Here's what I know
Nattavudh Powdthavee & Yohanes Riyanto
Review of Economics and Statistics, May 2015, Pages 257-272
Abstract:
Standard economic models assume that the demand for expert predictions arises only under the conditions in which individuals are uncertain about the underlying process generating the data and there is a strong belief that past performances predict future performances. We set up the strongest possible test of these assumptions. In contrast to the theoretical suggestions made in the literature, people are willing to pay for predictions of truly random outcomes after witnessing only a short streak of accurate predictions live in the lab. We discuss potential explanations and implications of such irrational learning in the contexts of economics and finance.
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Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge
Matthew Fisher, Mariel Goddu & Frank Keil
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
As the Internet has become a nearly ubiquitous resource for acquiring knowledge about the world, questions have arisen about its potential effects on cognition. Here we show that searching the Internet for explanatory knowledge creates an illusion whereby people mistake access to information for their own personal understanding of the information. Evidence from 9 experiments shows that searching for information online leads to an increase in self-assessed knowledge as people mistakenly think they have more knowledge "in the head," even seeing their own brains as more active as depicted by functional MRI (fMRI) images.
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What Goes Up Apparently Needn't Come Down: Asymmetric Predictions of Ascent and Descent in Rankings
Shai Davidai & Thomas Gilovich
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, forthcoming
Abstract:
In eight studies, we document an upward mobility bias, or a tendency to predict that a rise in rankings is more likely than a decline. This asymmetry was observed in predictions of classroom performance, NBA and NFL standings, business school rankings, and employee performance rankings. The bias was found for entities people care about and want to see improve their standing, as well as entities in which people are not invested. It appears to result from people's tendency to give considerable weight to a focal agent's intentions and motivation, but to give less weight to the intentions of competitors and other factors that would thwart the focal agent's improvement. We show that this bias is most pronounced for implicit incremental theorists, who believe that performance is malleable (and hence assign more weight to intentions and effort). We discuss implications of this asymmetry for decision making and for an understanding of the underdog bias.
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Victoria Lawson & Deryn Strange
Psychology of Popular Media Culture, April 2015, Pages 188-198
Abstract:
The media is influential in shaping people's knowledge and beliefs about the world; however, reporters may take liberties with the facts to support a particular view or to create an entertaining story, resulting in biased or even falsified reports. We examined whether news reports with exaggerated details from newspapers and/or television are more likely to lead to memory distortion and whether a warning regarding the media's potential for exaggeration can reduce memory distortion and increase skepticism for the information contained in the reports. We found that despite being trusted less, more extreme reports were more likely to lead to memory distortion. Further, a warning had no impact on the degree to which memory was distorted or on perceptions of trustworthiness; thus, it is not clear how best to protect news consumers against the negative effects of exaggerated reporting on memory for current events.
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Hajo Adam, Otilia Obodaru & Adam Galinsky
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, forthcoming
Abstract:
Eight studies explored the antecedents and consequences of whether people locate their sense of self in the brain or the heart. In Studies 1a-f, participants' self-construals consistently influenced the location of the self: The general preference for locating the self in the brain rather than the heart was enhanced among men, Americans, and participants primed with an independent self-construal, but diminished among women, Indians, and participants primed with an interdependent self-construal. In Study 2, participants' perceived location of the self influenced their judgments of controversial medical issues. In Study 3, we primed participants to locate the self in the brain or the heart, which influenced how much effort they put into writing a support letter for and how much money they donated to a charity for a brain disease (Alzheimer's disease) or a heart disease (coronary artery disease). Implications for research on the self-concept, judgment, and decision-making are discussed.
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Persuasion, interrupted: The effect of momentary interruptions on message processing and persuasion
Daniella Kupor & Zakary Tormala
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Marketers often seek to minimize or eliminate interruptions when they deliver persuasive messages in an attempt to increase consumers' attention and processing of those messages. However, in five studies conducted across different experimental contexts and different content domains, the current research reveals that interruptions that temporarily disrupt a persuasive message can increase consumers' processing of that message. As a result, consumers can be more persuaded by interrupted messages than they would be by the exact same messages delivered uninterrupted. In documenting this effect, the current research departs from past research illuminating the negative effects of interruptions, and delineates the mechanism through which and conditions under which momentary interruptions can promote persuasion.
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(In)Competence Is Everywhere: Self-Doubt and the Accessibility of Competence
Tiffany Hardy et al.
Self and Identity, July/August 2015, Pages 464-481
Abstract:
This research investigated the hypothesis that intellectual competence is chronically accessible to individuals who question their own intellectual competence, despite their own uncertainty on this dimension, and that they rely on intellectual competence in forming impressions of and thinking about others. In two studies, we show that doubtful individuals are more likely to use traits related to intellectual competence to describe others and these traits more strongly affect their overall impressions of others. These findings support recent approaches to accessibility by showing that a self-relevant trait may be chronically accessible to an individual even in the face of uncertainty regarding one's standing on the trait. The findings also contribute to the understanding of the phenomenology of self-doubt.
