Childfree adults do not want to have children, making them distinct from parents and other adults without children. However, they are difficult to study because they cannot be identified using conventional data on fertility. We use data from a representative sample in the United States to examine the prevalence, age of decision, and interpersonal warmth judgments by and about childfree adults. Our prevalence estimates suggest that childfree adults are quite common, comprising over one-fifth (21.64%) of the population. Our analysis of age-to-decision suggests that most childfree adults reported that they decided they did not want children early in life. Finally, our analysis of interpersonal warmth suggests asymmetric affective polarization among parents and childfree adults driven primarily by parent's ingroup favoritism. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of childfree adults and for future research on this historically overlooked segment of the population. 

/pdf/prevalence-age-of-decision-and-interpersonal-warmth-13apg243.pdf

Prevalence, age of decision, and interpersonal warmth judgements of childfree adults

Recent conservative political rhetoric support women having careers but emphasize that this should not be an obstacle to having children. We propose that this sentiment reflects the hierarchy of gender norms in today's society whereby motherhood is the ultimate role that women are expected to fulfil and denying such role evokes social penalties, above and beyond other prescribed gender norms. Across five experiments (N = 738), we predicted and found that voluntarily childless women elicit more negative reactions than mothers, and importantly, also more than women violating other gender norms in the realm of occupation (Study 1), power (Study 2) or sexual orientation (Study 3). We demonstrate that these patterns cannot be explained merely by a perceived lack of communal qualities of the non-mothers (Study 4) and also show that involuntary childless women do not receive the same negativity (Study 5). We discuss this, often neglected, gender bias and its resistance to social change.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/bjso.12661

The mother of violations: Motherhood as the primary expectation of women.

Abstract: Childfree adults do not have or want children and voluntarily opt out of parenthood. Although this group is large (more than one-fifth of some adult populations), its members are often subjected to negative stereotypes about their behavior, obligations, personal characteristics, and future outcomes. These negative stereotypes are important because they have implications for childfree adults’ stigmatization. To help measure individuals’ stereotyped views of childfree adults, we use data on a representative sample of 1,000 Michigan adults to develop and validate the Stereotypes about Childfree Adults (SAChA) scale. We demonstrate that this four-item scale exhibits (1) high internal consistency, (2) scalar invariance with respect to sex, race/ethnicity, and education, and (3) known groups, convergent, and discriminant validity. We conclude by discussing potential applications of this scale for understanding stereotypes of individuals’ reproductive decisions.

Stereotypes About Childfree Adults (SAChA)

ABSTRACT Football referees at the elite level are required to meet high-performance standards, physically, behaviourally, and mentally. These may pose considerable cognitive load which necessitates expert ability of gaze behaviour, perception, and attention allocation. In this article we aim to model the array of professional and psychological factors that impact referees’ performance, leading to optimal and non-optimal performance states. We initially discuss the cognitive demands of football refereeing. The structure of this article is as follows: (a) defining the demands of refereeing task; (b) providing the conceptual basis for understanding the attentional process within the football refereeing context; (c) reviewing empirical data concerning several potential factors influencing attention in football refereeing (i.e. gaze behaviour, inattentional blindness, external distractors, pressure, exertion, self-control, and VAR); (d) modelling attention allocation in football refereeing under normal and highly demanding match conditions; (e) providing practical recommendations for improving refereeing attentional performance, and (f) offering specific suggestions for future research in this area.

Attention allocation in elite football refereeing: conceptual, empirical, and applied considerations

Abstract People can fail to notice objects and events in their visual environment when their attention is engaged elsewhere. This phenomenon is known as inattentional blindness, and its consequences can be costly for important real-world decisions. However, not noticing certain visual information could also signal expertise in a domain. In this study, we compared professional fingerprint analysts and novices on a fingerprint matching task in which we covertly placed an image of a gorilla into one of the prints. This gorilla was either small, or large, but always embedded in a way that made it largely irrelevant to the primary task. We found that analysts were more likely than the novices to miss the large gorilla. We interpret this finding not as a flaw in how these experts make decisions, but most likely an expression of their expertise; instead of processing more information they filter out irrelevant information and constrain their attention to what is important. 

