Publications

Shaheed Azaad, Natalie Sebanz, Kassandra Friebe, Vjeran Keric, Simon Laham (2025) · Preprint

For two decades, the joint Simon effect (JSE) has been a cornerstone of joint action research. Initially presented as evidence that humans spontaneously represent others’ actions in a functionally equivalent way to their own, the JSE now serves as an interdisciplinary measure of self-other integration across research on social cognition, human-robot interaction, and animal cognition. However, whether the JSE is better explained by non-social mechanisms remains an open question. The present meta-analytic review sought to provide an overview of the JSE literature and to evaluate its suitability as a measure of self-other integration. Our meta-analysis of 274 JSEs from 80 studies (7042 participants across 186 samples) revealed a significant overall effect of gD = .60. Analysis of 52 canonical JSEs (reflecting the seminal study) revealed a larger JSE of gD =.72. Finally, moderation by study...

Shaheed Azaad (2025) · Preprint

The embodied view of cognition holds that cognitive and emotional processes are grounded in our bodily experiences and physical interactions with the world. In line with this view, studies have purported to show that enacting motivation-related postures, expressions, and actions can elicit or modulate their corresponding motivational states. While theory-building reviews on the topic have accepted these studies’ conclusions at face value, a closer reading of key articles reveals several statistical issues that cast doubt on their veracity. The present study sought to estimate the evidentiary value of these bodily feedback effects on motivation by fitting a z-curve on 52 significant results reported across 18 articles. Analyses indicated little, if any, evidentiary value, with a dismal estimated replicability rate of 22%. Results highlight the need for review papers to focus on both the...

Shaheed Azaad, Gerald Echterhoff (2025) · Preprint

Many experiments in psychology involve deceiving participants about aspects of the study. Researchers who employ deception sometimes administer post-experiment suspicion probes and exclude participants from analysis if their responses indicate that they were not successfully deceived. However, several studies have found that their suspicious participants behave as if they were deceived as intended. One explanation is that participants infer that they were deceived upon being presented with a suspicion probe, which biases them to overreport being suspicious. We tested whether post-experiment beliefs about deception can indeed induce such biases by manipulating whether we admitted to using deception before administering suspicion probes. Admitting to deception did not increase the amount of suspicion reported (Experiment 1), nor did the content of participants’ suspicions reflect the cont...

Jeremy Meier, Shaheed Azaad, Michael Donner, Aidan Runagall-McNaull, Simon M. Laham (2025) · Preprint