Theories of associative learning often propose that learning is proportional to prediction error, or the difference between expected events and those that occur. Spicer et al. (2020) suggested an alternative, that humans might instead selectively attribute surprising outcomes to cues that they are not confident about, to maintain cue-outcome associations about which they are more confident. Spicer et al. reported three predictive learning experiments, the results of which were consistent with their proposal (“theory protection”) rather than a prediction error account (Rescorla, 2001). The four experiments reported here further test theory protection against a prediction error account. Experiments 3 and 4 also test the proposals of Holmes et al. (2019), who suggested a function mapping learning to performance that can explain Spicer et al.’s results using a prediction-error framework. In contrast to the previous study, these experiments were based on inhibition rather than excitation. Participants were trained with a set of cues (represented by letters), each of which was followed by the presence or absence of an outcome (represented by + or -). Following this, a cue that previously caused the outcome (A+) was placed in compound with another cue (B) with an ambiguous causal status (e.g., a novel cue in Experiment 1). This compound (AB-) did not cause the outcome. Participants always learned more about B in the second training phase, despite A always having the greater prediction error. In Experiments 3 and 4, a cue with no apparent prediction error was learned about more than a cue with a large prediction error. Experiment 4 tested participants’ relative confidence about the causal status of cues A and B prior to the AB- stage, producing findings that are consistent with theory protection and inconsistent with the predictions of Rescorla, and Holmes et al. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Changing public behaviour is an essential step for successful conservation, and can be achieved through effective use of message framing. However, its use in the conservation sector is not well-studied. We first performed a content analysis to assess what types of framing styles environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) often employ for their social media posts. We then ran a real-world online fundraising campaign to examine the influence of value-framing (‘Intrinsic’ and ‘Extrinsic’) and message valence (‘Positive’ and ‘Negative’) on audience engagement with the advertisements, across five countries. Altogether, ENGOs generally used ‘Positive’ framing for their posts significantly more often than ‘Negative’, but did not use one type of value-framing more than the other. For the fundraising campaign, there were significant differences between countries’ engagement with the advertisements. However, click-through rates did not significantly differ when using types of value-framing nor message valence, and no donations were received to support the campaign. These results may show that message valence and value-framing alone have little influence on audience engagement, if any, at least in the context of social media. To enhance campaign success for the future, it is recommended that conservationists offer concrete information regarding fundraising outcomes, and activate social norms.

Celebrities can generate substantial attention and influence public interest in species. Using a large-scale examination of publicly available data, we assessed whether species across 6 taxonomic groups received more page views on Wikipedia when the species was named after a celebrity than when it was not. We conducted our analysis for 4 increasingly strict thresholds of how many average daily Wikipedia page views a celebrity had (1, 10, 100, or 1000 views). Overall, we found a high probability (0.96–0.98) that species named after celebrities had more page views than their closest relatives that were not named after celebrities, irrespective of the celebrity threshold. The multiplicative effect on species’ page views was larger but more uncertain as celebrity page-view thresholds increased. The range for thresholds of 1 to 1000 was 1.08 (95% credible interval [CI] 1.00–1.18) to 1.76 (95% CI 0.96–2.80), respectively. The hierarchical estimates for the taxa tended to be positive. The strongest effects were for invertebrates, followed by amphibians, reptiles, fish, and mammals, whereas the weakest effect was for birds at lower page-view thresholds. Our results suggest that naming species after celebrities could be particularly significant for those belonging to taxonomic groups that are generally less popular than others (e.g., invertebrates). Celebrities may further influence the effectiveness of this marketing strategy, depending on their likability and connection to the species named after them. Eponyms may serve as a reminder of the disproportionate power dynamics between populations and some namesakes’ untenable actions. However, they also provide an opportunity to recognize remarkable individuals and promote equity, inclusivity, and diversity in taxonomic practice. We encourage taxonomists to examine whether naming threatened species after celebrities could affect conservation support, especially for species that are otherwise typically overlooked by the public.