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Annual Review of Psychology Jan 2020Deceptive claims surround us, embedded in fake news, advertisements, political propaganda, and rumors. How do people know what to believe? Truth judgments reflect... (Review)
Review
Deceptive claims surround us, embedded in fake news, advertisements, political propaganda, and rumors. How do people know what to believe? Truth judgments reflect inferences drawn from three types of information: base rates, feelings, and consistency with information retrieved from memory. First, people exhibit a bias to accept incoming information, because most claims in our environments are true. Second, people interpret feelings, like ease of processing, as evidence of truth. And third, people can (but do not always) consider whether assertions match facts and source information stored in memory. This three-part framework predicts specific illusions (e.g., truthiness, illusory truth), offers ways to correct stubborn misconceptions, and suggests the importance of converging cues in a post-truth world, where falsehoods travel further and faster than the truth.
Topics: Deception; Humans; Judgment
PubMed: 31514579
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-psych-010419-050807 -
Annual Review of Psychology Jan 2020The science of judgment and decision making involves three interrelated forms of research: analysis of the decisions people face, description of their natural responses,... (Review)
Review
The science of judgment and decision making involves three interrelated forms of research: analysis of the decisions people face, description of their natural responses, and interventions meant to help them do better. After briefly introducing the field's intellectual foundations, we review recent basic research into the three core elements of decision making: judgment, or how people predict the outcomes that will follow possible choices; preference, or how people weigh those outcomes; and choice, or how people combine judgments and preferences to reach a decision. We then review research into two potential sources of behavioral heterogeneity: individual differences in decision-making competence and developmental changes across the life span. Next, we illustrate applications intended to improve individual and organizational decision making in health, public policy, intelligence analysis, and risk management. We emphasize the potential value of coupling analytical and behavioral research and having basic and applied research inform one another.
Topics: Decision Making; Human Development; Humans; Individuality; Judgment
PubMed: 31337275
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-psych-010419-050747 -
Annual Review of Psychology 2016People spontaneously create counterfactual alternatives to reality when they think "if only" or "what if" and imagine how the past could have been different. The mind... (Review)
Review
People spontaneously create counterfactual alternatives to reality when they think "if only" or "what if" and imagine how the past could have been different. The mind computes counterfactuals for many reasons. Counterfactuals explain the past and prepare for the future, they implicate various relations including causal ones, and they affect intentions and decisions. They modulate emotions such as regret and relief, and they support moral judgments such as blame. The loss of the ability to imagine alternatives as a result of injuries to the prefrontal cortex is devastating. The basic cognitive processes that compute counterfactuals mutate aspects of the mental representation of reality to create an imagined alternative, and they compare alternative representations. The ability to create counterfactuals develops throughout childhood and contributes to reasoning about other people's beliefs, including their false beliefs. Knowledge affects the plausibility of a counterfactual through the semantic and pragmatic modulation of the mental representation of alternative possibilities.
Topics: Decision Making; Emotions; Humans; Imagination; Intention; Judgment; Morals; Thinking
PubMed: 26393873
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-psych-122414-033249 -
Psychological Science Jan 2022We introduce a theoretical framework distinguishing between anchoring effects, anchoring bias, and judgmental noise: Anchoring effects require anchoring bias, but noise...
We introduce a theoretical framework distinguishing between anchoring effects, anchoring bias, and judgmental noise: Anchoring effects require anchoring bias, but noise modulates their size. We tested this framework by manipulating stimulus magnitudes. As magnitudes increase, psychophysical noise due to scalar variability widens the perceived range of plausible values for the stimulus. This increased noise, in turn, increases the influence of anchoring bias on judgments. In 11 preregistered experiments ( = 3,552 adults), anchoring effects increased with stimulus magnitude for point estimates of familiar and novel stimuli (e.g., reservation prices for hotels and donuts, counts in dot arrays). Comparisons of relevant and irrelevant anchors showed that noise itself did not produce anchoring effects. Noise amplified anchoring bias. Our findings identify a stimulus feature predicting the size and replicability of anchoring effects-stimulus magnitude. More broadly, we show how to use psychophysical noise to test relationships between bias and noise in judgment under uncertainty.
Topics: Adult; Bias; Humans; Judgment; Noise
PubMed: 34878951
DOI: 10.1177/09567976211024254 -
Experimental Psychology Mar 2017In this review we make a simple theoretical argument which is that for theory development, computational modeling, and general frameworks for understanding moral... (Review)
Review
In this review we make a simple theoretical argument which is that for theory development, computational modeling, and general frameworks for understanding moral psychology researchers should build on domain-general principles from reasoning, judgment, and decision-making research. Our approach is radical with respect to typical models that exist in moral psychology that tend to propose complex innate moral grammars and even evolutionarily guided moral principles. In support of our argument we show that by using a simple value-based decision model we can capture a range of core moral behaviors. Crucially, the argument we propose is that moral situations per se do not require anything specialized or different from other situations in which we have to make decisions, inferences, and judgments in order to figure out how to act.
