Think it over
Evolutionary Origins of the Endowment Effect: Evidence from Hunter-Gatherers
Coren Apicella et al.
American Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
The endowment effect, the tendency to value possessions more than non-possessions, is a well known departure from rational choice and has been replicated in numerous settings. We investigate the universality of the endowment effect, its evolutionary significance, and its dependence on environmental factors. We experimentally test for the endowment effect in an isolated and evolutionarily relevant population of hunter-gatherers, the Hadza Bushmen of Northern Tanzania. We find that Hadza living in isolated regions do not display the endowment effect, while Hadza living in a geographic region with increased exposure to modern society and markets do display the endowment effect.
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Henk Schmidt et al.
Academic Medicine, February 2014, Pages 285–291
Purpose: Anecdotal evidence indicates that exposure to media-distributed disease information, such as news about an outbreak, can lead physicians to errors; influenced by an availability bias, they misdiagnose patients with similar-looking but different diseases. The authors investigated whether exposure to media-provided disease information causes diagnostic errors and whether reflection (systematic review of findings) counteracts bias.
Method: In 2010, 38 internal medicine residents first read the Wikipedia entry about one or another of two diseases (Phase 1). Six hours later, in a seemingly unrelated study, they diagnosed eight clinical cases (Phase 2). Two cases superficially resembled the disease in the Wikipedia entry they had read (bias expected), two cases resembled the other disease they had not read about (bias not expected), and four were filler cases. In Phase 3, they diagnosed the bias-expected cases again, using reflective reasoning.
Results: Mean diagnostic accuracy scores (Phase 2; range: 0-1) were significantly lower on bias-expected cases than on bias-not-expected cases (0.56 versus 0.70, P = .016) because participants misdiagnosed cases that looked similar to a Wikipedia description of a disease more often when they had read the Wikipedia description (mean = 0.61) than when they had not (mean = 0.29). Deliberate reflection (Phase 3) restored performance on bias-expected cases to pre-bias levels (mean = 0.71).
Conclusions: Availability bias may arise simply from exposure to media-provided information about a disease, causing diagnostic errors. The bias's effect can be substantial. It is apparently associated with nonanalytical reasoning and can be counteracted by reflection.
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How Childhood Advertising Exposure Can Create Biased Product Evaluations That Persist into Adulthood
Paul Connell, Merrie Brucks & Jesper Nielsen
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research has found that children incrementally learn how to cope with advertising as they age. The current research investigates whether these developmental constraints in advertising knowledge at time of exposure have enduring consequences. Results from four experimental studies show that childhood exposure to advertisements can lead to resilient biased product evaluations that persist into adulthood. Study 1 demonstrates that positive affect toward ad-related stimuli encountered in childhood mediates the relationship between childhood advertising exposure and biased evaluations for products associated with childhood (but not adulthood) advertising. Study 2 demonstrates stronger biases when participants are exposed to childhood advertising cues relative to childhood consumption cues. Studies 3 and 4 show that even when ability and motivation to correct bias are high, lingering positive affect toward childhood ad-related stimuli is a motivational deterrent to correct biased product evaluations. Study 4 also shows that biased product evaluations can transfer to line extensions.
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Smart People Ask for (My) Advice: Seeking Advice Boosts Perceptions of Competence
Alison Wood Brooks, Francesca Gino & Maurice E. Schweitzer
Harvard Working Paper, July 2013
Abstract:
Although individuals can derive substantial benefits from exchanging information and ideas, many individuals are reluctant to seek advice from others. We find that people are reticent to seek advice for fear of appearing incompetent. This fear, however, is misplaced. We demonstrate that individuals perceive those who seek advice as more competent than those who do not. This effect is moderated by task difficulty and advisor ego. Individuals perceive those who seek advice as more competent when the task is difficult than when it is easy, and when people seek advice from them personally than when they seek advice from others.
