Framed
Fast Thought Speed Induces Risk Taking
Jesse Chandler & Emily Pronin
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
In two experiments, we tested for a causal link between thought speed and risk taking. In Experiment 1, we manipulated thought speed by presenting neutral-content text at either a fast or a slow pace and having participants read the text aloud. In Experiment 2, we manipulated thought speed by presenting fast-, medium-, or slow-paced movie clips that contained similar content. Participants who were induced to think more quickly took more risks with actual money in Experiment 1 and reported greater intentions to engage in real-world risky behaviors, such as unprotected sex and illegal drug use, in Experiment 2. These experiments provide evidence that faster thinking induces greater risk taking.
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The fast and the dangerous: The speed of events influences risk judgements
Heather Lench & Sarah Flores
British Journal of Social Psychology, March 2012, Pages 178-187
Abstract:
A risk-as-feelings approach suggests that factors irrelevant to the potential risk can influence risk perception. This investigation focused on the speed of events as one such factor. Negative events that occur relatively quickly were judged as more likely to occur than events that occur more slowly. Speed influenced risk perception when it was salient and differences in risk perception were reduced when it was not salient. Further, the likelihood of a negative outcome was judged to be more likely when the same event was described as occurring relatively quickly compared to slowly. Even when only the speed at which information was presented changed, faster events were judged to be riskier than slower events. Theoretically, these findings suggest that speed of an event contributes to risk judgements and suggest speed may be the reason people fear fast but low incidence events and fail to fear slower but higher incidence events.
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The Physical Burdens of Secrecy
Michael Slepian et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present work examined whether secrets are experienced as physical burdens, thereby influencing perception and action. Four studies examined the behavior of people who harbored important secrets, such as secrets concerning infidelity and sexual orientation. People who recalled, were preoccupied with, or suppressed an important secret estimated hills to be steeper, perceived distances to be farther, indicated that physical tasks would require more effort, and were less likely to help others with physical tasks. The more burdensome the secret and the more thought devoted to it, the more perception and action were influenced in a manner similar to carrying physical weight. Thus, as with physical burdens, secrets weigh people down.
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Heartwarming Memories: Nostalgia Maintains Physiological Comfort
Xinyue Zhou et al.
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Nostalgia, a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, is a predominantly positive and social emotion. Recent evidence suggests that nostalgia maintains psychological comfort. Here, we propose, and document in five methodologically diverse studies, a broader homeostatic function for nostalgia that also encompasses the maintenance of physiological comfort. We show that nostalgia - an emotion with a strong connotation of warmth - is triggered by coldness. Participants reported stronger nostalgia on colder (vs. warmer) days and in a cold (vs. neutral or warm) room. Nostalgia, in turn, modulates the interoceptive feeling of temperature. Higher levels of music-evoked nostalgia predicted increased physical warmth, and participants who recalled a nostalgic (vs. ordinary autobiographical) event perceived ambient temperature as higher. Finally, and consistent with the close central nervous system integration of temperature and pain sensations, participants who recalled a nostalgic (vs. ordinary autobiographical) event evinced greater tolerance to noxious cold.
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Affective Priming During the Processing of News Articles
Susanne Baumgartner & Werner Wirth
Media Psychology, Winter 2012, Pages 1-18
Abstract:
The present study investigates the role of affective priming during the processing of news articles. It is assumed that the valence of the affective response to a news article will influence the processing of subsequent news articles. More specifically, it is hypothesized that participants who read a positive article will recall subsequent positive information better than negative information. Similarly, participants who read a negative article will recall subsequent negative information better. To test this assumption, an experimental study was conducted (N = 87). Findings show that participants who read an initial positive article recalled more positive than negative information from six subsequent news articles. Participants who read an initial negative article recalled more negative information than positive information from subsequent news messages. Findings suggest that affective states induced by a news article influence how subsequent articles are processed and which information is learned.
