Deference in Indians' decision making: introjected goals or injunctive norms?

We examine the claim that Indians are more likely than Americans to act deferentially in the presence of authority figures and explore 2 possible psychological mechanisms for this cultural difference: introjected goals and injunctive norms. Studies 1 and 2 showed that after reflecting upon an authority's expectations, Indians were more likely than Americans to make clothing and course choices consistent with the authority's expectations, but there was no such cultural difference for peers' expectations. Study 3 showed that merely activating the concept of authority figures, without highlighting specific expectations, was sufficient to influence Indians' choices but not their evaluations. Examining a more basic distinction underlying introjected goals versus injunctive norms, Study 4 showed that authority primes influenced Indians' sense of what they should do but not what they want to do. Study 5 showed that, inconsistent with the internalized goal mechanism, the effect of explicit authority primes did not increase after brief delays. However, Indian participants who were less likely to accommodate to the salient authority experienced more guilt across delay conditions, which supported the injunctive norms mechanism. The findings suggest that manipulating injunctive norms can be an effective means for inducing or eliminating deferential behaviors in Indian settings.     

The Anterior Midline Field: coercion or decision making?

To study the neural bases of semantic composition in language processing without confounds from syntactic composition, recent magnetoencephalography (MEG) studies have investigated the processing of constructions that exhibit some type of syntax-semantics mismatch. The most studied case of such a mismatch is complement coercion; expressions such as the author began the book, where an entity-denoting noun phrase is coerced into an eventive meaning in order to match the semantic properties of the event-selecting verb (e.g., ‘the author began reading/writing the book’). These expressions have been found to elicit increased activity in the Anterior Midline Field (AMF), an MEG component elicited at frontomedial sensors at 400 ms after the onset of the coercing noun [Pylkkänen, L., & McElree, B. (2007). An MEG study of silent meaning. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 11]. Thus, the AMF constitutes a potential neural correlate of coercion. However, the AMF was generated in ventromedial prefrontal regions, which are heavily associated with decision-making. This raises the possibility that, instead of semantic processing, the AMF effect may have been related to the experimental task, which was a sensicality judgment. We tested this hypothesis by assessing the effect of coercion when subjects were simply reading for comprehension, without a decision-task. Additionally, we investigated coercion in an adjectival rather than a verbal environment to further generalize the findings. Our results show that an AMF effect of coercion is elicited without a decision-task and that the effect also extends to this novel syntactic environment. We conclude that in addition to its role in non-linguistic higher cognition, ventromedial prefrontal regions contribute to the resolution of syntax-semantics mismatches in language processing.     

Racism in the consulting room: myth or reality?

This paper explores ways in which issues of race might impact on, and/or be ignored within, the practice of psychotherapy. Racial difference, that is being white as well as being black, taps into ingrained patterns of binary thinking that create hierarchies of "otherness." This generates anxiety which leads some therapists to avoid seeing race or naming its resonance in the therapeutic alliance. The origins of this splitting may lie in the unconscious, from whence it can be subtly nudged into more conscious awareness, as a seminal paper by Andrew Curry, published in this journal, suggested some forty-five years ago. Other modalities bring these dynamics more directly into the therapeutic space by exploring the patient's familial history or their daily lived experiences of racial (dis)advantage from an explicitly empowering standpoint. But whatever route is taken, racism is not an animal that can, or should, be left sleeping in the corner of the consulting room.     

Rational or uncommitted? Depression and indecisiveness in interpersonal decision making

Two studies were run which tested the prediction that clinically depressed persons, known for difficulties in making a decision, would process predecisional information relevant to an interpersonal choice in a more impartial, less biased way than non-depressed persons. Both studies provided confirmation for this hypothesis. In each case, the depressed group focused less on specific alternatives, asked more criterion-based questions, and made decisions on the basis of information which was more evenly distributed over alternatives, thus conforming less to biasing, dominance structuring processes, than non-depressed participants. The depressed and non-depressed participants did not differ, however, in evaluative aspects of their decisions, suggesting a relative independence of affective and informational aspects of predecisional processes. The question arises: are depressed patients less biased and hence more rational when making decisions or are they just indifferent and uncommitted? The data have been discussed with reference to research on effortful versus automatic information processing in depression.     

Social categories in the making: construction or recruitment?

Real kinds, both natural and social categories, are characterized by rich inductive potential. They have relatively stable sets of conceptually independent projectable properties. Somewhat surprisingly, even some purely social categories (e.g., ethnicity, gender, political orientation) show such multiple projectability. The article explores the origin of the inductive richness of social categories and concepts. I argue that existing philosophical accounts provide only a partial explanation, and mechanisms of boundary formation and stabilization must be brought into view for a more comprehensive account of inductively rich social categories.

