Behold
Other People's Money: Money's Perceived Purchasing Power Is Smaller for Others Than for the Self
Evan Polman, Daniel Effron & Meredith Thomas
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Nine studies find that people believe their money has greater purchasing power than the same quantity of others' money. Using a variety of products from socks to clocks to chocolates, we found that participants thought the same amount of money could buy more when it belonged to themselves versus others - a pattern that extended to undesirable products. Participants also believed their money - in the form of donations, taxes, fines, and fees - would help charities and governments more than others' money. We tested six mechanisms based on psychological distance, the endowment effect, wishful thinking, better-than-average biases, pain of payment, and beliefs about product preferences. Only a psychological distance mechanism received support. Specifically, we found that the perceived purchasing power of other people's money decreased logarithmically as others' psychological distance from the self increased, consistent with psychological distance's subadditive property. Further supporting a psychological distance mechanism, we found that framing one's own money as distant (versus near) reduced the self-other difference in perceived purchasing power. Our results suggest that beliefs about the value of money depend on who owns it, and we discuss implications for marketing, management, psychology, and economics.
Pupil to pupil: The effect of a partner's pupil size on (dis)honest behavior
Jolien van Breen, Carsten De Dreu & Mariska Kret
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, January 2018, Pages 231-245
Abstract:
Being observed by others fosters honest behavior. In this study, we examine a very subtle eye signal that may affect participants' tendency to behave honestly: observed pupil size. For this, we use an experimental task that is known to evoke dishonest behavior. Specifically, participants made private predictions for a coin toss and earned a bonus by reporting correct predictions. Before reporting the (in)correctness of their predictions, participants viewed videos of partners with dilating or constricting pupils. As dilating pupils are generally perceived positively, we expected that dishonesty would be reduced when participants look into the eyes of a partner with dilating pupils, especially when their own pupil size mimics the observed pupil size. In line with this prediction, Experiments 1 and 2 showed that, when earning a bonus meant harming the interaction partner, dishonesty occurred less frequently when the partner's pupils dilated rather than constricted. That is, when the interests of the self and the other conflict, participants use the pupil of the partner as a social cue to inform their behavior. However, pupil mimicry was not observed. In Experiment 3, we examined pupil mimicry and dishonesty in a context where there was no temptation to hurt the partner. Here, pupil mimicry between partners was observed, but there were no effects of the partner's pupil on dishonesty. Thus, when dishonesty harms the interaction partner, participants use pupillary cues from their partner to inform their behavior. Pupil mimicry, however, is bound to non-competitive contexts only.
Creepiness Creeps In: Uncanny Valley Feelings Are Acquired in Childhood
Kimberly Brink, Kurt Gray & Henry Wellman
Child Development, forthcoming
Abstract:
The uncanny valley posits that very human-like robots are unsettling, a phenomenon amply demonstrated in adults but unexplored in children. Two hundred forty 3- to 18-year-olds viewed one of two robots (machine-like or very human-like) and rated their feelings toward (e.g., "Does the robot make you feel weird or happy?") and perceptions of the robot's capacities (e.g., "Does the robot think for itself?"). Like adults, children older than 9 judged the human-like robot as creepier than the machine-like robot - but younger children did not. Children's perceptions of robots' mental capacities predicted uncanny feelings: children judge robots to be creepy depending on whether they have human-like minds. The uncanny valley is therefore acquired over development and relates to changing conceptions about robot minds.
An overture to overeating: The cross-modal effects of acoustic pitch on food preferences and serving behavior
Michael Lowe, Christine Ringler & Kelly Haws
Appetite, April 2018, Pages 128-134
Abstract:
Billions of dollars are spent annually with the aim of enticing consumers to purchase food. Yet despite the prevalence of such advertising, little is known about how the actual sensation of this advertising media affects consumer behavior, including consequential choices regarding food. This paper explores the effect of acoustic pitch in food advertising, demonstrating in two studies, including a field study in a live retail environment, how the perception of pitch in advertising can impact food desirability and decisions regarding serving size. In study 1, a field study, pitch affects actual serving sizes and purchase behavior in a live, self-serve retail setting, with low pitch leading to larger serving sizes. Study 2 demonstrates how low pitch increases desire for a food product among hungry consumers, and that this effect is mediated by perceptions of size and how filling consumers believe the product will be. We discuss these results in the context of cross-modal correspondence and mental imagery.
Infectious Disease and Imperfections of Self-Image
Joshua Ackerman, Joshua Tybur & Chad Mortensen
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Infectious disease is an ever-present threat in daily life. Recent literature indicates that people manage this threat with a suite of antipathogenic psychological and behavioral defense mechanisms, which motivate the avoidance of people and objects bearing cues to pathogen risk. Here, we demonstrate that self-image is also impacted by these mechanisms. In seven studies, pathogen cues led individuals chronically averse to germs to express greater concern about their own physical appearance. Correspondingly, these people exhibited behavioral intentions and decisions intended to conceal or improve their appearance, such as purchasing facial products, taking pharmaceuticals, and undergoing cosmetic surgery. This work opens a new area of investigation for infectious-disease psychology research and highlights the central role played by physical appearance in pathogen-related cognition.
