Get a clue
Experts and laymen grossly underestimate the benefits of argumentation for reasoning
Hugo Mercier et al.
Thinking & Reasoning, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many fields of study have shown that group discussion generally improves reasoning performance for a wide range of tasks. This article shows that most of the population, including specialists, does not expect group discussion to be as beneficial as it is. Six studies asked participants to solve a standard reasoning problem — the Wason selection task — and to estimate the performance of individuals working alone and in groups. We tested samples of U.S., Indian, and Japanese participants, European managers, and psychologists of reasoning. Every sample underestimated the improvement yielded by group discussion. They did so even after they had been explained the correct answer, or after they had had to solve the problem in groups. These mistaken intuitions could prevent individuals from making the best of institutions that rely on group discussion, from collaborative learning and work teams to deliberative assemblies.
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Deserve and Diverge: Feeling Entitled Makes People More Creative
Emily Zitek & Lynne Vincent
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, January 2015, Pages 242–248
Abstract:
Four studies demonstrated that making people feel more entitled leads them to be more creative. In Study 1, entitlement was manipulated through a writing prompt task, and entitled participants generated more creative uses for a common household object and drew more creative pictures than participants in the control condition did. In Study 2, the same manipulation was used, and entitled participants performed better than control participants on a task measuring creative performance but not on a task measuring non-creative performance. In Studies 3a and 3b, entitlement was manipulated through a sentence unscramble task, and entitled participants again were more creative than control participants. In Studies 2, 3a, and 3b, a need for uniqueness mediated the relationship between entitlement and creativity.
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Geoffrey Munro & Cynthia Munro
Basic and Applied Social Psychology, November/December 2014, Pages 533-543
Abstract:
Perceptions of the quality of two kinds of psychological methods — brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and cognitive testing — were assessed in response to a scenario in which an expert's opinion rendered a politician incompetent to continue in his elected position. Participants evaluated the quality of MRI evidence more favorably than cognitive testing evidence, an effect that was particularly pronounced among participants motivated to disbelieve the evidence (strong partisans of the same party as the politician). This study is among the first to underscore the potential real-world implications of layperson's perceptions of psychological methods and to highlight that evaluations of “softer” methods may be more malleable than the “harder” ones.
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Stumbling in Their Shoes: Disability Simulations Reduce Judged Capabilities of Disabled People
Arielle Silverman, Jason Gwinn & Leaf Van Boven
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Simulating other people’s difficulties often improves attitudes toward those people. In the case of physical disabilities, however, such experience simulations can backfire. By highlighting the initial challenges of becoming disabled, experience simulations decrease the perceived adaptability of being disabled and reduce the judged capabilities of disabled people. In two experiments, participants engaged in a challenging blindness simulation and afterward judged blind people as less capable of work and independent living than did participants after simulating a different impairment (Experiment 1), no impairment (Experiments 1 and 2), or after merely watching someone else simulate blindness (Experiment 2). Blindness simulators forecast that they would be less capable themselves if blind and that they would adapt to blindness more slowly (Experiment 2), highlighting the self-centered nature of judged capabilities of disabled people. The findings demonstrate that experience simulation can sometimes harm rather than help attitudes toward other people’s difficulties.
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Stéphane Jouffre
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, January 2015, Pages 116-126
Abstract:
Individuals attempting to label their emotions look for a plausible source of their physiological arousal. Co-occurrence of plausible sources can lead to the misattribution of real (or bogus) physiological arousal, resulting in physically attractive individuals being perceived as more attractive than they actually are. In two experiments, female participants heard bogus heart rate feedback while viewing photos of attractive male models. Compared with low-power and control participants, high-power participants rated reinforced photos (increased heart rate) more attractive than non-reinforced photos (stable heart rate) to a greater extent when they heard their own bogus heart rate feedback (Experiments 1 and 2) and to a lesser extent when they heard a recording of another participant’s heart rate (Experiment 2). These findings, which suggest that power increases the tendency to misattribute one’s physiological arousal to physically attractive individuals, are discussed with reference to theories linking power and social perception.
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The Influence of Instructions to Correct for Bias on Social Judgments
Saera Khan, Tzipporah Dang & Andrea Mack
Basic and Applied Social Psychology, November/December 2014, Pages 553-562
Abstract:
We examined how instructions to correct for bias influenced judgments of a male target person whose behavior towards a female was either negative or ambiguous. Half of the female participants with egalitarian or traditional views about gender were instructed to correct for bias prior to reading the vignette. All participants rated his negative behavior unfavorably. In the non-instructed condition, participants with a traditional bias rated the ambiguous male behavior more favorably than participants with an egalitarian bias. However, in the instructed condition, this pattern was reversed. Results demonstrate that the evaluative implications of behavior can impact correction effects.