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Self-selection bias in hypothesis comparison
Jennifer Whitman & Todd Woodward
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, forthcoming
Abstract:
Here we investigated whether, given equivalent supporting evidence, we judge self-selected hypotheses differently from those selected by an external source. On each trial of a probabilistic reasoning task requiring no retrieval from memory, participants rated the probability of a focal hypothesis, relative to two alternatives. The focal hypothesis was either selected by the participant or by a computer. In four experiments, self-selected focal hypotheses were judged to be more probable than externally selected ones, despite equivalent supporting evidence. This self-selection bias was independent of level of difficulty in selecting the focal hypothesis (cognitive effort) and of whether evidence was gradually accumulated or all presented instantaneously. These results suggest that the cognitive operations involved in selecting a hypothesis lead to assignment of higher probability to that hypothesis, and that this effect is independent of hypothesis selection difficulty and of the rate of evidence accumulation.
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The Future is Bright: The Underdog Label, Availability, and Optimism
Nadav Goldschmied & Joseph Vandello
Basic and Applied Social Psychology, Winter 2012, Pages 34-43
Abstract:
Research suggests that people support underdogs. Three studies examined how laypeople conceptualize the underdog label. Study 1 used a free association method to create a semantic network map of the underdog construct. In Study 2, participants provided their own definitions and selected the entity that best exemplified an underdog. In the two studies, the underdog term was linked to both disadvantage and successful qualities. In Study 3, participants read fictional stories about competing entities unlikely to succeed. When targets were labeled as underdogs, participants predicted that they would perform significantly better than expectations. We suggest that, although dictionaries define underdogs as unlikely to prevail, a layperson's conceptions, shaped by inspirational archetypal stories of odds overcome, are more optimistic.
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The disgust-promotes-disposal effect
Seunghee Han, Jennifer Lerner & Richard Zeckhauser
Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, April 2012, Pages 101-113
Abstract:
Individuals tend toward status quo bias: preferring existing options over new ones. There is a countervailing phenomenon: Humans naturally dispose of objects that disgust them, such as foul-smelling food. But what if the source of disgust is independent of the object? We induced disgust via a film clip to see if participants would trade away an item (a box of unidentified office supplies) for a new item (alternative unidentified box). Such "incidental disgust" strongly countered status quo bias. Disgusted people exchanged their present possession 51% of the time compared to 32% for people in a neutral state. Thus, disgust promotes disposal. A second experiment tested whether a warning about this tendency would diminish it. It did not. These results indicate a robust disgust-promotes-disposal effect. Because these studies presented real choices with tangible rewards, their findings have implications for everyday choices and raise caution about the effectiveness of warnings about biases.
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Making less of a mess: Scent exposure as a tool for behavioral change
M.A. de Lange et al.
Social Influence, Spring 2012, Pages 90-97
Abstract:
Following a cognitive route from olfactory perception to goal-directed behavior, we aimed to influence littering behavior on Dutch trains. In order to achieve this, the scent of a cleaning product was subtly dispersed in train compartments. Compared to passengers in unscented compartments, passengers littered less as measured by the weight and number of items left behind in compartments containing cleaner scent. Apart from extending research on the influence of scent on behavior in a natural environment, the findings suggest that the cognitive route from scents to behavior provides a tool for behavior change in everyday life.
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Jesse Chandler, David Reinhard & Norbert Schwarz
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Participants evaluated a book as more important when it weighed heavily in their hands (due to a concealed weight), but only when they had substantive knowledge about the book. Those who had read a synopsis (Study 1), had read the book (Study 2) and knew details about its plot (Study 3) were influenced by its weight, whereas those unfamiliar with the book were not. This contradicts the widely shared assumption that metaphorically related perceptual inputs serve as heuristic cues that people primarily use in the absence of more diagnostic information. Instead, perceptual inputs may increase the accessibility of metaphorically congruent knowledge or may suggest an initial hypothesis that is only endorsed when supporting information is accessible.
