Decider
Valerie Reyna et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Intelligence agents make risky decisions routinely, with serious consequences for national security. Although common sense and most theories expect that experienced intelligence professionals would be less prone to irrational inconsistencies than college students, we show the opposite. Moreover, this "developmental reversal" is predicted by the growth of experience-based intuition. We compared intelligence agents to college students and similar post-college adults on 30 gain-loss framing decisions. Not only did agents exhibit larger framing biases than college students, they were more confident. Post-college adults occupied an interesting middle ground, generally as biased as college students (sometimes more so), but less biased than agents. Experimental manipulations testing explanations for these effects, derived from fuzzy-trace theory, made the college students look as biased as agents. These results show that, although framing biases are irrational (because equivalent outcomes are treated differently), they are the ironical output of cognitively advanced mechanisms of meaning-making.
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Inflated Applicants: Attribution Errors in Performance Evaluation by Professionals
Samuel Swift et al.
PLoS ONE, July 2013
Abstract:
When explaining others' behaviors, achievements, and failures, it is common for people to attribute too much influence to disposition and too little influence to structural and situational factors. We examine whether this tendency leads even experienced professionals to make systematic mistakes in their selection decisions, favoring alumni from academic institutions with high grade distributions and employees from forgiving business environments. We find that candidates benefiting from favorable situations are more likely to be admitted and promoted than their equivalently skilled peers. The results suggest that decision-makers take high nominal performance as evidence of high ability and do not discount it by the ease with which it was achieved. These results clarify our understanding of the correspondence bias using evidence from both archival studies and experiments with experienced professionals. We discuss implications for both admissions and personnel selection practices.
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Patient Inertia and the Status Quo Bias: When an Inferior Option Is Preferred
Gaurav Suri et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Medical noncompliance is a major public-health problem. One potential source of this noncompliance is patient inertia. It has been hypothesized that one cause of patient inertia might be the status quo bias - which is the tendency to select the default choice among a set of options. To test this hypothesis, we created a laboratory analogue of the decision context that frequently occurs in situations involving patient inertia, and we examined whether participants would stay with a default option even when it was clearly inferior to other available options. Specifically, in Studies 1 and 2, participants were given the option to reduce their anxiety while waiting for an electric shock. When doing nothing was the status quo option, participants frequently did not select the option that would reduce their anxiety. In Study 3, we demonstrated a simple way to overcome status quo bias in a context relevant to patient inertia.
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Consumer Behavior in "Equilibrium": How Experiencing Physical Balance Increases Compromise Choice
Jeffrey Larson & Darron Billeter
Journal of Marketing Research, August 2013, Pages 535-547
Abstract:
The authors propose that the physical sensation of balance can affect consumer judgments and decisions. A series of six experiments demonstrates that certain consumer behaviors, such as leaning back in a chair while shopping online, can activate the concept of balance and thereby affect the consumer decision-making process. Specifically, consumers experiencing a heightened sense of balance are more likely to choose compromise options. The authors propose and show evidence for the mechanism underlying these effects: that the concept of balance is metaphorically linked in the mind to the concept of parity and that activating balance increases the accessibility of the parity concept. The increased accessibility of parity changes consumer perceptions of the product offerings in a choice set, increasing the selection of compromise options because they provide parity on the described product attributes.
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One for All: Social Power Increases Self-Anchoring of Traits, Attitudes, and Emotions
Jennifer Overbeck & Vitaliya Droutman
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We argue that powerful people tend to engage in social projection. Specifically, they self-anchor: They use the self as a reference point when judging others' internal states. In Study 1, which used a reaction-time paradigm, powerful people used their own traits as a reference when assessing the traits of group members, classifying group descriptors more quickly if they had previously reported that those terms described themselves. Study 2, which used a classic false-consensus paradigm, showed that powerful people believed that their group-related attitudes were shared by group members. Study 3 showed that more-powerful people relied more on their own state affect when judging other people's ambiguous emotional expressions. These results support our argument that power fosters self-anchoring, because powerful individuals are often called on to act as the representative face of their groups, and the association between power and representation prompts the heuristic use of the self to infer group properties.