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This Number Just Feels Right: The Impact of Roundedness of Price Numbers on Product Evaluations
Monica Wadhwa & Kuangjie Zhang
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research proposes that because rounded numbers are more fluently processed, rounded prices (e.g., $200.00) encourage reliance on feelings. In contrast, because nonrounded numbers are disfluently processed, nonrounded prices (e.g., $198.76) encourage reliance on cognition. Thus, rounded (nonrounded) prices lead to a subjective experience of “feeling right” when the purchase decision is driven by feelings (cognition). Further, this sense of feeling right resulting from the fit between the roundedness of the price number and the nature of decision context can make positive reactions toward the target product more positive and negative reactions more negative, a phenomenon referred to as the rounded price effect in the current research. Results from five studies provide converging evidence for the rounded price effect. Findings from the current research further show that merely priming participants with rounded (nonrounded) numbers in an unrelated context could also lead to the rounded price effect. Finally, this research provides process support by showing that the rounded price effect is mediated by a sense of feeling right. This is the first research examining the differential impact of roundedness of prices on product purchase decisions, based on whether the purchase decision is driven by feelings versus cognition.
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Supine Body Posture Decreases Rationalizations: Testing the Action-Based Model of Dissonance
Eddie Harmon-Jones, Tom Price & Cindy Harmon-Jones
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, January 2015, Pages 228–234
Abstract:
The action-based model of dissonance theorizes that when individuals have conflicting cognitions with action implications, they experience dissonance. This dissonance motivates the individual to value one action tendency over the other, thereby facilitating effective action. Thus, a decrease in the motivation to act (decreased approach motivation) should decrease this tendency to value one action tendency over the other (dissonance reduction). The present research tested this prediction by using an embodied manipulation, a supine posture, to decrease approach motivation. In Experiment 1, relative to an upright posture, a supine posture decreased dissonance reduction in an effort justification paradigm. In Experiment 2, a supine posture decreased the spreading of alternatives following a difficult decision. These results suggest that embodied manipulations that reduce approach motivation decrease dissonance reduction. The findings support the action-based model of dissonance, and suggest that embodied manipulations of reduced approach motivation reduce the rationalization of behavior.
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Gender differences in the endowment effect: Women pay less, but won’t accept less
Alice Wieland et al.
Judgment and Decision Making, November 2014, Pages 558–571
Abstract:
We explore different contexts and mechanisms that might promote or alleviate the gender effect in risk aversion. Our main result is that we do not find gender differences in risk aversion when the choice is framed as a willingness-to-accept (WTA) task. When the choice is framed as a willingness-to-pay (WTP) task, men are willing to pay more and thus exhibit lower risk aversion. However, when the choice is framed as a willingness to accept task, women will not accept less than men. These findings imply gender differences in the endowment effect. We also find that the effect size of the gender difference in risk aversion is reduced or eliminated as the context changes from tasks framed as gambles to other domains; and that attitudes toward gambling mediate the gender effect in gambling framed tasks.
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Creativity Under Fire: The Effects of Competition on Innovation and the Creative Process
Daniel Gross
University of California Working Paper, November 2014
Abstract:
Creativity is fundamental to innovation and pervasive in everyday life, yet the creative process has received only limited attention in economics and can in practice be difficult to model and measure. In this paper, I study the effect of competition on individuals' incentives for creative experimentation in the production of commercial art. Using a sample of logo design contests, and a novel, content-based measure of designs' originality, I find that competition has an inverted-U shaped effect on individuals' propensity for innovation: some competition is necessary to induce players to experiment with novel, untested ideas, but heavy competition can drive them to abandon the tournament altogether, such that experimentation is maximized by the presence of one high-quality competitor. The evidence is consistent with a generalized model of agents' choice between risky, radical innovation; more reliable, incremental innovation; and exit from a creative tournament where agents are risk-averse or face decreasing returns to improvement due to a concave success function. These results reconcile conflicting evidence from an extensive literature on the effects of competition on innovation and have direct implications for R&D policy, competition policy, and the management of organizations in creative or research industries.
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Older Adults Are Highly Responsive to Recent Events During Decision-Making
Darrell Worthy et al.
Decision, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent work suggests that older adults’ decision-making behavior is highly affected by recent events. In the present work, younger and older adults performed a 2-choice task where 1 option provided a larger average reward, but there was a large amount of noise around the mean reward for each option, which led to sharp improvements or declines in rewards over trials. Older adults showed greater responsiveness to recent events than younger adults as evidenced by fits of Reinforcement Learning (RL) models. Older adults were particularly sensitive to recent negative events, which was evidenced by a strong tendency for older adults to switch to the other option following steep declines in reward. This tendency led to superior performance for older adults in 1 condition where heightened sensitivity to recent negative events was advantageous. These results extend prior work that has found an older adult bias toward negative feedback and suggest that older adults engage in more abrupt switching in response to negative outcomes than younger adults.
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Regulatory Focus Affects Predictions of the Future
Tieyuan Guo & Roy Spina
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research investigated how regulatory focus might influence trend-reversal predictions. We hypothesized that compared with promotion focus, prevention focus hinders sense of control, which in turn predicts more trend-reversal developments. Studies 1 and 3 revealed that participants expected trend-reversal developments to be more likely to occur when they focused on prevention than when they focused on promotion. Study 2 extended the findings by including a control condition, and revealed that participants expected trend-reversal developments to be more likely to occur in the prevention condition than in the promotion and control conditions. Studies 4 and 5 revealed that participants’ chronic prevention focus predicted a low sense of control (Study 4), and that promotion focus predicted a high sense of control (Studies 4 and 5). Furthermore, participants with a high sense of control expected trend-reversal developments to be less likely to occur. Thus, the results provided converging evidence for the hypothesis.
