Deciding Factor
People express more bias in their predictions than in their likelihood judgments
Inkyung Park et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
The desirability bias refers to when people’s expectations about an uncertain event are biased by outcome preferences. Prior work has provided limited evidence that the magnitude of this motivated bias depends on (is moderated by) how expectations are solicited -- as discrete outcome predictions or as likelihood judgments expressed on more continuous scales. The present studies extended the generalizability and understanding of the moderating process. The authors proposed that solicitations of predictions and likelihood judgments have different connotations that ultimately affect how much bias is expressed; this varies from a prior account that attributed the moderation effect to response scale differences (dichotomous vs. continuous). Study 1 confirmed the connotation difference, with predictions being viewed as more affording of hunches. Studies 2–4 directly tested the moderation effect, and unlike prior work focusing on expectations for purely stochastic events, the present studies involved more naturalistic events for which likelihood information was not supplied or directly knowable. Before viewing scenes from a basketball game (Study 2) or an endurance race (Studies 3 and 4), participants were led to prefer one contestant over another. After viewing most of the closely fought contest, they made either a prediction or likelihood judgment about the outcome. Participants’ tendency to forecast their preferred contestant to win was significantly stronger among those making predictions rather than likelihood judgments. In support of the proposed account, this effect persisted even when both types of solicitations offered only dichotomous response options. Broader implications for measuring and understanding people’s expectations or forecasts are discussed.
Opportunity Neglect: An Aversion to Low-Probability Gains
Emily Prinsloo et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Seven preregistered studies (N = 2,890, adult participants) conducted in the field, in the lab, and online documented opportunity neglect: a tendency to reject opportunities with low probability of success even when they come with little or no objective cost (e.g., time, money, reputation). Participants rejected a low-probability opportunity in an everyday context (Study 1). Participants also rejected incentive-compatible gambles with positive expected value—for both goods (Study 2) and money (Studies 3–7)—even with no possibility of monetary loss and nontrivial rewards (e.g., a 1% chance at $99). Participants rejected low-probability opportunities more frequently than high-probability opportunities with equal expected value (Study 3). Although taking some real-life opportunities comes with costs, we show that people are even willing to incur costs to opt out of low-probability opportunities (Study 4). Opportunity neglect can be mitigated by highlighting that rejecting an opportunity is equivalent to choosing a zero probability of success (Studies 6–7).
The Struggle is Real: Motivating Goal Pursuit by Normalizing Difficulty
Alexander Park, Rachel Gershon & Marissa Sharif
University of Pennsylvania Working Paper, June 2022
Abstract:
Consumers often use products, such as language learning apps or fitness trackers, to aid them in their goal pursuits. In long-term goal pursuit, setbacks and struggles are inevitable and may lead consumers to disengage from the goal and discontinue the use of goal-relevant products. How can marketers help struggling consumers re-engage with their goals? Across a field study and four preregistered experiments (N = 6,163), we find that when consumers struggle to achieve a goal, setting a norm that goal pursuit is often difficult improves motivation and leads to a greater likelihood of re-engaging with goal-relevant products. We further demonstrate that this increase in motivation is driven by perceived self-attainability – when consumers learn that many people find a goal difficult to achieve, they attribute their struggles to the goal pursuit process rather than their lack of ability, which increases their interest in goal re-engagement.
Pounds That Save: The Role of Preferences for Safety in Demand for Large Vehicles
Jonathan Scott
Journal of Law and Economics, August 2022, Pages 555–579
Abstract:
This paper provides novel evidence that consumers choose larger vehicles as an investment in their safety. I test for this purchasing behavior by isolating the quasi randomness of death in accidents involving at least one fatality. Leveraging this variation as a shock that made driving risk more salient to the victims’ acquaintances, I test whether consumers consequently infer a link between safety and vehicle weight. Using detailed information about household vehicle purchases and the locations of the purchasers’ residences, I demonstrate that households neighboring an individual who dies in an accident respond by purchasing significantly larger vehicles than comparable households neighboring someone who survives an accident. These findings capture strategic purchases of heavier vehicles for safety, behavior that can ultimately lead to the inefficiencies of a vehicle arms race.
Sweet ideas: How the sensory experience of sweetness impacts creativity
Lidan Xu, Ravi Mehta & JoAndrea Hoegg
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, September 2022
Abstract:
The importance of creativity to organizations is significant, ergo, scholars have begun to investigate how sensory elements in the workplace might impact creative performance. Our research examines effects of the sensory experience of taste, specifically sweetness, on creativity. Using a range of real taste tests and imagination tasks, we demonstrate that sweet taste facilitates creative performance. We argue that this is because sweet taste, as a positive implicit affective cue, increases cognitive flexibility and creativity independent of the elicitation of positive emotions. However, when the positive associations of sweet taste are externally overridden, such as when health risks are made salient, the positive impact of sweet taste on creativity is attenuated. We further demonstrate that sensory experience of sweetness increases performance on related tasks that require cognitive flexibility, but does not increase performance on non-creative tasks.