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Attitude moderation: A comparison of online chat and face-to-face conversation
Maciek Lipinski-Harten & Romin Tafarodi
Computers in Human Behavior, November 2013, Pages 2490-2493
Abstract:
Face-to-face conversation and online chat were compared on their tendency to moderate attitudes through exposure to an opposing perspective. As predicted on the basis of the greater self-focus and reduced presence of the other in text-based chat, strangers who chatted online for 20 min about a divisive social issue on which they held opposing attitudes showed less movement toward their partner's position as a result than did those who spoke face-to-face for the same length of time. The potential limitation of text-based online communication for bridging attitude divides is discussed.
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One Without the Other: Seeing Relationships in Everyday Objects
James Mourey, Daphna Oyserman & Carolyn Yoon
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
People often make multiple choices at the same time, choosing a snack and drink or a cell phone and case, only to learn that some of their choices are unavailable. Do they take the available item (or items) or something else entirely? Culture-as-situated-cognition theory predicts that this choice is determined by one's accessible cultural mind-set. An accessible collectivist (vs. individualist) mind-set should heighten sensitivity to an emergent relationship among items chosen together so that having some is not acceptable if not all can be obtained. Indeed, we found that Latinos (but not Anglos) refuse chosen items if not all can be obtained (Study 1a). Further, making a collectivist mind-set accessible reproduces this between-groups difference (Study 1b), increases people's willingness to pay to complete sets (Study 1b), and shifts choice to previously undesired items if no set-completing option is provided (Studies 2-4). Finally, we found that increased sensitivity to an emergent relationship among chosen items mediates these effects (Studies 3 and 4).
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Neural Activity Reveals Preferences without Choices
Alec Smith et al.
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate the feasibility of inferring the choices people would make (if given the opportunity) based on their neural responses to the pertinent prospects when they are not engaged in actual decision making. The ability to make such inferences is of potential value when choice data are unavailable, or limited in ways that render standard methods of estimating choice mappings problematic. We formulate prediction models relating choices to "non-choice" neural responses and use them to predict out-of-sample choices for new items and for new groups of individuals. The predictions are sufficiently accurate to establish the feasibility of our approach.
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The effect of nonprobative photographs on truthiness persists over time
Elise Fenn et al.
Acta Psychologica, September 2013, Pages 207-211
Abstract:
When making rapid judgments about the truth of a claim, related nonprobative information leads people to believe the claim - an effect called "truthiness" (Newman, Garry, Bernstein, Kantner, & Lindsay, 2012). For instance, within a matter of seconds, subjects judge the claim "The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows," to be true more often when it appears with a photograph of the Mona Lisa viewed at a distance by a person. But does truthiness persist longer than a few seconds? To determine if truthiness "sticks," we asked people to judge if each trivia claim in a series was true. Half of the claims appeared with nonprobative photos; the rest appeared alone. In a second session 48 h later, people returned and made the same judgments about the same statements, but this time, all claims appeared without photos. We found that truthiness "stuck." The magnitude of the effect of photos on subjective feelings of truth was consistent over time. These results fit with those from cognitive and educational psychology, as well as with the related idea that photos make relevant information more available and familiar - and therefore feel more true - even after a delay.
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Free Offer ≠ Cheap Product: A Selective Accessibility Account on the Valuation of Free Offers
Mauricio Palmeira & Joydeep Srivastava
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many consumer price promotions (including new product launches) offer a product for free or for a low, discounted price along with a required purchase. This research demonstrates that consumers' willingness to pay for the product after the promotion is retracted is higher when it was offered for free than when it was offered at a low, discounted price. The underlying reasoning is that the price of the product on promotion is used as a natural anchor for value estimation. However, when the product is offered for free (i.e., zero price), consumers are less likely to consider the value of the product and are influenced by anchors such as the price of the focal purchase. In contrast to some prior findings, a free offer does not devalue the product at all and, at a minimum, devalues the product less than if it were offered for a low, discounted price.
