Precision of the anchor influences the amount of adjustment

The anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic has been used to account for a wide variety of numerical judgments. Five studies show that adjustment away from a numerical anchor is smaller if the anchor is precise than if it is rounded. Evidence suggests that precise anchors, compared with rounded anchors, are represented on a subjective scale with a finer resolution. If adjustment consists of a series of iterative mental movements along a subjective scale, then an adjustment from a precise anchor should result in a smaller overall correction than an adjustment from a rounded anchor.     

货币幻觉的心理机制与影响因素

货币幻觉是指经济交易活动中,人们因倾向于以货币的名义价值而非实际价值思考而对其消费和投资行为造成影响的一种认知偏差。大量研究表明,货币幻觉普遍存在于房地产投资、股票投资、组织管理以及捐赠等领域中。目前,研究者主要从决策框架、锚定与调整启发式、数目启发式以及神经心理机制这四个方面解释货币幻觉的形成机制。研究发现,货币幻觉的影响因素有心境、货币兑换率、通货膨胀率、情感依恋和先前经验。未来的研究可以从深入探讨货币幻觉的心理机制、影响因素和探索货币幻觉的应对策略这三个方面展开。     

重复学习判断中的低自信效应

学习判断是元认知判断的一种重要形式,是对未来回忆成绩的预测。重复学习判断中的低自信效应是一个有趣而反常的现象,指在重复学习测验中,学习判断往往低估了回忆成绩的增加,出现低自信的一种现象。目前,大部分实验证据支持重复学习判断中的低自信效应是普遍存在的,但也有一些实验结果表明该效应是受一定条件限制的。对于这种低自信效应的作用机制,研究者提出了不同的理论模型（如,锚定调整假说、记忆偏向消除理论、过去测验记忆的启发式假说等）进行了深入探讨。最后,文章还指出了此领域现有研究的局限和有待研究的问题     

Overconfidence in estimation: Testing the anchoring-and-adjustment hypothesis

People are frequently overconfident in the accuracy of their estimates of uncertain quantities. The present study requested 50%- or 90%-confidence ranges. Overconfidence is shown when less than the target percentage of ranges include the true value. Tversky and Kahneman (1974) proposed that people use an anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic: They begin with a starting value, one supplied to them or generated by them, and insufficiently adjust their estimates around this anchor. The present data support the proposed anchoring process. If subjects receive another person's point estimates, their own implicit point estimates are correlated with these values. However, anchoring- and-adjustment processes do not invariably produce overconfidence. Subjects who receive anchors are no more overconfident than are those who do not receive anchors. If subjects are required to produce a point estimate first, overconfidence decreases; processes involved in explicitly displaying the point estimate are implicated. Overconfidence may occur because people do not realistically assess their estimation ability.     

Always on My Mind: Exploring How Frequent,Recent, and Vivid Television Portrayals Are Used in the Formation of Social Reality Judgments

Prior research has found consistent support for the heuristic processing model of cultivation effects, which argues that cultivation effects can be explained by the availability heuristic. The present study represents an experimental test of the heuristic processing model and tests the impact of frequency, recency, and vividness on construct accessibility and social reality beliefs. 213 students participated in a 2 × 2 × 2 prolonged exposure experimental design varying the frequency of exposure to violent television programs, the level of vividness in the programs, and recency of exposure. Dependent measures were accessibility and social reality beliefs. Results showed that reaction times were largely unresponsive to the independent variables. Although there were no main effects for frequency on social reality beliefs, there was a significant interaction between frequency and vividness on beliefs: People watching vivid violent media gave higher estimates of the prevalence of crime and police immorality in the real world in the 3× viewing condition than those in the 1× viewing condition. In concluding, it is argued that this study has important implications for the heuristic processing model, cultivation theory, and research into vividness effects.     

A signal detection analysis of the recognition heuristic

The recognition heuristic uses a recognition decision to make an inference about an unknown variable in the world. Theories of recognition memory typically use a signal detection framework to predict this binary recognition decision. In this article, I integrate the recognition heuristic with signal detection theory to formally investigate how judges use their recognition memory to make inferences. The analysis reveals that false alarms and misses systematically influence the performance of the recognition heuristic. Furthermore, judges should adjust their recognition response criterion according to their experience with the environment to exploit the structure of information in it. Finally, the less-is-more effect is found to depend on the distribution of cue knowledge and judges’ sensitivity to the difference between experienced and novel items. Theoretical implications of this bridge between the recognition heuristic and models of recognition memory are discussed.     

Incommensurability, incomparability, and rational world-choice

Klaas J. Kraay argues that the rational choice model for divine creation—according to which God chooses to actualize one world among possible alternatives based on its axiological properties—cannot succeed given failures of comparability across possible worlds. I argue that failure of comparability across worlds would not undermine the rationality of choosing one world to create among possible alternatives.     

How to Retain Real Estate Sales People: What Things Work

Abstract

This study examines the residential real estate salesperson as one population and the real estate sales manager as a second population in an effort to identify those rewards important to successful sales and career development, as well as retention. Indepth interviews were conducted in order to provide more reliable results for this career field. It was determined that the management of real estate salespeople can be improved by focusing upon selection procedures as well as by developing a greater identification of the salesperson with the firm.     