     

Take the best or look at the rest? Factors influencing "one-reason" decision making

Aspects of an experimental environment were manipulated in 3 experiments to examine the parameters under which the "take-the-best" (TTB) heuristic (e.g., G. Gigerenzer & D. G. Goldstein, 1996) operates. Results indicated TTB use to be more prevalent when the cost of information was high, when validities of the cues were known, and when a deterministic environment was used. However, large individual variability in strategy use was observed as well as a significant proportion of behavior inconsistent with TTB, expecially its stopping rule. The results demarcate some of the heuristic's boundary conditions and also question the validity of TTB as a psychologically plausible and pervasive model of behavior.     

Gender and values: What is the impact on decision making?

In this study we investigated C. Gilligan's [(1982), In a different voice: Psychological theory and women's development, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press] suggestion that women and men, due to socialization, develop differently in terms of moral development [L. Kohlberg (1969), “Stage and Consequence: The Cognitive Development Approach to Socialization,” In D. G. Goslin (Ed.), Handbook of socialization: Theory and research, Chicago: Rand McNally]. We also considered whether men and women differ in terms of a related construct, values of equity and equality [K. A. Rasinski (1987), “What's Fair Is Fair or Is It? Value Differences Underlying Public Views About Social Justice,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 53, pp. 201–211]. It is our expectation that gender influences overall orientation in terms of the two sets of values, and that differences in values lead decision makers to weigh decision issues and to make final decisions differently. Results suggest that there are some gender-related differences in value systems, weights of decision issues, and final decisions.     

Jury decision making research: Are researchers focusing on the mouse and not the elephant in the room?

The concerns of jury research have extensively focused on subject selection, yet larger issues loom. We argue that observed differences between students and non-students in mock juror studies are inconsistent at best, and that researchers are ignoring the more important issue of jury deliberation. We contend that the lack of information on deliberating jurors and/or juries is a much greater threat to ecological validity and that some of our basic findings and conclusions in the literature today might be different if we had used juries, not non-deliberating jurors, as the unit of measure. Finally, we come full circle in our review and explore whether the debate about college and community samples might be more relevant to deliberating versus non-deliberating jurors.     

Dual or unitary system? Two alternative models of decision making

In recent years, a lively debate in neuroeconomics has focused on what appears to be a fundamental question: Is the brain a unitary or a dual system? We are still far from a consensus view. The accumulating evidence supports both sides of the debate. A reason for the difficulty in reaching a convincing solution is that we do not yet have a clear theoretical model for either position. Here I review the basic elements and potential building blocks for such theories, using sources in large measure from classical decision theory and game theory.     

Family decision at the turn of the century: has the changing structure of households impacted the family decision‐making process?

Evaluation of husbands' and wives' influence in family decision making is heavily reliant on studies conducted in the 1970s and 1980s. Since that time, profound changes have occurred in the American family. These changes may have affected the nature of decision making in the household. To examine the degree to which earlier findings are still generalisable today, hypotheses are developed and tested with a contemporary sample of 458 men and women. Results suggest that there have been significant changes in the roles assumed in the family decision‐making process, with the wife gaining more influence in all decision areas. The results indicate that marketers must re‐examine their marketing strategies for some products and/or services. Possible theoretical explanations are suggested to explain why these changes may have occurred. Copyright © 2002 Henry Stewart Publications.     

Sequential lineups: shift in criterion or decision strategy?

R. C. L. Lindsay and G. L. Wells (1985) argued that a sequential lineup enhanced discriminability because it elicited use of an absolute decision strategy. E. B. Ebbesen and H. D. Flowe (2002) argued that a sequential lineup led witnesses to adopt a more conservative response criterion, thereby affecting bias, not discriminability. Height was encoded as absolute (e.g., 6 ft [1.83 m] tall) or relative (e.g., taller than). If a sequential lineup elicited an absolute decision strategy, the principle of transfer-appropriate processing predicted that performance should be best when height was encoded absolutely. Conversely, if a simultaneous lineup elicited a relative decision strategy, performance should be best when height was encoded relatively. The predicted interaction was observed, providing direct evidence for the decision strategies explanation of what happens when witnesses view a sequential lineup.     

