Think about it
Angry expressions induce extensive processing of persuasive appeals
Jimmy Calanchini, Wesley Moons & Diane Mackie
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, May 2016, Pages 88–98
Abstract:
Persuasive appeals sometimes include expressions of anger in an attempt to influence message recipients' thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors. The current research investigated how angry expressions change the way in which a persuasive appeal is considered. In five experiments, participants reported more favorable attitudes towards strong than weak appeals attributed to sources expressing anger, indicating careful processing of those appeals. However, participants reported equally favorable attitudes towards appeals attributed to sources expressing other emotions, indicating a lack of careful processing. Angry expressions induced extensive processing even in those not dispositionally inclined to do so, and also influenced attitudes towards issues related to, but not specifically addressed in, the appeal. Mediation and causal-chain analyses indicate that extensive processing was induced by the threat signaled by angry expressions.
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The SPOT Effect: People Spontaneously Prefer Their Own Theories
Aiden Gregg, Nikhila Mahadevan & Constantine Sedikides
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
People often exhibit confirmation bias: they process information bearing on the truth of their theories in a way that facilitates their continuing to regard those theories as true. Here, we tested whether confirmation bias would emerge even under the most minimal of conditions. Specifically, we tested whether drawing a nominal link between the self and a theory would suffice to bias people towards regarding that theory as true. If, all else equal, people regard the self as good (i.e., engage in self-enhancement), and good theories are true (in accord with their intended function), then people should regard their own theories as true; otherwise put, they should manifest a Spontaneous Preference for their Own Theories (i.e., a SPOT effect). In three experiments, participants were introduced to a theory about which of two imaginary alien species preyed upon the other. Participants then considered in turn several items of evidence bearing on the theory, and each time evaluated the likelihood that the theory was true versus false. As hypothesized, participants regarded the theory as more likely to be true when it was arbitrarily ascribed to them as opposed to an “Alex” (Experiment 1) or to no one (Experiment 2). We also found that the SPOT effect failed to converge with four different indices of self-enhancement (Experiment 3), suggesting it may be distinctive in character.
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The role of magical thinking in forecasting the future
Olga Stavrova & Andrea Meckel
British Journal of Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article explores the role of magical thinking in the subjective probabilities of future chance events. In five experiments, we show that individuals tend to predict a more lucky future (reflected in probability judgements of lucky and unfortunate chance events) for someone who happened to purchase a product associated with a highly moral person than for someone who unknowingly purchased a product associated with a highly immoral person. In the former case, positive events were considered more likely than negative events, whereas in the latter case, the difference in the likelihood judgement of positive and negative events disappeared or even reversed. Our results indicate that this effect is unlikely to be driven by participants’ immanent justice beliefs, the availability heuristic, or experimenter demand. Finally, we show that individuals rely more heavily on magical thinking when their need for control is threatened, thus suggesting that lack of control represents a factor in driving magical thinking in making predictions about the future.
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Teenage Offenders' Ability to Detect Deception in Their Peers
Louise Jupe et al.
Applied Cognitive Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study investigated the deception detection abilities of teenage offenders and teenage non-offenders who made veracity judgments about 12 videotaped interviewees and also explored the behavioural characteristics of teenage liars and truth tellers. The findings revealed that teenage offenders were significantly more accurate in their credibility judgments than teenage non-offenders. However, the offenders' impressive accuracy rates were not as a consequence of using valid cues to deceit. The feedback hypothesis helps to explain why the offenders were more accurate in their decisions: Operating within a criminal environment may mean that teenage offenders frequently lie and are lied to. Consequently, they receive more feedback than non-offenders regarding the effectiveness of their lies as well as how successful they are at detecting lies. As a result, their lie detection ability improves. The current study suggests moving away from individual deceptive cues as predictors of deceit towards a more intuitive and holistic approach to lie detection, such as the Brunswikian Lens Model.
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Evaluating replicability of laboratory experiments in economics
Colin Camerer et al.
Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The reproducibility of scientific findings has been called into question. To contribute data about reproducibility in economics, we replicate 18 studies published in the American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2011-2014. All replications follow predefined analysis plans publicly posted prior to the replications, and have a statistical power of at least 90% to detect the original effect size at the 5% significance level. We find a significant effect in the same direction as the original study for 11 replications (61%); on average the replicated effect size is 66% of the original. The reproducibility rate varies between 67% and 78% for four additional reproducibility indicators, including a prediction market measure of peer beliefs.
