures...

Following theories of emotional embodiment, the facial feedback hypothesis suggests that individuals’ subjective experiences of emotion are influenced by their facial expressions. However, evidence for this hypothesis has been mixed. We thus formed a global adversarial collaboration and carried out a preregistered, multicentre study designed to spe...

Progress in psychology has been frustrated by challenges concerning replicability, generalizability, strategy selection, inferential reproducibility, and computational reproducibility. Although often discussed separately, these five challenges may share a common cause: insufficient investment of intellectual and nonintellectual resources into the t...

In the January 2022 issue of Perspectives, Götz et al. argued that small effects are “the indispensable foundation for a cumulative psychological science.” They supported their argument by claiming that (a) psychology, like genetics, consists of complex phenomena explained by additive small effects; (b) psychological-research culture rewards large...

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about...

Among animals, natural selection has resulted in a broad array of behavioural strategies to maintain core body temperature in a relatively narrow range. One important temperature regulation strategy is social thermoregulation , which is often done by warming the body together with conspecifics. The literature suggests that the same selection pressu...

When psychologists attend to Africa, they usually test whether theories and concepts developed in North America and Europe generalize to Africa. Psychology would be enriched by focusing on Africa on its own terms.

When psychologists attend to Africa, they usually test whether theories and concepts developed in North America and Europe generalize to Africa. Psychology would be enriched by focusing on Africa on its own terms.

La qualité de la recherche scientifique s’évalue non seulement par son impact positif sur le développement socio-économique et le bien-être humain, mais également par sa contribution à l’élaboration des connaissances scientifiques valides et fiables. De ce fait, les chercheurs, quelle que soit leur discipline scientifique, sont censés adopter des p...

Götz et al. (2021) argue that small effects are the indispensable foundation for a cumulative psychological science. Whilst we applaud their efforts to bring this important discussion to the forefront, we argue that their core arguments do not hold up under scrutiny, and if left uncorrected have the potential to undermine best practices in reportin...

We conducted a pre-registered meta-analysis to appraise available evidence on two stress regulation strategies: Self-administered mindfulness meditation and heart rate variability biofeedback. We used a combination of keywords to find as many experimental and observational studies as possible, all of which highlighted a link between the two strateg...

Improving the generalizability of psychology findings to a culture requires sampling participants in that culture. Yet few psychology studies sample Africans. We believe we can expand the capacity of African psychology researchers by giving them freely available, cutting-edge research tools and workflows. We used a training method developed by the...

Improving the generalizability of psychology findings to a culture requires sampling participants in that culture. Yet few psychology studies sample Africans. We believe we can expand the capacity of African psychology researchers by giving them freely available, cutting-edge research tools and workflows. We used a training method developed by the...

Spurred by a crisis in their confidence in past findings, psychology in North America, Europe, and Australia has been undergoing a credibility revolution, which has spurred the development and popularization of open science practices to improve the research process. Alongside this development, a broad array of stakeholders have noted that African s...

In a now-classic study by Srull and Wyer (1979), people who were exposed to phrases with hostile content subsequently judged a man as being more hostile. And this “hostile priming effect” has had a significant influence on the field of social cognition over the subsequent decades. However, a recent multi-lab collaborative study (McCarthy et al., 20...

This document estimates the Psychological Science Accelerator’s study capacity for the 2020-2021 academic year. As described in our Study Capacity Policy, study capacity is determined by the PSA’s data collection capacity, or the amount and kind of participant data the PSA can collect in a given year, and its administrative capacity, or its ability...

Social and behavioural scientists have attempted to speak to the COVID-19 crisis. But is behavioural research on COVID-19 suitable for making policy decisions? We offer a taxonomy that lets our science advance in ‘evidence readiness levels’ to be suitable for policy. We caution practitioners to take extreme care translating our findings to applicat...

