Decisions, Decisions
The Role of Cognitive Resources in Determining Our Moral Intuitions: Are We All Liberals at Heart?
Jennifer Cole Wright & Galen Baril
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent research provides evidence that one important difference between liberals and conservatives is their basic moral intuitions. These studies suggest that while liberals and conservatives respond equally to considerations of harm/care and fairness (what Graham & Haidt call the "individualizing" foundations), conservatives also respond strongly to considerations of in-group, authority, and purity (the "binding" foundations) while liberals do not. Our study examined two alternative hypotheses for this difference - the first being that liberals cognitively override, and the alternative being that conservatives cognitively enhance, their binding foundation intuitions. Using self-regulation depletion and cognitive load tasks to compromise people's ability to monitor and regulate their automatic moral responses, we found support for the latter hypothesis - when cognitive resources were depleted/distracted, conservatives became more like liberals (de-prioritizing the binding foundations), rather than the other way around. This provides support for the view that conservatism is a form of motivated social cognition.
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Rom Schrift, Oded Netzer & Ran Kivetz
Journal of Marketing Research, April 2011, Pages 308-326
Abstract:
A great deal of research in consumer decision making and social cognition has explored consumers' attempts to simplify choices by bolstering their tentative choice candidate and/or denigrating the other alternatives. The current research investigates a diametrically opposed process, whereby consumers complicate their decisions. The authors demonstrate that to complicate their choices, consumers increase choice conflict by overweighting small disadvantages of superior alternatives, converging overall evaluations of alternatives, reversing preference ordering, and even choosing less preferred alternatives. Furthermore, the results from five studies support a unifying theoretical framework: the effort-compatibility principle. Specifically, the authors argue that consumers strive for compatibility between the effort they anticipate and the effort that they actually exert. When a decision seems more difficult than initially expected, a simplifying process ensues. However, when the decision seems easier to resolve than anticipated (e.g., when consumers face an important yet easy choice), consumers artificially increase their effort.
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Strategy and PowerPoint: An Inquiry into the Epistemic Culture and Machinery of Strategy Making
Sarah Kaplan
Organization Science, March-April 2011, Pages 320-346
Abstract:
PowerPoint has come to dominate organizational life in general and strategy making in particular. The technology is lauded by its proponents as a powerful tool for communication and excoriated by its critics as dangerously simplifying. This study takes a deeper look into how PowerPoint is mobilized in strategy making through an ethnographic study inside one organization. It treats PowerPoint as a technology embedded in the discursive practices of strategic knowledge production and suggests that these practices make up the epistemic or knowledge culture of the organization. Conceptualizing culture as composed of practices foregrounds the "machineries" of knowing. Results from a genre analysis of PowerPoint use suggest that it should not be characterized simply as effective or ineffective, as current PowerPoint controversies do. Instead, I show how the affordances of PowerPoint enabled the difficult task of collaborating to negotiate meaning in an uncertain environment, creating spaces for discussion, making recombinations possible, allowing for adjustments as ideas evolved, and providing access to a wide range of actors. These affordances also facilitated cartographic efforts to draw boundaries around the scope of a strategy by certifying certain ideas and allowing document owners to include or exclude certain slides or participants. These discursive practices - collaboration and cartography - are part of the "epistemic machinery" of strategy culture. This analysis demonstrates that strategy making is not only about analysis of industry structure, competitive positioning, or resources, as assumed in content-based strategy research, but it is also about how the production and use of PowerPoint documents that shape these ideas.
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Davide Rigoni et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The feeling of being in control of one's own actions is a strong subjective experience. However, discoveries in psychology and neuroscience challenge the validity of this experience and suggest that free will is just an illusion. This raises a question: What would happen if people started to disbelieve in free will? Previous research has shown that low control beliefs affect performance and motivation. Recently, it has been shown that undermining free-will beliefs influences social behavior. In the study reported here, we investigated whether undermining beliefs in free will affects brain correlates of voluntary motor preparation. Our results showed that the readiness potential was reduced in individuals induced to disbelieve in free will. This effect was evident more than 1 s before participants consciously decided to move, a finding that suggests that the manipulation influenced intentional actions at preconscious stages. Our findings indicate that abstract belief systems might have a much more fundamental affect than previously thought.
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Divergent effects of different positive emotions on moral judgment
Nina Strohminger, Richard Lewis & David Meyer
Cognition, May 2011, Pages 295-300
Abstract:
Positive emotions are often treated as relatively similar in their cognitive-behavioral effects, and as having unambiguously beneficial consequences. For example, Valdesolo and DeSteno (2006) reported that a humorous video made people more prone to choose a utilitarian solution to a moral dilemma. They attributed this finding to increased positive affect. To determine whether such results actually stem in general from positive affect or from other more specific properties of humor, we conducted an experiment with moral dilemmas presented during an interleaved emotion-induction procedure involving mirth and another positive emotion, elevation. Mirth increased permissiveness for deontological violations, whereas elevation had the opposite effect. Furthermore, affective valence had no apparent independent influence on these judgments. Our results suggest that mirth and elevation have distinct cognitive consequences whose properties reflect their respective social functions, not their shared positive valence.
