Thought Pattern
Two-Sided Messages Promote Openness for a Variety of Deeply Entrenched Attitudes
Mengran Xu & Richard Petty
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prior research showed that people holding attitudes on relatively moral topics became more open to two- rather than one-sided messages as the moral basis of their attitudes increased. Across three studies (N = 963), we extend this finding to relatively non-moral topics by demonstrating that two-sided messages can encourage people with strong attitudes indexed by various non-moral attitude strength measures to be more open to contrary positions. Study 1 demonstrated this for four indicators of attitude strength (e.g., certainty). As the strength of one’s attitude increased, two-sided messages increased in relative effectiveness over one-sided communication. This was mediated by perceived appreciation for the speaker acknowledging one’s view. Study 2 replicated this finding in a preregistered experiment. Study 3 conceptually replicated and extended it to people holding attitudes based on their political identity. Finally, evidence was obtained supporting perceived appreciation (rather than source evaluation) as the key driver of this interactive effect.
There is an ‘I’ in truth: How salient identities shape dynamic perceptions of truth
Chris Wang, Michael Platow & Eryn Newman
European Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research examined the hypothesis that people judge as true those claims aligned with the normative content of their salient social identities. In Experiment 1a, participants’ social identities were manipulated by assigning them to ‘inductive-thinker’ and ‘intuitive-thinker’ groups. Participants subsequently made truth judgements about aphorisms randomly associated with ‘science’ and ‘popular wisdom’. Those with salient inductive-thinker social identities judged science-based claims as more truthful than popular wisdom-based claims to a greater extent than those with salient intuitive-thinker social identities. Experiment 1b was a preregistered replication, with additional conditions eliminating an alternative semantic-priming explanation. In Experiment 2, American Conservatives and Liberals judged as more true claims associated with the ideological content of their social identities. This difference was attenuated through a manipulation that framed participants as more moderate than they had originally indicated. Overall, these experiments suggest an identity-truth malleability, such that making salient specific social identities can lead to related perceptions of truth normatively aligned with those identities.
Listening speaks to our intuition while reading promotes analytic thought
Janet Geipel & Boaz Keysar
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
It is widely assumed that thinking is independent of language modality because an argument is either logically valid or invalid regardless of whether we read or hear it. This is taken for granted in areas such as psychology, medicine, and the law. Contrary to this assumption, we demonstrate that thinking from spoken information leads to more intuitive performance compared with thinking from written information. Consequently, we propose that people think more intuitively in the spoken modality and more analytically in the written modality. This effect was robust in five experiments (N = 1,243), across a wide range of thinking tasks, from simple trivia questions to complex syllogisms, and it generalized across two different languages, English and Chinese. We show that this effect is consistent with neuroscientific findings and propose that modality dependence could result from how language modalities emerge in development and are used over time. This finding sheds new light on the way language influences thought and has important implications for research that relies on linguistic materials and for domains where thinking and reasoning are central such as law, medicine, and business.
Implicit theories of opportunity: When opportunity fails to knock, keep waiting, or start cultivating?
Paul O'Keefe et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We live in a time of disappearing professions, pandemic-related upheaval, and growing social inequality. While recognizing that good opportunities are unequally distributed in society (an injustice that requires rectification), can beliefs about the nature and workings of opportunities help people see the door to their goals as more open than closed, and can these beliefs influence the likelihood of goal attainment? Seven studies (N = 1,031) examined people’s beliefs about whether or not opportunities can be changed (growth vs. fixed theory of opportunity). In Studies 1a–4, participants responded to scenarios about competent people (or themselves) with challenging, long-term aspirations. When opportunities were available, both theories predicted high expectations for success and a preference for active strategies to pursue the goal, like being persistent. By contrast, when opportunities seemed unavailable, a stronger fixed theory predicted lower expectations for success and a preference for passive strategies, like simply waiting. We also established the implicit theories’ causal role and demonstrated processes explaining how a growth theory leads to higher anticipated success. The final two studies examined unemployed people. In Study 5, those with a stronger growth theory chose to engage more in a task about cultivating new opportunities for employment. Study 6 showed that those with a stronger growth theory were more likely to report securing employment 5 months later, even when controlling for motivation-relevant variables, education, and socioeconomic status. They also engaged in more active job-search strategies. These studies offer a novel perspective on when, how, and why people initiate and maintain goal pursuit.
Risky Sure Things
Yuval Rottenstreich, Alex Markle & Johannes Müller-Trede
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Decision research often takes the variability of potential outcomes as a measure of risk. It thus characterizes sure things, which, by definition, guarantee a specific outcome, as safe. But is this characterization always empirically valid? We show that, when the prevailing reference point is an uncertain option or position, sure things can be perceived as risky rather than safe. Furthermore, preferences may hinge on such perceptions: when construed as risky, sure things can be less appealing. Our findings suggest a perception-based explanation for why the classic tendency to favor sure things over uncertain options is often attenuated given an uncertain reference point. More broadly, they tap an unresolved debate about the determinants of decisions. Much research focuses on taste-based determinants, such as attitudes toward perceived risks, and thereby underplays the critical role of the underlying perceptions. Appreciating the impact of perceptions on decision making leads to novel prescriptive recommendations.
Using curiosity to incentivize the choice of “should” options
Evan Polman, Rachel Ruttan & Joann Peck
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, November 2022
Abstract:
Drawing on people’s motivation to whet their curiosity, we tested a previously unexplored solution to reconciling want/should conflicts. Past work has shown that people are motivated to satisfy their curiosity and find enjoyment in doing so. Our work shows that piquing people’s curiosity can be leveraged to influence their choices, by steering them away from tempting “want” options (e.g., choosing unhealthy foods, watching lowbrow films, taking the elevator), and toward less-than-tempting, though normatively desirable “should” options. In two lab and two field studies, we created curiosity lures — incentives that pique people’s curiosity and deliver its closure on the condition people choose the “should” option over the “want” option. In all, our nudges were successful and highlight the external validity of our research. Notably, we observed a 9.8% increase in stairwell-use, and a 10% increase in fruit-and-vegetable purchases when we tested curiosity lures in large-scale field experiments totaling over 100,000 observations.
Human-level play in the game of Diplomacy by combining language models with strategic reasoning
Meta AI team
Science, 9 December 2022, Pages 1067-1074
Abstract:
Despite much progress in training AI systems to imitate human language, building agents that use language to communicate intentionally with humans in interactive environments remains a major challenge. We introduce Cicero, the first AI agent to achieve human-level performance in Diplomacy, a strategy game involving both cooperation and competition that emphasizes natural language negotiation and tactical coordination between seven players. Cicero integrates a language model with planning and reinforcement learning algorithms by inferring players' beliefs and intentions from its conversations and generating dialogue in pursuit of its plans. Across 40 games of an anonymous online Diplomacy league, Cicero achieved more than double the average score of the human players and ranked in the top 10% of participants who played more than one game.