Guesstimates
Motivated Optimism and Workplace Risk
Yeşim Orhun, Alain Cohn & Collin Raymond
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
We provide field evidence that individuals engage in motivated optimism in the face of impending risk. Congruent with a dynamic anticipatory utility model, we demonstrate that belief distortions are time- and stake-dependent. Our study leverages variation in the time span between the survey and the externally imposed date when workers are required to return to their workplaces during the COVID-19 pandemic. We show that as the work return date approaches, individuals become relatively more optimistic about the increased infection risk associated with going back to the workplace, and about how severely their health may be impacted if they get infected. Belief distortions are larger among those facing potential health complications conditional on infection. Our results are informative about when and for whom interventions will be most effective.
Interacting with Man or Machine: When Do Humans Reason Better?
Ralph-Christopher Bayer & Ludovic Renou
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The resolution of complex problems is widely seen as the next challenge for hybrid human-artificial intelligence (AI) teams. This paper uses experiments to assess whether there is a difference in the quality of human reasoning depending on whether the humans interact with humans or algorithms. For this purpose, we design an interactive reasoning task and compare the performance of humans when paired with other humans and AI. Varying the difficulty of the task (i.e., steps of counterfactual reasoning required), we find that, for simple tasks, subjects perform much better if they play with other humans, whereas the opposite is true for difficult problems. Additional experiments in which subjects play with human experts show that the differences are driven by the knowledge that AI reasons correctly rather than that it is nonhuman.
The exaggerated benefits of failure
Lauren Eskreis-Winkler et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, July 2024, Pages 1920-1937
Abstract:
Commencement speakers, business leaders, and the popular press tell us that failure has at least one benefit: It fuels success. Does it? Across 11 studies, including a field study of medical professionals, predictors overestimated the rate at which people course correct following failure (Studies 1-4). Predictors overestimated the likelihood that professionals who fail a professional exam (e.g., the bar exam, the medical boards) pass a retest (Studies 1a, 1b, and 2a), the likelihood that patients improve their health after a crisis (e.g., heart attack, drug overdose; Studies 2b and 6), and the probability, more generally, of learning from one's mistakes (Studies 3-5). This effect was specific to overestimating success following failure (Study 4) and erasing mention of an initial failure that had actually occurred corrected the problem (Studies 2a and 2b). The success overestimate was due, at least in part, to the belief that people attend to failure more than they do (Studies 5 and 6). Correcting this overestimate had policy implications. Citizens apprised of the sobering true rate of postfailure success increased their support for rehabilitative initiatives aimed at helping struggling populations (e.g., people with addiction, ex-convicts) learn from past mistakes (Studies 7a-7c).
The Effect of Robot Assistance on Skills
Sungwoo Cho
United States Military Academy Working Paper, July 2024
Abstract:
How does work with robots change human capital? I study a unique setting in which professional baseball leagues provided-and subsequently removed-access to robot assistance for umpires. Umpires demonstrated improved precision and accuracy in ball-strike decisions while using robot assistance, but their performance declined substantially below pre-assistance levels after it was removed. Both highly skilled and inexperienced umpires exhibited large declines in performance after the removal of robot assistance. Umpires who used robot assistance for longer periods of time faced a steeper decline in accuracy than those who used it for shorter periods. Umpires who worked a full season with robot assistance did not fully return to their initial skill level by the end of the following season. In contrast, umpires who missed an entire canceled season during the COVID-19 pandemic suffered much smaller skill depreciation effects, indicating that robot-exposure effects are not driven solely by umpires not using their skills. Finally, I show that robot-exposed umpires experience skill deterioration in determining whether a baserunner is safe, showing that skill depreciation extends beyond robot-assisted tasks.
Evaluations are inherently comparative, but are compared to what?
Minah Jung, Clayton Critcher & Leif Nelson
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Understanding how objective quantities are translated into subjective evaluations has long been of interest to social scientists, medical professionals, and policymakers with an interest in how people process and act on quantitative information. The theory of decision by sampling proposes a comparative procedure: Values seem larger or smaller based on how they rank in a comparison set, the decision sample. But what values are included in this decision sample? We identify and test four mechanistic accounts, each suggesting that how previously encountered attribute values are processed determines whether they linger in the sample to guide the subjective interpretation, and thus the influence, of newly encountered values. Testing our ideas through studies of loss aversion, delay discounting, and vaccine hesitancy, we find strongest support for one account: Quantities need to be subjectively evaluated -- rather than merely encountered -- for them to enter the decision sample, alter the subjective interpretation of other values, and then guide decision making. Discussion focuses on how the present findings inform understanding of the nature of the decision sample and identify new research directions for the longstanding question of how comparison standards influence decision making.
Why creatives don't find the oddball odd: Neural and psychological evidence for atypical salience processing
Madeleine Gross, James Elliott & Jonathan Schooler
Brain and Cognition, August 2024
Abstract:
Creativity has previously been linked with various attentional phenomena, including unfocused or broad attention. Although this has typically been interpreted through an executive functioning framework, such phenomena may also arise from atypical incentive salience processing. Across two studies, we examine this hypothesis both neurally and psychologically. First we examine the relationship between figural creativity and event-related potentials during an audio-visual oddball task, finding that rater creativity of drawings is associated with a diminished P300 response at midline electrodes, while abstractness and elaborateness of the drawings is associated with an altered distribution of the P300 over posterior electrodes. These findings support the notion that creativity may involve an atypical attribution of salience to prominent information. We further explore the incentive salience hypothesis by examining relationships between creativity and a psychological indicator of incentive salience captured by participants' ratings of enjoyment (liking) and their motivation to pursue (wanting) diverse real world rewards, as well as their positive spontaneous thoughts about those rewards. Here we find enhanced motivation to pursue activities as well as a reduced relationship between the overall tendency to enjoy rewards and the tendency to pursue them. Collectively, these findings indicate that creativity may be associated with atypical allocation of attentional and motivational resources to novel and rewarding information, potentially allowing more types of information access to attentional resources and motivating more diverse behaviors. We discuss the possibility that salience attribution in creatives may be less dependent on task-relevance or hedonic pleasure, and suggest that atypical salience attribution may represent a trait-like feature of creativity.