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The effects of process and outcome accountability on judgment process and performance
Bart de Langhe, Stijn van Osselaer & Berend Wierenga
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article challenges the view that it is always better to hold decision makers accountable for their decision process rather than their decision outcomes. In three multiple-cue judgment studies, the authors show that process accountability, relative to outcome accountability, consistently improves judgment quality in relatively simple elemental tasks. However, this performance advantage of process accountability does not generalize to more complex configural tasks. This is because process accountability improves an analytical process based on cue abstraction, while it does not change a holistic process based on exemplar memory. Cue abstraction is only effective in elemental tasks (in which outcomes are a linear additive combination of cues) but not in configural tasks (in which outcomes depend on interactions between the cues). In addition, Studies 2 and 3 show that the extent to which process and outcome accountability affect judgment quality depends on individual differences in analytical intelligence and rational thinking style.
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To trade or not to trade: The moderating role of vividness when exchanging gambles
Michal Maimaran
Judgment and Decision Making, Febuary 2011, Pages 147-155
Abstract:
Individuals are generally reluctant to trade goods - a phenomenon identified as the endowment effect. This paper focuses on consumers' puzzling reluctance to exchange gambles, and in particular lottery tickets with identical distribution (i.e., same odds of winning), and identifies the ticket's vividness as an important moderator. Three studies demonstrate that individuals are more willing to exchange less vivid lottery tickets (e.g., tickets concealed in envelopes, or tickets with an unknown number) compared to more vivid tickets (e.g., tickets not concealed in envelopes, or tickets with a known number) when offered an incentive to exchange. Moreover, this effect is mediated by anticipated regret, such that less regret is anticipated when exchanging less vivid tickets, thus increasing individuals' willingness to exchange tickets.
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Sleep Deprivation Biases the Neural Mechanisms Underlying Economic Preferences
Vinod Venkatraman et al.
Journal of Neuroscience, 9 March 2011, Pages 3712-3718
Abstract:
A single night of sleep deprivation (SD) evoked a strategy shift during risky decision making such that healthy human volunteers moved from defending against losses to seeking increased gains. This change in economic preferences was correlated with the magnitude of an SD-driven increase in ventromedial prefrontal activation as well as by an SD-driven decrease in anterior insula activation during decision making. Analogous changes were observed during receipt of reward outcomes: elevated activation to gains in ventromedial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum, but attenuated anterior insula activation following losses. Finally, the observed shift in economic preferences was not correlated with change in psychomotor vigilance. These results suggest that a night of total sleep deprivation affects the neural mechanisms underlying economic preferences independent of its effects on vigilant attention.
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Seeking Confirmation Is Rational for Deterministic Hypotheses
Joseph Austerweil & Thomas Griffiths
Cognitive Science, April 2011, Pages 499-526
Abstract:
The tendency to test outcomes that are predicted by our current theory (the confirmation bias) is one of the best-known biases of human decision making. We prove that the confirmation bias is an optimal strategy for testing hypotheses when those hypotheses are deterministic, each making a single prediction about the next event in a sequence. Our proof applies for two normative standards commonly used for evaluating hypothesis testing: maximizing expected information gain and maximizing the probability of falsifying the current hypothesis. This analysis rests on two assumptions: (a) that people predict the next event in a sequence in a way that is consistent with Bayesian inference; and (b) when testing hypotheses, people test the hypothesis to which they assign highest posterior probability. We present four behavioral experiments that support these assumptions, showing that a simple Bayesian model can capture people's predictions about numerical sequences (Experiments 1 and 2), and that we can alter the hypotheses that people choose to test by manipulating the prior probability of those hypotheses (Experiments 3 and 4).
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Yoel Inbar & Thomas Gilovich
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many numerical judgments are made by adjusting from a salient anchor value. This research examines the effect of high-certainty emotions - emotions associated with feelings of confidence about what is happening, what will happen, and how to respond - on the adjustment process. The authors examined whether such emotions would induce people to engage in adjustment more confidently and thoroughly, leading to greater adjustment. In two studies, the authors found that people feeling anger (Study 1) and disgust (Study 2) - emotions associated with appraisals of certainty - adjusted more from self-generated anchors than did people feeling fear (Study 1) and sadness (Study 2) - emotions associated with appraisals of uncertainty. Study 2 found that this effect does not occur for experimenter-provided anchors, from which adjustment tends to be less consistently observed.
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Stephanie Madon et al.
Law and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Drawing on the psychological principle that proximal consequences influence behavior more strongly than distal consequences, the authors tested the hypothesis that criminal suspects exhibit a short-sightedness during police interrogation that increases their risk for confession. Consistent with this hypothesis, Experiment 1 showed that participants (N = 81) altered how frequently they admitted to criminal and unethical behaviors during an interview to avoid a proximal consequence even though doing so increased their risk of incurring a distal consequence. Experiment 2 (N = 143) yielded the same pattern, but with a procedure that reversed the order of the proximal and distal consequences, thereby ruling out the possibility that it was the unique characteristics of the consequences rather than their proximity that influenced the admission rate. The authors discuss the supported psychological process as a potential explanation for several well-established findings reported in the literature on confessions.