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The Overestimation Phenomenon in a Skill-Based Gaming Context: The Case of March Madness Pools
Dae Hee Kwak
Journal of Gambling Studies, March 2016, Pages 107-123
Abstract:
Over 100 million people are estimated to take part in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Championship bracket contests. However, relatively little is known about consumer behavior in skill-based gaming situations (e.g., sports betting). In two studies, we investigated the overestimation phenomenon in the “March Madness” context. In Study 1 (N = 81), we found that individuals who were allowed to make their own predictions were significantly more optimistic about their performance than individuals who did not make their own selections. In Study 2 (N = 197), all subjects participated in a mock competitive bracket pool. In line with the illusion of control theory, results showed that higher self-ratings of probability of winning significantly increased maximum willingness to wager but did not improve actual performance. Lastly, perceptions of high probability of winning significantly contributed to consumers’ enjoyment and willingness to participate in a bracket pool in the future.
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Stephen Gray & David Gallo
Memory & Cognition, February 2016, Pages 242-261
Abstract:
Belief in paranormal psychic phenomena is widespread in the United States, with over a third of the population believing in extrasensory perception (ESP). Why do some people believe, while others are skeptical? According to the cognitive differences hypothesis, individual differences in the way people process information about the world can contribute to the creation of psychic beliefs, such as differences in memory accuracy (e.g., selectively remembering a fortune teller’s correct predictions) or analytical thinking (e.g., relying on intuition rather than scrutinizing evidence). While this hypothesis is prevalent in the literature, few have attempted to empirically test it. Here, we provided the most comprehensive test of the cognitive differences hypothesis to date. In 3 studies, we used online screening to recruit groups of strong believers and strong skeptics, matched on key demographics (age, sex, and years of education). These groups were then tested in laboratory and online settings using multiple cognitive tasks and other measures. Our cognitive testing showed that there were no consistent group differences on tasks of episodic memory distortion, autobiographical memory distortion, or working memory capacity, but skeptics consistently outperformed believers on several tasks tapping analytical or logical thinking as well as vocabulary. These findings demonstrate cognitive similarities and differences between these groups and suggest that differences in analytical thinking and conceptual knowledge might contribute to the development of psychic beliefs. We also found that psychic belief was associated with greater life satisfaction, demonstrating benefits associated with psychic beliefs and highlighting the role of both cognitive and noncognitive factors in understanding these individual differences.
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Economic irrationality is optimal during noisy decision making
Konstantinos Tsetsos et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
According to normative theories, reward-maximizing agents should have consistent preferences. Thus, when faced with alternatives A, B, and C, an individual preferring A to B and B to C should prefer A to C. However, it has been widely argued that humans can incur losses by violating this axiom of transitivity, despite strong evolutionary pressure for reward-maximizing choices. Here, adopting a biologically plausible computational framework, we show that intransitive (and thus economically irrational) choices paradoxically improve accuracy (and subsequent economic rewards) when decision formation is corrupted by internal neural noise. Over three experiments, we show that humans accumulate evidence over time using a “selective integration” policy that discards information about alternatives with momentarily lower value. This policy predicts violations of the axiom of transitivity when three equally valued alternatives differ circularly in their number of winning samples. We confirm this prediction in a fourth experiment reporting significant violations of weak stochastic transitivity in human observers. Crucially, we show that relying on selective integration protects choices against “late” noise that otherwise corrupts decision formation beyond the sensory stage. Indeed, we report that individuals with higher late noise relied more strongly on selective integration. These findings suggest that violations of rational choice theory reflect adaptive computations that have evolved in response to irreducible noise during neural information processing.
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Default-Switching: The Hidden Cost of Defaults
Jon Jachimowicz, Shannon Duncan & Elke Weber
Columbia University Working Paper, February 2016
Abstract:
We examine when and why choice defaults fail to work. One obvious situation is the one where the default option does not match the decision maker's preference. Less obviously, when defaults reduce perceived choice autonomy, decision makers may switch away from a choice default option even when it matches their preferences. We present evidence from a meta-analysis of existing default studies and four lab experiments to provide evidence for the existence of and potential causes for such default-switching. We show that designing default implementations that retain higher perceived decision-making autonomy can help align decision makers' choices with their preferences.
