Reality Distortion Field
Avoiding Catastrophe: The Interactional Production of Possibility during the Cuban Missile Crisis
David Gibson
American Journal of Sociology, September 2011, Pages 361-419
Abstract:
In October 1962, the fate of the world hung on the U.S. response to the discovery of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. President Kennedy's decision to impose a blockade was based on hours of discussions with top advisers (the so-called ExComm), yet decades of scholarship on the crisis have missed the central puzzle: How did the group select one response, the blockade, when all options seemed bad? Recently released audio recordings are used to argue that the key conversational activity was storytelling about an uncertain future. Kennedy's choice of a blockade hinged on the narrative "suppression" of its most dangerous possible consequence, namely the perils of a later attack against operational missiles, something accomplished through omission, self-censorship, ambiguation, uptake failure, and narrative interdiction. The article makes the very first connection between the localized dynamics of conversation and decision making in times of crisis, and offers a novel processual account of one of the most fateful decisions in human history.
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Consequence-Cause Matching: Looking to the Consequences of Events to Infer Their Causes
Robyn LeBoeuf & Michael Norton
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article documents a bias in people's causal inferences, showing that people non-normatively consider an event's consequences when inferring its causes. Across experiments, participants' inferences about event causes were systematically affected by how similar (in both size and valence) those causes were to event consequences, even when the consequences were objectively uninformative about the causes. For example, people inferred that a product failure (computer crash) had a large cause (widespread computer virus) if it had a large consequence (job loss), but that the identical failure was more likely to have a smaller cause (cooling fan malfunction) if the consequence was small - even though the consequences gave no new information about what caused the crash. This "consequence-cause matching," which can affect product attitudes, may arise because people are motivated to see the world as predictable and because matching is an accessible schema that helps them to fulfill this motivation.
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Mind games: The mental representation of conflict
Nir Halevy, Eileen Chou & Keith Murnighan
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Perception and misperception play a pivotal role in conflict and negotiation. We introduce a framework that explains how people think about their outcome interdependence in conflict and negotiation and how their views shape their behavior. Seven studies show that people's mental representations of conflict are predictably constrained to a small set of possibilities with important behavioral and social consequences. Studies 1 and 2 found that, when prompted to represent a conflict in matrix form, more than 70% of the people created 1 of 4 archetypal mixed-motive games (out of 576 possibilities): Maximizing Difference, Assurance, Chicken, and Prisoner's Dilemma. Study 3 demonstrated that these mental representations relate in predictable ways to negotiators' fixed-pie perceptions. Studies 4-6 showed that these mental representations shape individuals' behavior and interactions with others, including cooperation, perspective taking, and use of deception in negotiation, and through them, conflict's outcomes. Study 7 found that the games that people think they are playing influence how their counterparts see them, as well as their counterparts' negotiation expectations. Overall, the findings document noteworthy regularities in people's mental representations of outcome interdependence in conflict and illustrate that 4 archetypal games can encapsulate fundamental psychological processes that emerge repeatedly in conflict and negotiation.
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The Delay Hypothesis: The Manifestation of Media Effects Over Time
Jakob Jensen et al.
Human Communication Research, October 2011, Pages 509-528
Abstract:
A between-participants experiment (N = 147) tested for the presence of a delayed effect following exposure to an episode of a legal drama that contained false information. Participants were more likely to endorse false beliefs if they were queried two weeks after watching the program rather than immediately following exposure. The relationship between time and false belief endorsement was found to be moderated by perceived reality of the program. Consistent with the delay hypothesis, those who perceived the legal drama to be unrealistic following exposure had significantly higher false belief scores at Time 2.
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The Risk of Polite Misunderstandings
Jean-François Bonnefon, Aidan Feeney & Wim De Neys
Current Directions in Psychological Science, October 2011, Pages 321-324
Abstract:
We review evidence showing that politeness taxes mental resources and creates confusion about what is truly meant during interactions. While this confusion can be useful in low-stakes situations, it can have negative, even dangerous consequences in high-stakes situations such as flying a plane in an emergency or helping a patient decide on a course of treatment. Unfortunately, high-stakes situations are especially conducive to politeness-based misunderstandings. Although policies that discourage politeness in high-stakes situations are undergoing empirical assessment, we suggest that research is needed on the nonverbal cues that help people disambiguate polite statements.
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Overestimating Others' Willingness to Pay
Shane Frederick
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper documents a widespread bias: a tendency to overestimate how much others will pay for goods. The effect may influence pricing and negotiations, which depend on accurate assessments of others' valuations. It is also shown to underlie or interact with several widely researched behavioral phenomena, including egocentric empathy gaps, the endowment effect, and the false-consensus effect.
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Reconstructing Visual Experiences from Brain Activity Evoked by Natural Movies
Shinji Nishimoto et al.