Mental Simulation of Visceral States Affects Preferences and Behavior
Janina Steinmetz, Brittany Tausen & Jane Risen
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Preferences and behavior are heavily influenced by one's current visceral experience, yet people often fail to anticipate such effects. Although research suggests that this gap is difficult to overcome - to act as if in another visceral state - research on mental simulation has demonstrated that simulations can substitute for experiences, albeit to a weaker extent. We examine whether mentally simulating visceral states can impact preferences and behavior. We show that simulating a specific visceral state (e.g., being cold or hungry) shifts people's preferences for relevant activities (Studies 1a-2) and choices of food portion sizes (Study 3). Like actual visceral experiences, mental simulation only affects people's current preferences but not their general preferences (Study 4). Finally, people project simulated states onto similar others, as is the case for actual visceral experiences (Study 5). Thus, mental simulation may help people anticipate their own and others' future preferences, thereby improving their decision making.
Human Information Processing Shapes Language Change
Maryia Fedzechkina, Becky Chu & Florian Jaeger
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Human languages exhibit both striking diversity and abstract commonalities. Whether these commonalities are shaped by potentially universal principles of human information processing has been of central interest in the language and psychological sciences. Research has identified one such abstract property in the domain of word order: Although sentence word-order preferences vary across languages, the superficially different orders result in short grammatical dependencies between words. Because dependencies are easier to process when they are short rather than long, these findings raise the possibility that languages are shaped by biases of human information processing. In the current study, we directly tested the hypothesized causal link. We found that learners exposed to novel miniature artificial languages that had unnecessarily long dependencies did not follow the surface preference of their native language but rather systematically restructured the input to reduce dependency lengths. These results provide direct evidence for a causal link between processing preferences in individual speakers and patterns in linguistic diversity.
Genetic Influence on Eye Movements to Complex Scenes at Short Timescales
Daniel Kennedy et al.
Current Biology, 20 November 2017, Pages 3554-3560
Abstract:
Where one looks within their environment constrains one's visual experiences, directly affects cognitive, emotional, and social processing, influences learning opportunities, and ultimately shapes one's developmental path. While there is a high degree of similarity across individuals with regard to which features of a scene are fixated, large individual differences are also present, especially in disorders of development, and clarifying the origins of these differences is essential to understand the processes by which individuals develop within the complex environments in which they exist and interact. Toward this end, a recent paper found that "social visual engagement" - namely, gaze to eyes and mouths of faces - is strongly influenced by genetic factors. However, whether genetic factors influence gaze to complex visual scenes more broadly, impacting how both social and non-social scene content are fixated, as well as general visual exploration strategies, has yet to be determined. Using a behavioral genetic approach and eye tracking data from a large sample of 11-year-old human twins (233 same-sex twin pairs; 51% monozygotic, 49% dizygotic), we demonstrate that genetic factors do indeed contribute strongly to eye movement patterns, influencing both one's general tendency for visual exploration of scene content, as well as the precise moment-to-moment spatiotemporal pattern of fixations during viewing of complex social and non-social scenes alike. This study adds to a now growing set of results that together illustrate how genetics may broadly influence the process by which individuals actively shape and create their own visual experiences.
Executive-related oculomotor control is improved following a 10-min single-bout of aerobic exercise: Evidence from the antisaccade task
Ashna Samani & Matthew Heath
Neuropsychologia, 8 January 2018, Pages 73-81
Abstract:
Previous work has shown that a single-bout of moderate-to-vigorous intensity exercise improves task-specific activity within frontoparietal networks and produces a short-term 'boost' to executive-related cognitive control - an effect in healthy young adults that is reported to be selective to exercise durations of 20 min or greater. The present study sought to determine whether such a 'boost' extends to an exercise duration as brief as 10 min. Healthy young adults performed a 10-min single-bout of moderate-to-vigorous intensity aerobic exercise (i.e., via a cycle ergometer) and pre- and post-exercise executive control was examined via the antisaccade task. Antisaccades are an executive task requiring a goal-directed eye movement (i.e., a saccade) mirror-symmetrical to a visual stimulus. The hands- and language-free nature of antisaccades coupled with the temporal precision of eye-tracking technology make it an ideal tool for identifying executive performance changes. Moreover, an extensive literature has shown that antisaccades are mediated via frontoparietal networks that are modulated following single-bout and chronic exercise training. Results showed that antisaccade reaction time (RT) reliably decreased by 27 ms from pre- to post-exercise assessments. Further, the percentage of antisaccade directional errors did not reliably vary from the pre- (13%) to post-exercise (9%) assessments - a result indicating that the RT improvement was unrelated to a speed-accuracy trade-off. A follow-up experiment involving antisaccade sessions separated by a non-exercise interval did not show a similar RT modulation. Thus, a 10-min bout of moderate-to-vigorous intensity aerobic exercise benefits executive-related oculomotor control, and is a finding we attribute to an exercise-based increase in attention/arousal and/or improved task-specific activity within the frontoparietal networks supporting antisaccades.