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When Conflicts Are Good: Nonconscious Goal Conflicts Reduce Confirmatory Thinking
Tali Kleiman & Ran Hassin
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this article, we argue that nonconscious goal conflicts are accompanied by a mindset that has wide-ranging implications for reasoning and thinking in content areas that are not part of the conflict itself. Specifically, we propose that nonconscious goal conflicts induce a mode of processing information that increases the likelihood of approaching an issue from opposing perspectives. This hypothesis is examined by investigating the effects of nonconscious goal conflicts on confirmatory thinking, that is, a way of thinking that narrowly focuses on confirmation rather than on broader examination of information. In 5 experiments, we show that nonconscious goal conflicts significantly reduce confirmatory hypothesis testing (Experiments 1 through 3) and anchoring (Experiments 4 and 5). We further show that these effects result from a goal conflict by rejecting explanations based on priming of semantic opposites, and priming of multiple goals that do not conflict (Experiments 2 and 3), and by examining decision times as a conflict process variable (Experiment 5). Using various probes, we show that these changes in confirmatory judgments are not accompanied by changes in conflict phenomenology. Together, these results suggest that nonconscious goal conflicts attenuate the robust confirmatory thinking strategy that characterizes human thinking in numerous domains.
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Egocentrism in Judging the Effectiveness of Treatments
Paul Windschitl et al.
Basic and Applied Social Psychology, July/August 2013, Pages 325-333
Abstract:
Four experiments examined projection and egocentrism in people's expectations about how a treatment they tried would impact others. In Experiment 1, people's expectations and recommendations for others aligned heavily with their own experience even though they directly witnessed a co-participant's contradictory experience. Experiments 2 and 3 examined potential mechanisms for the egocentrism. In Experiment 4, egocentrism persisted even when participants saw two co-participants have experiences that contradicted their own, except when the dependent measure about expectations was statistically framed. Implications for the literature on false consensus and for understanding the persistence of beliefs in ineffective treatments are discussed.
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Motivation Crowding in Real Consumption Decisions: Who Is Messing with My Groceries?
Grischa Perino, Luca Panzone & Timothy Swanson
Economic Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
We present evidence of crowding out of intrinsic motivation in real purchasing decisions from a field experiment in a large supermarket chain. We compare three instruments, a label, a subsidy, and a neutral price change, in their ability to induce consumers to switch from dirty to clean products. Interestingly, a subsidy framed as an intervention is less effective than either a label or a neutrally framed price change. We argue that this provides a new explanation for crowding behavior: consumers are resistant to having the line of demarcation between public and private decision making moved in either direction.
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Timothy Koscik & Daniel Tranel
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, August 2013, Pages 1372-1382
Abstract:
People tend to assume that outcomes are caused by dispositional factors, for example, a person's constitution or personality, even when the actual cause is due to situational factors, for example, luck or coincidence. This is known as the "correspondence bias." This tendency can lead normal, intelligent persons to make suboptimal decisions. Here, we used a neuropsychological approach to investigate the neural basis of the correspondence bias, by studying economic decision-making in patients with damage to the ventromedial pFC (vmPFC). Given the role of the vmPFC in social cognition, we predicted that vmPFC is necessary for the normal correspondence bias. In our experiment, consistent with expectations, healthy (n = 46) and brain-damaged (n = 30) comparison participants displayed the correspondence bias during economic decision-making and invested no differently when given dispositional or situational information. By contrast, vmPFC patients (n = 17) displayed a lack of correspondence bias and invested more when given dispositional than situational information. The results support the conclusion that vmPFC is critical for normal social inference and the correspondence bias. The findings help clarify the important (and sometimes disadvantageous) role of social inference in economic decision-making.
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Intuition and cooperation reconsidered
Gustav Tinghög et al.
Nature, 6 June 2013, E1-E2
Abstract:
Rand et al. reported increased cooperation in social dilemmas after forcing individuals to decide quickly. Time pressure was used to induce intuitive decisions, and they concluded that intuition promotes cooperation. We test the robustness of this finding in a series of five experiments involving about 2,500 subjects in three countries. None of the experiments confirms the Rand et al. finding, indicating that their result was an artefact of excluding the about 50% of subjects who failed to respond on time.
