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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 -
Scientific Reports May 2023The study of moral judgement and decision making examines the way predictions made by moral and ethical theories fare in real world settings. Such investigations are...
The study of moral judgement and decision making examines the way predictions made by moral and ethical theories fare in real world settings. Such investigations are carried out using a variety of approaches and methods, such as experiments, modeling, and observational and field studies, in a variety of populations. The current Collection on moral judgments and decision making includes works that represent this variety, while focusing on some common themes, including group morality and the role of affect in moral judgment. The Collection also includes a significant number of studies that made theoretically driven predictions and failed to find support for them. We highlight the importance of such null-results papers, especially in fields that are traditionally governed by theoretical frameworks.
Topics: Negative Results; Judgment; Morals; Decision Making
PubMed: 37169894
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-34899-x -
Perspectives on Psychological Science :... Jan 2022Observed variability and complexity of judgments of "right" and "wrong" cannot be readily accounted for within extant approaches to understanding moral judgment. In...
Observed variability and complexity of judgments of "right" and "wrong" cannot be readily accounted for within extant approaches to understanding moral judgment. In response to this challenge, we present a novel perspective on categorization in moral judgment. Moral judgment as categorization (MJAC) incorporates principles of category formation research while addressing key challenges of existing approaches to moral judgment. People develop skills in making context-relevant categorizations. They learn that various objects (events, behaviors, people, etc.) can be categorized as morally right or wrong. Repetition and rehearsal result in reliable, habitualized categorizations. According to this skill-formation account of moral categorization, the learning and the habitualization of the forming of moral categories occur within goal-directed activity that is sensitive to various contextual influences. By allowing for the complexity of moral judgments, MJAC offers greater explanatory power than existing approaches while also providing opportunities for a diverse range of new research questions.
Topics: Humans; Judgment; Learning; Morals
PubMed: 34264152
DOI: 10.1177/1745691621990636 -
Annual Review of Psychology Jan 2024Determining the psychological, computational, and neural bases of confidence and uncertainty holds promise for understanding foundational aspects of human metacognition.... (Review)
Review
Determining the psychological, computational, and neural bases of confidence and uncertainty holds promise for understanding foundational aspects of human metacognition. While a neuroscience of confidence has focused on the mechanisms underpinning subpersonal phenomena such as representations of uncertainty in the visual or motor system, metacognition research has been concerned with personal-level beliefs and knowledge about self-performance. I provide a road map for bridging this divide by focusing on a particular class of confidence computation: propositional confidence in one's own (hypothetical) decisions or actions. Propositional confidence is informed by the observer's models of the world and their cognitive system, which may be more or less accurate-thus explaining why metacognitive judgments are inferential and sometimes diverge from task performance. Disparate findings on the neural basis of uncertainty and performance monitoring are integrated into a common framework, and a new understanding of the locus of action of metacognitive interventions is developed.
Topics: Humans; Metacognition; Judgment
PubMed: 37722748
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-psych-022423-032425 -
BMC Medical Ethics Nov 2016Recent rapid technological and medical advance has more than ever before brought to the fore a spectrum of problems broadly categorized under the umbrella of 'ethics of...
Recent rapid technological and medical advance has more than ever before brought to the fore a spectrum of problems broadly categorized under the umbrella of 'ethics of human enhancement'. Some of the most contentious issues are typified well by the arguments put forward in a recent article on human cognitive enhancement authored by Garasic and Lavazza. Herein I analyse some of the assumptions made in their work and highlight important flaws. In particular I address the problems associated with the distinction between 'treatment' and 'enhancement', and 'natural' vs. 'non-natural' therapies.
Topics: Humans; Judgment; Technology
PubMed: 27876015
DOI: 10.1186/s12910-016-0155-8 -
Trends in Cognitive Sciences Sep 2007Being happy or sad influences the content and style of thought. One explanation is that affect serves as information about the value of whatever comes to mind. Thus,... (Review)
Review
Being happy or sad influences the content and style of thought. One explanation is that affect serves as information about the value of whatever comes to mind. Thus, when a person makes evaluative judgments or engages in a task, positive affect can enhance evaluations and empower potential responses. Rather than affect itself, the information conveyed by affect is crucial. Tests of the hypothesis find that affective influences can be made to disappear by changing the source to which the affect is attributed. In tasks, positive affect validates and negative affect invalidates accessible cognitions, leading to relational processing and item-specific processing, respectively. Positive affect is found to promote, and negative affect to inhibit, many textbook phenomena from cognitive psychology.
Topics: Affect; Cognition; Decision Making; Humans; Judgment; Thinking
PubMed: 17698405
DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2007.08.005 -
International Journal of Environmental... Oct 2021The physical environment plays an important role in moral cognition. Previous research has demonstrated that the physical environment affects individual moral judgment....
