Are teachers biased against boys?

The most popular articles being shared in our network this week.

The logic of social exchange: Has natural selection shaped how humans reason? Studies with the Wason selection task. In a classic article from 1989, Leda Cosmides examines whether humans have a general-purpose ability to detect violations of conditional rules. Using an experiment, she finds that subjects are much better able to solve the Wason selection task when it is framed in terms of cheater detection than when it is framed in abstract terms.

Updating stereotypical attributions in light of new information: The attractiveness halo effect changes when attractiveness changes. The attractiveness halo effect is where people assume an attractive person must have other desirable traits. Marine Rougier and Jan De Houwer find that the halo effect can be undone by providing new information suggesting that the attractive person is less attractive than initially thought.

A contemporary look at the relationship between general cognitive ability and job performance. Paul Sackett and colleagues carry out a meta-analysis of the relationship between general intelligence and job performance, using only studies from the 21st century. They obtain an average correlation of .22 corrected for unreliability and range restriction. This is lower than prior estimates based on studies from the 20th century.