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Insight solutions are correct more often than analytic solutions
Carola Salvi et al.
Thinking & Reasoning, forthcoming
Abstract:
How accurate are insights compared to analytical solutions? In four experiments, we investigated how participants' solving strategies influenced their solution accuracies across different types of problems, including one that was linguistic, one that was visual and two that were mixed visual-linguistic. In each experiment, participants' self-judged insight solutions were, on average, more accurate than their analytic ones. We hypothesised that insight solutions have superior accuracy because they emerge into consciousness in an all-or-nothing fashion when the unconscious solving process is complete, whereas analytic solutions can be guesses based on conscious, prematurely terminated, processing. This hypothesis is supported by the finding that participants' analytic solutions included relatively more incorrect responses (i.e., errors of commission) than timeouts (i.e., errors of omission) compared to their insight responses.
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Using alien coins to test whether simple inference is Bayesian
Peter Cassey et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, March 2016, Pages 497-503
Abstract:
Reasoning and inference are well-studied aspects of basic cognition that have been explained as statistically optimal Bayesian inference. Using a simplified experimental design, we conducted quantitative comparisons between Bayesian inference and human inference at the level of individuals. In 3 experiments, with more than 13,000 participants, we asked people for prior and posterior inferences about the probability that 1 of 2 coins would generate certain outcomes. Most participants’ inferences were inconsistent with Bayes’ rule. Only in the simplest version of the task did the majority of participants adhere to Bayes’ rule, but even in that case, there was a significant proportion that failed to do so. The current results highlight the importance of close quantitative comparisons between Bayesian inference and human data at the individual-subject level when evaluating models of cognition.
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Are Choosers Losers? The Propensity to Under-Delegate in the Face of Potential Gains and Losses
Sebastian Bobadilla-Suarez, Cass Sunstein & Tali Sharot
University College London Working Paper, February 2016
Abstract:
Human beings are often faced with a pervasive problem: whether to make their own decisions or to delegate decision tasks to someone else. Here, we test whether people are inclined to forgo monetary rewards in order to retain agency when faced with choices that could lead to losses and gains. In a simple choice task, we show that even though participants have all the information needed to maximize rewards and minimize losses, they choose to pay in order to control their own payoff. This tendency cannot be explained by participants’ overconfidence in their own ability, as their perceived ability was elicited and accounted for. Rather, the results reflect an intrinsic value for choice, which emerges in the domain of both gains and losses. Moreover, our data indicates that participants are aware that they are making suboptimal choices in the normative sense, but do so anyway, presumably for psychological gains.
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Elliot Panek
Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Explosive growth in the number of options prompts media researchers to consider how selection behavior changes under higher choice conditions. Two experiments demonstrate that choice environments offering options in smaller sets lead users to be more likely to select news content, in particular “hard news” content. A third study incorporates theories of information processing to explain the observed effects of choice environment. The study provides evidence that smaller sets of options lead users to compare the merits of each option, whereas larger sets of options prompt users to quickly scan the environment for an acceptable option.
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Uncovering Uncertainty through Disagreement
Susannah Paletz, Joel Chan & Christian Schunn
Applied Cognitive Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study explored the association between different types of brief disagreements and subsequent levels of expressed psychological uncertainty, a fundamental cognitive aspect of complex problem solving. We examined 11 hours (11 861 utterances) of conversations in expert science teams, sampled across the first 90 days of the Mars Exploration Rover mission. Utterances were independently coded for micro-conflicts and expressed psychological uncertainty. Using time-lagged hierarchical linear modeling applied to blocks of 25 utterances, we found that micro-conflicts regarding rover planning were followed by greater uncertainty. Brief disagreements about science issues were followed by an increase in expressed uncertainty early in the mission. Examining the potential reverse temporal association, uncertainty actually predicted fewer subsequent disagreements, ruling out indirect, third variable associations of conflict and uncertainty. Overall, these findings suggest that some forms of disagreement may serve to uncover important areas of uncertainty in complex teamwork, perhaps via revealing differences in mental models.