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Effects of Symptom Presentation Order on Perceived Disease Risk
Virginia Kwan et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
People are quick to perceive meaningful patterns in the co-occurrence of events. We report two studies exploring the effects of streaks in symptom checklists on perceived personal disease risk. In the context of these studies, a streak is a sequence of consecutive items on a list that share the characteristic of being either general or specific. We identify a psychological mechanism underlying the effect of streaks in a list of symptoms and show that the effect of streaks on perceived risk varies with the length of the symptom list. Our findings reveal a tendency to infer meaning from streaks in medical and health decision making. Participants perceived a higher personal risk of having an illness when presented with a checklist in which common symptoms were grouped together than when presented with a checklist in which these same symptoms were separated by rare symptoms. This research demonstrates that something as arbitrary as the order in which symptoms are presented in a checklist can affect perceived risk of disease.
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The social impact of pathogen threat: How disease salience influences conformity
Bao-Pei Wu & Lei Chang,
Personality and Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Our human ancestors learned to use morphological deviations from the normal population to identify conspecific pathogen carriers and developed group normative practices in fighting local diseases. Modern conformity is still driven in part by disease avoidance. In this study, we tested the association between pathogen threat and conformity in three studies. A survey of 164 college students revealed that perceived vulnerability to disease uniquely predicted conformity tendencies. Results from the next two experiments showed that, in comparison to the control groups, participants primed by pathogen threat conformed more to majority views when evaluating abstract art drawings and rated themselves as more conforming on a questionnaire. There appears to be an evolved pathogen-avoidance mechanism that includes not only out-group avoidance strategies as have been found by other researchers, but also in-group approach strategies such as conformity.
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Debunking Vaccination Myths: Strong Risk Negations Can Increase Perceived Vaccination Risks
Cornelia Betsch & Katharina Sachse
Health Psychology, forthcoming
Objective: Information about risks is often contradictory, especially in the health domain. A vast amount of bizarre information on vaccine-adverse events (VAE) can be found on the Internet; most are posted by antivaccination activists. Several actors in the health sector struggle against these statements by negating claimed risks with scientific explanations. The goal of the present work is to find optimal ways of negating risk to decrease risk perceptions.
Methods: In two online experiments, we varied the extremity of risk negations and their source. Perception of the probability of VAE, their expected severity (both variables serve as indicators of perceived risk), and vaccination intentions.
Results: Paradoxically, messages strongly indicating that there is "no risk" led to a higher perceived vaccination risk than weak negations. This finding extends previous work on the negativity bias, which has shown that information stating the presence of risk decreases risk perceptions, while information negating the existence of risk increases such perceptions. Several moderators were also tested; however, the effect occurred independently of the number of negations, recipient involvement, and attitude. Solely the credibility of the information source interacted with the extremity of risk negation: For credible sources (governmental institutions), strong and weak risk negations lead to similar perceived risk, while for less credible sources (pharmaceutical industries) weak negations lead to less perceived risk than strong negations.
Conclusions: Optimal risk negation may profit from moderate rather than extreme formulations as a source's trustworthiness can vary.
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Raymond Pingree, Megan Hill & Douglas McLeod
Communication Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
An online experiment tested the influence of "he said/she said" coverage versus active adjudication of factual disputes, as well as strategy versus policy framing in postdebate news coverage. Adjudication in policy-framed stories increased epistemic political efficacy (EPE), a measure of confidence in one's own ability to determine the truth in politics. However, adjudicated policy stories also elicited greater cynicism than passive policy framing. This suggests a caveat for the spiral of cynicism, calling into question its assumption that all policy framing behaves similarly in reducing cynicism. Results also provide several forms of evidence that effects of adjudication on EPE differ from spiral of cynicism effects while further validating the EPE construct as distinct from the reverse of political cynicism. Adjudication also positively affected evaluations of the coverage as interesting and informative.