Among animals, natural selection has resulted in a broad array of behavioral strategies to maintain core body temperature in a relatively narrow range. These strategies include social thermoregulation, the use of con-specifics to warm the body through activities like huddling. We suspected that the same selection pressures that apply to other anima...

Progress in psychology has been frustrated by challenges concerning replicability, generalizability, strategy selection, inferential reproducibility, and computational reproducibility. Although often discussed separately, we argue that these five problems share a common cause: insufficient investment of resources into the typical psychology study....

The quality of scientific research is assessed not only by its positive impact on socio-economic development and human well-being, but also by its contribution to the development of valid and reliable scientific knowledge. Thus, researchers regardless of their scientific discipline, are supposed to adopt research practices based on transparency and...

Psychological scientists have attempted to speak to the COVID-19 crisis. Psychology research on COVID-19, we argue, is unsuitable for making policy decisions. We offer a taxonomy that lets our science advance in Evidence Readiness Levels to be suitable for policy; we caution practitioners to take extreme care translating our findings to application...

The Psychological Science Accelerator's Rapid-Response COVID-19 Project (PSACR) is a project to rapidly select and conduct rigorous, multi-site, and multinational research to understand the psychological and behavioral aspects of the COVID-19 crisis. Here we describe the process we used to select our projects and our general methods for implementin...

The Psychological Science Accelerator's Rapid-Response COVID-19 Project (PSACR) aimed to rapidly select and conduct rigorous, multi-site, and multinational research to understand the psychological and behavioral aspects of the COVID-19 crisis. Here we describe the process we used to select our projects and our general methods for implementing them

The 2016 U.S. presidential election coincided with the rise of the “alternative right,” or alt-right. Alt-right associates have wielded considerable influence on the current administration and on social discourse, but the movement’s loose organizational structure has led to disparate portrayals of its members’ psychology and made it difficult to de...

Over the last ten years, Oosterhof and Todorov’s valence-dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgments of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear w...

We detail the philosophy of our lab, which serves as a general workflow and also a lab manual describing expectations and responsibilities. Updated once per year based on what is/isn't working.

According to stereotype threat theory, the possibility of confirming a negative group stereotype can evoke feelings of threat, leading people to underperform in the very domains in which they are stereotyped as lacking ability. This theory has immense theoretical and practical implications, but many studies supporting it include small samples and v...

Using a novel technique known as network meta-analysis, we synthesized evidence from 492 studies (87,418 participants) to investigate the effectiveness of procedures in changing implicit measures, which we define as response biases on implicit tasks. We also evaluated these procedures’ effects on explicit and behavioral measures. We found that impl...

The National Institutes of Health uses small groups of scientists to judge the quality of the grant proposals that they receive, and these quality judgments form the basis of its funding decisions. In order for this system to fund the best science, the subject experts must, at a minimum, agree as to what counts as a “quality” proposal. We investiga...

We describe the data management bylaws for the Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA), a distributed network of laboratories dedicated to completing large-scale collaborative behavioral science projects. Our bylaws are organized around the principles of ethical data use, security, accuracy, usability, transparency. We describe how these embodied t...

Many granting agencies allow reviewers to know the identity of a proposal’s principal investigator (PI), which opens the possibility that reviewers discriminate on the basis of PI race and gender. We investigated this experimentally with 48 NIH R01 grant proposals, representing a broad range of NIH-funded science. We modified PI names to create sep...

Concerns about the veracity of psychological research have been growing. Many findings in psychological science are based on studies with insufficient statistical power and nonrepresentative samples, or may otherwise be limited to specific, ungeneralizable settings or populations. Crowdsourced research, a type of large-scale collaboration in which...

Concerns have been growing about the veracity of psychological findings. Many findings in psychological science are based on studies with insufficient statistical power and non-representative samples, or may otherwise be limited to specific, ungeneralizable settings or populations. Large-scale collaboration, in which one or more research projects a...

