Deciding
When Does Making Detailed Predictions Make Predictions Worse?
Theresa Kelly & Joseph Simmons
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this paper, we investigate whether making detailed predictions about an event worsens other predictions of the event. Across 19 experiments, 10,896 participants, and 407,045 predictions about 724 professional sports games, we find that people who made detailed predictions about sporting events (e.g., how many hits each baseball team would get) made worse predictions about more general outcomes (e.g., which team would win). We rule out that this effect is caused by inattention or fatigue, thinking too hard, or a differential reliance on holistic information about the teams. Instead, we find that thinking about game-relevant details before predicting winning teams causes people to give less weight to predictive information, presumably because predicting details makes useless or redundant information more accessible and thus more likely to be incorporated into forecasts. Furthermore, we show that this differential use of information can be used to predict what kinds of events will and will not be susceptible to the negative effect of making detailed predictions.
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Jon Lauring et al.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, forthcoming
Abstract:
We assess the impact of social and monetary contextual information on liking ratings of art. A group of art-naïve university students (N = 187) was asked to rate a set of 90 paintings for liking, using a 7-point Likert-type scale. Before painting presentation, participants were primed either with information that a certain social group (fellow students, art museum curators/art experts, or low-education/income youth) had rated the painting positively or negatively (social prime, Study 1) or with a fictitious sales price of the artwork (monetary prime, Study 2). These conditions were compared against a control condition in which paintings were viewed without priming information. Results showed a significant effect of both priming types. Paintings with high monetary primes or with high ratings by peers and art experts led to higher participant liking ratings. In contrast, paintings with a low rating by the low-education/income social group led to higher liking ratings by participants. Social priming was also modulated by interest in art and by the level of identification with the social groups. These results provide empirical support for the social “distinction” behavior theory, according to which individuals use their evaluation and engagement with art in order to show allegiance to, or distance themselves from, desirable/undesirable social others, and mark an important area for future research into the analysis of consumer decisions or art preference.
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Magicians fix your mind: How unlikely solutions block obvious ones
Cyril Thomas & André Didierjean
Cognition, September 2016, Pages 169–173
Abstract:
In everyday life, several factors limit the human capacity to think differently. The present study shows that implanting an unlikely and unfamiliar idea in the mind can prevent participants from finding a more obvious one. To demonstrate this, we used a technique often adopted by magicians to misrepresent the method of a trick: the false solution. Our results reveal that a single exposure to an unlikely false solution (the magician can influence the spectator’s choice with his gesture) before the presentation of a card trick can prevent participants from finding the real (more obvious) secret of a trick, even if they are invited to search for an alternative solution.
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Metacognitive Inferences From Other People’s Memory Performance
Robert Smith & Norbert Schwarz
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, forthcoming
Abstract:
Three studies show that people draw metacognitive inferences about events from how well others remember the event. Given that memory fades over time, detailed accounts of distant events suggest that the event must have been particularly memorable, for example, because it was extreme. Accordingly, participants inferred that a physical assault (Study 1) or a poor restaurant experience (Studies 2–3) were more extreme when they were well remembered one year rather than one week later. These inferences influence behavioral intentions. For example, participants recommended a more severe punishment for a well-remembered distant rather than recent assault (Study 1). These metacognitive inferences are eliminated when people attribute the reporter’s good memory to an irrelevant cause (e.g., photographic memory), thus undermining the informational value of memory performance (Study 3). These studies illuminate how people use lay theories of memory to learn from others’ memory performance about characteristics of the world.
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Emily Hopkins, Deena Skolnick Weisberg & Jordan Taylor
Cognition, October 2016, Pages 67–76
Abstract:
Previous work has found that people feel significantly more satisfied with explanations of psychological phenomena when those explanations contain neuroscience information—even when this information is entirely irrelevant to the logic of the explanations. This seductive allure effect was first demonstrated by Weisberg, Keil, Goodstein, Rawson, and Gray (2008), and has since been replicated several times (Fernandez-Duque, Evans, Christian, & Hodges, 2015; Minahan & Siedlecki, 2016; Rhodes, Rodriguez, & Shah, 2014; Weisberg, Taylor, & Hopkins, 2015). However, these studies only examined psychological phenomena. The current study thus investigated the generality of this effect and found that it occurs across several scientific disciplines whenever the explanations include reductive information: reference to smaller components or more fundamental processes. These data suggest that people have a general preference for reductive information, even when it is irrelevant to the logic of an explanation.