The physical environment plays an important role in moral cognition. Previous research has demonstrated that the physical environment affects individual moral judgment. Investigators have argued that the environment influences moral judgment through emotion and cognition, such as during metaphor processing. Following the intensification of urbanization and increases in population size, the phenomenon of a narrow environment has become more common. However, the relation between environmental spaciousness and moral judgment has not been thoroughly examined. We examined the effect of environmental spaciousness (spaciousness vs. narrowness) on moral judgments in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2. Results showed that participants report a higher rating score of moral judgment in more spacious environments compared with narrow environments. We further explored the roles of emotion and metaphor in the relation between environmental spaciousness and moral judgments. We found support for a partial mediation effect of emotion in the relationship between environmental spaciousness and moral judgment. The results also supported an association between the concept of spaciousness and tolerant cognition. Spacious environments may elicit positive emotions and more tolerant cognition, which in turn influences moral judgment. These results provide new evidence for the influence of the environment on moral judgments, and more attention may be warranted to incorporate this relationship in environmental design.
Topics: Cognition; Emotions; Humans; Judgment; Metaphor; Morals
PubMed: 34639830
DOI: 10.3390/ijerph181910530 -
Cognitive Psychology Feb 2022Logic and common sense say that judging two stimuli as "same" is the converse of judging them as "different". Empirically, however, 'Same'-'Different' judgment data are...
Logic and common sense say that judging two stimuli as "same" is the converse of judging them as "different". Empirically, however, 'Same'-'Different' judgment data are anomalous in two major ways. The fast-'Same' effect violates the expectation that 'Same' reaction time (RT) should be predictable by extrapolating from 'Different' RT. The criterion effect violates the expectation that RTs measured when sameness is defined by a conjunction of matching attributes should predict RTs measured when sameness is defined by a disjunction of matching attributes. The two criteria are symmetrical, yet empirically they differ greatly, disjunctive judgments being by far the slower of the two. This study sought the sources of these two effects. With the aid of a cue, a selective-comparison method deconfounded the contributions of stimulus encoding and comparisons to the two effects. The results were paradoxical. Each additional irrelevant (uncued) letter in a random string incremented RT for conjunctive judgments as much as an additional relevant letter did. Yet irrelevant letters were not compared and relevant letters had to be compared. These results appeared again in a second experiment that used words as stimuli. Contrary to intuition, a distinct comparison mechanism-the heart of relative judgment models-is not necessary in judgments of sameness and difference. It is shown here that encoding can carry out the comparison function without the operation of a separate comparison mechanism. Attention mediates the process by selecting from the set of stimulus alternatives, thereby partitioning the set into the 'Same' and 'Different' subsets. The fast-'Same' and criterion effects result from a structural limitation on what attention can select at any one time. With attention mediating the task, 'Same'-'Different' judgments become, in effect, the outcome of a testing of a hypothesis, bridging the distinction between absolute stimulus identification and relative judgments.
Topics: Attention; Humans; Judgment; Reaction Time
PubMed: 34856532
DOI: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2021.101443 -
Behavioral Neuroscience Oct 2022Recent primate studies suggest a potential link between pupil size and subjectively elapsed duration. Here, we sought to investigate the relationship between pupil size...
Recent primate studies suggest a potential link between pupil size and subjectively elapsed duration. Here, we sought to investigate the relationship between pupil size and perceived duration in human participants performing two temporal bisection tasks in the subsecond and suprasecond interval ranges. In the subsecond task, pupil diameter was greater during stimulus processing when shorter intervals were overestimated but also during and after stimulus offset when longer intervals were underestimated. By contrast, in the suprasecond task, larger pupil diameter was observed only in the late stimulus offset phase prior to response prompts when longer intervals were underestimated. This pattern of results suggests that pupil diameter relates to an error monitoring mechanism in interval timing. These results are at odds with a direct relationship between pupil size and the perception of duration but suggest that pupillometric variation might play a key role in signifying errors related to temporal judgments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
Topics: Animals; Humans; Judgment
PubMed: 36222640
DOI: 10.1037/bne0000533 -
The International Journal of... Aug 2021Our social activities are quite often erroneous and irrational, based on biased judgements and decision-making, known as social biases. However, the cognitive and...
BACKGROUND
Our social activities are quite often erroneous and irrational, based on biased judgements and decision-making, known as social biases. However, the cognitive and affective processes that produce such biases remain largely unknown. In this study, we investigated associations between social schemas, such as social judgment and conformity, entailing social biases and psychological measurements relevant to cognitive and affective functions.
METHOD
This study recruited 42 healthy adult subjects. A psychological test and a questionnaire were administered to assess biased social judgements by superficial attributes and social conformity by adherence to social norms, respectively, along with additional questionnaires and psychological tests for cognitive and affective measurements, including negative affects, autistic traits, and Theory of Mind (ToM). Associations of social judgment and conformity with cognitive and affective functions were examined using a multiple regression analysis and structural equation modeling.
RESULTS
Anxiety and the cognitive realm of ToM were mutually associated with both social judgments and conformity, although social judgements and conformity were still independent processes. Social judgements were also associated with autistic traits and the affective realm of ToM, whereas social conformity was associated with negative affects other than anxiety and an intuitive decision-making style.
CONCLUSIONS
These results suggest that ToM and negative affects may play important roles in social judgements and conformity, and the social biases connoted in these social schemas.
Topics: Adult; Affect; Female; Humans; Judgment; Male; Social Conformity; Social Perception; Theory of Mind; Young Adult
PubMed: 33929492
DOI: 10.1093/ijnp/pyab022