Ralph Hertwig

Abrupt social and political transformations in twentieth-century Germany may have shifted how polygenic indices relate to educational outcomes across birth cohorts. Following a prespecified analysis plan, we harmonized genomic, educational, and regional data from four German studies, comprising 13,049 individuals born between 1918 and 1995. Polygenic index associations with educational attainment were robust and strengthened modestly across more recent birth cohorts, with no detectable difference between East and West Germany. Associations with intergenerational educational mobility showed no evidence of such strengthening but were stronger in the East than in the West. Polygenic indices were less predictive of educational attainment and educational mobility for women than for men, with no evidence of regional variation. We discuss the methodological limitations of polygenic indices for examining gene– environment interactions, and emphasize that evaluating whether these differences represent progress towards equal educational opportunity requires a normative framework that social science genetics alone cannot supply.

Human culture and cognition evolve in designed environments, like business organizations and online platforms, which are engineered to elicit some behaviors and suppress others. Emergent cultural complexity should thus be understood as a function of both bottom-up self-organization and properties of designed environments. Glossing over the role of top-down design risks misrepresenting the evolution of culture and cognition.

Empowering people to navigate online information competently is essential to complement systemic content moderation and platform regulation. A nationally representative randomized controlled study among adults in Germany ( N = 2,666) compared two media-literacy interventions: a source-focused lateral-reading strategy to help participants distinguish trustworthy from untrustworthy news outlets, and a claim-focused search strategy to help them assess the credibility of specific claims. Both interventions showed small improvements in discernment, but not all effects were statistically distinguishable from zero. At a 2-week follow-up, discernment improved in all groups, and differences between the intervention and control groups were no longer statistically distinguishable. We found no evidence of backfire effects. An exploratory analysis of discernment pretreatment indicated the lowest performance for supporters of populist radical-right parties. Behavioral measures suggested increases in information search in both intervention groups. On average, lateral reading reduced trust in untrustworthy sources, and online search increased trust in trustworthy sources.

False news-given its capacity to distort public opinion and erode trust-has prompted extensive research on potential countermeasures. Yet, there has been no systematic, comparative, and computational investigation of false news sharing and how best to curb it. To address this gap, we apply a semi-integrative experimental approach that (a) compares multiple existing false news interventions, (b) examines how individual and news-level factors predict false news sharing and shape intervention efficacy, and (c) uses drift-diffusion modeling to uncover the decision-making processes underlying all these effects. We find warning labels and media literacy tips to substantially improve news-sharing quality, whereas social norm cues exert a comparatively modest effect, and accuracy prompts yield only subtle benefits. Although numerous individual factors (e.g., age, political conservatism, social media use) predicted news-sharing quality, the observed intervention effects remained broadly robust across these factors, proving effective even within at-risk populations. Intervention outcomes were likewise robust to news-level variation, such as the believability, sensationalism, and political congruence of news content. Despite this robustness, we find each intervention to operate via distinct decision-making pathways. Warning labels shift initial sharing intentions toward sharing higher quality news, whereas media literacy tips operate later, enhancing the processing of news content and increasing cautiousness before making sharing decisions. By applying a multicomponent experimental framework, this work clarifies the risk factors and decision-making processes driving false news sharing and pinpoints which interventions work best, how they operate at the process level, and in which contexts they should be most effective. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

In “The Origins of Judgment and Decision-Making in Childhood,” Santhanagopalan et al. (this issue) argue that investigating the development of judgment and decision-making (JDM) is key to a compreh...

Responses to COVID‐19 in the United States were split along partisan political lines throughout the pandemic. People on the political left tended to take the medical threat more seriously and were more likely to adopt preventive health behaviors than those on the political right, resulting in clear differences in state‐level policies and health consequences. Here, we examine the origins of these differences, investigating whether they are based on interindividual differences or in party dynamics. Two groups of participants (), who had voted either for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in 2016, played the Transmission Game. Players made repeated decisions in a simulated pandemic that involved a trade‐off between increasing their expected personal payoff and reducing the chance of a total payoff‐loss for themselves and others. In four experimental conditions, the study framing (neutral or pandemic) was crossed with the presence (or absence) of a normative intervention aimed at reducing risk‐taking. We observed systematic partisan differences in all conditions, with Republicans taking more risk than Democrats, even in neutrally framed conditions—supporting the idea of interindividual differences between voter groups beyond party dynamics. At the same time, both normative interventions and the pandemic framing reduced risk‐taking and expected infection rates in both voter groups. Moreover, we examined individual predictors of risk‐taking and demonstrated that game behavior, conservatism, and psychological reactance predict intentions to adopt preventive health behaviors outside the laboratory. We discuss implications for the framing of studies conducted during ongoing crises and lessons for future pandemic preparedness.

Research on judgment and decision making typically studies "small worlds"-highly simplified and stylized tasks such as monetary gambles-among homogenous populations rather than big real-life decisions made by people around the globe. These transformative life decisions (e.g., whether or not to emigrate or flee a country, disclose one's sexual orientation, get divorced, or report a sexual assault) can shape lives. This article argues that rather than reducing such consequential decisions to fit small-world models, researchers need to analyze their real-world properties. Drawing on principles of bounded and ecological rationality, it proposes a framework that identifies five dimensions of transformative life decisions: conflicting cues, change of self, uncertain experiential value, irreversibility, and risk. The framework also specifies simple, versatile choice strategies that address these dimensions by, for instance, breaking down a decision into steps, avoiding trade-offs between present and future selves, or sampling others' experiences. Finally, it suggests benchmarks for assessing the rationality of transformative life decisions. Methodologically, this framework adapts a long tradition of mainly lab-based judgment and decision-making research to a text-based approach, thereby setting the stage for empirical work that analyzes real-world decisions using natural-language processing. Only by understanding decisions with the potential to transform life trajectories-and people in the process-will it be possible to develop encompassing and inclusive theories of human decision making. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).