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My Recency, Our Primacy: How Social Connection Influences Evaluations of Sequences
Rajesh Bhargave & Nicole Votolato Montgomery
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, forthcoming
Abstract:
Individuals have many life experiences (e.g., work and vacations) that consist of a series of interconnected episodes (i.e., temporal sequences). Assessments of such experiences are integral to daily life in that they facilitate future planning and behaviors for individuals. Therefore, these experiences often culminate in evaluations of their global affect. Past work has shown that retrospective, affective evaluations of these sequences generally exhibit an "end effect," whereby a sequence's end intensity - but not its start intensity - is disproportionately weighted. Yet, researchers have largely investigated experiences that occur alone. In contrast, many real-world experiences vary in their extent of social connection to others (e.g., working in an office with others versus alone in a cubicle). The present work fills this gap by showing the moderating role of social connection on how episodes are weighted in global affective ratings. Five studies involving two autobiographical experiences spanning several days each (workweek and spring break) and two brief simulated experiences show that high social connection leads to greater (lesser) weighting of the first (last) episode. To our knowledge, we are the first to demonstrate that these effects persist across different forms of social connection (i.e., interpersonal interaction versus semantic priming tasks) and are supported regardless of whether social connection occurs at encoding or retrieval of an experience.
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Daniel Randles et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, May 2015, Pages 697-710
Abstract:
Cognitive dissonance theory shares much in common with other perspectives that address anomalies, uncertainty, and general expectancy violations. This has led some theorists to argue that these theories represent overlapping psychological processes. If responding to dissonance and uncertainty occurs through a common psychological process, one should expect that the behavioral outcomes of feeling uncertain would also apply to feelings of dissonance, and vice versa. One specific prediction from the meaning maintenance model would be that cognitive dissonance, like other expectancy violations, should lead to the affirmation of unrelated beliefs, or the abstraction of unrelated schemas when the dissonant event cannot be easily accommodated. This article presents 4 studies (N = 1124) demonstrating that the classic induced-compliance dissonance paradigm can lead not only to a change of attitudes (dissonance reduction), but also to (a) an increased reported belief in God (Study 2), (b) a desire to punish norm-violators (Study 1 and 3), (c) a motivation to detect patterns amid noise (Study 3), and (d) polarizing support of public policies among those already biased toward a particular side (Study 4). These results are congruent with theories that propose content-general fluid compensation following the experience of anomaly, a finding not predicted by dissonance theory. The results suggest that dissonance reduction behaviors may share psychological processes described by other theories addressing violations of expectations.
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Leave Her out of It: Person-Presentation of Strategies Is Harmful for Transfer
Anne Riggs, Martha Alibali & Charles Kalish
Cognitive Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
A common practice in textbooks is to introduce concepts or strategies in association with specific people. This practice aligns with research suggesting that using "real-world" contexts in textbooks increases students' motivation and engagement. However, other research suggests this practice may interfere with transfer by distracting students or leading them to tie new knowledge too closely to the original learning context. The current study investigates the effects on learning and transfer of connecting mathematics strategies to specific people. A total of 180 college students were presented with an example of a problem-solving strategy that was either linked with a specific person (e.g., "Juan's strategy") or presented without a person. Students who saw the example without a person were more likely to correctly transfer the novel strategy to new problems than students who saw the example presented with a person. These findings are the first evidence that using people to present new strategies is harmful for learning and transfer.
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Ryan Boyd & James Pennebaker
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
More than 100 years after Shakespeare's death, Lewis Theobald published Double Falsehood, a play supposedly sourced from a lost play by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Since its release, scholars have attempted to determine its true authorship. Using new approaches to language and psychological analysis, we examined Double Falsehood and the works of Theobald, Shakespeare, and Fletcher. Specifically, we created a psychological signature from each author's language and statistically compared the features of each signature with those of Double Falsehood's signature. Multiple analytic approaches converged in suggesting that Double Falsehood's psychological style and content architecture predominantly resemble those of Shakespeare, showing some similarity with Fletcher's signature and only traces of Theobald's. Closer inspection revealed that Shakespeare's influence is most apparent early in the play, whereas Fletcher's is most apparent in later acts. Double Falsehood has a psychological signature consistent with that expected to be present in the long-lost play The History of Cardenio, cowritten by Shakespeare and Fletcher.
