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"Prudence," "impatience" or "laziness" are typically thought of as entrenched personality traits that guide how people weigh the cost of risk, delay and effort (respectively). However, new research shows that people's attitudes towards effort, delay, or risk drift towards those of others. Jean Daunizeau and Marie Devaine, from INSERM, Paris, combined mathematical modelling and cognitive psychology to explore the laws that govern such attitude alignment. The authors asked 56 participants to make a series of decisions involving risks, delays or efforts, both before and after having observed the decisions of fictitious participants (in fact: artificial intelligence algorithms) whose prudent, patient and lazy attitudes were sensibly calibrated . The study results show that participants are bound to a "false-consensus" bias, i.e. they believe without evidence that the attitudes of others resemble their own. It also shows that people exhibit ...

A team from Bristol's School of Experimental Psychology aimed to find out whether six basic facial expressions differing in intensity are challenging for young people with autism to recognise. Researchers gave 63 children and adolescents with an ASC diagnosis and 64 without a diagnosis , an internet-based test of emotion recognition. The two groups, aged between 6 -- 16 years-old, were presented with 'happy', 'sad', 'surprised', 'disgusted', 'scared' and 'angry' facial expressions and asked to select a label that matched the expression. Some faces had exaggerated 'high-intensity' expressions -- which were easier to identify, while others had subtle 'low-intensity' expressions -- which were more difficult but considered more relevant to real world interactions. The team also measured language skills and non-verbal reasoning skills in order to see if differences in these skills explained any differences in ability to...