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Kai Sassenberg et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Attempts at idea generation often produce outputs that are marked by restricted creativity. This lack of originality is often due to responses being tethered to recently activated knowledge and salient examples. The current research tested the hypothesis that implicitly priming creativity results in more creativity (i.e., flexibility). Experiment 1 addressed the potential underlying mechanisms that might lead to such an effect and demonstrated that creativity priming leads to the activation of remote, as opposed to close, associations to a target item. Experiments 2a, 2b, 3, and 4 showed that priming creativity (using two different procedures) leads to more original ideas in a generative task as well as better performance in the remote association task (RAT). These effects occurred independently of the conscious intention to be creative as well as motivational and mood states. Across these studies, the activation of a creative mindset undermined the sources of inflexible and uncreative responding.
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Revising Probability Estimates: Why Increasing Likelihood Means Increasing Impact
Sam Maglio & Evan Polman
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Forecasted probabilities rarely stay the same for long. Instead, they are subject to constant revision — moving upward or downward, uncertain events become more or less likely. Yet little is known about how people interpret probability estimates beyond static snapshots, like a 30% chance of rain. Here, we consider the cognitive, affective, and behavioral consequences of revisions to probability forecasts. Stemming from a lay belief that revisions signal the emergence of a trend, we find in 10 studies (comprising uncertain events such as weather, climate change, sex, sports, and wine) that upward changes to event-probability (e.g., increasing from 20% to 30%) cause events to feel less remote than downward changes (e.g., decreasing from 40% to 30%), and subsequently change people’s behavior regarding those events despite the revised event-probabilities being the same. Our research sheds light on how revising the probabilities for future events changes how people manage those uncertain events.
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Pricing Color Intensity and Lightness in Contemporary Art Auctions
Rachel Pownall & Kathryn Graddy
Research in Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Color plays an important part in modern life and influences our decision making process. However, little is known about how the different attributes of color, namely intensity and lightness, influence price. By analyzing auction data for paintings we can put a price on these attributes of color. Using a unique set of data for Contemporary artworks of Andy Warhol prints, we are able to observe the influence of intensity and lightness using RGB values as explanatory variables on prices achieved at auction. Controlling for other hedonic characteristics, our empirical results find significant evidence of intense colors fetching a premium over equivalent artworks which are less intense in color. Furthermore, darkness carries a premium over lightness.
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Social exclusion, self-affirmation, and health information avoidance
Jennifer Howell & James Shepperd
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although early detection of disease is key, people sometimes opt to avoid learning personal health information. Correlational research suggests that people will avoid health information if they lack social support. In the present study, we aimed to investigate this social motive for health-information avoidance experimentally. We examined whether social rejection might prompt health information avoidance and whether self-affirmation could temper this effect. Participants who were either rejected or included in an online game (Studies 1 & 3) received the opportunity to learn their risk for a disease. Participants who were recently rejected were more likely to avoid learning their risk. Conceptually replicating earlier work, participants who thought about their own demonstration of a personal value (i.e., who self-affirmed) were less likely to avoid information (Study 2 & 3). Affirmation did not moderate the effect of exclusion on avoidance suggesting the affirmation and exclusion operated independently, but in opposite directions (Study 3).
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Decision sidestepping: How the motivation for closure prompts individuals to bypass decision making
Ashley Otto, Joshua Clarkson & Frank Kardes
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, July 2016, Pages 1-16
Abstract:
We all too often have to make decisions — from the mundane (e.g., what to eat for breakfast) to the complex (e.g., what to buy a loved one) — and yet there exists a multitude of strategies that allows us to make a decision. This work focuses on a subset of decision strategies that allows individuals to make decisions by bypassing the decision-making process — a phenomenon we term decision sidestepping. Critical to the present manuscript, however, we contend that decision sidestepping stems from the motivation to achieve closure. We link this proposition back to the fundamental nature of closure and how those seeking closure are highly bothered by decision making. As such, we argue that the motivation to achieve closure prompts a reliance on sidestepping strategies (e.g., default bias, choice delegation, status quo bias, inaction inertia, option fixation) to reduce the bothersome nature of decision making. In support of this framework, five experiments demonstrate that (a) those seeking closure are more likely to engage in decision sidestepping, (b) the effect of closure on sidestepping stems from the bothersome nature of decision making, and (c) the reliance on sidestepping results in downstream consequences for subsequent choice. Taken together, these findings offer unique insight into the cognitive motivations stimulating a reliance on decision sidestepping and thus a novel framework by which to understand how individuals make decisions while bypassing the decision-making process.
