Keynotes
We are delighted to welcome three excellent keynote speakers at TeaP2027!
Stephan Lewandowsky (Chair in Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol, UK)
The Power of Political Speech: From Persuasion to Action
Democracy is in retreat around the world. Even countries that were long considered exemplary democracies are not immune against autocratization. Here we apply the lens of large-scale computational linguistic analysis to illustrate and understand those trends. Language is crucial to democracy: it permits negotiation of power relations; it is used to compete on the “marketplace of ideas” to inform government policy. But language is also the tool of demagogues and autocrats to control the populace and suppress dissent. How does discourse in a democracy differ from the rhetoric of autocrats? Can we anticipate the decline of a democracy by analyzing its political discourse? We present several strands of research that illustrate how language mirrors the health of a democracy and how it can also be used to subvert democracy. We first show that the tacit conceptions of truth and honesty that are embodied in political speech are strong predictors of political performance and societal welfare. An analysis of U.S. Congressional speeches reveals that since the mid-1970s, rhetoric has shifted from being evidence-based to being intuition-based –that is, instead of appealing to data and facts, politicians have increasingly appealed to feelings and hunches when making political arguments. This shift has been accompanied by increasing societal inequality, decreased congressional productivity, and increased polarization. We next show that political speech can be linked to violence in several ways. For example, we show that the language of political manifestos can be used to predict whether a particular manifesto gave rise to political violence. Similarly, presidential falsehoods have been associated with political violence during the last 175 years. We also show that persuasive language can be tailored to exploit people's particular vulnerabilities based on their personality or other personal characteristics, providing an avenue for large-scale manipulation. When considered together, it is clear linguistic analysis of political speech provides an early window into democratic backsliding and autocratization.
Anne Cleary (Department of Psychology, Colorado State University, U.S.A.)
Putting Familiarity at the Center of Cognition
TBA
Julia Haaf (Psychological Methods, Statistics & Evaluation; University of Potsdam; Germany)
Measuring Attentional Control: Psychometric, Experimental, and Theoretical Considerations
Attentional control refers to the ability of maintaining a goal and goal-relevant information in the face of distraction. This ability can be conceptualized as a psychometric construct with individual variability across experimental tasks and situations. However, it is often difficult to obtain robust individual differences when measuring attentional control. In this talk, I will discuss psychometric, methodological, and theoretical considerations related to this issue. First, important psychometric considerations are how to assess whether individual differences of attentional control are reliable or not, and whether behavioral tasks assessing attentional control ability are appropriately calibrated to produce reliable measures. To address these considerations, I will draw upon item response theory, and assess if and how this fundamental psychometric approach can be used to improve attentional control measurement. Second, an important methodological consideration is the speed-accuracy trade-off, the tendency for faster responses to result in lower accuracy. Typically, this trade-off is neglected when using attentional-control measures. However, it is possible that individual or situational differences in the speed-accuracy trade-off based on different strategies or preferences affect the quality of measurement. To address this potential problem, I will present a large-scale empirical assessment of the speed-accuracy trade-off in typical attentional control tasks. Third, I will argue that the measurement debate currently lacks theoretical considerations. To move forward with the psychometric construct of attentional control, we need to consider cognitive models that formalize how attentional-control processes relate to empirical attentional-control measures.
