Mind the Gap
Staying the course: Decision makers who escalate commitment are trusted and trustworthy
Charles Dorison, Christopher Umphres & Jennifer Lerner
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Escalation of commitment -- the tendency to remain committed to a course of action, often despite negative prospects -- is common. Why does it persist? Across three preregistered experiments (N = 3,888), we tested the hypothesis that escalating commitment signals trustworthiness. Experiments 1-2, respectively, revealed that decision makers who escalated commitment were perceived as more trustworthy and entrusted with 29% more money by third-party observers. Experiment 3 revealed that decision makers who escalated commitment subsequently made more trustworthy choices, returning 15% more money than those who de-escalated. Decision makers were equally likely to escalate commitment in public versus in private, possibly because they previously internalized how others would evaluate them. Complementing research examining cognitive factors driving escalation of commitment, the present work reveals that accounting for the reputational causes and consequences of decisions to escalate enhances understanding of why escalation is so common and suggests how organizations might reduce it.
Is it a fallacy to believe in the hot hand in the NBA three-point contest?
Joshua Miller & Adam Sanjurjo
European Economic Review, September 2021
Abstract:
The NBA Three-Point Contest has been considered an ideal setting to study the hot hand, as it showcases the elite professional shooters that hot hand beliefs are typically directed towards, but in an environment that eliminates many of the confounds present in game action. We collect 34 years of NBA Three-Point Contest television broadcast data (1986-2020), apply a statistical approach that improves on those of previous studies, and find considerable evidence of hot hand shooting in and across individuals. Our results support fans' and experts' widely held belief in the hot hand among NBA shooters.
Socially Situated Transmission: The Bias to Transmit Negative Information is Moderated by the Social Context
Nicolas Fay et al.
Cognitive Science, September 2021
Abstract:
Cultural evolutionary theory has identified a range of cognitive biases that guide human social learning. Naturalistic and experimental studies indicate transmission biases favoring negative and positive information. To address these conflicting findings, the present study takes a socially situated view of information transmission, which predicts that bias expression will depend on the social context. We report a large-scale experiment (N = 425) that manipulated the social context and examined its effect on the transmission of the positive and negative information contained in a narrative text. In each social context, information was progressively lost as it was transmitted from person to person, but negative information survived better than positive information, supporting a negative transmission bias. Importantly, the negative transmission bias was moderated by the social context: Higher social connectivity weakened the bias to transmit negative information, supporting a socially situated account of information transmission. Our findings indicate that our evolved cognitive preferences can be moderated by our social goals.
What are the benefits of mind wandering to creativity?
Samuel Murray et al.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, forthcoming
Abstract:
A primary aim of mind-wandering research has been to understand its influence on task performance. While this research has typically highlighted the costs of mind wandering, a few studies have suggested that mind wandering may be beneficial in certain situations. Perhaps the most-touted benefit is that mind wandering during a creative-incubation interval facilitates creative thinking. This finding has played a critical role in the development of accounts of the adaptive value of mind wandering and its functional role, as well as potential mechanisms of mind wandering. Thus, a demonstration of the replicability of this important finding is warranted. Here, we attempted to conceptually replicate results of a highly cited laboratory-based experiment supporting this finding. However, across 2 studies (N = 443), we found no evidence for the claim that mind wandering during a creative-incubation interval facilitates a form of creativity associated with divergent thinking. We suggest that our failed conceptual replication stems from an inadequate characterization of mind wandering (task-unrelated thought), and that there are good reasons to think that task-unrelated thought is unlikely to be causally related to creativity. Our results cast doubt on the claim that task-unrelated thought during an incubation interval enhances divergent creativity while also offering some prescriptions for how future research might further elucidate the cognitive benefits of mind wandering.
Attractors: Incidental values that influence forecasts of change
Clayton Critcher & Emily Rosenzweig
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article examines whether forecasts of change are influenced by attractors, salient values in the direction of the considered change. When an attractor is relatively distal from (vs. proximal to) the base value from which change originates, it encourages forecasts of greater change. Participants showed this pattern when predicting which of two airfare changes was imminent (Study 1) and by how much gas prices (Study 2) or a stock's price (Study 3) would change. Attractors have this influence because they alter the way people translate even equivalent subjective interpretations of prospective changes into objective forecasts of change. In the context of a distal (vs. a proximal) attractor, forecasters thought more objective change was necessary to reflect the same subjective characterization of that change (Study 4). Having participants precommit to a subjective interpretation of an objective amount of change reduced a subsequently introduced attractor's influence on forecasting (Study 5). Following almost five decades of research showing many ways arbitrary values anchor judgments, we discuss how attractors reflect the first evidence that such values can also influence adjustment.
Pupil-Linked Arousal Biases Evidence Accumulation Toward Desirable Percepts During Perceptual Decision-Making
Yuan Chang Leong, Roma Dziembaj & Mark D'Esposito
Psychological Science, September 2021, Pages 1494-1509
Abstract:
People's perceptual reports are biased toward percepts they are motivated to see. The arousal system coordinates the body's response to motivationally significant events and is well positioned to regulate motivational effects on perceptual judgments. However, it remains unclear whether arousal would enhance or reduce motivational biases. Here, we measured pupil dilation as a measure of arousal while participants (N = 38) performed a visual categorization task. We used monetary bonuses to motivate participants to perceive one category over another. Even though the reward-maximizing strategy was to perform the task accurately, participants were more likely to report seeing the desirable category. Furthermore, higher arousal levels were associated with making motivationally biased responses. Analyses using computational models suggested that arousal enhanced motivational effects by biasing evidence accumulation in favor of desirable percepts. These results suggest that heightened arousal biases people toward what they want to see and away from an objective representation of the environment.
Unconscious pupillometry: An effect of "attentional contagion" in the absence of visual awareness
Clara Colombatto & Brian Scholl
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
When looking at other people, we can readily tell how attentive (or distracted) they are. Some cues to this are fairly obvious (as when someone stares intensely at you), but others seem more subtle. For example, increased cognitive load or emotional arousal causes one's pupils to dilate. This phenomenon is frequently employed as a physiological measure of arousal, in studies of pupillometry. Here, in contrast, we employ it as a stimulus for social perception. Might the human visual system be naturally and automatically engaging in "unconscious pupillometry"? We demonstrate that faces rendered invisible (through continuous flash suppression) enter awareness faster when their pupils are dilated. This cannot be explained by appeal to differential contrast, differential attractiveness, or spatial attentional biases, and the effect vanishes when the identical stimuli are presented in socially meaningless ways (e.g., as shirt buttons or facial moles). These results demonstrate that pupil dilation is prioritized in visual processing even outside the focus of conscious awareness, in a form of unconscious "attentional contagion."