Strategy compatibility: The time versus money effect on product evaluation strategies

We show that time priming leads consumers to adopt an alternative-based evaluation strategy, whereas money priming elicits the use of an attribute-based evaluation strategy. In Experiment 1, we used process tracing in Mouselab to test this proposition, and the results suggested that the effect of time versus money priming on the choice of product-evaluation strategy was mediated by a holistic versus piecemeal information-processing. The results of Experiments 2A and 2B showed that the use of time versus money priming to trigger the choice of an alternative-based versus attribute-based evaluation strategy may result in systematic preference reversals. Specifically, when time (versus money) was primed, the participants were found to be more likely to choose a product dominating on a verbally described (versus numerically described) attribute (Experiment 2A), and one dominating on a non-alignable (versus alignable) attribute (Experiment 2B).     

The unexpected benefits of final deadlines in negotiation

Two experiments explored actual and predicted outcomes in competitive dyadic negotiations under time pressure. Participants predicted that final deadlines would hurt their negotiation outcomes. Actually, moderate deadlines improved outcomes for negotiators who were eager to get a deal quickly because the passage of time was costly to them. Participants’ erroneous predictions may be due to oversimplified and egocentric prediction processes that focus on the effects of situational constraints (deadlines) on the self and oversimplify or ignore their effects on others. The results clarify the psychological processes by which people predict the outcomes of negotiation and select negotiation strategies.     

The path more travelled: Time pressure increases reliance on familiar route-based strategies during navigation

Navigating large-scale environments involves dynamic interactions between the physical world and individuals’ knowledge, goals, and strategies. Time pressure can result from self-imposed goals or relatively dynamic situational factors that induce varied constraints. While time pressure is ubiquitous in daily life and has been shown to influence affective states, cost-benefit analyses, and strategy selection, its influence on navigation behaviour is unknown. The present study examined how introducing varied time constraints during virtual urban navigation would influence spatial strategies and impact the efficiency and effectiveness of goal-directed wayfinding. Participants learned a large-scale urban virtual environment by wayfinding between a series of 20 successive landmark goals (e.g., You have reached the Theater. Now find the Bank.). A day later, they again performed the same task, but landmark-to-landmark trials were characterized by conditions of low-, moderate-, or high-pressure time limits as quantified by a pilot experiment. As time pressure increased, participants more likely navigated along previously experienced paths and less likely travelled in the global direction of the destination. Results suggest strategy shifts under time constraints that increase reliance on egocentric, route-based strategies and decrease reliance on global configural knowledge, probably in an attempt to reduce cognitive demands and support performance under pressure.     

Give them what they want: The benefits of explicitness in gift exchange

Five studies show that gift recipients are more appreciative of gifts they explicitly request than those they do not. In contrast, gift givers assume that both solicited and unsolicited gifts will be equally appreciated. At the root of this dilemma is a difference of opinion about what purchasing an unsolicited gift signals: gift givers expect unsolicited gifts will be considered more thoughtful and considerate by their intended recipients than is actually the case (,  and ). In our final two studies, we highlight two boundary conditions for this effect: identifying a specific gift and using money as a gift. When gift recipients request one specific gift, rather than providing a list of possible gifts, givers become more willing to purchase the requested gift (Study 4). Further, although givers believe that recipients do not appreciate receiving money as much as receiving a solicited gift, recipients feel the opposite about these two gift options (Study 5).     

Pricing risk and ambiguity: The effect of perspective taking

In the valuation of uncertain prospects, a difference is often observed between selling and buying perspectives. This paper distinguishes between risk (known probabilities) and ambiguity (unknown probabilities) in decisions under uncertainty and shows that the valuation disparity increases under ambiguity compared to risk. It is found that both the comparative versus noncomparative evaluation of risky and ambiguous prospects and the uniqueness of the valuation perspective (either seller or buyer) moderate this increase in the disparity under ambiguity. The finding is consistent with recent theoretical accounts of pricing under uncertainty. We discuss implications for market behaviour and for the ambiguity paradigm as a research tool.     

On the benefits of thinking unconsciously: Unconscious thought can increase post-choice satisfaction

This work compares conscious thought and unconscious thought in relation to quality of choice. Earlier work [Dijksterhuis, A. (2004). Think different: The merits of unconscious thought in preference development and decision making. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 586-598] has shown that people make better choices after engaging in unconscious thought (i.e., unconscious activity during a period of distraction) rather than in conscious thought. However, the evidence was obtained for choices between hypothetical alternatives with quality of choice operationalized normatively. As quality of decision is essentially subjective, in the current experiment participants chose between real objects with quality operationalized as post-choice satisfaction. In a paradigm based on work by Wilson and colleagues [Wilson, T. D., Lisle, D., Schooler, J. W., Hodges, S. D., Klaaren, K. J., & LaFleur, S. J. (1993). Introspecting about reasons can reduce post-choice satisfaction. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19, 331-339], participants were briefly presented with five art posters, and chose one either (a) immediately, (b) after thorough conscious thinking about each poster, or (c) after a period of distraction. Participants took their favorite poster home and were phoned 3-5 weeks later. As hypothesized, unconscious thinkers were more satisfied with their choice than participants in the other two conditions.     

