Less is more
Ed O'Brien & Nadav Klein
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, February 2017, Pages 161-185
Abstract:
Change often emerges from a series of small doses. For example, a person may conclude that a happy relationship has eroded not from 1 obvious fight but from smaller unhappy signs that at some point "add up." Everyday fluctuations therefore create ambiguity about when they reflect substantive shifts versus mere noise. Ten studies reveal an asymmetry in this first point when people conclude "official" change: people demand less evidence to diagnose lasting decline than lasting improvement, despite similar evidential quality. This effect was pervasive and replicated across many domains and parameters. For example, a handful of poor grades, bad games, and gained pounds led participants to diagnose intellect, athleticism, and health as "officially" changed; yet corresponding positive signs were dismissed as fickle flukes (Studies 1a, 1b, and 1c). This further manifested in real-time reactions: participants interpreted the same graphs of change in the economy and public health as more meaningful if framed as depicting decline versus improvement (Study 2), and were more likely to gamble actual money on continued bad versus good luck (Study 3). Why? Effects held across self/other change, added/subtracted change, and intended/unintended change (Studies 4a, 4b, and 4c), suggesting a generalized negativity bias. Teasing this apart, we highlight a novel "entropy" component beyond standard accounts like risk aversion: good things seem more truly capable of losing their positive qualities than bad things seem capable of gaining them, rendering signs of decline to appear more immediately diagnostic (Studies 5 and 6). An asymmetric tipping point raises theoretical and practical implications for how people might inequitably react to smaller signs of change.
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Pierre Chandon & Nailya Ordabayeva
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, February 2017, Pages 250-268
Abstract:
Five studies show that people, including experts such as professional chefs, estimate quantity decreases more accurately than quantity increases. We argue that this asymmetry occurs because physical quantities cannot be negative. Consequently, there is a natural lower bound (zero) when estimating decreasing quantities but no upper bound when estimating increasing quantities, which can theoretically grow to infinity. As a result, the "accuracy of less" disappears (a) when a numerical or a natural upper bound is present when estimating quantity increases, or (b) when people are asked to estimate the (unbounded) ratio of change from one size to another for both increasing and decreasing quantities. Ruling out explanations related to loss aversion, symbolic number mapping, and the visual arrangement of the stimuli, we show that the "accuracy of less" influences choice and demonstrate its robustness in a meta-analysis that includes previously published results. Finally, we discuss how the "accuracy of less" may explain asymmetric reactions to the supersizing and downsizing of food portions, some instances of the endowment effect, and asymmetries in the perception of increases and decreases in physical and psychological distance.
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Short-Term Upper Limb Immobilization Affects Action-Word Understanding
Christel Bidet-Ildei et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present study aimed to investigate whether well-established associations between action and language can be altered by short-term upper limb immobilization. The dominant arm of right-handed participants was immobilized for 24 hours with a rigid splint fixed on the hand and an immobilization vest restraining the shoulder, arm, and forearm. The control group did not undergo such immobilization. In 2 experiments, participants had to judge whether a verb involved movements of the hands or feet. In Experiment 1, the response times for controls were shorter for hand-action verbs than for foot-action verbs, whereas there was no significant difference in the immobilized group. Experiment 2 confirmed these results with a pre/posttest procedure. Shorter response times were shown for hand-action verbs than for foot-action verbs in the pretests and posttests for the control group and in the pretest for the immobilized group (i.e., before immobilization). This difference was not observed for participants undergoing 24 hr of hand immobilization, who showed little progress in assessing hand-action verbs between pretest and posttest. Moreover, participants with the highest motor imagery capacities clearly demonstrated shorter response times in Experiment 2 for both hand-action and foot-action verbs, regardless of hand immobilization. Overall, these findings demonstrate for the first time that short-term sensorimotor deprivation can affect action verb processing. We discuss our results in light of the embodiment view, which considers that cognition is grounded in sensorimotor experiences.
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The Elephant in the Road: Auditory Perceptual Load Affects Driver Perception and Awareness
Gillian Murphy & Ciara Greene
Applied Cognitive Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Perceptual load theory research has shown that the level of perceptual load in a task affects processing of additional information. Less certain are the cross-modal effects of perceptual load - does load in one modality affect processing in another? The current study assessed the effect of auditory perceptual load on visual attention in a driving simulator task. While driving, participants listened to traffic updates on the radio, which imposed either low or high perceptual load. Awareness for an unexpected animal as well as less novel objects (such as billboards and other vehicles) was markedly reduced under high load. Driver behaviour was also significantly affected, with impaired lateral control, longer reaction times to hazards and more collisions under high load. This study has important implications for load theory and also more general implications for road safety, as it suggests that auditory load may be an important, often overlooked factor in driver attention.
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Can observing a Necker cube make you more insightful?
Ruben Laukkonen & Jason Tangen
Consciousness and Cognition, February 2017, Pages 198-211
Abstract:
It is a compelling idea that an image as simple as a Necker cube, or a duck-rabbit illusion, can reveal something about a person's creativity. Surprisingly, there are now multiple examples showing that people who are better at discovering 'hidden' images in a picture, are also better at solving some creative problems. Although this idea goes back at least a century, little is known about how these two tasks - that seem so different on the surface - are related to each other. At least some forms of creativity (and indeed scientific discoveries) may require that we change our perspectives in order to discover a novel solution to a problem. It's possible that such problems involve a similar cognitive process, and perhaps the same cognitive capacities, as switching perspectives in an ambiguous image. We begin by replicating previous work, and also show metacognitive similarities between the sudden appearance of hidden images in consciousness, and the sudden appearance of solutions to verbal insight problems. We then show that simply observing a Necker cube can improve subsequent creative problem-solving and lead to more self-reported insights. We speculate that these results may in part be explained by Conflict Monitoring Theory.