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Keith Marzilli Ericson & Andreas Fuster
Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 2011, Pages 1879-1907
Abstract:
While evidence suggests that people evaluate outcomes with respect to reference points, little is known about what determines them. We conduct two experiments that show that reference points are determined, at least in part, by expectations. In an exchange experiment, we endow subjects with an item and randomize the probability they will be allowed to trade. Subjects that are less likely to be able to trade are more likely to choose to keep their item. In a valuation experiment, we randomly assign subjects a high or low probability of obtaining an item and elicit their willingness-to-accept for it. The high probability treatment increases valuation of the item by 20-30%.
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Social comparison and risky choices
Jona Linde & Joep Sonnemans
Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, February 2012, Pages 45-72
Abstract:
Theories (and experiments) on decision making under risk typically ignore (and exclude) a social context. We explore whether this omission is detrimental. To do so we experimentally investigate the simplest possible situation with both social comparison and risk: participants choose between two lotteries while a referent faces a fixed payoff. Participants are more risk averse when they can earn at most as much as their referent (loss situation) than when they are ensured they will earn at least as much as their referent (gain situation). Prospect theory with a social reference point would predict the exact opposite behavior. These results show that straightforward extensions of existing theories to allow for social comparison do not provide accurate predictions.
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Thorsten Pachur & Benjamin Scheibehenne
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, forthcoming
Abstract:
People often attach a higher value to an object when they own it (i.e., as seller) compared with when they do not own it (i.e., as buyer) - a phenomenon known as the endowment effect. According to recent cognitive process accounts of the endowment effect, the effect is due to differences between sellers and buyers in information search. Whereas previous investigations have focused on search order and internal search processes (i.e., in memory), we used a sampling paradigm to examine differences in search termination in external search. We asked participants to indicate selling and buying prices for monetary lotteries in a within-subject design. In an experience condition, participants had to learn about the possible outcomes and probabilities of the lotteries by experiential sampling. As hypothesized, sellers tended to terminate search after sampling high outcomes, whereas buyers tended to terminate search after sampling low outcomes. These differences in stopping behavior translated into samples of the lotteries that were differentially distorted for sellers and buyers; the amount of the distortion was predictive of the resulting size of the endowment effect. In addition, for sellers search was more extended when high outcomes were rare compared with when low outcomes were rare. Our results add to the increasing evidence that the endowment effect is due, in part, to differences in predecisional information search.
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Blind in one eye: How psychological ownership of ideas affects the types of suggestions people adopt
Markus Baer & Graham Brown
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, May 2012, Pages 60-71
Abstract:
Two experimental studies demonstrated that feeling as though an object, such as an idea, is "ours" (i.e., experiencing feelings of psychological ownership) propels people to selectively adopt others' suggestions for change. Whereas feelings of ownership caused individuals to embrace the adoption of suggestions that expanded upon their possessions (additive change), it simultaneously made them shun the adoption of suggestions that shrank them (subtractive change) (Studies 1 and 2). Furthermore, results indicated that both a sense of personal loss and negative affect sequentially mediated this joint effect of psychological ownership and change type on the adoption of others' suggestions for change (Study 2). Our findings suggest that the nature of change and how it impacts high ownership people's sense of loss and negative affect is an important determinant of whether feelings of ownership will cause individuals to remain open to or resist others' suggestions for change.
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A Selective Emotional Decision-Making Bias Elicited by Facial Expressions
Nicholas Furl, Shannon Gallagher & Bruno Averbeck
PLoS ONE, March 2012
Abstract:
Emotional and social information can sway otherwise rational decisions. For example, when participants decide between two faces that are probabilistically rewarded, they make biased choices that favor smiling relative to angry faces. This bias may arise because facial expressions evoke positive and negative emotional responses, which in turn may motivate social approach and avoidance. We tested a wide range of pictures that evoke emotions or convey social information, including animals, words, foods, a variety of scenes, and faces differing in trustworthiness or attractiveness, but we found only facial expressions biased decisions. Our results extend brain imaging and pharmacological findings, which suggest that a brain mechanism supporting social interaction may be involved. Facial expressions appear to exert special influence over this social interaction mechanism, one capable of biasing otherwise rational choices. These results illustrate that only specific types of emotional experiences can best sway our choices.
