Magical Thinking
The hot hand exists in volleyball and is used for allocation decisions
Markus Raab, Bartosz Gula & Gerd Gigerenzer
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, forthcoming
Abstract:
The "hot hand" belief in sports refers to the conviction that a player has a higher chance of making a shot after two or three successful shots than after two or three misses (resulting in "streaks"). This belief is usually considered a cognitive fallacy, although it has been conjectured that in basketball the defense will attack a "hot" player and prevent streaks from occurring. To address this argument, we provide the first study on the hot hand in volleyball, where the net limits direct defensive counterstrategies, meaning that streaks can more likely emerge if a player is hot. We first establish that athletes believe in the hot hand in volleyball (Study 1A). Analyzing the top 26 first-division players, we then show that streaks do exist for half of the players (Study 1B). Coaches can detect players' performance variability and use it to make strategic decisions (Study 2A). Playmakers are also sensitive to streaks and rely on them when deciding to whom to allocate the ball (Study 2B). We conclude that for volleyball the hot hand exists, coaches and playmakers are able to detect it, and playmakers tend to use it "adaptively," which results in more hits for a team.
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Mere belonging: The power of social connections
Gregory Walton et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Four experiments examined the effect on achievement motivation of mere belonging, a minimal social connection to another person or group in a performance domain. Mere belonging was expected to increase motivation by creating socially shared goals around a performance task. Participants were led to believe that an endeavor provided opportunities for positive social interactions (Experiment 1), that they shared a birthday with a student majoring in an academic field (Experiment 2), that they belonged to a minimal group arbitrarily identified with a performance domain (Experiment 3), or that they had task-irrelevant preferences similar to a peer who pursued a series of goals (Experiment 4). Relative to control conditions that held constant other sources of motivation, each social-link manipulation raised motivation, including persistence on domain-relevant tasks (Experiments 1-3) and the accessibility of relevant goals (Experiment 4). The results suggest that even minimal cues of social connectedness affect important aspects of self.
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Enjoy! Hedonic Consumption and Compliance with Assertive Messages
Ann Kronrod, Amir Grinstein & Luc Wathieu
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the persuasiveness of assertive language (as in Nike's slogan "Just do it") as compared to nonassertive language (as in Microsoft's slogan "Where do you want to go today?"). Previous research implies that assertive language should reduce consumer compliance. Two experiments show that assertiveness is more effective in communications involving hedonic products, as well as hedonically advertised utilitarian products. This prediction builds on sociolinguistic research addressing relationships between mood, communication expectations, and compliance to requests. A third experiment reaffirms the role of linguistic expectations by showing that an unknown product advertised using assertive language is more likely to be perceived as hedonic.
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Putting Like a Pro: The Role of Positive Contagion in Golf Performance and Perception
Charles Lee et al.
PLoS ONE, October 2011, e26016
Abstract:
Many amateur athletes believe that using a professional athlete's equipment can improve their performance. Such equipment can be said to be affected with positive contagion, which refers to the belief of transference of beneficial properties between animate persons/objects to previously neutral objects. In this experiment, positive contagion was induced by telling participants in one group that a putter previously belonged to a professional golfer. The effect of positive contagion was examined for perception and performance in a golf putting task. Individuals who believed they were using the professional golfer's putter perceived the size of the golf hole to be larger than golfers without such a belief and also had better performance, sinking more putts. These results provide empirical support for anecdotes, which allege that using objects with positive contagion can improve performance, and further suggest perception can be modulated by positive contagion.
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Sticking with What (Barely) Worked
Lars Lefgren, Brennan Platt & Joseph Price
NBER Working Paper, October 2011
Abstract:
Outcome bias occurs when an evaluator considers ex-post outcomes when judging whether a choice was correct, ex-ante. We formalize this cognitive bias in a simple model of distorted Bayesian updating. We then examine strategy changes made by professional football coaches. We find they are more likely to revise their strategy after a loss than a win - even for narrow losses, which are uninformative about future success. This increased revision following a loss occurs even when a loss was expected, and the offensive strategy is revised even when failure is attributable to the defense. These results are consistent with our model's predictions.
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Time-Critical Social Mobilization
Galen Pickard et al.
Science, 28 October 2011, Pages 509-512
Abstract:
The World Wide Web is commonly seen as a platform that can harness the collective abilities of large numbers of people to accomplish tasks with unprecedented speed, accuracy, and scale. To explore the Web's ability for social mobilization, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held the DARPA Network Challenge, in which competing teams were asked to locate 10 red weather balloons placed at locations around the continental United States. Using a recursive incentive mechanism that both spread information about the task and incentivized individuals to act, our team was able to find all 10 balloons in less than 9 hours, thus winning the Challenge. We analyzed the theoretical and practical properties of this mechanism and compared it with other approaches.
