Tough Decisions
Yes We Can: Belief in Progress as Compensatory Control
Bastiaan Rutjens, Frenk van Harreveld & Joop van der Pligt
Social Psychological and Personality Science, July 2010, Pages 246-252
Abstract:
The present research shows that belief in progress helps to alleviate the aversive experience of low levels of control. When control is low, believing in progress provides people with the promise of future control in a broader sense. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants lacking control disagreed more with an essay on the illusory nature of human progress. Experiment 3 corroborated these findings in a field study comparing airplane passengers with a nonairborne control group. Experiment 4 assessed belief in progress more directly and showed an increased willingness to invest in specific fields of progress-oriented research when personal control was low. Moreover, participants lacking control showed an increased preference for high-tech solutions to combat environmental problems and believed more firmly in scientific and moral progress.
-----------------------
Evan Apfelbaum, Anne Krendl & Nalini Ambady
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Conventional wisdom suggests that older adults are more likely than young adults to speak their mind. Age-related executive function (EF) decline is believed to underlie this tendency by weakening older adults' capacity to inhibit responses. While age-related EF decline disrupts social and cognitive functioning in many domains, such degeneration may also carry the unforeseen benefit of improving communication in uncomfortable social contexts. We examined the performance of relatively low and high EF older adults and young adults on the socially distressing task of providing critical advice to a troubled obese teenager. Relative to higher EF older adults and younger adults, lower EF older adults were more open, provided more advice, and were seen as more empathic. Moreover, doctors specializing in obesity treatment rated lower EF older adults' advice to the teen as having greater potential for prompting a lifestyle change. Our findings suggest a potential silver lining to age-related cognitive decline.
-----------------------
The Locus of Choice: Personal Causality and Satisfaction with Hedonic and Utilitarian Decisions
Simona Botti & Ann McGill
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Consumers may consume the same products or services with different goals, for example for their own pleasure - a hedonic goal - or to achieve some higher level purpose - a utilitarian goal. This article investigates whether this difference in goals influences satisfaction with an outcome that was either self-chosen or externally determined. In four experiments we manipulate consumption goals controlling for the outcomes, the option valence, and whether the externally made choice was determined by an expert or at random. Results show that the outcome of a self-made choice is more satisfying than the outcome of an externally made choice when the goal is hedonic, but not when it is utilitarian. We hypothesize that this effect results from the greater perceived personal causality associated with terminally motivated activities, such as hedonic choices, relative to instrumentally motivated activities, such as utilitarian choices, and provide evidence that support this explanation over alternative accounts.
-----------------------
The neural basis of rationalization: Cognitive dissonance reduction during decision-making
Johanna Jarcho, Elliot Berkman & Matthew Lieberman
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
People rationalize the choices they make when confronted with difficult decisions by claiming they never wanted the option they did not choose. Behavioral studies on cognitive dissonance provide evidence for decision-induced attitude change, but these studies cannot fully uncover the mechanisms driving the attitude change because only pre- and post-decision attitudes are measured, rather than the process of change itself. In the first fMRI study to examine the decision phase in a decision-based cognitive dissonance paradigm, we observed that increased activity in right-inferior frontal gyrus, medial fronto-parietal regions and ventral striatum, and decreased activity in anterior insula were associated with subsequent decision-related attitude change. These findings suggest the characteristic rationalization processes that are associated with decision-making may be engaged very quickly at the moment of the decision, without extended deliberation and may involve reappraisal-like emotion regulation processes.
