Decision tree
When Multiple Creators Are Worse Than One: The Bias Toward Single Authors in the Evaluation of Art
Rosanna Smith & George Newman
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present studies investigate whether people perceive the same work of art to be of lower quality if they learn that it was a collaborative work (resulting from the efforts of multiple artists) versus the work of a single artist. Study 1 finds that indeed, as the number of authors increases, the perceived quality of an artwork decreases. Study 2 finds that this effect occurs because people tend to assess quality in terms of the effort put forth by each author, rather than the total amount of effort required to create the work. Study 3 further demonstrates that this bias toward single authors appears to be driven by people’s beliefs, rather than by any inherent differences between individual versus collaborative work. These results broaden our understanding of how perceptions of effort drive evaluative judgments, and are consistent with a more general notion that art is not evaluated as a static entity, but rather as an endpoint in a “creative performance.”
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Quinn Keefer
Journal of Sports Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Rank-based groupings are uninformative signals of quality when the exact rank is known; therefore, they should be ignored in decision making. However, evidence is presented that rank-based groupings are used to determine the compensation of rookie players in the National Football League (NFL). The NFL draft, which largely determines rookie compensation, provides two signals of player quality, selection number, and round. However, the rounds are simply groupings based on selection number; thus, the rounds should not affect subsequent decisions. Sharp regression discontinuity design (RDD) estimates of discontinuities in rookie compensation at the round cutoffs are shown to be very large and robust. The first to second round discontinuity is −US$240,000 to −US$250,000, or 36% of the average salary of the first selection in the second round. The second to third round discontinuity is −US$60,000 to −US$70,000, or 17% of the average salary of the first selection in the third round. The results show rookie compensation, which comprises a large share of career earnings, is subject to heuristic thinking.
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The Bottom Dollar Effect: The Influence of Spending to Zero on Pain of Payment and Satisfaction
Robin Soster, Andrew Gershoff & William Bearden
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Spending that exhausts a budget is shown to decrease satisfaction with purchased products relative to spending when resources remain in the budget. Six studies, including those in which participants earn and spend real resources and evaluate real products, explore this bottom dollar effect. This research contributes to prior mental accounting research regarding how costs influence decision making (e.g., bundling, coupling, sunk costs) and to the satisfaction literature. Supporting the role of pain of payment in this process, we show that the bottom dollar effect increases as effort required to earn budgetary resources increases, decreases in the presence of windfall gains, and decreases when there is less time between budget exhaustion and replenishment. Mediation analyses further demonstrate the role of payment pain in the bottom dollar effect. Implications are discussed in the context of behavioral research, marketing promotions management, and public policy.
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Igor Grossmann & Ethan Kross
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Are people wiser when reflecting on other people’s problems compared with their own? If so, does self-distancing eliminate this asymmetry in wise reasoning? In three experiments (N = 693), participants displayed wiser reasoning (i.e., recognizing the limits of their knowledge and the importance of compromise and future change, considering other people’s perspectives) about another person’s problems compared with their own. Across Studies 2 and 3, instructing individuals to self-distance (rather than self-immerse) eliminated this asymmetry. Study 3 demonstrated that each of these effects was comparable for younger (20–40 years) and older (60–80 years) adults. Thus, contrary to the adage “with age comes wisdom,” our findings suggest that there are no age differences in wise reasoning about personal conflicts, and that the effects of self-distancing generalize across age cohorts. These findings highlight the role that self-distancing plays in allowing people to overcome a pervasive asymmetry that characterizes wise reasoning.
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Andrew Knight & Markus Baer
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Non-sedentary work configurations, which encourage standing rather than sitting in the course of work, are becoming increasingly prevalent in organizations. In this article, we build and test theory about how non-sedentary arrangements influence interpersonal processes in groups performing knowledge work — tasks that require groups to combine information to develop creative ideas and solve problems. We propose that a non-sedentary workspace increases group arousal, while at the same time decreasing group idea territoriality, both of which result in better information elaboration and, indirectly, better group performance. The results of an experimental study of 54 groups engaged in a creative task provide support for this dual pathway model and underscore the important role of the physical space in which a group works as a contextual input to group processes and outcomes.