Harry Potter and the measures of personality: Extraverted Gryffindors,agreeable Hufflepuffs,clever Ravenclaws,and manipulative Slytherins

People use fiction and storytelling to learn about themselves and their social world. Fans of J.K. Rowling’s popular Harry Potter book series often identify with one of the four Hogwarts school communities or “houses”—Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin—that correspond to characters’ specific traits. Fans use a feature on Rowling’s “Pottermore” website that tests their personality and sorts them into the Hogwarts house that best fits them. But what does Pottermore’s sorting quiz measure? We asked fans from online Harry Potter groups into which Hogwarts house they had been sorted on Pottermore. Fans then completed personality measures, including the Big Five traits, need to belong, need for cognition, and the Dark Triad traits—narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Planned contrasts found positive associations between need for cognition and placement in Ravenclaw (known for wit and learning), and between the Dark Triad traits and placement in Slytherin (known for using any means to achieve their ends). We expected—but did not find—that those in Gryffindor (known for bravery) would be higher in extraversion and openness, and that Hufflepuffs (known for loyalty) would be higher on need to belong. Our findings suggest that fiction can reflect real underlying personality dimensions.     

A multilevel investigation of motivational cultural intelligence, organizational diversity climate, and cultural sales: evidence from U.S. real estate firms

Adopting a multilevel theoretical framework, the authors examined how motivational cultural intelligence influences individual cultural sales--the number of housing transactions occurring between people of different cultural origins. Data from 305 real estate agents employed at 26 real estate firms in the United States demonstrated that an individual's motivational cultural intelligence is positively related to his or her cultural sales. This positive relationship is enhanced by the firm's motivational cultural intelligence and diversity climate. The authors discuss the theoretical and practical implications of their findings in a workplace context that involves cross-cultural interpersonal interactions.     

The Other Game: A Journey into the World of Warcraft

ABSTRACT

Many people today live out significant aspects of their internal lives online, in a digital world. Rather than analyze these worlds as mere metaphors for real life, it has become increasingly important for psychotherapists to be willing to participate in these worlds as they are described during the clinical hour. It is necessary to work within a paradox: An online fantasy world takes away from living life in the outer world; the world online offers the safety necessary to help the patient approach living his life in any world. This article explores a case in which I learn to work within the parameters of an online gaming experience—World of Warcraft?—to help a patient integrate split-off aspects of himself as he develops the capacity to own his desires. In this case, the game functioned as an “Eden project” (Hollis, 1998, p. 33), an earnest, if severely constricted, search for paradise lost. This article illustrates what was found—not Eden, but true Otherness.     

Sex Roles and the Desirability of Job Rewards,Expectations and Aspirations of Male versus Female Salespeople

Abstract

There have been numerous studies of the impact of sex-role stereotyping upon the preferences for job rewards and the difference between men and women. This study tests for such differences in a career field where men and women compete equally—commissioned residential real estate sales. Several new hypotheses were tested to include not only differences in desirability for job rewards, but also the expectancy of success in achieving them. There was little evidence of any differences between men and women in this career field resulting from a sex-role impact.     

The anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic: why the adjustments are insufficient

One way to make judgments under uncertainty is to anchor on information that comes to mind and adjust until a plausible estimate is reached. This anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic is assumed to underlie many intuitive judgments, and insufficient adjustment is commonly invoked to explain judgmental biases. However, despite extensive research on anchoring effects, evidence for adjustment-based anchoring biases has only recently been provided, and the causes of insufficient adjustment remain unclear. This research was designed to identify the origins of insufficient adjustment. The results of two sets of experiments indicate that adjustments from self-generated anchor values tend to be insufficient because they terminate once a plausible value is reached (Studies 1a and 1b) unless one is able and willing to search for a more accurate estimate (Studies 2a-2c).     

Psychoanalytischer Raum und alltägliche Welt

The differentiation of an inner analytical space with its immanent fictionality from the real world with its communications and interactions poses the following questions: What have the two worlds in common and how is the transfer from the as-if of the psychoanalytical situation to the real world going on? The apparently exclusive verbal treatment, which at first glance differs explicitly from body therapies but also from behavior therapies leads many nonanalytical people to the incorrect assessment of psychoanalysis as a therapy method being just a verbal exercise, which has nothing to do with real conflicts. In the following paper it will be demonstrated, that language, which in fact transports beside the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic contents intentions, has always a crucial emotive function in a psychoanalytical sense. According to the model of the Polish linguist Roman Jakobson and the ideas of the Argentine/American psychoanalyst Ana-Maria Rizzuto the importance of the emotive function—beside the five other functions—or the mutative actions in the analytic situation will be demonstrated from an interdisciplinary perspective. The question of the transformations and transfers from psychoanalytical situation to the real world allows and requires therefore a greater differentiation.     