Addressing the underrepresentation of women in science is a top priority for many institutions, but the majority of efforts to increase representation of women are neither evidence-based nor rigorously assessed. One exception is the gender bias habit-breaking intervention (Carnes et al., 2015), which, in a cluster-randomized trial involving all but...

The 2016 U.S. presidential election coincided with the rise the “alternative right” or “alt-right”. Although alt-right associates wield considerable influence on the current administration, the movement’s loose organizational structure has led to disparate portrayals of its members’ psychology. We surveyed 447 alt-right adherents on a battery of ps...

Psychologists wishing to resolve societal problems typically develop interventions that target individuals. However, many societal problems, such as disparities in hiring, are not caused solely by the actions of individuals operating independently. In two studies, including a field experiment in academic departments randomized at the cluster level...

The prejudice habit-breaking intervention (Devine, Forscher, Austin, & Cox, 2012) and its offshoots (e.g., Carnes et al., 2015) have shown promise in effecting long-term change in key outcomes related to intergroup bias, including increases in awareness, concern about discrimination, and, in one study, long-term decreases in implicit bias. This int...

Research on reducing or controlling implicit bias has been characterized by a tension between the two goals of reducing lingering intergroup disparities and gaining insight into human cognition. The tension between these two goals has created two distinct research traditions, each of which is characterized by different research questions, methods,...

As a morally charged subject with great relevance to society, prejudice has captured the attention of social psychologists since the field's inception. However, these characteristics have also made the study of prejudice particularly susceptible to the vicissitudes of historical circumstance. In this chapter, we trace how the study of prejudice has...

This chapter reviews research on the prejudice habit model (Devine, 1989), which conceptualizes unintentional bias as an unwanted habit that can be broken through motivation, awareness, and effort. We review research from the past two decades on the various components of the habit model and identify areas of ambiguity for future research. We conclu...

Scholars and activists alike have expressed concern that a form of have expressed alarm over ongoing disparities in legal outcomes between social groups. Based on evidence that measures of implicit bias are correlated with some discriminatory behaviors, many of these scholars and activists have concluded that implicit bias causes these disparities....

The prejudice habit-breaking intervention (Devine et al., 2012) and its offshoots (e.g., Carnes et al., 2012) have shown promise in effecting long-term change in key outcomes related to intergroup bias, including increases in awareness, concern about discrimination, and, in one study, long-term decreases in implicit bias. This intervention is based...

Contemporary prejudice research focuses primarily on people who are motivated to respond without prejudice and the ways in which unintentional bias can cause these people to act inconsistent with this motivation. However, some real-world phenomena (e.g., hate speech, hate crimes) and experimental findings (e.g., Plant & Devine, 2001; 2009) suggest...

Using a technique known as network meta-analysis that is new to psychological science, we synthesized evidence from 494 studies (80,356 participants) to investigate the effectiveness of different procedures to change implicit bias, and their effects on explicit bias and behavior. We found that implicit bias can be changed, but the effects are often...

Contemporary prejudice research focuses primarily on people who are motivated to respond without prejudice and the ways in which unintentional bias can cause these people to act in a manner inconsistent with this motivation. However, some real-world phenomena (e.g., hate speech, hate crimes) and experimental findings (e.g., Plant & Devine, 2001, 20...

Research on reducing or controlling implicit bias has been characterized by a tension between the two goals of reducing lingering intergroup disparities and gaining insight into human cognition. The tension between these two goals has created two distinct research traditions, each of which is characterized by different research questions, methods,...

Purpose: Despite sincere commitment to egalitarian, meritocratic principles, subtle gender bias persists, constraining women's opportunities for academic advancement. The authors implemented a pair-matched, single-blind, cluster randomized, controlled study of a gender-bias-habit-changing intervention at a large public university. Method: Partic...

We developed a multi-faceted prejudice habit-breaking intervention to produce long-term reductions in implicit race bias. The intervention is based on the premise that implicit bias is like a habit that can be reduced through a combination of awareness of implicit bias, concern about the effects of that bias, and the application of strategies to re...