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Cognitive Ability and the Stock Reallocations of Retirees during the Great Recession
Chris Browning & Michael Finke
Journal of Consumer Affairs, forthcoming
Abstract:
Retirees are increasingly responsible for managing their retirement savings. The ability to manage these assets efficiently can have an important impact on retirement well-being. Lower levels of cognitive ability in old age can reduce an investor's ability to control emotional responses to a loss. Greater sensitivity to loss may increase preferences for safety following a market decline, resulting in allocations away from stocks that are associated with long-term underperformance. We investigate whether cognitive ability is related to stock reallocations among retirees during the Great Recession. Using the Health and Retirement Study, we find that cognitive ability is negatively related to allocations away from stock. Compared to those with the lowest levels of cognitive ability, respondents with higher cognitive ability are 40% less likely to reduce their stock allocation by 50% or more. These results suggest that the quality of investment decisions in old age may be compromised by cognitive decline.
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Kesten Green, Scott Armstrong & Andreas Graefe
Journal of Business Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
The Golden Rule of Forecasting is a general rule that applies to all forecasting problems. The Rule was developed using logic and was tested against evidence from previously published comparison studies. The evidence suggests that a single violation of the Golden Rule is likely to increase forecast error by 44%. Some commentators argue that the Rule is not generally applicable, but do not challenge the logic or evidence provided. While further research might provide useful findings, available evidence justifies adopting the Rule now. People with no prior training in forecasting can obtain the substantial benefits of following the Golden Rule by using the Checklist to identify biased and unscientific forecasts at little cost.
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Distraction from emotional information reduces biased judgements
Heather Lench, Shane Bench & Elizabeth Davis
Cognition & Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Biases arising from emotional processes are some of the most robust behavioural effects in the social sciences. The goal of this investigation was to examine the extent to which the emotion regulation strategy of distraction could reduce biases in judgement known to result from emotional information. Study 1 explored lay views regarding whether distraction is an effective strategy to improve decision-making and revealed that participants did not endorse this strategy. Studies 2-5 focused on several established, robust biases that result from emotional information: loss aversion, desirability bias, risk aversion and optimistic bias. Participants were prompted to divert attention away from their feelings while making judgements, and in each study this distraction strategy resulted in reduced bias in judgement relative to control conditions. The findings provide evidence that distraction can improve choice across several situations that typically elicit robustly biased responses, even though participants are not aware of the effectiveness of this strategy.
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Are Longshots Only for Losers? A New Look at the Last Race Effect
Craig McKenzie et al.
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, forthcoming
Abstract:
There is evidence that betting on longshots increases in the last race of a day of horse racing. Previous accounts have assumed that the phenomenon is driven by bettors who have lost money and are trying to recoup their losses. To test this assumption of "reference dependence," three laboratory experiments simulated a day at the races: In each of several rounds, participants chose either (i) a gamble with a small probability of a large gain and a large probability of a small loss (the "longshot") or (ii) a gamble with a moderate chance of a small gain or a small loss (the "favorite"). The first two experiments employed a game played for points, while a third experiment included monetary incentives and stimuli drawn from a real day of racing. These experiments provide a clear demonstration of the last race effect in a laboratory setting. However, the results indicate that the effect is largely reference independent: Participants were more likely to choose the longshot in the last round regardless of whether, and how much, they had won or lost in previous rounds. Winning or losing, bettors prefer to "go out with a bang" at the end of a series of gambles.
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How Do Experts Update Beliefs? Lessons from a Non-Market Environment
Michael Sinkey
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Experts are regularly relied upon to provide their professional assessments in a wide array of markets (e.g., asset pricing, stock and bond ratings, expert witnesses, forecasting), which frequently have characteristics that may generate incentives for experts to provide biased analyses. I ask how experts update beliefs in a relatively simple environment with minimal market incentives. Using data from the Associated Press (AP) Top 25 Poll for college football I find that many standard sets of Bayesian beliefs are rejected by the data, and that experts, while using Bayes' rule, may still be subject to similar biases as non-experts, including confirmatory bias and lagged signal response, which may be symptomatic of inattention, voter heterogeneity, and signal reassessment. In more complex environments, experts may have strong incentives to substantially deviate from Bayes' rule, biasing expert predictions in unknown directions.
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Keith Marzilli Ericson et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Heuristic models have been proposed for many domains involving choice. We conducted an out-of-sample, cross-validated comparison of heuristic models of intertemporal choice (which can account for many of the known intertemporal choice anomalies) and discounting models. Heuristic models outperformed traditional utility-discounting models, including models of exponential and hyperbolic discounting. The best-performing models predicted choices by using a weighted average of absolute differences and relative percentage differences of the attributes of the goods in a choice set. We concluded that heuristic models explain time-money trade-off choices in experiments better than do utility-discounting models.