Surrogate‐assisted multicriteria optimization: Complexities,prospective solutions,and business case

Complexity in solving real‐world multicriteria optimization problems often stems from the fact that complex, expensive, and/or time‐consuming simulation tools or physical experiments are used to evaluate solutions to a problem. In such settings, it is common to use efficient computational models, often known as surrogates or metamodels, to approximate the outcome (objective or constraint function value) of a simulation or physical experiment. The presence of multiple objective functions poses an additional layer of complexity for surrogate‐assisted optimization. For example, complexities may relate to the appropriate selection of metamodels for the individual objective functions, extensive training time of surrogate models, or the optimal use of many‐core computers to approximate efficiently multiple objectives simultaneously. Thinking out of the box, complexity can also be shifted from approximating the individual objective functions to approximating the entire Pareto front. This leads to further complexities, namely, how to validate statistically and apply the techniques developed to real‐world problems. In this paper, we discuss emerging complexity‐related topics in surrogate‐assisted multicriteria optimization that may not be prevalent in nonsurrogate‐assisted single‐objective optimization. These complexities are motivated using several real‐world problems in which the authors were involved. We then discuss several promising future research directions and prospective solutions to tackle emerging complexities in surrogate‐assisted multicriteria optimization. Finally, we provide insights from an industrial point of view into how surrogate‐assisted multicriteria optimization techniques can be developed and applied within a collaborative business environment to tackle real‐world problems.     

Memory accessibility shapes explanation: Testing key claims of the inherence heuristic account

People understand the world by constructing explanations for what they observe. It is thus important to identify the cognitive processes underlying these judgments. According to a recent proposal, everyday explanations are often constructed heuristically: Because people need to generate explanations on a moment-by-moment basis, they cannot perform an exhaustive search through the space of possible reasons, but may instead use the information that is most easily accessible in memory (Cimpian & Salomon 2014a, b). In the present research, we tested two key claims of this proposal that have so far not been investigated. First, we tested whether—as previously hypothesized—the information about an entity that is most accessible in memory tends to consist of inherent or intrinsic facts about that entity, rather than extrinsic (contextual, historical, etc.) facts about it (Studies 1 and 2). Second, we tested the implications of this difference in the memory accessibility of inherent versus extrinsic facts for the process of generating explanations: Does the fact that inherent facts are more accessible than relevant extrinsic facts give rise to an inherence bias in the content of the explanations generated (Studies 3 and 4)? The findings supported the proposal that everyday explanations are generated in part via a heuristic process that relies on easily accessible—and often inherent—information from memory.     

Attachment,caregiving, and volunteering: Placing volunteerism in an attachment‐theoretical framework

Recent studies based on attachment theory demonstrate that dispositional and experimentally manipulated attachment security facilitate cognitive openness and empathy, strengthen self‐transcendent values, and foster tolerance of out‐group members, suggesting an effect of one behavioral system, attachment, on another, caregiving. Here we report 2 studies conducted in 3 different countries (Israel, the Netherlands, and the United States) to determine whether the 2 dimensions of attachment insecurity—anxiety and avoidance—are related to real‐world altruistic volunteering. In both studies and across the 3 locations, avoidant attachment was related to volunteering less and having less altruistic and exploration‐oriented motives for volunteering. Anxious attachment was related to self‐enhancing motives for volunteering. Additional results suggested that volunteering ameliorates the interpersonal problems of individuals high in anxiety and that volunteering has more beneficial effects if it is done for altruistic reasons. Future directions for experimental research on this topic are outlined.     

Scaffolds for Social Meaning

The perception of social meanings traditionally deemed to be private is addressed by contrasting the perception of social affordances with the perception of the physical affordances of environmental objects. Assuming that (a) affordances are defined by relationships between properties of the environment and properties of an actor and that (b) information must exist to specify this relationship for the perception of affordances, the question is whether and how private social meanings can fulfill these criteria. The attack is twofold. First, one needs to take seriously the ontology of the social world by considering social environment properties and actors' social roles as real and embodied—existing in the world and not just in mental representations. Second and more problematically, one needs to understand how information exists that specifies these more abstract and temporally extended aspects of the environment and actor. I propose that these problems can be averted by taking seriously as conceptual scaffolds the reality of functionally defined properties of the environment and actor, J. J. Gibson's primacy of events, and his notion of the occluding edge (1979/1986).     

Fine Tuning Explained? Multiverses and Cellular Automata

The objective of this paper is analyzing to which extent the multiverse hypothesis provides a real explanation of the peculiarities of the laws and constants in our universe. First we argue in favor of the thesis that all multiverses except Tegmark’s “mathematical multiverse” are too small to explain the fine tuning, so that they merely shift the problem up one level. But the “mathematical multiverse" is surely too large. To prove this assessment, we have performed a number of experiments with cellular automata of complex behavior, which can be considered as universes in the mathematical multiverse. The analogy between what happens in some automata (in particular Conway’s “Game of Life") and the real world is very strong. But if the results of our experiments can be extrapolated to our universe, we should expect to inhabit—in the context of the multiverse—a world in which at least some of the laws and constants of nature should show a certain time dependence. Actually, the probability of our existence in a world such as ours would be mathematically equal to zero. In consequence, the results presented in this paper can be considered as an inkling that the hypothesis of the multiverse, whatever its type, does not offer an adequate explanation for the peculiarities of the physical laws in our world.