On the Fence
Can Acetaminophen Reduce the Pain of Decision-Making?
Nathan DeWall, David Chester & Dylan White
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Psychological and behavioral economic theories have shown that people often make irrational and suboptimal decisions. To describe certain decisions, people often use words related to pain (“hurt,” “painful”). Neuroscientific evidence suggests common overlap between systems involved in physical pain and decision-making. Yet no prior studies have explored whether a pharmacological intervention aimed at reducing physical pain could reduce the pain of decision-making. The current investigation filled this gap by assigning participants to consume the physical painkiller acetaminophen or placebo and then exposing them to situations known to produce cognitive dissonance (Experiment 1) or loss aversion (Experiment 2). Both experiments showed that acetaminophen reduced the pain of decision-making, as indicated by lower attitude change that accompanies cognitive dissonance and lower selling prices when selling personal possessions.
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James Cornwell & David Krantz
Judgment and Decision Making, September 2014, Pages 433–444
Abstract:
Past research has shown that people consistently believe that others are more easily manipulated by external influences than they themselves are — a phenomenon called the “third-person effect” (Davison, 1983). The present research investigates whether support for public policies aimed at changing behavior using incentives and other decision “nudges” is affected by this bias. Across two studies, we phrased justification for public policy initiatives using either the second- or third-person plural. In Study 1, we found that support for policies is higher when their justification points to people in general rather than the general “you”, and in Study 2 we found that this former phrasing also improves support compared to a no-justification control condition. Policy support is mediated by beliefs about the likelihood of success of the policies (as opposed to beliefs about the policies’ unintended consequences), and, in the second-person condition, is inversely related to a sense of personal agency. These effects suggest that the third-person effect holds true for nudge-type and incentive-based public policies, with implications for their popular support.
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Indecision and the construction of self
Daniel Newark
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper proposes a theoretically grounded definition of indecision and considers one of indecision’s potential functions. It argues that, despite a reputation as mere choice pathology, indecision may play an important role in identity formation and maintenance. In particular, the contemplations and conversations characteristic of indecision may help construct, discover, or affirm who one is, even if ostensibly they are intended only to clarify what one should do. In addition to positing an underexplored function of indecision, the possibility that indecision facilitates identity development suggests that concentrated identity work need not be an explicit objective or even a process of which one is cognizant; it can be an unwitting byproduct of frustrated attempts at choice.
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Getting older isn’t all that bad: Better decisions and coping when facing “sunk costs”
Wändi Bruine de Bruin, JoNell Strough & Andrew Parker
Psychology and Aging, Summer 2014, Pages 642-647
Abstract:
Because people of all ages face decisions that affect their quality of life, decision-making competence is important across the life span. According to theories of rational decision making, one crucial decision skill involves the ability to discontinue failing commitments despite irrecoverable investments also referred to as “sunk costs.” We find that older adults are better than younger adults at making decisions to discontinue such failing commitments especially when irrecoverable losses are large, as well as at coping with the associated irrecoverable losses. Our results are relevant to interventions that aim to promote better decision-making competence across the life span.
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Eimear O'Connor, Teresa McCormack & Aidan Feeney
Child Development, September/October 2014, Pages 1995–2010
Abstract:
Although regret is assumed to facilitate good decision making, there is little research directly addressing this assumption. Four experiments (N = 326) examined the relation between children's ability to experience regret and the quality of their subsequent decision making. In Experiment 1 regret and adaptive decision making showed the same developmental profile, with both first appearing at about 7 years. In Experiments 2a and 2b, children aged 6–7 who experienced regret decided adaptively more often than children who did not experience regret, and this held even when controlling for age and verbal ability. Experiment 3 ruled out a memory-based interpretation of these findings. These findings suggest that the experience of regret facilitates children's ability to learn rapidly from bad outcomes.