-----------------------
When deserving translates into causing: The effect of cognitive load on immanent justice reasoning
Mitchell Callan, Robbie Sutton & Cristina Dovale
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In immanent justice reasoning, negative events are attributed to some prior moral failing, even in the absence of a physically plausible causal link between them. Drawing on just-world theory, we examined immanent justice reasoning as an intuitive, deservingness-guided form of causal judgment. Participants were exposed to a story about a man who either did or did not cheat on his wife and who was subsequently injured in a car accident. Under either high or low cognitive load, participants rated the extent to which they believed the accident was the result of the man's prior moral failings. The results showed that participants causally attributed the man's accident to his prior conduct when he was immoral (vs. not immoral) more strongly under high cognitive load. Further, moderated mediation analyses showed that perceived deservingness of the accident mediated the effect of the man's prior immoral behavior on immanent justice attributions more strongly under high cognitive load. These results offer support for the notion that immanent justice attributions reflect an automatic tendency to assume that people get what they deserve.
-----------------------
Examining Laughter Functionality in Jury Deliberations
Joann Keyton & Stephenson Beck
Small Group Research, August 2010, Pages 386-407
Abstract:
Despite a presumption that laughter and a death penalty decision seem incompatible, transcript data of jury deliberations from both the guilt-or-innocence and penalty phases of the State of Ohio v. Mark Ducic trial demonstrate that jurors do laugh. Working from the disparate literature on laughter, we problematized laughter from a group communication perspective and analyzed its functionality in jury interaction. The authors identified and analyzed 51 laughter sequences across 414 transcript pages. Three categories of laughter functions (i.e., relational, processual, and informational) were identified; these categories were further detailed by 6, 10, and 10 subfunctions, respectively. Based on these findings, the authors revised their definition of laughter to incorporate its multifunctionality as vocalic and public emotional displays that (a) can be read as positive, negative, or ambiguous and (b) question, control, and regulate relationships, procedures, and information in the group. That laughter can be read in so many ways suggests that one role of laughter may be to create ambiguity to allow the group a chance to figure out what to do next.
-----------------------
Frames, decisions, and cardiac-autonomic control
Stefan Sutterlin, Cornelia Herbert, Michael Schmitt, Andrea Kubler & Claus Vogele
Social Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
The "framing effect" (FE) describes the phenomenon whereby human choices are susceptible to the way they are presented rather than objective information. The present study extends common decision-making paradigms with frame variation by including inhibitory control, operationalized as vagally mediated heart rate variability (HRV) at rest and motor response inhibition during a stop-signal task (SST). We hypothesized that inhibitory control is inversely associated with susceptibility to framing effects. Forty adult volunteers performed a risky-choice framing task in which identical information about wins and losses was presented using loss or gain frames. As predicted, there was an inverse association between HRV and framing effects, accounting for 23% of the variance in framing effects. Inhibitory control as indexed by performance in the SST was not associated with framing effects. These results are discussed in terms of the role of inhibitory processes (as indicated by vagal activity) for decision-making processes.
-----------------------
Work or Fun? How Task Construal and Completion Influence Regulatory Behavior
Juliano Laran & Chris Janiszewski
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Volitional behaviors can be construed as "work" (extrinsically motivated) or as "fun" (intrinsically motivated). When volitional behaviors are construed as an obligation to work, completing the behavior depletes a consumer and subsequent self-control becomes more difficult. When volitional behaviors are construed as an opportunity to have fun, completing the behavior vitalizes a consumer and subsequent self-control becomes easier. Six studies show how individual differences and contextual factors influence the construal of a task, the motivation for completing it, and subsequent regulatory behavior.
-----------------------
Adult age differences in learning from positive and negative probabilistic feedback
Jessica Simon, James Howard & Darlene Howard
Neuropsychology, July 2010, Pages 534-541
Objective: Past research has investigated age differences in frontal-based decision making, but few studies have focused on the behavioral effects of striatal-based changes in healthy aging. Feedback learning has been found to vary with dopamine levels; increases in dopamine facilitate learning from positive feedback, whereas decreases facilitate learning from negative feedback. Given previous evidence of striatal dopamine depletion in healthy aging, we investigated behavioral differences between college-aged and healthy older adults using a feedback learning task that is sensitive to both frontal and striatal processes.