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Jan-Willem van Prooijen & Eric van Dijk
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, November 2014, Pages 63–73
Abstract:
People believe in conspiracy theories more strongly following consequential as opposed to inconsequential events. We expected this effect to be most pronounced among people who take the perspective of the group that is directly affected by the event. Five studies support our line of reasoning. Studies 1 and 4 reveal that participants endorsed stronger conspiracy beliefs when reading about an event with big consequences (i.e., an opposition leader of an African country died in a car crash) than when reading about an event with small consequences (the opposition leader survived the car crash), but only among participants who took the perspective of the citizens of the African country. Similar findings emerged using an individual difference measure of perspective-taking abilities, and with different operationalizations of conspiracy beliefs (Studies 2 and 3). Study 5 revealed that the effects of perspective-taking are mediated by participants’ own sense-making motivation. It is concluded that perspective taking promotes conspiracy beliefs when confronted with events that are harmful to another group.
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Learning Through Noticing: Theory and Experimental Evidence in Farming
Rema Hanna, Sendhil Mullainathan & Joshua Schwartzstein
Quarterly Journal of Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We consider a model of technological learning under which people “learn through noticing”: they choose which input dimensions to attend to and subsequently learn about from available data. Using this model, we show how people with a great deal of experience may persistently be off the production frontier because they fail to notice important features of the data that they possess. We also develop predictions on when these learning failures are likely to occur, as well as on the types of interventions that can help people learn. We test the model's predictions in a field experiment with seaweed farmers. The survey data reveal that these farmers do not attend to pod size, a particular input dimension. Experimental trials suggest that farmers are particularly far from optimizing this dimension. Furthermore, consistent with the model, we find that simply having access to the experimental data does not induce learning. Instead, behavioral changes occur only after the farmers are presented with summaries that highlight previously unattended-to relationships in the data.
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Metacognition of multitasking: How well do we predict the costs of divided attention?
Jason Finley, Aaron Benjamin & Jason McCarley
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, June 2014, Pages 158-165
Abstract:
Risky multitasking, such as texting while driving, may occur because people misestimate the costs of divided attention. In two experiments, participants performed a computerized visual-manual tracking task in which they attempted to keep a mouse cursor within a small target that moved erratically around a circular track. They then separately performed an auditory n-back task. After practicing both tasks separately, participants received feedback on their single-task tracking performance and predicted their dual-task tracking performance before finally performing the 2 tasks simultaneously. Most participants correctly predicted reductions in tracking performance under dual-task conditions, with a majority overestimating the costs of dual-tasking. However, the between-subjects correlation between predicted and actual performance decrements was near 0. This combination of results suggests that people do anticipate costs of multitasking, but have little metacognitive insight on the extent to which they are personally vulnerable to the risks of divided attention, relative to other people.
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Seeing the Math in the Story: On How Abstraction Promotes Performance on Mathematical Word Problems
Dan Schley & Kentaro Fujita
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The negative social, health, financial, and other life outcomes associated with mathematical proficiency deficits highlight the need to understand the underlying cognitive operations entailed in solving math problems. We focus specifically on mathematical word problems and propose that abstraction can enhance performance by helping people see beyond the incidental details described in word problems and to recognize instead the underlying mathematical relationships. Three studies manipulated abstraction as a procedural mind-set (i.e., inducing abstraction in one task and observing its “carry-over” effect in subsequent unrelated tasks) and observed performance on both numeric and word problems. Participants in the abstract, relative to concrete, mind-set condition were more successful in translating word problems into their analogous numeric forms, resulting in improved performance. We discuss implications of these findings for understanding individual and group differences in mathematics proficiencies, which may stem from both chronic and situational factors, and for the development of novel interventions.
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Noam Karsh & Tal Eyal
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although pride and joy are both positive emotions, we expected their consideration to affect persuasion differently because of the different perspectives (near vs. distant) and level of abstractness they involve, with pride being more abstract than joy. Therefore, we predicted that when the attitude object is construed at a high level rather than a low level, the consideration of pride is likely to promote more persuasion than the consideration of joy. In three studies, we found that the consideration of pride, when featured in the persuasion message (Studies 1a and 1b) or incidentally (Study 2), increased persuasion more than did the consideration of joy, when the persuasion object was temporally distant compared with temporally near (Studies 1a and 1b) or construed as a high-level category compared with a more concrete individual (Study 2). These findings advance our understanding of the ways in which specific emotions may affect persuasion, beyond valence.
