Randomness and inductions from streaks: “Gambler’s fallacy” versus ”hot hand“

Sometimes people believe that a run of similar independent events will be broken (belief in thegambler’s fallacy) but, other times, that such a run will continue (belief in the hot hand). Both of these opposite inductions have been explained as being due to belief in a law of small numbers. We argue that one factor that distinguishes these phenomena is people’s beliefs about the randomness of the underlying process generating the events. We gave participants information about a streak of events but varied the scenarios in such a way that the mechanism generating the events should vary in how random the participants would judge it to be. A manipulation check confirmed our assumptions about the scenarios. We found that with less random scenarios, the participants were more likely to continue a streak.     

Credible testimony in and out of court

Assessing informants’ credibility is critical to several aspects of the legal process (e.g., when police interrogate suspects or jurors evaluate witnesses). There is a large body of research—from various areas of psychology and allied fields—about how people evaluate each others’ credibility. We review the literature on lie detection and interpersonal perception to demonstrate that inferences regarding credibility may be multiply determined. Specifically, characteristics of the informant, of the listener, and of the situation affect people’s perceptions of informants’ credibility. We conclude with a discussion of research on calibration (i.e., an informant’s confidence-accuracy relation) because it offers fruitful avenues for future credibility research in the legal domain.     

Love,Power and Consistency: Scotus’ Doctrines of God’s Power,Contingent Creation,Induction and Natural Law

I first examine John Duns Scotus’ view of contingency, pure possibility, and created possibilities, and his version of the celebrated distinction between ordained and absolute power. Scotus’ views on ethical natural law and his account of induction are characterised, and their dependence on the preceding doctrines detailed. I argue that there is an inconsistency in his treatments of the problem of induction and ethical natural law. Both proceed with God’s contingently willed creation of a given order of laws, which can be revoked and replaced with a new order of laws. In the case of ethical natural law God promulgated the Decalogue, for example; in the case of nature, there are physical laws that can be known by induction. Scotus exalts the freedom of God and the mutability of ethical natural law in order to explain exceptions to it disclosed by revelation (for example, the Old Testament command to Abraham to kill Isaac). Yet he treats ethical natural laws as (mostly) not universal and immutable. In contrast, he holds that we can arrive at knowledge of the universal and immutable laws of nature, except for those regularities that result from free will. Finally, I present several ways of characterising this tension between Scotus’ doctrines.     

Why does the base rate appear to be ignored? The equiprobability hypothesis

The base rate fallacy has been considered to result from people’s tendency to ignore the base rates given in tasks. In the present article, we note a particular, common structure of the tasks (the imbalanced probability structure) in which the fallacy is often observed. The equiprobability hypothesis explains the mechanism that produces the fallacy. This hypothesis predicts that task material that overrides people’s default equiprobability assumption can facilitate normative Bayesian inferences. The results of our two experiments strongly supported this prediction, and none of the alternative theories considered could explain the results. nt]mis|The present research was supported by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research 19500229 from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, awarded to M.H.     

Evidence that judgments of learning are causally related to study choice

Three experiments investigated whether study choice was directly related to judgments of learning (JOLs) by examining people’s choices in cases in which JOLs were dissociated from recall. In Experiment 1, items were given either three repetitions or one repetition on Trial 1. Items given three repetitions received one on Trial 2, and those given one repetition received three on Trial 2—equating performance at the end of Trial 2, but yielding different immediate Trial 2 JOLs. Study choice followed the “illusory” JOLs. A delayed JOL condition in Experiment 2 did not show this JOL bias and neither did study choice. Finally, using a paradigm (Koriat & Bjork, 2005) in which similar JOLs are given to forward and backward associative pairs, despite much worse performance on the backward pairs, study choice again followed the mistaken JOLs. We concluded that JOLs—what people believe they know—directly influence people’s study choices.     