Method: Seventeen college-aged (M = 18.9 years) and 24 healthy, older adults (M = 70.3 years) completed the Probabilistic Selection task, in which participants are trained on probabilistic stimulus-outcome information and then tested to determine whether they learned more from positive or negative feedback.
Results: As a group, the older adults learned equally well from positive and negative feedback, whereas the college-aged group learned more from positive than negative feedback, F(1, 39) = 4.10, p < .05, reffect = .3. However, these group differences were not due to older individuals being more balanced learners. Most individuals of both ages were balanced learners, but while all of the remaining young learners had a positive bias, the remaining older learners were split between those with positive and negative learning biases (χ²(2) = 6.12, p < .047).
Conclusions: These behavioral results are consistent with the dopamine theory of striatal aging, and suggest there might be adult age differences in the kinds of information people use when faced with a current choice.
-----------------------
The effects of majority versus minority source status on persuasion: A self-validation analysis
Javier Horcajo, Richard Petty & Pablo Briñol
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present research proposes that sources in the numerical majority (vs. minority) can affect persuasion by influencing the confidence with which people hold their thoughts in response to the persuasive message. Participants received a persuasive message composed of either strong or weak arguments that was presented by a majority or a minority source. Consistent with the self-validation hypothesis, we predicted and found that the majority (vs. minority) status of the source increased the confidence with which recipients held their thoughts. As a consequence, majority (vs. minority) sources increased argument quality effects in persuasion when source status information followed message processing (Experiment 1). In contrast, when the information regarding source status preceded (rather than followed) the persuasive message, it validated the perception of the position advocated, reducing message processing. As a consequence of having more confidence in the position advocated before receiving the message, majority (vs. minority) sources reduced argument quality effects in persuasion (Experiment 2). Finally, Experiment 3 isolated the timing of the source status manipulation, revealing that sources in the numerical majority (vs. minority) can increase or decrease persuasion to strong arguments depending on whether source status is introduced before or after processing the message.
-----------------------
Necessary for Possession: How People Reason About the Acquisition of Ownership
Ori Friedman
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
For property rights to be upheld, people need to be able to judge how ownership is established. Previous research suggests that people may judge that the first person to possess an object establishes ownership over it. This article proposes and tests an alternative account, which claims that people decide who owns an object by judging who was probably necessary for the object to be possessed. Participants read stories in which one character pursues an object (e.g., an animal being hunted, a gem jutting out of a high cliff), which a second character then captures. Judgments about which character owns the object depended on which character was plausibly necessary for capturing the object. The findings support the "necessary for possession" account and suggest that people's judgments about ownership likely depend on counterfactual reasoning or on processes akin to those used to make judgments about causality.
-----------------------
Counterfactual Thinking in the Jury Room
Sun Wolf
Small Group Research, August 2010, Pages 474-494
Abstract:
There may be no more intense group task experience than serving as a decision-making juror on a death penalty case, where a group of strangers is asked to decide whether another person should live or die. Using the deliberation transcripts from the ABC News documentary In the Jury Room, the double homicide trial of State of Ohio v. Mark Ducic was examined to learn more about communication during a jury's decision-making process. Counterfactual thinking involves the creation of fictional narratives (concerning past events or anticipated future events) about how an outcome might have been (or might still be) different. Decisional regret theory was used to assess if high salience of the evidence and verdict would produce counterfactual thinking for individual jurors and subsequent shared counterfactual talk during deliberations, as well as anticipatory regret for the decisional choices. Results found exemplars of shared counterfactual talk in both the guilt-innocence phase of deliberations and the sentencing phase, in which jurors considered the death penalty. In addition to counterfactual talk, jurors (both individually and in short dialogues) shared anxieties about anticipated verdict regret.