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Predicting what we will like: Asking a stranger can be as good as asking a friend
Casey Eggleston et al.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, May 2015, Pages 1-10
Abstract:
When predicting how much they will like something they have not encountered before, people use three commonsense theories: It is better to have a description of the attitude object than to know how someone else felt about it ("I know better than others"), better to know how a friend felt about it than how a stranger felt ("birds of a feather"), and better to get advice from friends - how much they think we will like it - than to know how they felt about it ("my friends know me"). We present evidence that people endorse these lay theories but also that they overuse them. Sometimes people make better predictions by knowing how a stranger felt than by getting a description of the object, sometimes a stranger is as good as a friend, and sometimes advice is not any better than knowing how someone else felt.
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Helen Fischer & Cleotilde Gonzalez
Cognitive Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Stocks and flows (SF) are building blocks of dynamic systems: Stocks change through inflows and outflows, such as our bank balance changing with withdrawals and deposits, or atmospheric CO2 with absorptions and emissions. However, people make systematic errors when trying to infer the behavior of dynamic systems, termed SF failure, whose cognitive explanations are yet unknown. We argue that SF failure appears when people focus on specific system elements (local processing), rather than on the system structure and gestalt (global processing). Using a standard SF task (n = 148), SF failure decreased by (a) a global as opposed to local task format; (b) individual global as opposed to local processing styles; and (c) global as opposed to local perceptual priming. These results converge toward local processing as an explanation for SF failure. We discuss theoretical and practical implications on the connections between the scope of attention and understanding of dynamic systems.
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Willem Sleegers, Travis Proulx & Ilja van Beest
Biological Psychology, May 2015, Pages 126-131
Abstract:
In the social psychological threat-compensation literature, there is an apparent contradiction whereby relatively extreme beliefs both decrease markers of physiological arousal following meaning violations, and increase the values affirmation behaviors understood as a palliative responses to this arousal. We hypothesize that this is due to the differential impact of measuring extremism on behavioral inhibition and approach systems following meaning violations, whereby extremism both reduces markers of conflict arousal (BIS) and increases values affirmation (BAS) unrelated to this initial arousal. Using pupil dilation as a proxy for immediate conflict arousal, we found that the same meaning violation (anomalous playing cards) evoked greater pupil dilation, and that this pupillary reaction was diminished in participants who earlier reported extreme beliefs. We also found that reporting extreme beliefs was associated with greater affirmation of an unrelated meaning framework, where this affirmation was unrelated to physiological markers of conflict arousal.
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Scott Radnitz & Patrick Underwood
British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
What are the origins of belief in conspiracy theories? The dominant approach to studying conspiracy theories links belief to social stresses or personality type, and does not take into account the situational and fluctuating nature of attitudes. In this study, a survey experiment, subjects are presented with a mock news article designed to induce conspiracy belief. Subjects are randomly assigned three manipulations hypothesized to heighten conspiracy perceptions: a prime to induce anxiety; information about the putative conspirator; and the number and identifiability of the victim(s). The results indicate that conspiratorial perceptions can emerge from both situational triggers and subtle contextual variables. Conspiracy beliefs emerge as ordinary people make judgments about the social and political world.
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Graham Dixon
Communication Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study explores the effect of negative exemplars on two-sided message recall and risk perception, as mediated by negative affect. In an experiment, participants were randomly assigned to an article presenting conflicting risk arguments about vaccination that included a photograph exemplifying one argument side (receiving a vaccine is risky), a photograph exemplifying the other argument side (not receiving a vaccine is risky), or no photograph (control condition). Exemplifying the risks associated with vaccination influenced uneven recall and risk perception. Negative affect, rather than perceived argument strength, mediated these effects and was a stronger predictor of risk perception than risk argument recall, lending support to the affect heuristic. However, exemplifying the risk of not vaccinating produced null effects on affect, risk perception, and recall, despite using the same photograph. A follow-up study suggests that motivated reasoning played a role in this null finding, providing direction for future research.
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Can We Undo Our First Impressions? The Role of Reinterpretation in Reversing Implicit Evaluations
Thomas Mann & Melissa Ferguson
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Little work has examined whether implicit evaluations can be effectively "undone" after learning new revelations. Across 7 experiments, participants fully reversed their implicit evaluation of a novel target person after reinterpreting earlier information. Revision occurred across multiple implicit evaluation measures (Experiments 1a and 1b), and only when the new information prompted a reinterpretation of prior learning versus did not (Experiment 2). The updating required active consideration of the information, as it emerged only with at least moderate cognitive resources (Experiment 3). Self-reported reinterpretation predicted (Experiment 4) and mediated (Experiment 5) revised implicit evaluations beyond the separate influence of how thoughtfully participants considered the new information in general. Finally, the revised evaluations were durable 3 days later (Experiment 6). We discuss how these results inform existing theoretical models, and consider implications for future research.