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Jennifer Whitson, Adam Galinsky & Aaron Kay
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We predicted that experiencing emotions that reflect uncertainty about the world (e.g., worry, surprise, fear, hope), compared to certain emotions (e.g., anger, happiness, disgust, contentment), would activate the need to imbue the world with order and structure across a wide range of compensatory measures. To test this hypothesis, three experiments orthogonally manipulated the uncertainty and the valence of emotions. Experiencing uncertain emotions increased government defense (Experiment 1) and led people to embrace conspiracies and the paranormal (Experiment 2). Self-affirmation eliminated the effects of uncertain emotions on compensatory control (Experiment 3). Across all experiments, the valence of the emotions had no main effects on compensatory control and never interacted with the uncertainty of emotions. These studies establish a link between the experience of emotions and the desire for structure.
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Robert Ashton
Journal of Wine Economics, August 2014, Pages 171-182
Abstract:
Economic theorists maintain that wine is an experience good, a product whose quality can be evaluated only after purchase and consumption. Theory holds that consumers often rely on the price of experience goods as one cue to judge their quality. In this paper, however, I provide evidence that an important segment of wine consumers do not consider price a useful cue to quality. Specifically, I test the robustness of Goldstein et al.'s (2008) finding that, in blind tastings, average wine drinkers consider less expensive wines to taste better than more expensive wines. Four blind tastings of 2006 red Bordeaux and 2009 white Burgundy with a price range of $20–$119 were conducted, in which members of a wine club rated their extent of enjoyment of each wine. In three of the tastings, there was no relationship between price and enjoyment, while in the other the relationship was negative, lending additional credibility to the contention that an important segment of wine consumers do not find enjoyment to increase with price.
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Differential Influence of Sadness and Disgust on Music Preference
Christa Taylor & Ronald Friedman
Psychology of Popular Media Culture, October 2014, Pages 195-205
Abstract:
Studies investigating the effects of negative affect on selective exposure to music have produced conflicting findings. In an effort to delineate whether this could be due to the common conceptualization of affect and related constructs as a 1-dimensional function of valence, the current study sought to determine if distinct forms of negative affect would influence music preference differentially. Participants were induced to feel sad, disgusted, or neutral via audio-guided visualization and asked to indicate their preferences for expressively happy and sad music selections. As expected, a significant interaction between condition (sad vs. disgust vs. neutral) and music emotion (sad vs. happy) was found. Participants induced to feel disgusted or neutral demonstrated a significantly greater desire to listen to happy (opposed to sad) music, whereas this effect was not present in individuals induced to feel sad. Results also elucidate the conflicting findings of studies investigating sadness in particular. These findings have important implications for understanding how affect influences music preference.
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Eddy Nahmias, Jason Shepard & Shane Reuter
Cognition, November 2014, Pages 502–516
Abstract:
In recent years, a number of prominent scientists have argued that free will is an illusion, appealing to evidence demonstrating that information about brain activity can be used to predict behavior before people are aware of having made a decision. These scientists claim that the possibility of perfect prediction based on neural information challenges the ordinary understanding of free will. In this paper we provide evidence suggesting that most people do not view the possibility of neuro-prediction as a threat to free will unless it also raises concerns about manipulation of the agent’s behavior. In Experiment 1 two scenarios described future brain imaging technology that allows perfect prediction of decisions and actions based on earlier neural activity, and this possibility did not undermine most people’s attributions of free will or responsibility, except in the scenario that also allowed manipulation. In Experiment 2 the scenarios increased the salience of the physicalist implications of neuro-prediction, while in Experiment 3 the scenarios suggested dualism, with perfect prediction by mindreaders. The patterns of results for these two experiments were similar to the results in Experiment 1, suggesting that participants do not understand free will to require specific metaphysical conditions regarding the mind–body relation. Most people seem to understand free will in a way that is not threatened by perfect prediction based on neural information, suggesting that they believe that just because “my brain made me do it,” that does not mean that I didn’t do it of my own free will.