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Context effects produced by question orders reveal quantum nature of human judgments
Zheng Wang et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1 July 2014, Pages 9431–9436
Abstract:
The hypothesis that human reasoning obeys the laws of quantum rather than classical probability has been used in recent years to explain a variety of seemingly “irrational” judgment and decision-making findings. This article provides independent evidence for this hypothesis based on an a priori prediction, called the quantum question (QQ) equality, concerning the effect of asking attitude questions successively in different orders. We empirically evaluated the predicted QQ equality using 70 national representative surveys and two laboratory experiments that manipulated question orders. Each national study contained 651–3,006 participants. The results provided strong support for the predicted QQ equality. These findings suggest that quantum probability theory, initially invented to explain noncommutativity of measurements in physics, provides a simple account for a surprising regularity regarding measurement order effects in social and behavioral science.
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Arguments, More Than Confidence, Explain the Good Performance of Reasoning Groups
Emmanuel Trouche, Emmanuel Sander & Hugo Mercier
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
In many intellective tasks groups consistently outperform individuals. One factor is that the individual(s) with the best answer is able to convince the other group members using sound argumentation. Another factor is that the most confident group member imposes her answer whether it is right or wrong. In Experiments 1 and 2, individual participants were given arguments against their answer in intellective tasks. Demonstrating sound argumentative competence, many participants changed their minds to adopt the correct answer, even though the arguments had no confidence markers, and barely any participants changed their minds to adopt an incorrect answer. Confidence could not explain who changed their mind, as the least confident participants were as likely to change their minds as the most confident. In Experiments 3 (adults) and 4 (10-year-olds), participants solved intellective tasks individually and then in groups, before solving transfer problems individually. Demonstrating again sound argumentative competence, participants adopted the correct answer when it was present in the group, and many succeeded in transferring this understanding to novel problems. Moreover, the group member with the right answer nearly always managed to convince the group even when she was not the most confident. These results show that argument quality can overcome confidence among the factors influencing the discussion of intellective tasks. Explanations for apparent exceptions are discussed.
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Profiting from Machine Learning in the NBA Draft
Philip Maymin
NYU Working Paper, May 2014
Abstract:
I project historical NCAA college basketball performance to subsequent NBA performance for prospects using modern machine learning techniques without snooping bias. I find that the projections would have helped improve the drafting decisions of virtually every team: over the past ten years, teams forfeited an average of about $90,000,000 in lost productivity that could have been theirs had they followed the recommendations of the model. I provide team-by-team breakdowns of who should have been drafted instead, as well as team summaries of lost profit, and draft order comparison. Far from being just another input in making decisions, when used properly, advanced draft analytics can effectively be an additional revenue source in a team’s business model.
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Wisdom or Madness? Comparing Crowds with Expert Evaluation in Funding the Arts
Ethan Mollick & Ramana Nanda
Harvard Working Paper, May 2014
Abstract:
In fields as diverse as technology entrepreneurship and the arts, crowds of interested stakeholders are increasingly responsible for deciding which innovations to fund, a privilege that was previously reserved for a few experts, such as venture capitalists and grant‐making bodies. Little is known about the degree to which the crowd differs from experts in judging which ideas to fund, and, indeed, whether the crowd is even rational in making funding decisions. Drawing on a panel of national experts and comprehensive data from the largest crowdfunding site, we examine funding decisions for proposed theater projects, a category where expert and crowd preferences might be expected to differ greatly. We instead find substantial agreement between the funding decisions of crowds and experts. Where crowds and experts disagree, it is far more likely to be a case where the crowd is willing to fund projects that experts may not. Examining the outcomes of these projects, we find no quantitative or qualitative differences between projects funded by the crowd alone, and those that were selected by both the crowd and experts. Our findings suggest that the democratization of entry that is facilitated by the crowdfunding has the potential to lower the incidence of “false negatives,” by allowing projects the option to receive multiple evaluations and reach out to receptive communities that may not otherwise be represented by experts.