-----------------------
Todd Warner & Kerri Pickel
Psychology, Crime & Law, July 2010, Pages 493-506
Abstract:
Prior research demonstrates that observers rate videotaped confessions as more voluntary if the camera focuses on the suspect rather than on the interrogator or on both individuals. The present study extends this finding by examining whether the amount of detail within the content of a confession interacts with camera perspective to influence jurors' assessments. Mock jurors viewed a videotaped confession embedded within a murder trial that contained either a high or low amount of detail about the crime. The confession was recorded with the camera focused either on the defendant, on the defendant and detective equally, or on the detective. As predicted, the amount of detail had no effect when the camera focused either on the detective or on both individuals equally. However, in the defendant-focused condition, a high rather than low detail confession led jurors to conclude that the defendant had a better memory for the crime, to rate his confession as more authentic and incriminating, and to view him as more likely guilty.
-----------------------
Young Children Use Statistical Sampling to Infer the Preferences of Other People
Tamar Kushnir, Fei Xu & Henry Wellman
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Psychological scientists use statistical information to determine the workings of human behavior. We argue that young children do so as well. Over the course of a few years, children progress from viewing human actions as intentional and goal directed to reasoning about the psychological causes underlying such actions. Here, we show that preschoolers and 20-month-old infants can use statistical information - namely, a violation of random sampling - to infer that an agent is expressing a preference for one type of toy instead of another type of toy. Children saw a person remove five toys of one type from a container of toys. Preschoolers and infants inferred that the person had a preference for that type of toy when there was a mismatch between the sampled toys and the population of toys in the box. Mere outcome consistency, time spent with the toys, and positive attention toward the toys did not lead children to infer a preference. These findings provide an important demonstration of how statistical learning could underpin the rapid acquisition of early psychological knowledge.
-----------------------
Economic choices can be made using only stimulus values
Klaus Wunderlich, Antonio Rangel & John O'Doherty
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Decision-making often involves choices between different stimuli, each of which is associated with a different physical action. A growing consensus suggests that the brain makes such decisions by assigning a value to each available option and then comparing them to make a choice. An open question in decision neuroscience is whether the brain computes these choices by comparing the values of stimuli directly in goods space or instead by first assigning values to the associated actions and then making a choice over actions. We used a functional MRI paradigm in which human subjects made choices between different stimuli with and without knowledge of the actions required to obtain the different stimuli. We found neural correlates of the value of the chosen stimulus (a postdecision signal) in ventromedial prefrontal cortex before the actual stimulus-action pairing was revealed. These findings provide support for the hypothesis that the brain is capable of making choices in the space of goods without first transferring values into action space.
-----------------------
Daniel Acuña & Víctor Parada
PLoS ONE, July 2010, e11685
Abstract:
Humans need to solve computationally intractable problems such as visual search, categorization, and simultaneous learning and acting, yet an increasing body of evidence suggests that their solutions to instantiations of these problems are near optimal. Computational complexity advances an explanation to this apparent paradox: (1) only a small portion of instances of such problems are actually hard, and (2) successful heuristics exploit structural properties of the typical instance to selectively improve parts that are likely to be sub-optimal. We hypothesize that these two ideas largely account for the good performance of humans on computationally hard problems. We tested part of this hypothesis by studying the solutions of 28 participants to 28 instances of the Euclidean Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). Participants were provided feedback on the cost of their solutions and were allowed unlimited solution attempts (trials). We found a significant improvement between the first and last trials and that solutions are significantly different from random tours that follow the convex hull and do not have self-crossings. More importantly, we found that participants modified their current better solutions in such a way that edges belonging to the optimal solution ("good" edges) were significantly more likely to stay than other edges ("bad" edges), a hallmark of structural exploitation. We found, however, that more trials harmed the participants' ability to tell good from bad edges, suggesting that after too many trials the participants "ran out of ideas." In sum, we provide the first demonstration of significant performance improvement on the TSP under repetition and feedback and evidence that human problem-solving may exploit the structure of hard problems paralleling behavior of state-of-the-art heuristics.