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Framing effect in evaluation of others’ predictions
Saiwing Yeung
Judgment and Decision Making, September 2014, Pages 445–464
Abstract:
This paper explored how frames influence people’s evaluation of others’ probabilistic predictions in light of the outcomes of binary events. Most probabilistic predictions (e.g., “there is a 75% chance that Denver will win the Super Bowl”) can be partitioned into two components: A qualitative component that describes the predicted outcome (“Denver will win the Super Bowl”), and a quantitative component that represents the chance of the outcome occurring (“75% chance”). Various logically equivalent variations of a single prediction can be created through different combinations of these components and their logical or numerical complements (e.g., “25% chance that Denver will lose the Super Bowl”, “75% chance that Seattle will lose the Super Bowl”). Based on the outcome of the predicted event, these logically equivalent predictions can be categorized into two classes: Congruently framed predictions, in which the qualitative component matches the outcome, and incongruently framed predictions, in which it does not. Although the two classes of predictions are logically equivalent, we hypothesize that people would judge congruently framed predictions to be more accurate. The paper tested this hypothesis in seven experiments and found supporting evidence across a number of domains and experimental manipulations, and even when the congruently framed prediction was logically inferior. It also found that this effect held even for subjects who saw both congruently framed and incongruently framed versions of a prediction and judged the two to be logically equivalent.
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Do we follow others when we should outside the lab? Evidence from the AP top 25
Daniel Stone & Basit Zafar
Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, August 2014, Pages 73-102
Abstract:
We use data from the Associated Press college American football poll to analyze two types of ex-post optimality of social learning in a non-lab setting. The poll is a weekly subjective ranking of the top 25 teams, voted on by over 60 sports journalists. Voters potentially can learn from their peers by observing the aggregate ranks before updating their individual ranks. Our results indicate that, while voters do learn from their peers to some extent, the informativeness of peer ranks appears to be under-valued.
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Lukas Thürmer, Frank Wieber & Peter Gollwitzer
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, forthcoming
Abstract:
In hidden-profile (HP) problems, groups squander their potential to make superior decisions because members fail to capitalize on each other's unique knowledge (unshared information). A new self-regulation perspective suggests that hindrances in goal striving (e.g., failing to seize action opportunities) contribute to this problem. Implementation intentions (if–then plans) are known to help deal with hindrances in goal striving; therefore, supporting decision goals with if–then plans should improve the impact of unshared information on group decisions. Indeed, in line with past research, control participants in two experiments rarely identified the best alternative despite monetary incentives and setting decision goals. In contrast, simply adding if–then plans to review advantages of the non-preferred alternatives before making the final decision significantly increased solution rates. Process manipulations (Experiment 1) and measures (Experiment 2) indicate that conceptualizing HP problems as a self-regulation challenge provides explanatory power beyond existing accounts.
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Extensive Imitation is Irrational and Harmful
Erik Eyster & Matthew Rabin
Quarterly Journal of Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Rationality leads people to imitate those with similar tastes but different information. But people who imitate common sources develop correlated beliefs, and rationality demands that later social learners take this correlation into account. This implies severe limits to rational imitation. We show that (i) in most natural observation structures besides the canonical single-file case, full rationality dictates that people must “anti-imitate” some of those they observe; and (ii) in every observation structure full rationality dictates that people imitate, on net, at most one person and are imitated by, on net, at most one person, over any set of interconnected players. We also show that in a very broad class of settings, any learning rule in which people regularly do imitate more than one person without anti-imitating others will lead to a positive probability of people converging to confident and wrong long-run beliefs.
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Ethan Zell, Mark Alicke & Jason Strickhouser
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, January 2015, Pages 18–23
Abstract:
People evaluate themselves more favorably when they outperform a referent (downward comparison) than when they underperform a referent (upward comparison). However, research has yet to examine whether people are sensitive to the status of the referent during social comparison. That is, does defeating a highly skilled referent yield more favorable self-evaluations than defeating an unskilled referent? Does losing to an unskilled referent yield less favorable self-evaluations than losing to a skilled referent? To address these questions, participants learned that they performed better or worse than another person (social comparison) who ranked above average or below average (referent status). Social comparison information had a more pronounced influence on self-evaluations than referent status information. Furthermore, consistent with self-enhancement theories, participants selectively highlighted referent status information when it had favorable implications for the self. These findings demonstrate that people neglect referent status information, leading winners to evaluate themselves favorably even when the competitor is incompetent.
