Ze Hong (Kevin), Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Macau, has recently published two research papers in the leading international journals Cognition and Evolutionary Anthropology.

The published papers are:

“Chance Neglect in Performance Judgements”

  • Abstract: Humans often struggle to incorporate chance information into performance evaluations. Across diverse samples in China and the United States (total N = 1387), we show that people systematically misperceive or ignore chance-level success rates when judging the efficacy of technological practices. Using scenarios where chance performance is objectively known (e.g., ∼50 % success rate for fetal sex prediction), we find that (1) many participants underestimate the success achievable by random guessing, (2) even when they accurately recognize chance-level information, they often fail to use it as a baseline for evaluating expert predictions, and (3) this “chance neglect” is especially pronounced in performance-related judgments. These findings highlight a cognitive bias that may contribute to the persistence of ineffective technologies across societies.
  • Hong, Z., & Henrich, J. (2026). Chance Neglect in Performance Judgements. Cognition, 268, 106375.

“When Rituals Fail: Rationalization, Bayesianism, and Predictive Processing”

  • Abstract: Why do rituals persist in human societies despite their frequent and observable failures to produce intended outcomes? This paper advances a two-part argument to explain this resilience. First, at the individual level, I argue that belief in ritual efficacy is maintained through Bayesian-rational processes, where the invocation of auxiliary hypotheses absorbs disconfirming evidence and shields central beliefs from significant revision. Importantly, such protection is not complete. Each failure produces a small but non-zero erosion of individual confidence. Second, I address the resulting population-level puzzle: why does such incremental doubt not accumulate into widespread skepticism and the eventual collapse of ritual systems? I argue that social features and informational dynamics (e.g., memory biases, the underreporting of failure, pluralistic ignorance) as well as the protective “design” of rituals themselves systematically inhibit the aggregation of doubt across individuals and generations. By linking individual cognition with population dynamics, this account explains the remarkable resilience of ritual systems in the face of persistent empirical failure.
  • Hong, Z. (2025). When Rituals Fail: Rationalization, Bayesianism, and Predictive Processing. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 34(4), e70020.

Cognition is a premier international journal publishing theoretical and experimental papers on the study of the mind, consistently ranked in the JCR Q1 category. Evolutionary Anthropology is a leading cross-disciplinary journal focusing on human evolution and behavior, currently ranked 3rd out of 141 journals in its field.