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Matthew Taylor
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, August 2016, Pages 136–147
Abstract:
A body of literature based primarily on experiments suggests that cognitive ability and risk aversion are inversely related. In contrast, studies using observational data often find that lower ability, or lower income, is positively related to risky behaviors. One potential explanation for the conflicting conclusions is that experimental studies tend to measure risk attitudes by presenting subjects with choices between an option with a certain outcome and an option characterized by risk, which requires computation and, hence, cognitive effort. Additionally, these studies have primarily relied on the use of hypothetical choices. I use an experiment to test whether this frequently-used method of measuring risk preferences is biased toward finding results that indicate that individuals with lower cognitive ability are more risk averse than individuals with higher cognitive ability. I find that the inverse relationship between risk aversion and cognitive ability is not robust and that high-ability subjects may misrepresent their preferences when they face hypothetical choices. Also, similar to earlier studies, I find that low-ability subjects are more likely to make errors and show that the availability of a certain option reduces errors for the lowest-ability subjects.
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Dolores Albarracín, Tarcan Kumkale & Patrick Poyner-Del Vento
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The sleeper effect has been proposed to describe temporal changes in persuasion for messages associated with noncredible sources. The present research introduces a new kind of sleeper effect denoting increases in persuasion for weak messages associated with credible sources. This effect of the source was hypothesized to derive from attending to the message source rather than the message arguments and reconstructing delayed attitudes primarily on the basis of the source information. Findings from three experiments revealed that when the focus of attention was the communicator, there was a sleeper effect for the source. Specifically, during the time between an immediate follow up and a delayed follow up, persuasion increased when credible sources presented weak arguments. In contrast, when the focus of attention was the message arguments, a traditional sleeper effect emerged. That is, persuasion increased when strong arguments were presented by a noncredible communicator. These effects were mediated by relative recall of arguments versus source attributes and replicated with different message topics and lengths of delay.
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Big picture is better: The social implications of construal level for advice taking
Jean-Nicolas Reyt, Batia Wiesenfeld & Yaacov Trope Organizational
Behavior and Human Decision Processes, July 2016, Pages 22–31
Abstract:
Advice taking is of growing interest to organizational scholars because it is a critical pathway for knowledge transfer and learning. Based on construal level theory, we hypothesize that high construal advisors are viewed as experts and, in turn, others are more likely to take their advice. In a field study of an online community of programmers and a laboratory experiment measuring psychological mechanisms, we find that signaling higher construal by communicating more abstractly is positively associated with expert reputation, which in turn explains others’ advice-taking behavior. Implications for research on the social consequences of construal level and novel antecedents of perceived expertise and advice taking are discussed.
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Can Survey Participation Alter Household Saving behavior
Thomas Crossley et al.
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
We document an effect of survey participation on household saving. Identification comes from random assignment to modules within a population-representative internet panel. The saving measure is based on linked administrative wealth data. Households that responded to a detailed questionnaire on needs in retirement reduced their non-housing saving rate by 3.5 percentage points, on a base of 1.5%. The survey may have acted as a salience shock, possibly with respect to reduced housing costs in retirement. Our findings present an important challenge to survey designers. They also add to the evidence of limited attention in household financial decision making.
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Igor Grossmann, Baljinder Sahdra & Joseph Ciarrochi
Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, April 2016
Abstract:
Cardiac vagal tone (indexed via resting heart rate variability [HRV]) has been previously associated with superior executive functioning. Is HRV related to wiser reasoning and less biased judgments? Here we hypothesize that this will be the case when adopting a self-distanced (as opposed to a self-immersed) perspective, with self-distancing enabling individuals with higher HRV to overcome bias-promoting egocentric impulses and to reason wisely. However, higher HRV may not be associated with greater wisdom when adopting a self-immersed perspective. Participants were randomly assigned to reflect on societal issues from a self-distanced or self-immersed perspective, with responses coded for reasoning quality. In a separate task, participants read about and evaluated a person performing morally ambiguous actions, with responses coded for dispositional vs. situational attributions. We simultaneously assessed resting cardiac recordings, obtaining six HRV indicators. As hypothesized, in the self-distanced condition, each HRV indicator was positively related to prevalence of wisdom-related reasoning (e.g., prevalence of recognition of limits of one’s knowledge, recognition that the world is in flux/change, consideration of others’ opinions and search for an integration of these opinions) and to balanced vs. biased attributions (recognition of situational and dispositional factors vs. focus on dispositional factors alone). In contrast, there was no relationship between these variables in the self-immersed condition. We discuss implications for research on psychophysiology, cognition, and wisdom.