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Gift Cards and Mental Accounting: Green-lighting Hedonic Spending
Chelsea Helion & Thomas Gilovich
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, October 2014, Pages 386–393
Abstract:
In three studies, we examine the mental accounting rules that govern how gift cards are used. We predicted that their identity as gift cards would shift consumption from utilitarian to hedonic goods even in contexts where both types of goods are available and the consumer's needs are unchanged. In Study 1a, participants were asked to imagine that they had both a gift card and a specified amount of cash and needed to purchase both a hedonic item and a utilitarian item. When asked which currency they would use to buy which item, respondents were significantly more likely to say they would use the gift card to buy the hedonic item. Study 1b replicated this result and found that it was tied to participants' beliefs how different types of money should be used. In Study 2, we found that participants who were required to spend a certain amount of their compensation in a laboratory store spent more on hedonic goods if their payment was in the form of a gift card. In Study 3, we analyzed transactions at a campus bookstore and found that shoppers tended to spend disproportionately on hedonic goods when using their gift cards than when making credit card purchases. Taken together, these studies indicate that people tend to assign the monetary value of a gift card to a hedonic mental account and spend it accordingly.
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Increasing Hand Washing Compliance With a Simple Visual Cue
Eric Ford et al.
American Journal of Public Health, October 2014, Pages 1851-1856
Abstract:
We tested the efficacy of a simple, visual cue to increase hand washing with soap and water. Automated towel dispensers in 8 public bathrooms were set to present a towel either with or without activation by users. We set the 2 modes to operate alternately for 10 weeks. Wireless sensors were used to record entry into bathrooms. Towel and soap consumption rates were checked weekly. There were 97 351 hand-washing opportunities across all restrooms. Towel use was 22.6% higher (P = .05) and soap use was 13.3% higher (P = .003) when the dispenser presented the towel without user activation than when activation was required. Results showed that a visual cue can increase hand-washing compliance in public facilities.
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Analytic thinking reduces belief in conspiracy theories
Viren Swami et al.
Cognition, December 2014, Pages 572–585
Abstract:
Belief in conspiracy theories has been associated with a range of negative health, civic, and social outcomes, requiring reliable methods of reducing such belief. Thinking dispositions have been highlighted as one possible factor associated with belief in conspiracy theories, but actual relationships have only been infrequently studied. In Study 1, we examined associations between belief in conspiracy theories and a range of measures of thinking dispositions in a British sample (N = 990). Results indicated that a stronger belief in conspiracy theories was significantly associated with lower analytic thinking and open-mindedness and greater intuitive thinking. In Studies 2–4, we examined the causational role played by analytic thinking in relation to conspiracist ideation. In Study 2 (N = 112), we showed that a verbal fluency task that elicited analytic thinking reduced belief in conspiracy theories. In Study 3 (N = 189), we found that an alternative method of eliciting analytic thinking, which related to cognitive disfluency, was effective at reducing conspiracist ideation in a student sample. In Study 4, we replicated the results of Study 3 among a general population sample (N = 140) in relation to generic conspiracist ideation and belief in conspiracy theories about the July 7, 2005, bombings in London. Our results highlight the potential utility of supporting attempts to promote analytic thinking as a means of countering the widespread acceptance of conspiracy theories.
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Zhe Chen & Simon Kemp
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, forthcoming
Abstract:
Six experiments investigated the effect of the promotion criterion in simulated academic promotion decisions. In total, 547 undergraduate students and 33 university faculty members rated a promotion application, and some also indicated their decisions to support or to reject it. Performance ratings were reliably affected by the criterion, with a high criterion resulting in higher ratings than a low criterion, and this criterion effect was found regardless of the evaluator's expertise, whether he or she took the role of an independent assessor or the line manager to the applicant, or whether the criterion was provided by the experimenter or randomly generated by the participant. The criterion also affected the level of support for a candidate when the position applied for was perceived to be extremely competitive, or when a lesser position was considered at a later time. These results provide evidence that the use of a criterion, a fairly common practice in decision-making processes, may bias performance evaluations, which in turn may have ripple effects that affect the outcome of a chain of events. Our results also shed light on the possible mechanisms that underlie the rating biases in performance appraisal.