Current Biology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Quantitative modeling of human brain activity can provide crucial insights about cortical representations and can form the basis for brain decoding devices. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have modeled brain activity elicited by static visual patterns and have reconstructed these patterns from brain activity. However, blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signals measured via fMRI are very slow, so it has been difficult to model brain activity elicited by dynamic stimuli such as natural movies. Here we present a new motion-energy encoding model that largely overcomes this limitation. The model describes fast visual information and slow hemodynamics by separate components. We recorded BOLD signals in occipitotemporal visual cortex of human subjects who watched natural movies and fit the model separately to individual voxels. Visualization of the fit models reveals how early visual areas represent the information in movies. To demonstrate the power of our approach, we also constructed a Bayesian decoder by combining estimated encoding models with a sampled natural movie prior. The decoder provides remarkable reconstructions of the viewed movies. These results demonstrate that dynamic brain activity measured under naturalistic conditions can be decoded using current fMRI technology.
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Getting Real: The Duration of Framing Effects
Sophie Lecheler & Claes de Vreese
Journal of Communication, October 2011, Pages 959-983
Abstract:
A growing number of studies test the effects of news framing on citizens' understanding of politics. By employing experimental designs, these studies report significant effects for a multitude of issues and frames. However, what happens to the framing effect after initial exposure? Based on a "classic" framing experiment (n = 625), this article traces framing effects across a number of delayed time points: after 1 day, 1 week, and 2 weeks. Our results show that framing effects are surprisingly persistent. The duration of framing effects depended on a person's level of political knowledge, with moderately knowledgeable individuals displaying most persistent framing effects. Effects on individuals with high or low levels of political knowledge dissipated much quicker.
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Kent Harber, Douglas Yeung & Anthony Iacovelli
Emotion, October 2011, Pages 1080-1090
Abstract:
Threatening things are often perceptually exaggerated, such that they appear higher, closer, of greater duration, or more intense than they actually are. According to the Resources and Perception Model (RPM) psychosocial resources can prevent this exaggeration, leading to more accurate perception. Two studies tested RPM. Study 1 showed that the perceived closeness of a threatening object (a live tarantula) but not an innocuous object (a cat toy) was moderated by induced self-worth. Further, the more self-worth that participants experienced, the less close the tarantula appeared to them. Study 2 showed that greater levels of self-esteem reduced perceived height, but only among participants prevented from holding a protective handrail while looking down. Together, these studies confirm that resources moderate the physical perception of both distance and height, that resources moderate perception of threats but not nonthreats, that different resources have similar moderating effects, and that psychosocial resources can supplant physical resources.
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Handedness Shapes Children's Abstract Concepts
Daniel Casasanto & Tania Henetz
Cognitive Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Can children's handedness influence how they represent abstract concepts like kindness and intelligence? Here we show that from an early age, right-handers associate rightward space more strongly with positive ideas and leftward space with negative ideas, but the opposite is true for left-handers. In one experiment, children indicated where on a diagram a preferred toy and a dispreferred toy should go. Right-handers tended to assign the preferred toy to a box on the right and the dispreferred toy to a box on the left. Left-handers showed the opposite pattern. In a second experiment, children judged which of two cartoon animals looked smarter (or dumber) or nicer (or meaner). Right-handers attributed more positive qualities to animals on the right, but left-handers to animals on the left. These contrasting associations between space and valence cannot be explained by exposure to language or cultural conventions, which consistently link right with good. Rather, right- and left-handers implicitly associated positive valence more strongly with the side of space on which they can act more fluently with their dominant hands. Results support the body-specificity hypothesis (Casasanto, 2009), showing that children with different kinds of bodies think differently in corresponding ways.
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Modeling the Influence of Investigator Bias on the Elicitation of True and False Confessions
Fadia Narchet, Christian Meissner & Melissa Russano
Law and Human Behavior, December 2011, Pages 452-465
Abstract:
The aim of this study was to model various social and cognitive processes believed to be associated with true and false confessions by exploring the link between investigative biases and what occurs in the interrogation room. Using the Russano et al. (Psychol Sci 16:481-486, 2005) paradigm, this study explored how perceptions of guilt influenced the frequency and type of interrogation tactics used, suspect's perceptions of the interrogation process, the likelihood of confession, and investigator's resulting perceptions of culpability. Results suggested that investigator bias led to the increased use of minimization tactics and thereby increased the likelihood of false confessions by innocent participants. In contrast, the manipulation of investigator bias had no direct or indirect influence on guilty participants. These findings confirm the important role of investigator bias and improve our understanding of the decision-making process associated with true and false confessions.
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Elaine Wong, Michael Haselhuhn & Laura Kray
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Reflecting on previous experiences and considering how things could have been better (upward counterfactual reflection) is central to learning. While researchers have identified a number of situational antecedents to upward counterfactual generation, less is known about individual differences in counterfactual reflection. We address this gap by considering how implicit beliefs regarding the fixedness or malleability of basic characteristics influence counterfactual generation. In a negotiation context, we show that individuals who believe that negotiation ability is changeable are more likely to consider how things could have been better following a negotiation experience compared to individuals who believe that negotiation ability is fixed. We further demonstrate the impact of upward counterfactual reflection on learning and performance: Negotiators who hold malleable beliefs are better able to discover creative agreements that benefit both parties in a negotiation, and these performance differences are mediated by upward counterfactual generation.