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Wijnand Adriaan Pieter Van Tilburg & Eric Raymond Igou
European Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examined the impact of eccentricity on the evaluation of artistic skills and the quality of artworks. Based on the notion that artists are typically perceived as eccentric, creative and skilled, we tested the hypothesis that eccentricity increases perceptions of artistic quality. In Study 1, Van Gogh's Sunflowers painting was evaluated more positively when he was said to have cut off his left ear lobe than when this information was not presented. In Study 2, participants liked art more when the artist was eccentric. In Study 3, the evaluation of fictitious art increased because of the artist's eccentric appearance. Study 4 established that the eccentricity effect was specific to unconventional as opposed to conventional art. In Study 5, Lady Gaga's music was more appreciated when she was displayed as highly eccentric; however, the eccentricity effect emerged only when the display seemed authentic. These novel findings indicate that art evaluations are partly rooted in perceptions of artists' eccentricity and evidence the importance of perceived authenticity and skills for these attributions.
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What makes an art expert? Emotion and evaluation in art appreciation
Helmut Leder et al.
Cognition & Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why do some people like negative, or even disgusting and provocative artworks? Art expertise, believed to influence the interplay among cognitive and emotional processing underlying aesthetic experience, could be the answer. We studied how art expertise modulates the effect of positive-and negative-valenced artworks on aesthetic and emotional responses, measured with self-reports and facial electromyography (EMG). Unsurprisingly, emotionally-valenced art evoked coherent valence as well as corrugator supercilii and zygamoticus major activations. However, compared to non-experts, experts showed attenuated reactions, with less extreme valence ratings and corrugator supercilii activations and they liked negative art more. This pattern was also observed for a control set of International Affective Picture System (IAPS) pictures suggesting that art experts show general processing differences for visual stimuli. Thus, much in line with the Kantian notion that an aesthetic stance is emotionally distanced, art experts exhibited a distinct pattern of attenuated emotional responses.
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Christoph Bühren & Marco Pleßner
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, forthcoming
Abstract:
By extending a typical endowment effect experiment with the possibility of winning the endowment in a real effort contest, we found two reinforcing effects that led to a complete market failure. Subjects who won the item in the effortful competition had a very high willingness to accept (trophy winner effect). By contrast, subjects who were not successful had an extremely low willingness to pay for the same item (trophy loser effect). We disentangle different components of these effects and investigate the underlying emotional responses. Further, we analyze the duration of the effects and discuss economic implications.
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Name-Letter and Birthday-Number Implicit Egotism Effects in Pricing
Keith Coulter & Dhruv Grewal
Journal of Marketing, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research examines how the implicit egotism resulting from consumers' positive self-associations affects their evaluations of product prices. The effects can occur when the product's price and the consumer share either name letters (name-letter/price effect), or birthday numbers (birthday-number/price effect).Through a series of studies, we demonstrate that the positive affect linked to name-letters and birthday-numbers transfers directly to consumers' price predilections, and ultimately affects their purchase intentions. More specifically, consumers like prices (e.g., “fifty-five dollars”) that contain digits beginning with the same first letter (e.g., “F”) as their own name (e.g., “Fred” or “Mr. Frank”) more than prices that do not. Similarly, prices containing cents digits (e.g., $49.15) that correspond to a consumer's date of birth (e.g., April 26) also enhance pricing liking and purchase intentions. Across groups of consumers, our findings demonstrate that implicit egotism effects can result in greater purchase intentions for a higher priced product compared to a lower-priced product.
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Paying More When Paying for Others: Consumer Elective Pricing with Pay-It-Forward Framing
Minah Jung et al.