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Diego Fernandez Slezak & Mariano Sigman
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
The time spent making a decision and its quality define a widely studied trade-off. Some models suggest that the time spent is set to optimize reward, as verified empirically in simple-decision making experiments. However, in a more complex perspective compromising components of regulation focus, ambitions, fear, risk and social variables, adjustment of the speed-accuracy trade-off may not be optimal. Specifically, regulatory focus theory shows that people can be set in a promotion mode, where focus is on seeking to approach a desired state (to win), or in a prevention mode, focusing to avoid undesired states (not to lose). In promotion, people are eager to take risks increasing speed and decreasing accuracy. In prevention, strategic vigilance increases, decreasing speed and improving accuracy. When time and accuracy have to be compromised, one can ask which of these 2 strategies optimizes reward, leading to optimal performance. This is investigated here in a unique experimental environment. Decision making is studied in rapid-chess (180 s per game), in which the goal of a player is to mate the opponent in a finite amount of time or, alternatively, time-out of the opponent with sufficient material to mate. In different games, players face strong and weak opponents. It was observed that (a) players adopt a more conservative strategy when facing strong opponents, with slower and more accurate moves, and (b) this strategy is suboptimal: Players increase their winning likelihood against strong opponents using the policy they adopt when confronting opponents with similar strength.
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Mnemonomics: The Sunk Cost Fallacy as a Memory Kludge
Sandeep Baliga & Jeffrey Ely
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2011, Pages 35-67
Abstract:
We offer a theory of the sunk cost fallacy as an optimal response to limited memory. As new information arrives, a decision-maker may not remember all the reasons he began a project. The sunk cost gives additional information about future profits and informs subsequent decisions. The Concorde effect makes the investor more eager to complete projects when sunk costs are high and the pro-rata effect makes the investor less eager. In a controlled experiment we had subjects play a simple version of the model. In a baseline treatment subjects exhibit the pro-rata bias. When we induce memory constraints the effect reverses and the subjects exhibit the Concorde bias.
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I-Space: The Effects of Emotional Valence and Source of Music on Interpersonal Distance
Ana Tajadura-Jiménez et al.
PLoS ONE, October 2011, e26083
Background: The ubiquitous use of personal music players in over-crowded public transport alludes to the hypothesis that apart from making the journey more pleasant, listening to music through headphones may also affect representations of our personal space, that is, the emotionally-tinged zone around the human body that people feel is "their space". We evaluated the effects of emotional valence (positive versus negative) and source (external, i.e. loudspeakers, versus embedded, i.e. headphones) of music on the participant's interpersonal distance when interacting with others.
Methodology/Principal Findings: Personal space was evaluated as the comfort interpersonal distance between participant and experimenter during both active and passive approach tasks. Our results show that, during passive approach tasks, listening to positive versus negative emotion-inducing music reduces the representation of personal space, allowing others to come closer to us. With respect to a no-music condition, an embedded source of positive emotion-inducing music reduced personal space, while an external source of negative emotion-inducing music expanded personal space.
Conclusions/Significance: The results provide the first empirical evidence of the relation between induced emotional state, as a result of listening to positive music through headphones, and personal space when interacting with others. This research might help to understand the benefit that people find in using personal music players in crowded situations, such as when using the public transport in urban settings.
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Food, sex and the hunger for distinction
Jonah Berger & Baba Shiv
Journal of Consumer Psychology, October 2011, Pages 464-472
Abstract:
Consumer preferences are often influenced by the distinctiveness of the options involved, but do needs for distinctiveness display motivational reward properties? Four studies suggest that they do. Activating needs for distinctiveness impacts the desirability of other, seemingly unrelated rewards, and reciprocally, preferences for distinctiveness are impacted by the presence of seemingly unrelated reward stimuli. Further, these cross-domain spillover effects were moderated by sensitivity to the general reward system and satiated by even seemingly unrelated intervening rewards. These findings shed light on the nature of distinctiveness and its implications for consumer behavior.
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Being All That You Can Be: The Weighting of Potential in Assessments of Self and Others
Elanor Williams, Thomas Gilovich & David Dunning
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
An accurate assessment of an individual often requires taking their potential into account. Across six studies the authors found that people are more inclined to do so when evaluating themselves than when evaluating others, such that people credit themselves for their perceived potential more than they credit others for theirs. Participants rated potential as a more telling component of the self than of others, and the importance participants placed on their own potential led to attentional biases toward information about their own future potential that did not apply to information about the potential of others. Furthermore, when assessing themselves and other people, participants required more tangible proof that someone else has a given level of potential than they required of themselves, and they relied more on how they would ideally perform in self-assessment but more on how others actually performed in judging them.
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Perspectives on prediction: Does third-person imagery improve task completion estimates?
Roger Buehler et al.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, forthcoming
Abstract:
People typically underestimate the time necessary to complete their tasks. According to the planning fallacy model of optimistic time predictions, this underestimation occurs because people focus on developing a specific plan for the current task and neglect the implications of past failures to meet similar deadlines. We extend the classic planning fallacy model by proposing that a phenomenal quality of mental imagery - the visual perspective that is adopted - may moderate the optimistic prediction bias. Consistent with this proposal, participants in four studies predicted longer completion times, and thus were less prone to bias, when they imagined an upcoming task from the third-person rather than first-person perspective. Third-person imagery reduced people's focus on optimistic plans, increased their focus on potential obstacles, and decreased the impact of task-relevant motives on prediction. The findings suggest that third-person imagery helps individuals generate more realistic predictions by reducing cognitive and motivational processes that typically contribute to bias.
