Across seven preregistered studies with 1,362 participants, people judged meaningfulness more by benefits to society than by benefits to themselves, whereas judgments of happiness weighed self-benefits equally or more heavily. This pattern held when evaluating jobs, other people's lives, advice, and one's own experiences, though self-benefits played a larger role in first-person meaning judgments than in third-person ones. The findings indicate that meaning perceptions are more self-transcendent than happiness perceptions.
A preregistered replication of a 2012 study tested whether people can follow an unseen instruction, integrate it with unseen digits, and perform addition without awareness. Two highly powered experiments failed to reproduce the original finding. The authors conclude that current evidence does not support the claim that arithmetic operations can be flexibly initiated without awareness, consistent with arguments for a more limited scope of unconscious processing.
Facing pairs of human heads gain privileged access to conscious awareness compared to nonfacing pairs, even when presented outside awareness. Eleven experiments using a breaking continuous flash suppression paradigm showed that two human faces facing each other broke into awareness faster than nonfacing pairs. This advantage could not be explained by low-level or mid-level visual features. Disrupting holistic processing of the two agents significantly reduced the facing advantage. The effect was specific to human agents and did not occur with daily objects, directional arrows, or nonhuman animals. These results suggest that social information, specifically the facingness between two individuals, can be integrated unconsciously and influences what reaches conscious awareness.
A two-week meditation-training program improved people's ability to accurately judge their own memory performance, but not their perceptual accuracy. Participants who completed the meditation program showed significantly enhanced introspective accuracy on a trial-by-trial basis for memory tasks, compared to an active control group that showed no change. These findings suggest that the capacity to introspect can be improved through mental training, at least in some cognitive domains.