The benefits of retail therapy: Making purchase decisions reduces residual sadness

People often shop when feeling sad, but whether and why shopping reduces residual (lingering) sadness remains an open question. Sadness is strongly associated with a sense that situational forces control the outcomes in one's life, and thus we theorized that the choices inherent in shopping may restore personal control over one's environment and reduce residual sadness. Three experiments provided support for our hypothesis. Making shopping choices helped to alleviate sadness whether they were hypothetical (Experiment 1) or real (Experiment 2). In addition, all experiments found support for the underlying mechanism of personal control restoration. Notably, the benefits of restored personal control over one's environment do not generalize to anger (Experiments 2 and 3), because anger is associated with a sense that other people (rather than situational forces) are likely to cause negative outcomes, and these appraisals are not ameliorated by restoring personal control over one's environment.     

When time is money: The effect of hourly payment on the evaluation of time

Empirical research shows decisions about time are often made differently than decisions about money, belying the oft-quoted maxim that “time is money”. However, there are organizational practices such as payment on the basis of time that can make the equivalence of time and money salient and are associated with an economic evaluation of time. Study 1 showed that people paid by the hour applied mental accounting rules to time that are typically only applied to money. Using data from a nationally representative survey, Study 2 documented that people paid by the hour weighed economic returns more strongly in making tradeoffs between time and money. Study 3 showed that participants’ prior exposure to hourly payment was associated with a greater willingness to trade more time for money and that participants randomly assigned to calculate their hourly wage rate expressed greater willingness to trade more time for money. The interaction of prior experience with whether or not participants calculated an hourly wage in predicting participants’ willingness to trade more time for money was fully mediated by the salience of economic criteria in participants’ decision-making.     

The prospect of negotiating: Stress, cognitive appraisal, and performance

Despite a significant literature on the impact of stress on performance in achievement settings, little is known about whether and how stress might matter for would-be negotiators. In two studies, we investigate how bargainers cognitively appraise a looming negotiation, whether its prospect is stressful and what the consequences are for performance. Individuals who appraised a prospective negotiation as a threat experienced more stress ahead of a negotiation, and reached lower quality deals compared to those who had appraised a challenge. Results from a follow-up experiment showed that would-be negotiators who had appraised a threat behaved more passively and were less likely to use tough tactics compared to those who appraised a challenge. Those who appraised a threat also had relatively inaccurate perceptions of their partners’ priorities and interests, which undermined their outcomes. The outcome advantage for those who appraised a challenge was limited to negotiations that contained integrative potential.     

The effect of embodying the elderly on time perception

The present study investigated the perception of stimulus durations represented by elderly faces or by young faces. In a temporal bisection task, participants classified intermediate durations as more similar to a short or a long reference duration. The results showed that the durations represented by elderly faces were less often classified as “long” than the durations represented by young faces. According to internal clock models of time perception, this shortening effect is due to a slowing down of the speed of the internal clock during the perception of elderly faces. Analyses also revealed an interaction between sex of face and sex of participant such that this shortening effect occurred only when the participants share the same sex than the stimulus faces. As discussed, this finding is quite consistent with embodied cognition approaches to information processing, but alternatives accounts are also considered.     

The impact of contextual priors and anxiety on performance effectiveness and processing efficiency in anticipation

It is proposed that experts are able to integrate prior contextual knowledge with emergent visual information to make complex predictive judgments about the world around them, often under heightened levels of uncertainty and extreme time constraints. However, limited knowledge exists about the impact of anxiety on the use of such contextual priors when forming our decisions. We provide a novel insight into the combined impact of contextual priors and anxiety on anticipation in soccer. Altogether, 12 expert soccer players were required to predict the actions of an oncoming opponent while viewing life-sized video simulations of 2-versus-2 defensive scenarios. Performance effectiveness and processing efficiency were measured under four conditions: no contextual priors (CP) about the action tendencies of the opponent and low anxiety (LA); no CP and high anxiety (HA); CP and LA; CP and HA. The provision of contextual priors did not affect processing efficiency, but it improved performance effectiveness on congruent trials. Anxiety negatively affected processing efficiency, but this did not affect the use of contextual priors or influence performance effectiveness. It appears that anxiety and prior contextual information impact attentional resources independent of each other. Findings are discussed with reference to current models of anticipation and anxiety.     