Memory conformity and the perceived accuracy of self versus other

Here, we demonstrate that the decision to conform to another person’s memory involves a strategic trade-off that balances the accuracy of one’s own memory against that of another person. We showed participants three household scenes, one for 30 s, one for 60 s, and one for 120 s. Half were told that they would encode each scene for half as long as their virtual partner, and half were told that they would encode each scene for twice as long as their virtual partner. On a subsequent two-alternative-forced choice (2AFC) memory test, the simulated answer of the partner (accurate, errant, or no response) was shown before participants responded. Conformity to the partner’s responses was significantly enhanced for the 30-s versus the 60- and 120-s scenes. This pattern, however, was present only in the group who believed that they had encoded each scene for half as long as their partner, even though the short-duration scene had the lowest baseline 2AFC accuracy in both groups and was also subjectively rated as the least memorable by both groups. Our reliance on other people’s memory is therefore dynamically and strategically adjusted according to knowledge of the conditions under which we and other people have acquired different memories.     

Self,Identity, and Reactions to Distal Threats: The Case of Environmental Behavior

This article examines self-relevant processes that sustain behaviors that have little or no direct implications for people’s well-being. When outcomes are low in direct personal relevance, far in the future, or only weakly linked to one’s present behavior, imagined personal incentives may not be enough to motivate behavior. Under such circumstances, people may nonetheless perform actions that are linked to their identity, self-evaluation, or public image. Using pro-environmental behavior as an exemplar, we examine self-processes that are involved when people engage in behaviors that do not directly affect their personal self-interest.     

Morphological Rationalism and the Psychology of Moral Judgment

According to rationalism regarding the psychology of moral judgment, people’s moral judgments are generally the result of a process of reasoning that relies on moral principles or rules. By contrast, intuitionist models of moral judgment hold that people generally come to have moral judgments about particular cases on the basis of gut-level, emotion-driven intuition, and do so without reliance on reasoning and hence without reliance on moral principles. In recent years the intuitionist model has been forcefully defended by Jonathan Haidt. One important implication of Haidt’s model is that in giving reasons for their moral judgments people tend to confabulate – the reasons they give in attempting to explain their moral judgments are not really operative in producing those judgments. Moral reason-giving on Haidt’s view is generally a matter of post hoc confabulation. Against Haidt, we argue for a version of rationalism that we call ‘morphological rationalism.’ We label our version ‘morphological’ because according to it, the information contained in moral principles is embodied in the standing structure of a typical individual’s cognitive system, and this morphologically embodied information plays a causal role in the generation of particular moral judgments. The manner in which the principles play this role is via ‘proceduralization’ – such principles operate automatically. In contrast to Haidt’s intuitionism, then, our view does not imply that people’s moral reason-giving practices are matters of confabulation. In defense of our view, we appeal to what we call the ‘nonjarring’ character of the phenomenology of making moral judgments and of giving reasons for those judgments.

Expecting the Worst: Moderating Effects of Social Cynicism on the Relationships Between Relationship Conflict and Negative Affective Reactions

Purpose  

Social cynicism, defined as negative beliefs about people and social institutions, shows negative impact on people’s affective reactions. We extended this line of work by testing the moderating effects of social cynicism on the relationships between relationship conflict and its affective consequences.     

Causal diversity effects in information seeking

When trying to determine the root cause of an observed effect, people may seek out information with which to test a candidate hypothesis. In two studies, we investigated how knowledge of causal structure influences this information-seeking process. Specifically, we asked whether people would choose to test for pieces of evidence that were far apart or close together in the learned causal structure of a disease category. In parallel with findings showing people’s tendency to select diverse evidence in argument testing (López, 1995), our participants tested for evidence distantly located within the causal structure. Simultaneously, they rated the probability of occurrence of such diverse evidence as comparatively low. These findings suggest that rather than seeking out information most likely to confirm the hypothesis, people seek out evidence that they believe will most strongly support the hypothesis if present but that they also believe is relatively unlikely to be present (that is, might disconfirm the hypothesis).     