University of California Working Paper, December 2013
Abstract:
In a series of field and lab experiments we compare how people behave under two forms of consumer elective pricing: “pay-what-you-want” pricing, in which a customer chooses how much to pay the seller (including zero) for a product or a service, and “pay-it-forward” pricing, which is financially identical, but is framed as paying for others, and others are paying for the customer. We predict that this reframing will change the social nature of the exchange and increase payments. Four field experiments confirmed our prediction; people paid more under pay-it-forward than pay-what-you-want in both non-profit and for-profit settings (Studies 1-4). Four subsequent lab studies consider whether affective intensity explains the increased payments (Study 5), whether people pay more out of a need to justify (Study 6), or whether implicit social preferences are influenced by the manipulation (Studies 7 and 8). Results indicate that when descriptive norms, in the form of other’s payment amount, are explicit, participants conform to them and pay just about the same amount. However, when descriptive norms are implicit, people overestimate the kindness of others and bring their own behavior in line with their misperception.
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Mehmet Gurdal, Joshua Miller & Aldo Rustichini
Journal of Political Economy, December 2013, Pages 1205-1247
Abstract:
We provide experimental evidence that subjects blame others on the basis of events they are not responsible for. In our experiment an agent chooses between a lottery and a safe asset; payment from the chosen option goes to a principal, who then decides how much to allocate between the agent and a third party. We observe widespread blame: regardless of their choice, agents are blamed by principals for the outcome of the lottery, an event they are not responsible for. We provide an explanation of this apparently irrational behavior with a delegated-expertise principal-agent model, the subjects’ salient perturbation of the environment.
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Dengfeng Yan & A.V. Muthukrishnan
Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present research examines how the inclusion of consolation or token prizes influences consumers' valuation of a promotional lottery. Results from four experiments show that consolation prizes lower consumers' expectations of winning the big prize, their valuations of, and their intentions to participate in the lottery. Because of the high likelihood of attaining the consolation prizes, consumers shift their focus from the value of a big prize to the probability of attaining it. This shift increases the weight given to the probability dimension and results in lowered valuations of the lottery. The first two experiments demonstrated the effect in hypothetical and real choices. In experiment 3, we proposed and showed a boundary condition for the effect. In experiment 4, we conducted an exploratory test of the process.
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Reducing and Exaggerating Escalation of Commitment by Option Partitioning
Jessica Kwong & Kin Fai Ellick Wong
Journal of Applied Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Options under escalation situations can be presented as a general class (e.g., investing in electronic products) or be partitioned into disjunctive suboptions within that class (e.g., investing in MP3 players, portable TV game consoles, and other electronic products). Drawing from the theoretical bases of partition priming and mental accounting, this research found support from 4 experiments that (a) a decision maker’s commitment to a failing course of action is exaggerated when the escalation options are partitioned into multiple suboptions, whereas such commitment is reduced when the alternative options are portioned into suboptions, and (b) these partitioning effects are mediated by the subjective utility, including subjective values and probability, of the escalation option.
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Handedness differences in information framing
John Jasper, Candice Fournier & Stephen Christman
Brain and Cognition, February 2014, Pages 85–89
Abstract:
Previous research has shown that strength of handedness predicts differences in sensory illusions, Stroop interference, episodic memory, and beliefs about body image. Recent evidence also suggests handedness differences in the susceptibility to common decision biases such as anchoring and sunk cost. The present paper extends this line of work to attribute framing effects. Sixty-three undergraduates were asked to advise a friend concerning the use of a safe allergy medication during pregnancy. A third of the participants received negatively-framed information concerning the fetal risk of the drug (1–3% chance of having a malformed child); another third received positively-framed information (97–99% chance of having a normal child); and the final third received no counseling information and served as the control. Results indicated that, as predicted, inconsistent (mixed)-handers were more responsive than consistent (strong)-handers to information changes and readily update their beliefs. Although not significant, the data also suggested that only inconsistent handers were affected by information framing. Theoretical implications as well as ongoing work in holistic versus analytic processing, contextual sensitivity, and brain asymmetry will be discussed.
