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Are markets more accurate than polls? The surprising informational value of “just asking”
Jason Dana et al.
Judgment and Decision Making, March 2019, Pages 135–147
Abstract:
Psychologists typically measure beliefs and preferences using self-reports, whereas economists are much more likely to infer them from behavior. Prediction markets appear to be a victory for the economic approach, having yielded more accurate probability estimates than opinion polls or experts for a wide variety of events, all without ever asking for self-reported beliefs. We conduct the most direct comparison to date of prediction markets to simple self-reports using a within-subject design. Our participants traded on the likelihood of geopolitical events. Each time they placed a trade, they first had to report their belief that the event would occur on a 0–100 scale. When previously validated aggregation algorithms were applied to self-reported beliefs, they were at least as accurate as prediction-market prices in predicting a wide range of geopolitical events. Furthermore, the combination of approaches was significantly more accurate than prediction-market prices alone, indicating that self-reports contained information that the market did not efficiently aggregate. Combining measurement techniques across behavioral and social sciences may have greater benefits than previously thought.
Happy Believers and Sad Skeptics? Affective Influences on Gullibility
Joseph Forgas
Current Directions in Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does affect influence gullibility? After a brief consideration of the nature of gullibility, I describe a series of experiments that explored the prediction that in situations in which close attention to stimulus information is required, negative mood can reduce gullibility and positive mood can increase gullibility. The experiments examined mood effects on truth judgments, vulnerability to misleading information, the tendency to uncritically accept interpersonal messages, the detection of deception, and the tendency to see meaning in random or meaningless information. In all of these domains, positive mood promoted gullibility and negative mood reduced it. The practical and theoretical significance of these convergent findings are discussed, and the practical implications of affectively induced gullibility in real-life domains are considered.
Causal understanding is not necessary for the improvement of culturally evolving technology
Maxime Derex et al.
Nature Human Behaviour, May 2019, Pages 446–452
Abstract:
Bows and arrows, houses and kayaks are just a few examples of the highly optimized tools that humans have produced and used to colonize new environments. Because there is much evidence that humans’ cognitive abilities are unparalleled, many believe that such technologies resulted from our superior causal reasoning abilities. However, others have stressed that the high dimensionality of human technologies makes them very difficult to understand causally. Instead, they argue that optimized technologies emerge through the retention of small improvements across generations without requiring understanding of how these technologies work. Here we show that a physical artefact becomes progressively optimized across generations of social learners in the absence of explicit causal understanding. Moreover, we find that the transmission of causal models across generations has no noticeable effect on the pace of cultural evolution. The reason is that participants do not spontaneously create multidimensional causal theories but, instead, mainly produce simplistic models related to a salient dimension. Finally, we show that the transmission of these inaccurate theories constrains learners’ exploration and has downstream effects on their understanding. These results indicate that complex technologies need not result from enhanced causal reasoning but, instead, can emerge from the accumulation of improvements made across generations.
Scientific discovery in a model-centric framework: Reproducibility, innovation, and epistemic diversity
Berna Devezer et al.
PLoS ONE, May 2019
Abstract:
Consistent confirmations obtained independently of each other lend credibility to a scientific result. We refer to results satisfying this consistency as reproducible and assume that reproducibility is a desirable property of scientific discovery. Yet seemingly science also progresses despite irreproducible results, indicating that the relationship between reproducibility and other desirable properties of scientific discovery is not well understood. These properties include early discovery of truth, persistence on truth once it is discovered, and time spent on truth in a long-term scientific inquiry. We build a mathematical model of scientific discovery that presents a viable framework to study its desirable properties including reproducibility. In this framework, we assume that scientists adopt a model-centric approach to discover the true model generating data in a stochastic process of scientific discovery. We analyze the properties of this process using Markov chain theory, Monte Carlo methods, and agent-based modeling. We show that the scientific process may not converge to truth even if scientific results are reproducible and that irreproducible results do not necessarily imply untrue results. The proportion of different research strategies represented in the scientific population, scientists’ choice of methodology, the complexity of truth, and the strength of signal contribute to this counter-intuitive finding. Important insights include that innovative research speeds up the discovery of scientific truth by facilitating the exploration of model space and epistemic diversity optimizes across desirable properties of scientific discovery.