https://cognitiveresearchjournal.springeropen.com/counter/pdf/10.1186/s41235-023-00486-x

The invisible 800-pound gorilla: expertise can increase inattentional blindness

Inattentional blindness occurs when one fails to notice a fully visible stimulus because one's attention is on another task. Researchers have suggested that expertise at this other task should reduce rates of inattentional blindness. However, research on the topic has produced mixed findings. To gain clarity on the issue, we meta-analyzed the extant studies (K = 14; N = 1153). On average, experts showed only a slight reduction in rates of inattentional blindness: 62% of novices experienced inattentional blindness compared to 56% of experts, weighted odds ratio = 1.33, 95% CI [0.78, 2.28]. The relevance of the stimuli to the experts’ domain of expertise showed no notable moderating effects. The low number of the included studies, and the small sample sizes of the original studies, weaken our conclusions. Nonetheless, when taken together, the available evidence provides little support for any reliable influence of expertise on rates of inattentional blindness.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/03010066211072466

Does Expertise Reduce Rates of Inattentional Blindness? A Meta-Analysis

OBJECTIVE
Interviewers often face the challenge of obtaining information from suspects who are willing to speak but are motivated to conceal incriminating information. The Shift-of-Strategy (SoS) approach is an interviewing technique designed to obtain new information from such suspects. This study provides a robust empirical test of the SoS approach using more complex crime events and longer interviews than previously tested as well as testing a new variation of the approach (SoS-Reinforcement) that included a strategic summary of the suspect's statement. We compared this new variation with a standard version of the approach (SoS-Standard) and an interviewing approach that involved no confrontation of discrepancies in the suspects' statements (Direct).


HYPOTHESES
We predicted that the two SoS versions would outperform the Direct condition in terms of participants' disclosure of previously unknown information. We also predicted that SoS-Reinforcement would outperform SoS-Standard. Finally, we expected that participants in the SoS conditions would not assess the interview or the interviewer more poorly than participants in Direct.


METHOD
A total of 300 participants completed an online mock crime procedure, and they were subsequently interviewed with one of the three interviewing techniques. Following the interview, participants provided assessments of their experiences being interviewed.


RESULTS
Participants in both SoS-Standard (d = 0.49, 95% confidence interval [CI: 0.21, 0.78]) and SoS-Reinforcement (d = 0.59, 95% CI [0.30, 0.87]) disclosed more previously unknown information than participants in the Direct condition, but SoS-Reinforcement did not outperform SoS-Standard (d = 0.08, 95% CI [-0.20, 0.36]). Participants in SoS-Reinforcement assessed their experience more negatively than those in Direct. No such differences were observed in the remaining two-way comparisons.


CONCLUSIONS
The study provides support for the effectiveness of eliciting new information through the SoS approach and illuminates possible experiential downsides with being subjected to the SoS-Reinforcement approach. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Advancing the Shift-of-Strategy approach: Shifting suspects' strategies in extended interviews.

. People who choose not to have children may face negative social judgment. Using a UK sample, Study 1 (N = 199) successfully replicated Ashburn-Nardo’s (2017) finding that childfree target...

Stigmatization of voluntarily childfree women and men in the UK: The roles of expected regret and moral judgment.

Social norms are pivotal in guiding decision-making. Motives for following social norms are often described as gaining or avoiding (dis)approval and as an adaptive heuristic. We propose that social norms also serve an emotion-regulating function. Across three preregistered experiments (ntotal = 2518), we operationalized uncertainty as complexity, risk, and ambiguity. Results first confirmed that descriptive social norms are more influential in uncertain situations than in less uncertain ones. When testing the psychological processes, uncertain situations did not make social norms more salient. For emotion regulation, however, we found a fairly consistent pattern across all three experiments; being exposed to a descriptive social norm mitigated participants' negative emotions. These results advance past research by suggesting that descriptive norms serve an emotion-regulating function.

The role of emotion regulation in normative influence under uncertainty

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Does Expertise Reduce Rates of Inattentional Blindness? A Meta-Analysis

Advancing the Shift-of-Strategy approach: Shifting suspects' strategies in extended interviews.

Stigmatization of voluntarily childfree women and men in the UK: The roles of expected regret and moral judgment.

The role of emotion regulation in normative influence under uncertainty