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Belief in Conspiracy Theories and Susceptibility to the Conjunction Fallacy
Robert Brotherton & Christopher French
Applied Cognitive Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
People who believe in the paranormal have been found to be particularly susceptible to the conjunction fallacy. The present research examines whether the same is true of people who endorse conspiracy theories. Two studies examined the association between conspiracist ideation and the number of conjunction violations made in a variety of contexts (neutral, paranormal and conspiracy). Study 1 found that participants who endorsed a range of popular conspiracy theories more strongly also made more conjunction errors than participants with weaker conspiracism, regardless of the contextual framing of the conjunction. Study 2, using an independent sample and a generic measure of conspiracist ideation, replicated the finding that conspiracy belief is associated with domain-general susceptibility to the conjunction fallacy. The findings are discussed in relation to the association between conspiracism and other anomalous beliefs, the representativeness heuristic and the tendency to infer underlying causal relationships connecting ostensibly unrelated events.
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Far-Out Thinking: Generating Solutions to Distant Analogies Promotes Relational Thinking
Michael Vendetti, Aaron Wu & Keith Holyoak
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Is it possible to induce a mind-set that will affect relational thinking in a subsequent reasoning task involving unrelated materials? We investigated whether evaluating the validity of verbal analogies (Experiment 1a) or generating solutions for them (Experiment 1b) could induce a relational mind-set that would transfer to an unrelated picture-mapping task. The verbal analogies were based on either near or far semantic relations. We found that generating (but not evaluating) solutions for semantically distant analogies increased the proportion of relational mappings on the transfer task, even after we controlled for fluid intelligence and response time. Solving near analogies did not produce transfer. Generation of solutions to far analogies appears to provide a potent method for triggering a mind-set that can enhance relational thinking in a different task.
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Karl-Andrew Woltin, Olivier Corneille & Vincent Yzerbyt
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research investigates whether metacognitive experiences accompanying the retrieval of autobiographical memories influence judgments about others. Based on social projection research, we tested the hypothesis that ease-of-retrieval, affecting how the self is perceived, affects first impressions. In line with this prediction, Experiment 1 showed that participants asked to recall a few personal instances of assertive behavior (easy retrieval) judged an unknown person to be more assertive than participants recalling many instances (difficult retrieval). Experiment 2, targeting creativity, provided evidence for the retrieval-ease mechanism: The effect disappeared when ease-of-retrieval was discredited as informational source in a misattribution paradigm. Finally, Experiments 3 and 4 replicated this pattern for the same personality traits and demonstrated two boundary conditions: Participants’ ease of autobiographical recalls affected judgments of in- but not outgroup members (Experiment 3), and judgments of unknown others were affected after autobiographical recall but not after recalling behaviors of someone else (Experiment 4).
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Pluralistic Ignorance in Virtually Assembled Peers: The Case of World of Warcraft
Margaret de Larios & John Lang
Games and Culture, March 2014, Pages 102-121
Abstract:
This article presents a study of pluralistic ignorance situated within the virtual community of guilds in World of Warcraft (WoW). Pluralistic ignorance is a mistaken perception of social norms that overwhelms personal attitudes and leads to behavior contrary to an actor’s attitude, and it has never been studied in the context of a virtual world. We analyze the presence of pluralistic ignorance in WoW guilds with the use of a sample of 195 players who responded to an Internet-based survey and 15 focus group participants. Findings show that pluralistic ignorance has a demonstrably lower presence in that community of WoW players than in a physical world equivalent, suggesting a higher tendency in that community toward consistency between private attitudes and public behavior. Factors uncovered that explain this difference include anonymity, safety of the Internet as social medium, and a hypersalience of identity in the WoW player community.
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Gamers against science: The case of the violent video games debate
Peter Nauroth et al.
European Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article explores the notion that scientific research programs and empirical findings are fundamentally devalued when they threaten a perceiver's social identity. Findings from three studies show the following: (1) identification with the group of “gamers” (i.e., people who play video games on a regular basis) influences the extent to which perceivers devalue research suggesting that playing violent video games has negative consequences; (2) this effect is mediated by the feeling that the group of gamers is being stigmatized by such research (Studies 1 and 2) as well as by anger about this research (Study 2); (3) the effect of in-group identification on negative research evaluations cannot be explained by attitude or behavioral preference inconsistency (Studies 1 and 3); and (4) strongly identified gamers not only devalue a specific scientific study but also generalize their negative evaluations to the entire field of violent video games research (Study 3). The findings suggest that the influence of social identity processes on the evaluation of research is larger than it has previously been recognized. Implications of these findings for science communication are discussed.
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Stuck in the moment: Cognitive inflexibility in preschoolers following an extended time period
Carolina Garcia & Anthony Steven Dick
Frontiers in Psychology, December 2013
Abstract:
Preschoolers display surprising inflexibility in problem solving, but seem to approach new challenges with a fresh slate. We provide evidence that while the former is true the latter is not. Here, we examined whether brief exposure to stimuli can influence children’s problem solving following several weeks after first exposure to the stimuli. We administered a common executive function task, the Dimensional Change Card Sort, which requires children to sort picture cards by one dimension (e.g., color) and then switch to sort the same cards by a conflicting dimension (e.g., shape). After a week or after a month delay, we administered the second rule again. We found that 70% of preschoolers continued to sort by the initial sorting rule, even after a month delay, and even though they are explicitly told what to do. We discuss implications for theories of executive function development, and for classroom learning.
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But consider the alternative: The influence of positive affect on overconfidence
Kyle Emich
Cognition & Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Three studies find evidence that positive affect reduces comparative overconfidence (overplacement). This occurs because positive affect attenuates focalism via decreasing people's tendency to overweight information regarding themselves in the light of information concerning others. Specifically, Study 1 provides evidence that positive affect leads to more realistic estimates of comparative ability and that other-focus partially mediates this effect. Then, Study 2 provides causal evidence that positive affect independently influences other-focus and that other-focus, in turn, influences overplacement. Additionally, Study 2 uses an indirect measure of focalism to better capture this attentional process. Finally, Study 3 explores the influence of negative affect on overplacement. In addition, each study finds that positive affect does not influence overconfidence regarding participant's raw performances (overestimation) as this type of overconfidence is not dependent on self-other comparisons.
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The Etiology of Diagnostic Errors: A Controlled Trial of System 1 Versus System 2 Reasoning
Geoffrey Norman et al.
Academic Medicine, February 2014, Pages 277–284
Purpose: Diagnostic errors are thought to arise from cognitive biases associated with System 1 reasoning, which is rapid and unconscious. The primary hypothesis of this study was that the instruction to be slow and thorough will have no advantage in diagnostic accuracy over the instruction to proceed rapidly.
Method: Participants were second-year residents who volunteered after they had taken the Medical Council of Canada (MCC) Qualifying Examination Part II. Participants were tested at three Canadian medical schools (McMaster, Ottawa, and McGill) in 2010 (n = 96) and 2011 (n = 108). The intervention consisted of 20 computer-based internal medicine cases, with instructions either (1) to be as quick as possible but not make mistakes (the Speed cohort, 2010), or (2) to be careful, thorough, and reflective (the Reflect cohort, 2011). The authors examined accuracy scores on the 20 cases, time taken to diagnose cases, and MCC examination performance.
Results: Overall accuracy in the Speed condition was 44.5%, and in the Reflect condition was 45.0%; this was not significant. The Speed cohort took an average of 69 seconds per case versus 89 seconds for the Reflect cohort (P < .001). In both cohorts, cases diagnosed incorrectly took an average of 17 seconds longer than cases diagnosed correctly. Diagnostic accuracy was moderately correlated with performance on both written and problem-solving components of the MCC licensure examination and inversely correlated with time.
Conclusions: The study demonstrates that simply encouraging slowing down and increasing attention to analytical thinking is insufficient to increase diagnostic accuracy.