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Which choice is the rational one? An Investigation of Need for Cognition in the Ultimatum Game
Patrick Mussel, Anja Göritz & Johannes Hewig
Journal of Research in Personality, October 2013, Pages 588-591
Abstract:
Recent studies have identified several factors, such as negative affect or fairness concerns, that contribute to explaining the seemingly irrational behavior of receivers in the ultimatum game, namely rejecting unfair offers despite the corresponding personal loss. The opposite behavior, accepting offers, has often been attributed to rational decision-making, as predicted by rational choice theory. Based on this assumption, we investigated long reaction times as a behavioral variable and need for cognition as an individual differences variable as indicators of thoughtful and rational decision-making. To our surprise, we found both reaction times and need for cognition to predict rejection, rather than acceptance of unfair offers. Our results challenge the interpretation of acceptance vs. rejection in terms of rational vs. emotional accounts.
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How psychological framing affects economic market prices in the lab and field
Ulrich Sonnemann et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 16 July 2013, Pages 11779-11784
Abstract:
A fundamental debate in social sciences concerns how individual judgments and choices, resulting from psychological mechanisms, are manifested in collective economic behavior. Economists emphasize the capacity of markets to aggregate information distributed among traders into rational equilibrium prices. However, psychologists have identified pervasive and systematic biases in individual judgment that they generally assume will affect collective behavior. In particular, recent studies have found that judged likelihoods of possible events vary systematically with the way the entire event space is partitioned, with probabilities of each of N partitioned events biased toward 1/N. Thus, combining events into a common partition lowers perceived probability, and unpacking events into separate partitions increases their perceived probability. We look for evidence of such bias in various prediction markets, in which prices can be interpreted as probabilities of upcoming events. In two highly controlled experimental studies, we find clear evidence of partition dependence in a 2-h laboratory experiment and a field experiment on National Basketball Association (NBA) and Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA World Cup) sports events spanning several weeks. We also find evidence consistent with partition dependence in nonexperimental field data from prediction markets for economic derivatives (guessing the values of important macroeconomic statistics) and horse races. Results in any one of the studies might be explained by a specialized alternative theory, but no alternative theories can explain the results of all four studies. We conclude that psychological biases in individual judgment can affect market prices, and understanding those effects requires combining a variety of methods from psychology and economics.
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Eating Dogfood: Examining the Relative Roles of Reason and Emotion
William Schulze, Annemie Maertens & Brian Wansink
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, August 2013, Pages 202-213
Abstract:
Psychologists have described the working of the human brain as a combination of two systems - a dual process model. One system is intuitive and automatic (System 1) and the other is reflective and rational (System 2). To determine what insights this model has for stigma - such as fears of food contamination - we elicited the willingness-to-pay for two foods: a sandwich made of dog food and fat-free ice cream. We find critical evidence of a dual process decision making process in which the absence of cognitive load allows the participants to deliberate over the health benefits of either food. In addition, in the case of the sandwich, there is an emotional component in which the positive emotion of surprise can partially offset the negative emotion of disgust. This has notable implications for addressing food safety fears related to contamination as well as the food neophobia related to unfamiliar foods, processing, or preparation.
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JoAndrea Hoegg et al.
Journal of Consumer Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Vanity sizing has become a popular retail trend and recent work shows it has a favorable impact on consumers. However, as the current research demonstrates, significant variations in sizing standards across retailers means that consumers are as likely to encounter larger sizes as they are smaller, "vanity" sizes when shopping, highlighting the importance of understanding how consumers react to this potential threat in the marketplace. Across five studies we demonstrate that larger sizes result in negative evaluations of clothing and show that these effects are driven by consumers' appearance self-esteem. Importantly, we also find that instead of unilaterally lowering purchase intent as one might assume, larger sizes can actually increase spending, as consumers engage in compensatory consumption to help repair their damaged self-esteem. In so doing, this research reveals a dynamic and complex relationship between consumers and sizing labels, where shopping can serve to build, strengthen, threaten, and/or repair appearance self-esteem.
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The Endowment Effect as Self-Enhancement in Response to Threat
Promothesh Chatterjee, Caglar Irmak & Randall Rose
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
The discrepancy between willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness to accept (WTA) for a product, referred to as the endowment effect, has been investigated and replicated across various domains because of its implications for rational decision making. The authors assume that implicit processes operate in the endowment effect and propose an explanation that is derived from the two main accounts of the effect, ownership and loss aversion. Based on the implicit egotism and self-affirmation literatures, the model argues that selling is perceived as an implicit self-threat and that sellers, as a part of their automatic defense mechanism, respond to this self-threat by enhancing the value of the self-associated object. Five studies test these conjectures and provide support for the proposed model.