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Do Maximizers Predict Better than Satisficers?
Kriti Jain, Neil Bearden & Allan Filipowicz
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examine the relationship between maximizing (i.e., seeking the best) versus satisficing (i.e., seeking the good enough) tendencies and forecasting ability in a real-world prediction task: forecasting the outcomes of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. In Studies 1 and 2, participants gave probabilistic forecasts for the outcomes of the tournament and completed a measure of maximizing tendencies. We found that although maximizers expected themselves to outperform others much more than satisficers, they actually forecasted more poorly. Hence, on net, they were more overconfident about their relative performance. Decompositional analyses of overall accuracy revealed that differences in forecasting abilities were primarily driven by maximizers' tendency to give more noisy estimates. In Study 3, participants played a betting task where they could choose between safe and uncertain gambles linked to World Cup outcomes. Again, maximizers did more poorly and earned less, because of greater noise in their choice-based responses.
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Who's afraid of red, yellow, and blue? Need for cognitive closure predicts aesthetic preferences
Daphne Wiersema, Job van der Schalk & Gerben van Kleef
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigated the relationship between need for cognitive closure (NFC), that is, the need for a clear, predictable and unambiguous world, and aesthetic preferences. Study 1, a correlational field study, reveals that individual differences in NFC are related to liking for a play with an open ending, such that individuals high in NFC liked the ending of this play less than their low-NFC counterparts. Study 2 demonstrates that high-NFC individuals prefer figurative paintings to abstract paintings. In Study 3, NFC was experimentally varied by means of a time-pressure manipulation. Participants who judged paintings under time-pressure (high NFC) showed a stronger preference for figurative rather than abstract paintings, compared with participants in the control condition (low NFC). We discuss implications and outline directions for future research.
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Reading is believing: The truth effect and source credibility
Linda Henkel & Mark Mattson
Consciousness and Cognition, December 2011, Pages 1705-1721
Abstract:
Five experiments explored how source reliability influences people's tendency to rate statements as more credible when they were encountered earlier (the truth effect). Undergraduates read statements from one reliable source and one unreliable source. Statements read multiple times were perceived as more valid and were more often correctly identified on a general knowledge test than statements read once or not at all. This occurred at varying retention intervals whether the statements originated from a reliable or unreliable source, when people had little memory for the statements themselves or their source, and when the discrediting information about the sources came either before or after reading the facts. While repetition aided recognition and source accuracy, both were unaffected by the reliability of the source. Consistent with the source monitoring framework, familiarity may create an illusion of truth for statements when people lack source-specifying cues, especially cues regarding the reliability of the source.
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Marie Forgeard
Personality and Individual Differences, December 2011, Pages 904-909
Abstract:
Past research on the relationship between affect and creativity has yielded contradictory results. Most of the evidence has tended to show that brief positive emotions as well as more enduring positive moods enhance creativity. No study to date, however, has attempted to determine whether the influence of momentary emotions on creativity depends on pre-existing moods. In the present study, 96 undergraduates completed one of two creative tasks (generating or evaluating captions for photographs) on three occasions, after watching videos designed to induce positive, neutral, or negative emotions. Participants also completed a questionnaire assessing depressed mood. Results confirmed that the effect of emotion inductions on creativity depended on pre-existing mood. Participants low in depression wrote more creative captions and rated captions more accurately with induced negative emotion than with induced positive emotion. In contrast, participants high in depression appeared impervious to the effect of emotion inductions.
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The Hot Hand and the Cold Hand in Professional Golf
Jeffrey Livingston
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous studies have shown that people believe in the existence of the "hot hand" effect: recent good performances make one more confident and lead to more good performances. However, economists have found little evidence that such an effect is present. Motivated by models of momentum from psychology, this study examines hole-by-hole performances of four types of professional golfers, which is perhaps the ideal environment to evaluate whether such an effect exists. The results show that evidence consistent with the existence of hot hand and cold hand can be masked by looking only at overall mean impacts because the existence and magnitude of the effects can vary with the player‘s experience.
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Gur Yaari & Shmuel Eisenmann
PLoS ONE, October 2011, e24532
Abstract:
The long lasting debate initiated by Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky in 1985 is revisited: does a "hot hand" phenomenon exist in sports? Hereby we come back to one of the cases analyzed by the original study, but with a much larger data set: all free throws taken during five regular seasons (2005/6-2009/10) of the National Basketball Association (NBA). Evidence supporting the existence of the "hot hand" phenomenon is provided. However, while statistical traces of this phenomenon are observed in the data, an open question still remains: are these non random patterns a result of "success breeds success" and "failure breeds failure" mechanisms or simply "better" and "worse" periods? Although free throws data is not adequate to answer this question in a definite way, we speculate based on it, that the latter is the dominant cause behind the appearance of the "hot hand" phenomenon in the data.