How incentive framing can harness the power of social norms
Alicea Lieberman, Kristen Duke & On Amir
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, March 2019, Pages 118-131
Abstract:
Incentives are an increasingly common tool used by organizations, managers, and policymakers to change behavior. We propose that more than just motivating behavior for monetary reasons, incentives also have an important, undiscovered consequence: they leak information about social norms. Four experiments reveal that framing an incentive as a surcharge, as compared to a discount, signals that the incentivized behavior is both more socially approved and more common. These implied norms lead individuals to experience emotions consistent with a desire to conform, motivating them to perform the incentivized behavior. Moreover, by shifting social norms, we find that incentives can influence behavior not only in the moment, but also downstream when there is no longer an active incentive. Further, merely being exposed to a surcharge (vs. discount) incentive — even without being financially affected by it — can increase performance of the behavior. These findings offer a novel perspective on the consequences of different incentive frames, while contributing to both organizational policy and practice by expanding the social norms messaging toolkit.
Conflating Temporal Advancement and Epistemic Advancement: The Progression Bias in Judgment and Decision Making
Haotian Zhou, Xilin Li & Jessica Sim
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
When seeking out the truth about a certain aspect of the world, people frequently conduct several inquiries successively over a time span. Later inquiries usually improve upon earlier ones; thus, it is typically rational to expect the finding of a later inquiry to be closer to the truth than that of an earlier one. However, when no meaningful differences exist between earlier and later inquiries, later findings should not be considered epistemically superior. However, in these cases, people continue to regard findings from later inquiries as closer to the truth than earlier ones. In 10 experiments, when later inquiries conflicted with — but did not epistemically improve upon — earlier ones, participants’ global judgments about the truth aligned more with later findings than earlier ones, an effect referred to as progression bias. The liability to progression bias may have severe ramifications for the well-being of the society and its members.
Caution in the time of cholera: Pathogen threats decrease risk tolerance
Marjorie Prokosch et al.
Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although frequently characterized as undesirable, risk-taking is an integral part of human social life. Research into the factors that influence risk-taking therefore represents an important area of study in the evolutionary sciences. The current research draws from research on humans’ pathogen avoidance psychology, life history theory, and sickness behavior to examine the role that pathogen threat plays in modulating risk tolerance. Across 4 studies, we measured or manipulated pathogen threat cues and examined their effect on risk tolerance. Results revealed a consistent pattern whereby people preferred less risk when the threat of illness was high. This pattern was observed using both self-report measures and behavioral assays but was eliminated when the threat was experimentally minimized. The current research provides evidence of a conceptual link between pathogen threats and global tolerance for risk, demonstrating a tendency to play it safe when the threat of illness is high.
Revisiting the house money effect in the field: Evidence from casino jackpots
Raphael Flepp & Maximilian Rüdisser
Economics Letters, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper tests the house money effect, i.e., that prior gains increase subsequent risk-taking behavior, in the field. We use individual-level slot machine gambling records of 5,169 players from a real casino and employ jackpot hits as exogenous house money shocks. Our results show that players wager significantly less money after hitting a jackpot, which implies that players reduce their risk-taking behavior and thus act more cautiously after experiencing gains. We fail to replicate the house money effect in the field and find evidence for a reverse house money effect. Furthermore, while risk-taking behavior is reduced after hitting a jackpot, the jackpot size has no additional effect.
Matters Order: The Role of Information Order on Implicit Impression Formation
Eva Fourakis & Jeremy Cone
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
A classic finding in the person perception literature is that information order is an important factor in the impressions we form of others. But how does order influence the formation of implicit evaluations? In three preregistered experiments including nearly 900 participants, we find evidence for a strong primacy effect even at the implicit level. This occurred on an affect misattribution procedure (Study 1), an evaluative priming task (Study 2), and an implicit association test (Study 3). These findings suggest that, just as explicit impressions are susceptible to primacy effects, so too are implicit ones. Implications for theories of evaluative conditioning and attitudes are discussed.