Figuring It Out
Fabricated lies are more likely to be mistaken for truth over time
Eric Rindal & Maria Zaragoza
Applied Cognitive Psychology, May/June 2024
Abstract:
When providing eyewitness testimony, people sometimes fabricate lies that supplement the truth by embellishing or adding new information. This study investigated whether participants confuse their fabricated lies for actually witnessed events over time. In two experiments employing different eyewitness events, participants viewed an event and were then asked to lie about unseen details and events. Memory was assessed after either a 1-week (E1a & E2) or a 4-week (E1b & E2) retention interval. In both experiments, participants falsely reported witnessing their lies after a 4-week retention interval, but only one experiment (E2) obtained evidence for these memory errors at the shorter retention interval of 1-week. In addition, when assessed repeatedly, lies that participants correctly rejected as not witnessed at the 1-week retention interval were later incorrectly endorsed as witnessed when tested again at the 4-week retention interval, thus showing that distinguishing lies from truth became more difficult over time.
Biases in Improvement Decisions: People Focus on the Relative Reduction in Bad Outcomes
William Ryan, Stephen Baum & Ellen Evers
Psychological Science, May 2024, Pages 558-574
Abstract:
People often decide whether to invest scarce resources -- such as time, money, or energy -- to improve their chances of a positive outcome. For example, a doctor might decide whether to utilize scarce medicine to improve a patient's chances of recovery, or a student might decide whether to study a few additional hours to increase their chances of passing an exam. We conducted 11 studies (N = 5,342 adults) and found evidence that people behave as if they focus on the relative reduction in bad outcomes caused by such improvements. As a consequence, the same improvements (e.g., 10-percentage-point improvements) are valued very differently depending on whether one's initial chances of success are high or low. This focus on the relative reduction of bad outcomes drives risk preferences that violate normative standards (Studies 1a-1g and 2a), is amplified when decisions become more consequential (Study 2b), and leads even experienced professionals to make suboptimal decisions (Study 3).
Mind or machine? Conversational internet search moderates search-induced cognitive overconfidence
Kristy Hamilton, Adrian Ward & Mike Yao
Journal of Media Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Searching for and accessing online information through search engines causes digital media users to become overconfident in their own knowledge -- in a sense, to attribute online knowledge to themselves. If searching the internet via search engine leads people to conflate digital information as self-produced, what happens when features of our devices turn information search into an interpersonal situation? The proliferation of anthropomorphic technology underpinned by artificial intelligence (AI) may challenge the current view of search-induced cognitive overconfidence. In two experiments, we investigate how using digital agents to search for information moderates the misattribution of online information to one's own memory. We find that, in contrast to using a search engine, using a digital agent to access online information does not lead to higher estimations of cognitive self-esteem (Experiment 1). Moreover, using a humanized digital agent may lead to lower cognitive self-esteem than using a non-humanized digital agent or thinking alone (Experiment 2). Whereas internet searches can make people overconfident in their cognitive abilities, accessing information through a conversational digital agent appears to clarify boundaries between internal and external knowledge.
Once and Again: Repeated Viewing Affects Judgments of Spontaneity and Preparation
Kristin Donnelly, William Ryan & Leif Nelson
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Reality is fleeting, and any moment can only be experienced once. Rewatching a video, however, allows people to repeatedly observe the exact same moment. We propose that people may fail to fully distinguish between merely observing behavior again (through replay) from that behavior being performed again in the exact same way. Using an assortment of stimuli that included auditions, commercials, and potential trial evidence, we demonstrated through nine experiments (N = 10,412 adults in the United States) that rewatching makes a recorded behavior appear more rehearsed and less spontaneous, as if the actors were simply precisely repeating their actions. These findings contribute to an emerging literature showing that incidental video features, like perspective or slow motion, can meaningfully change evaluations. Replay may inadvertently shape judgments in both mundane and consequential contexts. To understand how a video will influence its viewer, one will need to consider not only its content, but also how often it is viewed.
