What You Know
Memory for tweets versus headlines: Does message consistency matter?
Tori Peña et al.
Applied Cognitive Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
People routinely use news outlets and social media platforms to keep up with recent events. While information from these common sources often aligns in the messages conveyed, news headlines and microblogs on social media also frequently provide contradictory messages. In this study, we examined how people recall and recognize tweets and news headlines when these sources provide inconsistent messaging. We tested this question in person (Experiment 1) and online (Experiment 2). Participants studied news headlines and tweets that provided either consistent messaging or inconsistent messaging, then completed a free recall and recognition memory task sequentially, and provided confidence ratings for recognition judgments. Findings were similar across memory tasks and experiments: Participants had better memory for tweets than news headlines regardless of message consistency. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding memory in the digital age where social media use is widespread and messaging across sources is often inconsistent.
Human and Machine: The Impact of Machine Input on Decision Making Under Cognitive Limitations
Tamer Boyacı, Caner Canyakmaz & Francis de Véricourt
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies by many organizations has recently raised concerns that AI may eventually replace humans in certain tasks. In fact, when used in collaboration, machines can significantly enhance the complementary strengths of humans. Indeed, because of their immense computing power, machines can perform specific tasks with incredible accuracy. In contrast, human decision makers (DMs) are flexible and adaptive but constrained by their limited cognitive capacity. This paper investigates how machine-based predictions may affect the decision process and outcomes of a human DM. We study the impact of these predictions on decision accuracy, the propensity and nature of decision errors, and the DM’s cognitive efforts. To account for both flexibility and limited cognitive capacity, we model the human decision-making process in a rational inattention framework. In this setup, the machine provides the DM with accurate but sometimes incomplete information at no cognitive cost. We fully characterize the impact of machine input on the human decision process in this framework. We show that machine input always improves the overall accuracy of human decisions but may nonetheless increase the propensity of certain types of errors (such as false positives). The machine can also induce the human to exert more cognitive efforts, although its input is highly accurate. Interestingly, this happens when the DM is most cognitively constrained, for instance, because of time pressure or multitasking. Synthesizing these results, we pinpoint the decision environments in which human-machine collaboration is likely to be most beneficial.
More is Better: English Language Statistics are Biased Toward Addition
Bodo Winter et al.
Cognitive Science, April 2023
Abstract:
We have evolved to become who we are, at least in part, due to our general drive to create new things and ideas. When seeking to improve our creations, ideas, or situations, we systematically overlook opportunities to perform subtractive changes. For example, when tasked with giving feedback on an academic paper, reviewers will tend to suggest additional explanations and analyses rather than delete existing ones. Here, we show that this addition bias is systematically reflected in English language statistics along several distinct dimensions. First, we show that words associated with an increase in quantity or number (e.g., add, addition, more, most) are more frequent than words associated with a decrease in quantity or number (e.g., subtract, subtraction, less, least). Second, we show that in binomial expressions, addition-related words are mentioned first, that is, add and subtract rather than subtract and add. Third, we show that the distributional semantics of verbs of change, such as to improve and to transform, overlap more with the distributional semantics of add/increase than subtract/decrease, which suggests that change verbs are implicitly biased toward addition. Fourth, addition-related words have more positive connotations than subtraction-related words. Fifth, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art large language models, such as the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT-3), are also biased toward addition. We discuss the implications of our results for research on cognitive biases and decision-making.
Using the internet “raises the bar” for precision in self-produced question answering
Kristy Hamilton, Jessica Siler & Aaron Benjamin
Applied Cognitive Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
When responding to queries for information, people control the grain size (precision–coarseness) of the information they communicate based on competing goals of accuracy and informativeness (Goldsmith & Koriat, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1999, 19, 167). Two experiments examined whether the act of searching for answers using the internet influences the granularity of the information people later choose to report. Participants who searched the internet for answers to general information questions later provided more precise (granular) estimates to questions in the absence of the internet when compared to participants who initially answered questions from memory and participants who initially were not asked any questions. These results indicate that searching the internet influences metacognitive processes underlying decisions about the granularity of the information we choose to communicate. The internet may “raise the bar” with respect to the informativeness of the information we feel obliged to offer.
Lost in the mall again: A preregistered replication and extension of Loftus & Pickrell (1995)
Gillian Murphy et al.
Memory, forthcoming
Abstract:
The seminal Lost in the Mall study has been enormously influential in psychology and is still cited in legal cases. The current study directly replicated this paper, addressing methodological weaknesses including increasing the sample size fivefold and preregistering detailed analysis plans. Participants (N = 123) completed a survey and two interviews where they discussed real and fabricated childhood events, based on information provided by an older relative. We replicated the findings of the original study, coding 35% of participants as reporting a false memory for getting lost in a mall in childhood (compared to 25% in the original study). In an extension, we found that participants self-reported high rates of memories and beliefs for the fabricated event. Mock jurors were also highly likely to believe the fabricated event had occurred and that the participant was truly remembering the event, supporting the conclusions of the original study.