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Kathryn Kadous et al.
Journal of Behavioral Finance, Summer 2014, Pages 235-250
Abstract:
We conduct two experiments to examine potential causes of the disposition effect. In Experiment 1, we rule out beliefs in mean reversion as a cause of the disposition effect. Although a belief in the mean reversion of stock prices should be independent of whether an investor owns or only follows the stock, we show only investors who own the stock behave as though prices will reverse. In Experiment 2, participants buy and sell securities over multiple periods. We find that self-regard and investing confidence (two types of self-esteem) have opposing influences on investors’ tendency to hold losing investments. Investors with lower self-regard hold losing investments longer than those with higher self-regard, and investors with higher confidence hold losing investments longer than those with lower confidence. We focus on investors’ tendency to hold losing stocks too long because prior research suggests the gain versus loss sides of the disposition effect are driven by different biases.
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Motivated perception of probabilistic information
Heather Lench et al.
Cognition, November 2014, Pages 429–442
Abstract:
Desirability bias is the tendency to judge that, all else being equal, positive outcomes are more likely to occur than negative outcomes. The provision of probabilistic information about the likelihood that events will occur is typically viewed as a way to influence judgments by grounding them in objective information. Yet probabilistic information may be perceived differently when people are motivated to arrive at a particular conclusion, enabling the desirability bias. The present investigation explored how probabilistic information is used and perceived when people are motivated. In a game of chance, desirability bias was present for judgments about the likelihood of outcomes occurring to the self but not an unaffiliated other despite equal probabilities (Study 1). Probabilities were perceived as having more variance, both subjectively and in terms of probability spread (Studies 2, 3a, and 5), when participants were motivated to arrive at a particular conclusion (for the self or another person on the same team). Further, desirability bias was greater when probabilities were perceived as having more variance, either due to wide versus narrow probability ranges or subjective uncertainty (Studies 3b and 4). Together, these findings demonstrate that people perceive probabilistic information as having more variance when they are motivated to arrive at a conclusion and that this greater perceived variability contributes to bias in judgment.
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Affect and overconfidence: A laboratory investigation
John Ifcher & Homa Zarghamee
Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics, September 2014, Pages 125-150
Abstract:
We conduct 2 incentivized random-assignment experiments to investigate whether overconfidence is impacted by (a) incidental mild positive affect, or (b) incidental mild negative affects — anger, fear, and sadness. We measure overconfidence using overestimation of past quiz-performance and overestimation of past quiz-performance compared to peers. The results of the first experiment indicate that the effect of positive affect on both measures of overconfidence is positive and significant for male subjects. Although mood-inducement is equally successful for female subjects, their overconfidence is unaffected by positive affect. These positive affect results are robust to various specification checks. In the second experiment, we find consistent evidence of neither anger, fear, nor sadness’s effect on overconfidence; the lack of a result is attributable either to a genuine lack of relationship between these affects and overconfidence or to confounded mood-inducements. The effect of positive affect on overconfidence may help explain the relationship between mood and speculative bubbles and between mood and trading volume. Further, our results have implications for the effect of happiness on overconfidence and the role of emotions in economic decision-making, in general. Finally, we examine the neural evidence supported by our data.
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From East to West: Accessibility and Bias in Self–Other Comparative Judgments
Colton Christian, I-Ching Lee & Sara Hodges
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
People often weight information about the self more heavily than information about other people when making social comparative judgments. One possible explanation for this egocentrism is that information about the self is more accessible than information about others. We examine this egocentrism in samples from the United States and Taiwan. Study 1 finds egocentrism in comparisons of the self with the average other person in both cultures. Study 2 measured reaction times, demonstrating that (a) information about the self is more accessible than information about the average other and (b) as the accessibility of self-information increases, so does the influence of that information. Study 3 replicates Study 2, using comparisons with a specific other person. Egocentrism occurred in both cultures, suggesting that heavier weighting of self-information occurs across the traditional East–West cultural divide.