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Positive emotional context eliminates the framing effect in decision-making
Mathieu Cassotti et al.
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Dual-process theories have suggested that emotion plays a key role in the framing effect in decision-making. However, little is known about the potential impact of a specific positive or negative emotional context on this bias. We investigated this question with adult participants using an emotional priming paradigm. First, participants were presented with positive or negative affective pictures (i.e., pleasant vs. unpleasant photographs). Afterward, participants had to perform a financial decision-making task that was unrelated to the pictures previously presented. The results revealed that the presentation framed in terms of gain or loss no longer affected subjects' decision-making following specific exposure to emotionally pleasant pictures. Interestingly, a positive emotional context did not globally influence risk-taking behavior but specifically decreased the risk propensity in the loss frame. This finding confirmed that a positive emotional context can reduce loss aversion, and it strongly reinforced the dual-process view that the framing effect stems from an affective heuristic belonging to intuitive System 1.
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Decisions beyond boundaries: When more information is processed faster than less
Andreas Glöckner & Tilmann Betsch
Acta Psychologica, March 2012, Pages 532-542
Abstract:
Bounded rationality models usually converge in claiming that decision time and the amount of computational steps needed to come to a decision are positively correlated. The empirical evidence for this claim is, however, equivocal. We conducted a study that tests this claim by adding and omitting information. We demonstrate that even an increase in information amount can yield a decrease in decision time if the added information increases coherence in the information set. Rather than being influenced by amount of information, decision time systematically increased with decreasing coherence. The results are discussed with reference to a parallel constraint satisfaction approach to decision making, which assumes that information integration is operated in an automatic, holistic manner.
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Relative visual saliency differences induce sizable bias in consumer choice
Milica Milosavljevic et al.
Journal of Consumer Psychology, January 2012, Pages 67-74
Abstract:
Consumers often need to make very rapid choices among multiple brands (e.g., at a supermarket shelf) that differ both in their reward value (e.g., taste) and in their visual properties (e.g., color and brightness of the packaging). Since the visual properties of stimuli are known to influence visual attention, and attention is known to influence choices, this gives rise to a potential visual saliency bias in choices. We utilize experimental design from visual neuroscience in three real food choice experiments to measure the size of the visual saliency bias and how it changes with decision speed and cognitive load. Our results show that at rapid decision speeds visual saliency influences choices more than preferences do, that the bias increases with cognitive load, and that it is particularly strong when individuals do not have strong preferences among the options.
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Frank Durgin et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, forthcoming
Abstract:
Experiments take place in a physical environment but also a social environment. Generalizability from experimental manipulations to more typical contexts may be limited by violations of ecological validity with respect to either the physical or the social environment. A replication and extension of a recent study (a blood glucose manipulation) was conducted to investigate the effects of experimental demand (a social artifact) on participant behaviors judging the geographical slant of a large-scale outdoor hill. Three different assessments of experimental demand indicate that even when the physical environment is naturalistic, and the goal of the main experimental manipulation was primarily concealed, artificial aspects of the social environment (such as an explicit requirement to wear a heavy backpack while estimating the slant of a hill) may still be primarily responsible for altered judgments of hill orientation.
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The cognitive ripple of social norms communications
Jessica Nolan
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, September 2011, Pages 689-702
Abstract:
Social norms marketing has become a widely used technique for promoting pro-social behaviors, however, little is known about the cognitive changes produced by these interventions. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the extent and durability of changes in normative beliefs following a one-shot social norms communication. Participants were surveyed immediately following the intervention, one week later, and one month later. Results showed that (1) normative beliefs spilled over to behaviors and referents not specified in the original message; (2) communication and self-knowledge both contributed to participants' normative belief estimates; and (3) the change in normative beliefs over the one-month period was consistent with Miller and Prentice's (1996) theory of normative belief construction. Possible explanations for the spillover effect are discussed.