Moving eyes and moving thought: On the spatial compatibility between eye movements and cognition

Grant and Spivey (2003) proposed that eye movement trajectories can influence spatial reasoning by way of an implicit eye-movement-to-cognition link. We tested this proposal and investigated the nature of this link by continuously monitoring eye movements and asking participants to perform a problem-solving task under free-viewing conditions while occasionally guiding their eye movements (via an unrelated tracking task), either in a pattern related to the problem’s solution or in unrelated patterns. Although participants reported that they were not aware of any relationship between the tracking task and the problem, those who moved their eyes in a pattern related to the problem’s solution were the most successful problem solvers. Our results support the existence of an implicit compatibility between spatial cognition and the eye movement patterns that people use to examine a scene.     

A Defence of the Asymmetry in Population Ethics

A common intuition is that there is a moral difference between ‘making people happy’ and ‘making happy people.’ This intuition, often referred to as ‘the Asymmetry,’ has, however, been criticized on the grounds that it is incoherent. Why is there, for instance, not a corresponding difference between ‘making people unhappy’ and ‘making unhappy people’? I argue that the intuition faces several difficulties but that these can be met by introducing a certain kind of reason that is favouring but non-requiring. It is argued that there are structural similarities between the asymmetry and moral options and that the asymmetry can be defended as an instance of a moral option.     

The Warring States Concept of Xing

This essay defends a novel interpretation of the term “xìng 性” as it occurs in Chinese texts of the late Warring States period (roughly 320–221 BCE). The term played an important role both in the famous controversy over the goodness or badness of people’s xìng and elsewhere in the intellectual discourse of the period. Extending especially the work of A.C. Graham, the essay stresses the importance for understanding xìng of early Chinese assumptions about spontaneity, continuity, health, and (in the human case) motivation. These assumptions make xìng fundamentally different from the contemporary nature concepts with which it is often equated. In particular, people’s xìng is not a near-equivalent of human nature or (in modern Chinese) of rénxìng 人性.     

Gaze cuing and affective judgments of objects: I like what you look at

When we see another person look somewhere, we automatically attend to the same location in space. Thisjoint attention emerges early in life and has a great impact on social interactions in development and in everyday adult life. The direction of another’s gaze indicates what object is of current interest, which may be the target for a subsequent action. In this study, we found that objects that are looked at by other people are liked more than objects that do not receive the attention of other people (Experiment 1). This suggests that observing averted gaze can have an impact on the affective appraisals of objects in the environment. This liking effect was absent when an arrow was used to cue attention (Experiment 2). This underlines the importance of other people’s interactions with objects for generating our own impressions of such stimuli in the world.     

Volatile visual representations: failing to detect changes in recently processed information

Research documenting people’s inability to detect large changes in visual scenes suggests that visual representations may be sparse and volatile, providing no cumulative record of the attended items in a scene. However, these studies have failed to control for attention. Thus, the visual system may construct a cumulative record of all attended stimuli and still miss such changes, because they involve items that were never attended to. In two experiments, subjects saw 12-digit arrays and identified either the highest digit in the array (Experiment 1) or the lowest digit not in the array (Experiment 2). Subsequent change-detection tasks revealed that subjects often failed to detect changes that involved the same digits they had previously identified to perform the digit tasks successfully. This provides additional evidence that our usable visual representations are relatively impoverished and volatile.     

Evidence for a conceptual account of same-different discrimination learning in the pigeon

We trained pigeons to peck two different buttons in response to 16-iconsame arrays versus 16-icondifferent arrays. In thesame arrays, the icons were all the same as one another, whereas in thedifferent arrays, the icons were all different from one another. In Experiment 1, we upset the spatial regularities of the displays by disarranging the icons—randomly displacing each icon to reduce the degree of perceptual order. The pigeons’ discriminative performance was unaffected by disarranging. In Experiment 2, spatial regularities were disturbed by varying the rotation of the icons within a display. Again, no disruption in discriminative performance was observed. These and other findings suggest that pigeons treat the 16 icons as either the same or different despite changes in the spatial organization or orientation of the icons, thus implicating a conceptual rather than a perceptual process in same—different discrimination.     