Topics: Behavior; Decision Making; Humans; Judgment; Morals
PubMed: 28497724
DOI: 10.1027/1618-3169/a000336 -
Experimental Psychology Mar 2017How are judgments in moral dilemmas affected by uncertainty, as opposed to certainty? We tested the predictions of a consequentialist and deontological account using a...
How are judgments in moral dilemmas affected by uncertainty, as opposed to certainty? We tested the predictions of a consequentialist and deontological account using a hindsight paradigm. The key result is a hindsight effect in moral judgment. Participants in foresight, for whom the occurrence of negative side effects was uncertain, judged actions to be morally more permissible than participants in hindsight, who knew that negative side effects occurred. Conversely, when hindsight participants knew that no negative side effects occurred, they judged actions to be more permissible than participants in foresight. The second finding was a classical hindsight effect in probability estimates and a systematic relation between moral judgments and probability estimates. Importantly, while the hindsight effect in probability estimates was always present, a corresponding hindsight effect in moral judgments was only observed among "consequentialist" participants who indicated a cost-benefit trade-off as most important for their moral evaluation.
Topics: Adult; Female; Humans; Judgment; Male; Morals; Uncertainty
PubMed: 28497719
DOI: 10.1027/1618-3169/a000353 -
Perspectives on Psychological Science :... Mar 2017Claims about alterations in perception based on manipulations of the energetics hypothesis (and other influences) are often framed as interesting specifically because...
Claims about alterations in perception based on manipulations of the energetics hypothesis (and other influences) are often framed as interesting specifically because they affect our perceptual experience. Many control experiments conducted on such perceptual effects suggest, however, that they are the result of attribution effects and other kinds of judgmental biases influencing the reporting process rather than perception itself. Schnall (2017, this issue), appealing to Heider's work on attribution, argues that it is fruitless to try to distinguish between perception and attribution. This makes the energetics hypothesis less interesting.
Topics: Control Groups; Humans; Judgment; Reading Frames; Social Perception
PubMed: 28346119
DOI: 10.1177/1745691616677829 -
Experimental Psychology Sep 2019Processing fluency, a metacognitive feeling of ease of cognitive processing, serves as a cue in various types of judgments. Processing fluency is sometimes evaluated by...
Processing fluency, a metacognitive feeling of ease of cognitive processing, serves as a cue in various types of judgments. Processing fluency is sometimes evaluated by response times, with shorter response times indicating higher fluency. The present study examined existence of the opposite association; that is, it tested whether disfluency may lead to faster decision times when it serves as a strong cue in judgment. Retrieval fluency was manipulated in an experiment using previous presentation and phonological fluency by varying pronounceability of pseudowords. Participants liked easy-to-pronounce and previously presented words more. Importantly, their decisions were faster for hard-to-pronounce and easy-to-pronounce pseudowords than for pseudowords moderate in pronounceability. The results thus showed an inverted-U shaped relationship between fluency and decision times. The findings suggest that disfluency can lead to faster decision times and thus demonstrate the importance of separating different processes comprising judgment when response times are used as a measure of processing fluency.
Topics: Decision Making; Female; Humans; Judgment; Male; Recognition, Psychology
PubMed: 31603045
DOI: 10.1027/1618-3169/a000456 -
Perspectives on Psychological Science :... Mar 2017A number of papers have challenged research on physiological and psychological influences on perception by claiming to show that such findings can be explained by... (Review)
Review
A number of papers have challenged research on physiological and psychological influences on perception by claiming to show that such findings can be explained by nonperceptual factors such as demand characteristics. Relatedly, calls for separating perception from judgment have been issued. However, such efforts fail to consider key processes known to shape judgment processes: people's inability to report accurately on their judgments, conversational dynamics of experimental research contexts, and misattribution and discounting processes. Indeed, the fact that initially observed effects of embodied influences disappear is predicted by an extensive amount of literature on judgments studied within social psychology. Thus, findings from such studies suggest that the initially presumed underlying processes are at work-namely, functional considerations that are informative in the context of preparing the body for action. In this article, I provide suggestions on how to conduct research on perception within the social constraints of experimental contexts.
Topics: Behavioral Research; Humans; Judgment; Perception
PubMed: 28346118
DOI: 10.1177/1745691616660199 -
Progress in Brain Research 2019As a result of globalization, millions of people operate in a language that they comprehend well but is not their native tongue. This paper focuses on how the nativeness... (Review)
Review
As a result of globalization, millions of people operate in a language that they comprehend well but is not their native tongue. This paper focuses on how the nativeness of the language of a communication influences judgments and decisions. We review studies that compare decision making while people use a native language to when they use a nonnative language they understand well. The evidence shows that a nonnative language decreases the impact that emotions and socio-moral norms have on users, thereby reducing well-known judgmental biases and norm-related behavior. This effect of nonnative or foreign language brings to light the important role that the native language plays routinely in judgment and decision making. It suggests that the native language is not a simple carrier of meaning. Instead, it reveals that our native language serves as a carrier of emotions and socio-moral norms which in turn govern judgments and choices.
Topics: Brain; Decision Making; Emotions; Humans; Judgment; Language; Morals
PubMed: 31196437
DOI: 10.1016/bs.pbr.2019.02.003