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Shefali Patil, Philip Tetlock & Barbara Mellers
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, forthcoming
Abstract:
In dynamic task environments, decision makers are vulnerable to two types of errors: sticking too closely to the rules (excessive conformity) or straying too far from them (excessive deviation). We explore the effects of process and outcome accountability on the susceptibility to these errors. Using a multiple-cue probability-learning task, we show that process accountability encourages conformity errors and outcome accountability promotes deviation errors. Two additional studies explore the moderating effects of self-focused and other-focused group norms. Self-focused norms reduce the effect of process accountability on excessive conformity. Other-focused norms reduce the effect of outcome accountability on excessive deviation. Our results qualify prevailing claims about the benefits of process over outcome accountability and show that those benefits hinge on prevailing group norms, on the effectiveness of prescribed decision rules, and on the amount of irreducible uncertainty in the prediction task.
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The Technology Effect: How Perceptions of Technology Drive Excessive Optimism
Brent Clark, Christopher Robert & Stephen Hampton
Journal of Business and Psychology, March 2016, Pages 87-102
Purpose: We propose that constant exposure to advances in technology has resulted in an implicit association between technology and success that has conditioned decision makers to be overly optimistic about the potential for technology to drive successful outcomes. Three studies examine this phenomenon and explore the boundaries of this “technology effect.”
Design/Methodology/Approach: In Study 1, participants (N = 147) made simulated investment decisions where the information about technology was systematically varied. In Study 2 (N = 143), participants made decisions in a resource dilemma where technology was implicated in determining the amount of a resource available for harvest. Study 3 (N = 53 and N = 60) used two implicit association tests to examine the assumption that people associate technology with success.
Findings: Results supported our assumption about an implicit association between technology and success, as well as a “technology effect” bias in decision making. Signals of high performance trigger the effect, and the effect is more likely when the technology invoked is unfamiliar.
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Meaning Through Fiction: Science Fiction and Innovative Technologies
Markus Appel et al.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, forthcoming
Abstract:
Connecting philosophical and psychological theories on meaning to theories and findings on the real-world influence of fictional stories, the authors argue that science fiction provides meaning for otherwise disconcerting new technologies. An experiment with two points of measurement was conducted. After watching a full-length movie with a humanoid robot in a main role (vs. a control film condition), participants had a clearer understanding of humanoids. This, in turn, was related to a stronger link between the concept of humanoid robots and the self, which predicted a higher willingness to buy or use humanoid robot technology. The results remained stable after a 2-week postexposure delay. Implications regarding the meaning-generating function of fiction, science fiction, and humanoid robots are discussed.
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Rachel Adler, Francisco Iacobelli & Yehuda Gutstein
Computers in Human Behavior, April 2016, Pages 75–81
Abstract:
This research explores ideal methods of persuasion through computer-mediated dialogue. We attempt to identify which persuasive strategy is most successful. We designed a Wizard of Oz laboratory experiment, where participants interact with a human wizard via a custom-developed web-based chat interface. The wizard attempted to persuade participants to learn more about Tai Chi using the following persuasive strategies: Emotional Positive, Emotional Negative, Rational Positive, and Rational Negative. Based on the results of the pre- and post-chat questionnaire, participants’ interest in learning Tai Chi was significantly greater after completing the dialogue and 69% percent of the participants printed a flyer to receive more information. Furthermore, conversations using the Emotional Positive strategies resulted in more successful persuasion than rational ones. The results of our study suggest that Emotional Positive strategies may be the most effective. We also suggest successful strategies as a design guideline for autonomous dialogue systems for persuasion.
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Wanting a Bird’s Eye to Understand Why: Motivated Abstraction and Causal Uncertainty
Jae-Eun Namkoong & Marlone Henderson
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, May 2016, Pages 57–71
Abstract:
When negative events occur (e.g., a breakup, a mass shooting), people naturally ask themselves why such things happen. Recent research has shown that more abstract thinking about negative events fosters less uncertainty about why those events happened. The present research examined a downstream consequence of this effect, namely, whether causal uncertainty activates a goal to think more abstractly. We drew on principles of goal activation, to show that after leading participants to feel more uncertain about a negative event, they were more likely to resume an experience that afforded an opportunity to think more abstractly (i.e., focusing on similarities rather than differences; Experiment 1A and 1B). In further support of our motivational framework, we also show that after leading participants to feel more uncertain about a negative event, they no longer exhibited a more positive attitude towards an experience that afforded an opportunity to think more abstractly once they had the opportunity to actually engage in more abstract thinking (Experiment 2). Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.