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Bang for the Buck: Gain-Loss Ratio as a Driver of Judgment and Choice
Bart de Langhe & Stefano Puntoni
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prominent decision-making theories propose that individuals (should) evaluate alternatives by combining gains and losses in an additive way. Instead, we suggest that individuals seek to maximize the rate of exchange between positive and negative outcomes and thus combine gains and losses in a multiplicative way. Sensitivity to gain-loss ratio provides an alternative account for several existing findings and implies a number of novel predictions. It implies greater sensitivity to losses and risk aversion when expected value is positive, but greater sensitivity to gains and risk seeking when expected value is negative. It also implies more extreme preferences when expected value is positive than when expected value is negative. These predictions are independent of decreasing marginal sensitivity, loss aversion, and probability weighting—three key properties of prospect theory. Five new experiments and reanalyses of two recently published studies support these predictions.
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Lukasz Walasek & Neil Stewart
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
One of the most robust empirical findings in the behavioral sciences is loss aversion — the finding that losses loom larger than gains. We offer a new psychological explanation of the origins of loss aversion in which loss aversion emerges from differences in the distribution of gains and losses people experience. In 4 experiments, we tested this proposition by manipulating the range of gains and losses that individuals saw during the process of eliciting their loss aversion. We were able to find loss aversion, loss neutrality, and even the reverse of loss aversion.
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Better Know When (Not) to Think Twice: How Social Power Impacts Prefactual Thought
Annika Scholl & Kai Sassenberg
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Before approaching situations, individuals frequently imagine “what would happen, if . . . .” Such prefactual thought can promote confidence and facilitate behavior preparation when the upcoming situation can benefit from forethought, but it also delays action. The present research tested how social power predicts prefactual thought when its benefits are clear versus ambiguous. Power enhances flexible behavior adaptation and action tendencies — presumably without much forethought. We therefore proposed that power diminishes prefactual thought, unless the situation suggests that such thought is adaptive (i.e., could benefit performance). Power-holders indeed generated less prefactuals than the powerless (Experiments 1 and 2), but only if benefits for performance were ambiguous rather than clear (Experiment 3). These findings indicate that social context factors related to confidence affect prefactual thought, and that power-holders’ flexible adaptation to the situation sometimes elicits inaction (i.e., prefactual thought) rather than spontaneous action.
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Does the Better-Than-Average Effect Show That People Are Overconfident?: Two Experiments
Jean-Pierre Benoît, Juan Dubra & Don Moore
Journal of the European Economic Association, forthcoming
Abstract:
We conduct two experimental tests of the claim that people are overconfident, using new tests of overplacement that are based on a formal Bayesian model. Our two experiments, on easy quizzes, find that people overplace themselves. More precisely, we find apparently overconfident data that cannot be accounted for by a rational population of expected utility maximizers who care only about money. The finding represents new evidence of overconfidence that is robust to the Bayesian critique offered by Benoît and Dubra (Jean-Pierre Benoît and Juan Dubra (2011). “Apparent Overconfidence.” Econometrica, 79, 1591–1625). We discuss possible limitations of our results.
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Do markets mitigate misperceptions of feedback?
Christian Erik Kampmann & John Sterman
System Dynamics Review, July/September 2014, Pages 123–160
Abstract:
Experimental studies of dynamic decision making generally show poor performance. Most, however, lack market mechanisms, specifically price setting, while economic theory suggests markets should mitigate individual decision errors. We develop experimental markets to explore whether different price institutions improve performance in dynamic decision tasks. We find: (i) dynamic complexity degrades performance substantially relative to optimal despite the inclusion of different pricing mechanisms; and (ii) markets improve performance, though it remains significantly below optimal. We estimate decision rules for each actor; results reject the hypothesis of rationality at the individual level but support behavioral decision rules consistent with bounded rationality. Simulations using the estimated decision rules reproduce key features of market dynamics. Decision timing data and verbal protocols show that greater task complexity leads subjects to ignore important aspects of the environment, particularly strategic interactions among participants. Markets moderate but do not eliminate misperceptions of feedback.
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Uncertainty and Denial: A Resource-Rational Model of the Value of Information
Emma Pierson & Noah Goodman
PLoS ONE, November 2014
Abstract:
Classical decision theory predicts that people should be indifferent to information that is not useful for making decisions, but this model often fails to describe human behavior. Here we investigate one such scenario, where people desire information about whether an event (the gain/loss of money) will occur even though there is no obvious decision to be made on the basis of this information. We find a curious dual trend: if information is costless, as the probability of the event increases people want the information more; if information is not costless, people's desire for the information peaks at an intermediate probability. People also want information more as the importance of the event increases, and less as the cost of the information increases. We propose a model that explains these results, based on the assumption that people have limited cognitive resources and obtain information about which events will occur so they can determine whether to expend effort planning for them.