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The distortion of information to support an emerging evaluation of risk
J.E. Russo & Kevyn Yong
Journal of Econometrics, May 2011, Pages 132-139
Abstract:
A persistent problem in the assessment of the risk of an event is a bias driven by the desirability of different outcomes. However, such a desirability bias should not occur in the absence of prior dispositions toward those outcomes. This assumption is tested in an experiment designed to track the evaluation of information during an emerging evaluation of risk. Results confirm the presence of a substantial desirability bias even when there is no prior disposition toward any outcome. These findings bear implications for the assessment of risk not only in the presence of prior desirability, but also in situations currently considered benign.
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Ifat Levy, Stephanie Lazzaro, Robb Rutledge & Paul Glimcher
Journal of Neuroscience, 5 January 2011, Pages 118-125
Abstract:
Decision-making is often viewed as a two-stage process, where subjective values are first assigned to each option and then the option of the highest value is selected. Converging evidence suggests that these subjective values are represented in the striatum and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). A separate line of evidence suggests that activation in the same areas represents the values of rewards even when choice is not required, as in classical conditioning tasks. However, it is unclear whether the same neural mechanism is engaged in both cases. To address this question we measured brain activation with functional magnetic resonance imaging while human subjects passively viewed individual consumer goods. We then sampled activation from predefined regions of interest and used it to predict subsequent choices between the same items made outside of the scanner. Our results show that activation in the striatum and MPFC in the absence of choice predicts subsequent choices, suggesting that these brain areas represent value in a similar manner whether or not choice is required.
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Thoughtful days and valenced nights: How much will you think about the problem?
Todd McElroy & David Dickinson
Judgment and Decision Making, December 2010, Pages 516-523
Abstract:
Considerable research has pointed towards processing differences as a viable means for understanding the strength and likelihood of a framing effect. In the current study we explored how differences in processing may emerge through diurnal patters in circadian rhythm, which varies across individuals. We predicted that during circadian off-times, participants would exhibit stronger framing effects whereas framing effects would be relatively weaker during on-times. Six-hundred and eighty five individuals took part in the study; the findings supported our hypothesis, revealing a diurnal pattern of risk responding that varies across the 24-hour circadian cycle.
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Heritability of Delay Discounting in Adolescence: A Longitudinal Twin Study
Andrey Anokhin, Simon Golosheykin, Julia Grant & Andrew Heath
Behavior Genetics, March 2011, Pages 175-183
Abstract:
Delay discounting (DD) refers to the preference for smaller immediate rewards over larger but delayed rewards, and is considered to be a distinct component of a broader "impulsivity" construct. Although greater propensity for discounting the value of delayed gratification has been associated with a range of problem behaviors and substance abuse, particularly in adolescents, the origins of individual differences in DD remain unclear. We examined genetic and environmental influences on a real-life behavioral measure of DD using a longitudinal twin design. Adolescent participants were asked to choose between a smaller reward available immediately and a larger reward to be received in 7 days. Biometrical genetic analysis using linear structural equation modeling showed significant heritability of DD at ages 12 and 14 (30 and 51%, respectively) and suggested that the same genetic factors influenced the trait at both ages. DD was significantly associated with symptoms of conduct disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, substance use, and with higher novelty seeking and poor self-regulation. This study provides the first evidence for heritability of DD in humans and suggests that DD can be a promising endophenotype for genetic studies of addiction and externalizing disorders.
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Value Encoding in Single Neurons in the Human Amygdala during Decision Making
Rick Jenison et al.
Journal of Neuroscience, 5 January 2011, Pages 331-338
Abstract:
A growing consensus suggests that the brain makes simple choices by assigning values to the stimuli under consideration and then comparing these values to make a decision. However, the network involved in computing the values has not yet been fully characterized. Here, we investigated whether the human amygdala plays a role in the computation of stimulus values at the time of decision making. We recorded single neuron activity from the amygdala of awake patients while they made simple purchase decisions over food items. We found 16 amygdala neurons, located primarily in the basolateral nucleus that responded linearly to the values assigned to individual items.
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An Empirical Assessment of the Form of Utility Functions
Kris Kirby
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, March 2011, Pages 461-476
Abstract:
Utility functions, which relate subjective value to physical attributes of experience, are fundamental to most decision theories. Seven experiments were conducted to test predictions of the most widely assumed mathematical forms of utility (power, log, and negative exponential), and a function proposed by Rachlin (1992). For pairs of gambles for real monetary gains, undergraduate and nonstudent subjects either reported an equalizing amount for 1 outcome that made the gambles subjectively equal or chose between gambles where the amounts were varied across trial, which allowed the equalizing amount to be estimated from their pattern of choices. Using a novel method that eliminates several limitations of previous research, I manipulated the outcomes across trials such that each type of utility function predicted a linear relationship between the equalizing amounts and the amounts of the other outcomes, and made point predictions for either the slope or intercept of that relationship. In a meta-analysis across experiments, systematic departures from the point predictions were observed for each type of utility function. Thus, the data imply that despite their historical importance and incorporation in many psychological and economic decision theories, the most widely assumed models of utility are incorrect.