The shower effect: Mind wandering facilitates creative incubation during moderately engaging activities
Zachary Irving et al.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, forthcoming
Abstract:
People often seem to generate creative ideas during moderately engaging activities, such as showering or walking. One explanation of this shower effect is that creative idea generation requires a balance between focused, linear thinking (which limits originality) and unbounded, random associations (which are rarely useful). Activities like walking may help us strike this balance by allowing mind wandering in an engaging environment that places some constraints on thought. Although past studies have found an inconsistent relationship between mind wandering and creative idea generation, they have two limitations. First, creativity researchers have not studied a key form of mind wandering, which is freely moving thought. Second, studies have used boring tasks that may encourage unconstrained and unproductive mind wandering. To overcome these limitations, we investigate the relationship between idea generation and freely moving mind wandering during boring versus engaging video tasks. Across two studies, we find that mind wandering leads to more creative ideas, but only during moderately engaging activities. Boring activities lead to either more ideas or more semantically distant ideas overall, but these effects were unrelated to mind wandering. Boring activities may therefore lead to ideas by affording time for focused problem solving, whereas engaging activities may do so by encouraging productive mind wandering.
Does constructing a belief distribution truly reduce overconfidence?
Beidi Hu & Jospeh Simmons
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Can overconfidence be reduced by asking people to provide a belief distribution over all possible outcomes—that is, by asking them to indicate how likely all possible outcomes are? Although prior research suggests that the answer is “yes,” that research suffers from methodological confounds that muddle its interpretation. In our research, we remove these confounds to investigate whether providing a belief distribution truly reduces overconfidence. In 10 studies, participants made predictions about upcoming sports games or other participants’ preferences, and then indicated their confidence in these predictions using rating scales, likelihood judgments, and/or incentivized wagers. Contrary to prior research, and to our own expectations, we find that providing a belief distribution usually increases overconfidence, because doing so seems to reinforce people’s prior beliefs.
What You See Is What You Hear: Sounds Alter the Contents of Visual Perception
Jamal Williams et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Visual object recognition is not performed in isolation but depends on prior knowledge and context. Here, we found that auditory context plays a critical role in visual object perception. Using a psychophysical task in which naturalistic sounds were paired with noisy visual inputs, we demonstrated across two experiments (young adults; ns = 18–40 in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively) that the representations of ambiguous visual objects were shifted toward the visual features of an object that were related to the incidental sound. In a series of control experiments, we found that these effects were not driven by decision or response biases (ns = 40–85) nor were they due to top-down expectations (n = 40). Instead, these effects were driven by the continuous integration of audiovisual inputs during perception itself. Together, our results demonstrate that the perceptual experience of visual objects is directly shaped by naturalistic auditory context, which provides independent and diagnostic information about the visual world.
Genome-wide analyses of individual differences in quantitatively assessed reading- and language-related skills in up to 34,000 people
Else Eising et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 30 August 2022
Abstract:
The use of spoken and written language is a fundamental human capacity. Individual differences in reading- and language-related skills are influenced by genetic variation, with twin-based heritability estimates of 30 to 80% depending on the trait. The genetic architecture is complex, heterogeneous, and multifactorial, but investigations of contributions of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were thus far underpowered. We present a multicohort genome-wide association study (GWAS) of five traits assessed individually using psychometric measures (word reading, nonword reading, spelling, phoneme awareness, and nonword repetition) in samples of 13,633 to 33,959 participants aged 5 to 26 y. We identified genome-wide significant association with word reading (rs11208009, P = 1.098 × 10−8) at a locus that has not been associated with intelligence or educational attainment. All five reading-/language-related traits showed robust SNP heritability, accounting for 13 to 26% of trait variability. Genomic structural equation modeling revealed a shared genetic factor explaining most of the variation in word/nonword reading, spelling, and phoneme awareness, which only partially overlapped with genetic variation contributing to nonword repetition, intelligence, and educational attainment. A multivariate GWAS of word/nonword reading, spelling, and phoneme awareness maximized power for follow-up investigation. Genetic correlation analysis with neuroimaging traits identified an association with the surface area of the banks of the left superior temporal sulcus, a brain region linked to the processing of spoken and written language. Heritability was enriched for genomic elements regulating gene expression in the fetal brain and in chromosomal regions that are depleted of Neanderthal variants. Together, these results provide avenues for deciphering the biological underpinnings of uniquely human traits.