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The Effects of Counterfactual Attacks on Social Judgments
Patrizia Catellani & Mauro Bertolotti
Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Two experiments were conducted to compare the effects of different styles of verbal criticism (factual vs. counterfactual) on the perceptions of target, source, and quality of the attack. Counterfactual attacks resulted in more negative overall judgment of the target and ratings of the target’s morality than either factual attacks or no attack. Counterfactual attacks were also rated more positively than factual attacks, and the source of the counterfactual attack was rated as being less biased against the target. Regression analyses confirmed that the observed effect on overall judgment was mediated by the perceived bias of the source. The greater effectiveness of counterfactual attacks was moderated by awareness of prior hostility of the source of the attack toward the target.
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Jane Ebert & Tom Meyvis
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Hedonic experiences that involve real, immediate events (such as reading about a recent, real-life tragic event) naturally evoke strong affective reactions. When these events are instead fictional or removed in time, they should be perceived as more psychologically distant and evoke weaker affective reactions. The current research shows that, while consumers’ intuitions are in line with this prediction, their actual emotional experiences are surprisingly insensitive to the distancing information. For instance, readers of a sad story overestimated how much their emotional reaction would be reduced by knowing that it described a fictional event. Similarly, game participants overestimated how much their excitement about winning a prize would be dampened by knowing that the prize would only be available later. We propose that actual readers and prize winners were too absorbed by the hedonic experience to incorporate the distancing information, resulting in surprisingly strong affective reactions to fictional stories and delayed prizes.
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Predicting the Winner of Tied National Football League Games: Do the Details Matter?
Jared Quenzel & Paul Shea
Journal of Sports Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We construct a data set of all 429 tied at the half regular season National Football League (NFL) games between 1994 and 2012. We then examine whether or not the path taken to reach the tie (e.g., rushing yards, turnovers, etc.) has any ability to predict the eventual winner. Our main finding is that only the point spread is significantly predictive, although there is weak evidence to suggest that allowing more sacks reduces the chances of winning. Surprisingly, we find that the team receiving the first possession of the second half does not enjoy a statistically significant advantage. Teams should thus simply try to maximize their first half lead without expecting that first half strategies such as “establishing the run” will pay dividends in the second half.
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Nadine Jung et al.
Frontiers in Psychology, June 2014
Abstract:
Recent experimental studies show that emotions can have a significant effect on the way we think, decide, and solve problems. This paper presents a series of four experiments on how emotions affect logical reasoning. In two experiments different groups of participants first had to pass a manipulated intelligence test. Their emotional state was altered by giving them feedback, that they performed excellent, poor or on average. Then they completed a set of logical inference problems (with if p, then q statements) either in a Wason selection task paradigm or problems from the logical propositional calculus. Problem content also had either a positive, negative or neutral emotional value. Results showed a clear effect of emotions on reasoning performance. Participants in negative mood performed worse than participants in positive mood, but both groups were outperformed by the neutral mood reasoners. Problem content also had an effect on reasoning performance. In a second set of experiments, participants with exam or spider phobia solved logical problems with contents that were related to their anxiety disorder (spiders or exams). Spider phobic participants' performance was lowered by the spider-content, while exam anxious participants were not affected by the exam-related problem content. Overall, unlike some previous studies, no evidence was found that performance is improved when emotion and content are congruent. These results have consequences for cognitive reasoning research and also for cognitively oriented psychotherapy and the treatment of disorders like depression and anxiety.
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Two Reasons to Make Aggregated Probability Forecasts More Extreme
Jonathan Baron et al.
Decision Analysis, June 2014, Pages 133-145
Abstract:
When aggregating the probability estimates of many individuals to form a consensus probability estimate of an uncertain future event, it is common to combine them using a simple weighted average. Such aggregated probabilities correspond more closely to the real world if they are transformed by pushing them closer to 0 or 1. We explain the need for such transformations in terms of two distorting factors: The first factor is the compression of the probability scale at the two ends, so that random error tends to push the average probability toward 0.5. This effect does not occur for the median forecast, or, arguably, for the mean of the log odds of individual forecasts. The second factor — which affects mean, median, and mean of log odds — is the result of forecasters taking into account their individual ignorance of the total body of information available. Individual confidence in the direction of a probability judgment (high/low) thus fails to take into account the wisdom of crowds that results from combining different evidence available to different judges. We show that the same transformation function can approximately eliminate both distorting effects with different parameters for the mean and the median. And we show how, in principle, use of the median can help distinguish the two effects.