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Michael Nicholls, Nicole Thomas & Tobias Loetscher
Human Factors, August 2013, Pages 725-731
Background: Functional differences between the cerebral hemispheres affect the choices people make. For example, when asked to imagine going to a cinema, people preferentially select seats to the right. We investigated whether this experimental research generalizes to online booking sites for aircraft and theaters.
Method: Occupancy rates for seats taken on the left and right sides were assessed for 100 airline flights with 12,762 available seats and 37 theater performances with 34,456 seats. On the basis of previous research, a rightward bias was predicted for aircraft and theaters.
Results: For aircraft, contrary to expectation, occupancy rate was higher for left-compared with right-side seats. For theaters, a rightward bias was observed when the theater was less than half full. The bias was not affected by the orientation of the map.
Conclusion: For aircraft, the leftward preference could be attributable to a rightward turning bias or a "feeling" that the port seats are closer to the exit, even though they are not. For theaters, the data demonstrate that the rightward preference observed in earlier studies exists only when the theater is relatively empty.
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True Context-dependent Preferences? The Causes of Market-dependent Valuations
Nina Mazar, Botond Koszegi & Dan Ariely
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, forthcoming
Abstract:
A central assumption of neoclassical economics is that reservation prices for familiar products express people's true preferences for these products; that is, they represent the total benefit that a good confers to the consumers and are, thus, independent of actual prices in the market. Nevertheless, a vast amount of research has shown that valuations can be sensitive to other salient prices, particularly when individuals are explicitly anchored on them. In this paper, the authors extend previous research on single-price anchoring and study the sensitivity of valuations to the distribution of prices found for a product in the market. In addition, they examine its possible causes. They find that market-dependent valuations cannot be fully explained by rational inferences consumers draw about a product's value and are unlikely to be fully explained by true market-dependent preferences. Rather, the market dependence of valuations likely reflects consumers' focus on something other than the total benefit that the product confers to them. Furthermore, this paper shows that market-dependent valuations persist when - as in many real-life settings - individuals make repeated purchase decisions over time and infer the distribution of the product's prices from their market experience. Finally, the authors consider the implications of their findings for marketers and consumers.
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Decision Costs and Price Sensitivity: Field Experimental Evidence from India
Dean Spears
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Poor people often exhibit puzzlingly high sensitivity to low prices of important consumer health goods. This paper proposes decision costs as one explanation: whether a person buys at a price depends on whether she carefully considers the offer, which itself depends on price. A simple model predicts that deliberation costs (1) increase sensitivity to low prices; (2) can prevent cost-sharing from targeting products to buyers with high value; and (3) can have larger effects on poorer people. The principal contribution of this paper is a field experiment that sold hand-washing soap in rural India. Participants were randomly assigned to be offered soap for either a low or very low price, which was experimentally crossed with assignment to a control group or to a treatment that required deliberation. Results matched predictions of the model: the treatment decreased price sensitivity relative to the control group, and increased targeting of product take-up by need.
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Adam Biggs et al.
Visual Cognition, May 2013, Pages 330-352
Abstract:
Some visual searches depend upon accuracy (e.g., radiology, airport security screening), and it is important for both theoretical and applied reasons to understand what factors best predict performance. The current study administered a visual search task to both professional (Transportation Security Administration Officers) and nonprofessional (members of Duke University) searchers to examine group differences in which factors predict accuracy. Search speed - time taken to terminate search - was the primary predictor for nonprofessional searchers (accounting for 59% of their accuracy variability) and for the least experienced professional searchers (37% of variability). In contrast, consistency - how similarly (in terms of search speed) an individual spent searching from trial to trial - was the primary predictor for the most experienced professional visual searchers (39% of variability). These results inform cognitive theory by illuminating factors that differentially affect search performance between participants, and real-world issues by identifying search behaviours (consistency in particular) important to experienced professional searchers.