Publications

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

Shaheed Azaad, Natalie Sebanz (2025) · Scientific Reports

Research on joint action planning has demonstrated that, when acting with others, individuals will choose more effortful actions if it improves co-efficiency by reducing the overall effort exerted by the group. However, because these studies use actions for which time and effort costs are confounded, it is unclear which costs participants sought to minimise and what processes underlie decision-making about individual contributions to joint actions. Across three experiments, we tested (1) whether dyads aim to minimise effort vs. time costs (Experiments 1–2) and (2) whether individuals choose actions based on a rational, deliberative process or a heuristic (Experiment 3). Data from a joint object-dragging computer task revealed that participants chose to drag objects to the closer of two goals even when it required more effort from the dyad (Experiments 1–2). Participants preferred closer...