“Piensa” twice: On the foreign language effect in decision making

In this article, we assess to what extent decision making is affected by the language in which a given problem is presented (native vs. foreign). In particular, we aim to ask whether the impact of various heuristic biases in decision making is diminished when the problems are presented in a foreign language. To this end, we report four main studies in which more than 700 participants were tested on different types of individual decision making problems. In the first study, we replicated Keysar et al.’s (2012) recent observation regarding the foreign language effect on framing effects related to loss aversion. In the second section, we assessed whether the foreign language effect is present in other types of framing problems that involve psychological accounting biases rather than gain/loss dichotomies. In the third section, we studied the foreign language effect in several key aspects of the theory of decision making under risk and uncertainty. In the fourth study, we assessed the presence of a foreign language effect in the cognitive reflection test, a test that includes logical problems that do not carry emotional connotations. The absence of such an effect in this test suggests that foreign language leads to a reduction of heuristic biases in decision making across a range of decision making situations and provide also some evidence about the boundaries of the phenomenon. We explore several potential factors that may underlie the foreign language effect in decision making.     

Neighborhood frequency does affect performance in the Reicher task: encoding or decision?

Three experiments using the Reicher task show that performance on low-frequency words is disrupted if the incorrect alternative forms a higher frequency word. This neighborhood frequency effect occurs for both energy and pattern masks and for different sets of items. When the upcoming word is primed and its accessibility is enhanced, the neighborhood frequency effect is eliminated. Experiments 4a and 4b tested the neighborhood frequency effect using a same-different task and a signal-detection analysis. Neighborhood frequency affected the decision criterion but not the sensitivity of the perceptual system. Experiment 5 showed that many words with a frequency in the range from 1 to 5 per million are not recognized out of context. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that frequency effects in the Reicher task are caused by a bias in the decision system and can be simulated with the stochastic activation-verification model.     

When does duration matter in judgment and decision making?

Research on sequences of outcomes shows that people care about features of an experience, such as improvement or deterioration over time, and peak and end levels, which the discounted utility model (DU) assumes they do not care about. In contrast to the finding that some attributes are weighted more than DU predicts, Kahneman and coauthors have proposed that there is one feature of sequences that DU predicts people should care about but that people in fact ignore or underweight: duration. In this article, the authors extend this line of research by investigating the role of conversational norms (H. P. Grice, 1975), and scale-norming (D. Kahneman & T. D. Miller, 1986). The impact of these 2 factors are examined in 4 parallel studies that manipulate these factors orthogonally. The major finding is that response modes that reduce reliance on conversational norms or standard of comparison also increase the attention that participants pay to duration.     

Molecular reduction: reality or fiction?

Neurophysiological research suggests our mental life is related to the cellular processes of particular nerves. In the spirit of Occam’s razor, some authors take these connections as reductions of psychological terms and kinds to molecular- biological mechanisms and patterns. Bickle’s ‘intervene cellularly/molecularly and track behaviourally’ reduction is one example of this. Here the mental is being reduced to the physical in two steps. The first is, through genetically altered mammals, to causally alter activity of particular nerve cells, i.e. neurons, at the molecular level and then, under controlled experimental conditions, to use generally-accepted rules of behaviour within psychology to monitor the results of these manipulations. In this article, we argue that Bickle’s case example for molecular reduction, i.e. the reduction of long-term memory to its cellular-molecular mechanisms, cannot support his claims, because it turns out that his chosen molecular pathway is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for the memory consolidation switch, and thus, instead of rejecting the multiple realization argument, Bickle’s argument actually speaks in favour of it. Therefore the idea of reductive connections between our mental life and the activity of particular nerves is, at present, still more fiction than reality.     

Innate talents: reality or myth?

Talents that selectively facilitate the acquisition of high levels of skill are said to be present in some children but not others. The evidence for this includes biological correlates of specific abilities, certain rare abilities in autistic savants, and the seemingly spontaneous emergence of exceptional abilities in young children, but there is also contrary evidence indicating an absence of early precursors of high skill levels. An analysis of positive and negative evidence and arguments suggests that differences in early experiences, preferences, opportunities, habits, training, and practice are the real determinants of excellence.     

Power, risk, and the status quo: does power promote riskier or more conservative decision making?

Two experiments suggest that the experience of power can interact with a person's level of power motivation to produce effects on risky decision making. In Study 1, assignment to a position of power increased risk taking among participants with low levels of power motivation but reduced risk taking among participants with high levels of power motivation. In Study 2, participants high in power motivation again made more conservative decisions, but only under circumstances in which the dominance hierarchy was unstable and there was potential for losing their power. When power was irrevocable and participants' choices had no bearing on their ability to retain power, both high and low power-motivated participants responded by making riskier decisions. Findings suggest that although power may generally lead to riskier decisions, power may lead to more conservative decisions among power-motivated individuals, especially when the status quo is perceived to be in jeopardy.