A Pilot Study on the Living-Alone, Socio-Economically Deprived Older Chinese People’s Self-Reported Successful Aging: A Case of Hongkong

This study fills the gap of literature review in the field of successful aging among non-Western older people. It identifies predictors of self-reported successful aging for living-alone older Chinese people with a relatively low socioeconomic status. Also, it records these respondents’ typical interpretations of the concept of successful aging in their own words. This study employed a single-item, subjective approach to enable elderly respondents to define their own successful aging. It made use of an open-ended question to collect respondents’ interpretations of the concept of successful aging. This study successfully interviewed, at home, 109 randomly selected older Chinese people living alone in two public housing estates. The response rate was 75.6%. Life satisfaction, sex, self-reported health status, satisfaction with living environment and major source of income were crucial predictors of these older Chinese people’s self-reported successful aging. The explanatory power was 50.9%. Several typical interpretations of the concept of successful aging obtained from these respondents were categorized into the following groups: (1) health-related issues, (2) financial issues, (3) personal issues, (4) family issues, (5) psychological issues, and (6) housing issues. Many of their interpretations were consistent with some of this study’s predictors. Living-alone, relatively deprived older Chinese respondents’ self-reported successful aging seems to focus more on subjective predictors than on objective ones. Their interpretations of the concept of successful aging are culturally and socio-economically oriented. These older people’s cognitive assessment of their successful aging is thus largely a personal experience of their daily lives.     

Enhancing Poverty-Abatement Programs: a Subjective Well-Being Contribution

This paper questions the assumption used in designing social policies that raising people’s income automatically translates into greater well-being. Based on a subjective well-being approach and a representative survey from Costa Rica the paper shows that there is substantial dissonance in the classification of persons as poor and as being in well-being deprivation. The existence of dissonances leads to the conceptualization of different trajectories out-of-poverty and into well-being. Public policies oriented towards the abatement of income poverty can have a greater impact on people’s well-being if they recognize the complexity of human beings and acknowledge that their programs affect satisfaction in all domains of life. The paper states that public policy should not only be concerned with getting people out of income poverty, but also with placing them in a life-satisfying situation. The paper also discusses strategies that could improve poverty-abatement programs.     

Scaling techniques for modeling directional knowledge

A common way for researchers to model or graphically portray spatial knowledge of a large environment is by applying multidimensional scaling (MDS) to a set of pairwise distance estimations. We introduce two MDS-like techniques that incorporate people’s knowledge of directions instead of (or in addition to) their knowledge of distances. Maps of a familiar environment derived from these procedures were more accurate and were rated by participants as being more accurate than those derived from nonmetric MDS. By incorporating people’s relatively accurate knowledge of directions, these methods offer spatial cognition researchers and behavioral geographers a sharper analytical tool than MDS for studying cognitive maps.     

Moral Motivation Pluralism

Motivational externalists and internalists of various sorts disagree about the circumstances under which it is conceptually possible to have moral opinions but lack moral motivation. Typically, the evidence referred to are intuitions about whether people in certain scenarios who lack moral motivation count as having moral opinions. People’s intuitions about such scenarios diverge, however. I argue that the nature of this diversity is such that, for each of the internalist and externalist theses, there is a strong prima facie reason to reject it. That much might not be very controversial. But I argue further, that it also gives us a strong prima facie reason to reject all of these theses. This is possible since there is an overlooked alternative option to accepting any of them: moral motivation pluralism, the view that different internalist and externalist theses correctly accounts for different people’s concepts of moral opinions, respectively. I end the paper with a discussion of methodological issues relevant to the argument for moral motivation pluralism and of the consequences of this view for theories about the nature of moral opinions, such as cognitivism and non-cognitivism.