Collective behavior from surprise minimization
Conor Heins et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 23 April 2024
Abstract:
Collective motion is ubiquitous in nature; groups of animals, such as fish, birds, and ungulates appear to move as a whole, exhibiting a rich behavioral repertoire that ranges from directed movement to milling to disordered swarming. Typically, such macroscopic patterns arise from decentralized, local interactions among constituent components (e.g., individual fish in a school). Preeminent models of this process describe individuals as self-propelled particles, subject to self-generated motion and "social forces" such as short-range repulsion and long-range attraction or alignment. However, organisms are not particles; they are probabilistic decision-makers. Here, we introduce an approach to modeling collective behavior based on active inference. This cognitive framework casts behavior as the consequence of a single imperative: to minimize surprise. We demonstrate that many empirically observed collective phenomena, including cohesion, milling, and directed motion, emerge naturally when considering behavior as driven by active Bayesian inference -- without explicitly building behavioral rules or goals into individual agents. Furthermore, we show that active inference can recover and generalize the classical notion of social forces as agents attempt to suppress prediction errors that conflict with their expectations. By exploring the parameter space of the belief-based model, we reveal nontrivial relationships between the individual beliefs and group properties like polarization and the tendency to visit different collective states. We also explore how individual beliefs about uncertainty determine collective decision-making accuracy. Finally, we show how agents can update their generative model over time, resulting in groups that are collectively more sensitive to external fluctuations and encode information more robustly.
Dopamine and serotonin in human substantia nigra track social context and value signals during economic exchange
Seth Batten et al.
Nature Human Behaviour, April 2024, Pages 718-728
Abstract:
Dopamine and serotonin are hypothesized to guide social behaviours. In humans, however, we have not yet been able to study neuromodulator dynamics as social interaction unfolds. Here, we obtained subsecond estimates of dopamine and serotonin from human substantia nigra pars reticulata during the ultimatum game. Participants, who were patients with Parkinson's disease undergoing awake brain surgery, had to accept or reject monetary offers of varying fairness from human and computer players. They rejected more offers in the human than the computer condition, an effect of social context associated with higher overall levels of dopamine but not serotonin. Regardless of the social context, relative changes in dopamine tracked trial-by-trial changes in offer value -- akin to reward prediction errors -- whereas serotonin tracked the current offer value. These results show that dopamine and serotonin fluctuations in one of the basal ganglia's main output structures reflect distinct social context and value signals.
Divergent and Convergent Creativity Are Different Kinds of Foraging
Soran Malaie, Michael Spivey & Tyler Marghetis
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
According to accounts of neural reuse and embodied cognition, higher-level cognitive abilities recycle evolutionarily ancient mechanisms for perception and action. Here, building on these accounts, we investigate whether creativity builds on our capacity to forage in space ("creativity as strategic foraging"). We report systematic connections between specific forms of creative thinking -- divergent and convergent -- and corresponding strategies for searching in space. U.S. American adults completed two tasks designed to measure creativity. Before each creativity trial, participants completed an unrelated search of a city map. Between subjects, we manipulated the search pattern, with some participants seeking multiple, dispersed spatial locations and others repeatedly converging on the same location. Participants who searched divergently in space were better at divergent thinking but worse at convergent thinking; this pattern reversed for participants who had converged repeatedly on a single location. These results demonstrate a targeted link between foraging and creativity, thus advancing our understanding of the origins and mechanisms of high-level cognition.
Does Smart Money Believe in the Hot Hand? Evidence From Daily Fantasy Baseball
Jeremy Losak, Andrew Weinbach & Rodney Paul
American Behavioral Scientist, forthcoming
Abstract:
The behavior of informed traders, or "smart money," in sports betting markets has long been of interest to researchers. In this paper, we focus specifically on the behavior of smart money in Major League Baseball (MLB) daily fantasy sports (DFS) contests to determine whether they avoid cognitive-behavioral biases to increase their expected earnings. Specifically, we investigate whether smart money avoids the hot hand bias, where individuals tend to overestimate the likelihood of success for players on a hot streak. Using a dataset of MLB DFS contests, we find that winning lineups have lower usage rates for players exhibiting the hot hand compared to losing lineups. This suggests that smart money identifies and fades the hot hand strategy to increase their expected earnings.