What can machine learning teach us about habit formation? Evidence from exercise and hygiene
Anastasia Buyalskaya et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 25 April 2023
Abstract:
We apply a machine learning technique to characterize habit formation in two large panel data sets with objective measures of 1) gym attendance (over 12 million observations) and 2) hospital handwashing (over 40 million observations). Our Predicting Context Sensitivity (PCS) approach identifies context variables that best predict behavior for each individual. This approach also creates a time series of overall predictability for each individual. These time series predictability values are used to trace a habit formation curve for each individual, operationalizing the time of habit formation as the asymptotic limit of when behavior becomes highly predictable. Contrary to the popular belief in a “magic number” of days to develop a habit, we find that it typically takes months to form the habit of going to the gym but weeks to develop the habit of handwashing in the hospital. Furthermore, we find that gymgoers who are more predictable are less responsive to an intervention designed to promote more gym attendance, consistent with past experiments showing that habit formation generates insensitivity to reward devaluation.
A Dynamic Analysis of Conspiratorial Narratives on Twitter During the Pandemic
Chun Shao et al.
Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, forthcoming
Abstract:
Since the breakout of COVID-19 in late 2019, various conspiracy theories have spread widely on social media and other channels, fueling misinformation about the origins of COVID-19 and the motives of those working to combat it. This study analyzes tweets (N = 313,088) collected over a 9-month period in 2020, which mention a set of well-known conspiracy theories about the role of Bill Gates during the pandemic. Using a topic modeling technique (i.e., Biterm Topic Model), this study identified ten salient topics surrounding Bill Gates on Twitter, and we further investigated the interactions between different topics using Granger causality tests. The results demonstrate that emotionally charged conspiratorial narratives are more likely to breed other conspiratorial narratives in the following days. The findings show that each conspiracy theory is not isolated by itself. Instead, they are highly dynamic and interwoven. This study presents new empirical insights into how conspiracy theories spread and interact during crises. Practical and theoretical implications are also discussed.
Homo indifferencus: Effects of unavailable options on preference construction
Evan Polman & Rusty Stough
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, forthcoming
Abstract:
People want what they cannot have. Yet would people still covet a forgone option when they have no initial preference for it? We examined this question in two parts by identifying five unique types of choice indifference and testing what choices people make when they have “no preference” for receiving an endowed good that subsequently becomes unavailable. First, we found that feeling indifferent among options is a common response to making decisions; furthermore, we found that previously established effects are significantly altered when accounting for participants' indifference. Second, when people experience the loss of a would-be endowed option, we found that they replace it with a similar option, to such an extent that they choose an option that is inferior to other available options. Together, our results demonstrate that the classic endowment effect does not only emerge after people are endowed but beforehand. That is, when people expect to be endowed with a good, they behave like it is already theirs and replace its loss with a similar good even when (1) they are initially indifferent to it and (2) they could choose something better.
Awe and social conformity: Awe promotes the endorsement of social norms and conformity to the majority opinion
Claire Prade & Vassilis Saroglou
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Given that awe experiences promote collective identity and decrease self-importance, we reasoned that they should lead individuals to be more prone to cherish social conformity value and to adopt conformity behaviors. In two online experiments (N = 593), compared to neutral and amusement emotional states, awe was found to drive individuals to value the respect of social norms in a greater extent (Experiment 1), and to lead individuals to conform to the majority opinion on an evaluative judgment task (Experiment 2). The present research provides the first empirical evidence of awe as leading to conformity and, although more research is needed, it offers important theoretical implications about the social function of awe as well as, more generally, the importance of emotions in social influence situations.
Foreign language reduces false memories by increasing memory monitoring
Leight Grant et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
People have false memories that distort their recollection of past events. Language is an important source of such memories, from providing false inferences to outright misinformation. Here we investigate the impact of using a native or foreign language on bilinguals’ susceptibility to false memories. Although language has been argued to impact false memories in multiple ways, our study was inspired by recent work in the decision-making literature, which leads to the novel hypothesis that foreign language encourages people to engage in careful memory monitoring that could reduce false memories. This hypothesis contrasts with a processing load account, which predicts that a foreign language would increase false memories because it is naturally more difficult to process information in a foreign language. We tested these hypotheses using two false memory tasks. Using the DRM task, Experiment 1 found that individuals were more accurate in identifying false memories when using their foreign language compared with their native tongue, consistent with the memory monitoring hypothesis. Using the misinformation task, Experiment 2 found that processing misleading information in one's foreign language eliminated false memories, again supporting the hypothesis that a foreign language increases the use of memory monitoring. These findings support a monitoring hypothesis that has been overlooked in prior studies on bilingualism and false memory, with implications for billions of people who regularly use a foreign language.
Spoiler alert: How narrative film captures attention
Anna-Lisa Cohen et al.
Applied Cognitive Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Narrative transportation is a state of total immersion that arises when one becomes engaged in a story. In Cohen et al. (2015), participants viewed a suspenseful film either with order of scenes intact or scrambled (out of chronological order). Participants had to remember to raise their hand every time they heard a film character say the word “gun.” Results revealed participants were less likely to remember this instruction in the intact condition because their attention shifted away from processing their own goals to the goals of the protagonist. In three studies, we examined the boundary conditions of this effect by including a spoiler by telling participants the film ending (Study 1), having participants view the film individually or in groups (Study 2), and offering a reward incentive (Study 3). Overall, results showed that knowing the ending of the story did not improve performance, however, offering an incentive did boost goal maintenance. Implications of these findings are discussed.