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Wolves in sheep's clothing: How and when hypothetical questions influence behavior
Sarah Moore et al.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, forthcoming
Abstract:
How and when does responding to hypothetical questions shape future judgment and behavior? We identify knowledge accessibility as an implicit process through which hypothetical questions influence individuals, and examine moderators of accessibility that determine when these effects obtain. In an initial study, we show that hypothetical questions increase the accessibility of the specific positive or negative knowledge referenced by the question. In five subsequent studies, we manipulate factors known to enhance (consistency, elaboration) and attenuate (awareness, delay) accessibility, and show that these factors moderate the influence of hypothetical questions on individuals' voting choices, legal decision-making, and consumption behavior.
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Matthew Hunsinger, Linda Isbell & Gerald Clore
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research indicates that affect influences whether people focus on categorical or behavioral information during impression formation. One explanation is that affect confers its value on whatever cognitive inclinations are most accessible in a given situation. Three studies tested this malleable mood effects hypothesis, predicting that happy moods should maintain and unhappy moods should inhibit situationally dominant thinking styles. Participants completed an impression formation task that included categorical and behavioral information. Consistent with the proposed hypothesis, no fixed relation between mood and processing emerged. Whether happy moods led to judgments reflecting category-level or behavior-level information depended on whether participants were led to focus on the their immediate psychological state (i.e., current affective experience; Studies 1 and 2) or physical environment (i.e., an unexpected odor; Study 3). Consistent with research on socially situated cognition, these results demonstrate that the same affective state can trigger entirely different thinking styles depending on the context.
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Dissociable neural systems for analogy and metaphor: Implications for the neuroscience of creativity
Oshin Vartanian
British Journal of Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Two recent reviews of the neuroimaging literature on creativity have pointed to inconsistent findings across studies, calling into question the usefulness of the theoretical constructs motivating the search for its neural bases. However, it is argued that consistent patterns of neural activation do emerge when the cognitive process and the neuroimaging method are kept uniform across studies. To demonstrate this empirically, the activation likelihood estimation (ALE) method was used to conduct quantitative meta-analyses of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments of analogy and metaphor - two processes related to creativity and included in the recent reviews. The results demonstrated that analogy and metaphor reliably activate consistent but dissociable brain regions across fMRI studies. The implications of the findings for cognitive theories of analogy and metaphor are discussed. Furthermore, these results demonstrate that to the extent that creativity has heterogeneous sources, its neural instantiation will vary as a function of the underlying cognitive processes.
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Taking a different perspective: Mindset influences neural regions that represent value and choice
Jamil Bhanji & Jennifer Beer
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Most choices are complex and can be considered from a number of different perspectives. For example, someone choosing a snack may have taste, health, cost or any number of factors at the forefront of their mind. Although previous research has examined neural systems related to value and choice, very little is known about how mindset influences these systems. In the current study, participants were primed with Health or Taste while they made decisions about snack foods. Some neural regions showed consistent associations with value and choice across Health or Taste mindsets. Regardless of mindset, medial orbitofrontal cortex (MOFC) tracked value in terms of taste, regions in left lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) tracked value in terms of health, and MOFC and dorsal anterior cingulate were associated with choice. However, activity in other neural regions was modulated by the mindset manipulation. When primed with Taste, rostral anterior cingulate tracked value in terms of taste whereas left amygdala and left putamen were associated with choice. When primed with Health, right LPFC and posterior MOFC tracked value in terms of health. The findings contribute to the neural research on decision-making by demonstrating that changing perspectives can modulate value- and choice-related neural activity.
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Narcissism and recollections of early life experiences
Tamra Cater, Virgil Zeigler-Hill & Jennifer Vonk
Personality and Individual Differences, December 2011, Pages 935-939
Abstract:
Recent studies have found associations between narcissistic personality features and retrospective accounts of early experiences. The current study sought to extend these previous findings by examining whether adaptive and maladaptive features of narcissism were associated with recollections of early life experiences in a non-clinical sample of undergraduate students (N = 334). Results revealed that the Entitlement/Exploitativeness feature of narcissism was associated with low security, high parental discipline, and high threats of separation. Narcissistic Grandiosity was positively associated with peer affectional support and parental discipline, whereas Narcissistic Vulnerability was not uniquely associated with memories of early life experiences. The results provide partial support for models of narcissism in which parents are recalled as failing to provide a secure base while inducing threats of separation and discipline.
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The Choice Gap: The Divergent Online News Preferences of Journalists and Consumers
Pablo Boczkowski & Limor Peer
Journal of Communication, October 2011, Pages 857-876
Abstract:
This study examines 4 online news sites to compare stories that journalists display most prominently with stories consumers read most frequently. We find that journalists' chosen stories are "soft" with respect to subject matter but not story format, and that these choices diverge from consumers' choices, resulting in a choice gap. The study design makes important methodological contributions by using the story as the unit of analysis, operationalizing "soft news" in terms of subject matter as well as format, and considering the influence of journalists' and consumers' choices on each other. This article discusses the implications of the findings on such issues as the dynamics of agenda setting, the prospects for consumer-authored content, and the watchdog function of the media.