Time pressure and group performance: Exploring underlying processes in the Attentional Focus Model

The Attentional Focus Model (Karau & Kelly, 1992) predicts that time pressure should lead group members to focus on a restricted range of task-relevant cues and to adopt task completion as their major interaction objective. Although this prediction has been supported in several studies (e.g., Karau & Kelly, 1992; Kelly, Jackson, & Hutson-Comeaux, 1997; Kelly & Karau, 1999; Parks & Cowlin, 1995), the exact processes that underlie information restriction have not been specified. We propose that two processes are involved. Specifically, the restriction of information may occur because time pressure affects the way in which information is initially encoded or attended to before a group enters its decision-making phase, or because group members filter out what they judge to be less important information during group discussion and decision making. We assessed both of these processes within a decision-making experiment where time pressure was manipulated prior to learning information that would be used to perform a task. Recall of information learned prior to group discussion did not differ by time pressure condition, arguing against an encoding process. In contrast, interaction data demonstrated information restriction by group members, arguing for a filtering process. Thought listings collected 1 min into the group discussion in some groups also supported a filtering process, as did questionnaire data. Implications of these findings for the Attentional Focus Model and for effective group decision making are discussed.     

The impact of risk and affect on information search efficiency

We develop and test a theoretical framework of the joint influence of risk and affect on information search efficiency. Our framework proposes that information search is less efficient (i.e., less strategic) when risk is high, versus low. It further proposes that the influences of positive and negative affect on search efficiency are asymmetric and depend on the level of risk. Negative affect improves search efficiency when risk is high, but not when it is low. Positive affect degrades search efficiency when risk is low, but not when it is high. We find results consistent with our framework in two experiments. We discuss implications for affect research and for decision making in risky contexts, including financial statement auditing.     

An interactionist perspective on the relation between 2D:4D and behavior: An overview of (moderated) relationships between 2D:4D and economic decision making

The present paper gives an overview of recent research on the association between 2D:4D and different types of economic behavior. Particular attention is given to the importance of context dependence of relationships between 2D:4D and economic as well as other, social, behavior. Patterns of results are discussed from the perspective that 2D:4D might serve as a biological marker of dispositional dominance. This overview hopes to stimulate research from an interactionist perspective which focuses at relationships between 2D:4D and behavior that only appear when specific situational pressures interact with individual differences in 2D:4D.     

Improving time discrimination in children and adults in a temporal bisection task: The effects of feedback and no forced choice on decision and memory processes

In children aged 5 and 8 years old as well as in adults, Experiment 1 tested the effect of feedback on temporal performance using a bisection task. Experiment 2 added a no-forced-choice condition by giving the participants the possibility of responding “I don't know”. The results of Experiment 1 showed that providing feedback increased the bisection point value (point of subjective equality) in all age groups and increased sensitivity to time in the youngest children. The results of Experiment 2 showed that the proportion of “I don't know” responses peaked at the probe duration close to the arithmetic mean of the two anchor durations and decreased as the distance from this central value increased in both the adults and the 8-year-olds. In the 5-year-olds, the proportion of “I don't know” responses was lower and remained constant whatever the probe duration values. Unlike in the youngest children, giving the adults and the 8-year-olds the opportunity to respond “I don't know” increased their sensitivity to time. The modelling of our data suggests that providing feedback in a temporal bisection task affects both the memory and the decision processes. However, whereas the feedback-related effect had a similar effect on decision processes across the age groups, it had an opposite effect on memory processes in the 5-year-olds and the older participants, decreasing the variability of the memory representation of the anchor durations in the former while increasing it in the latter. Finally, in bisection, feedback only improved temporal performance when the memory for duration was imprecise as in the case of the children.     

The time course of gaze bias in visual decision tasks

In three experiments, we used eyetracking to investigate the time course of biases in looking behaviour during visual decision making. Our study replicated and extended prior research by Shimojo, Simion, Shimojo, and Scheier (2003), and Simion and Shimojo (2006). Three groups of participants performed forced-choice decisions in a two-alternative free-viewing condition (Experiment 1a), a two-alternative gaze-contingent window condition (Experiment 1b), and an eight-alternative free-viewing condition (Experiment 1c). Participants viewed photographic art images and were instructed to select the one that they preferred (preference task), or the one that they judged to be photographed most recently (recency task). Across experiments and tasks, we demonstrated robust bias towards the chosen item in either gaze duration, gaze frequency or both. The present gaze bias effect was less task specific than those reported previously. Importantly, in the eight-alternative condition we demonstrated a very early gaze bias effect, which rules out a postdecision response-related explanation.     

The conscious awareness of time distortions regulates the effect of emotion on the perception of time

This study examined how the awareness of emotion-related time distortions modifies the effect of emotion on time perception. Before performing a temporal bisection task with stimulus durations presented in the form of neutral or emotional facial expressions (angry, disgusted and ashamed faces), some of the participants read a scientific text providing either correct or incorrect information on the emotion–time relationship. Other participants did not receive any information. The results showed that the declarative knowledge allowed the participants to regulate (decrease) the intensity of emotional effects on the perception of time, but did not trigger temporal effects when the emotional stimuli did not automatically induce emotional reactions that distorted time.     

Task conflict,information processing,and decision-making: The damaging effect of relationship conflict

A popular theoretical assumption holds that task-related disagreements stimulate critical thinking, and thus may improve group decision making. Two recent meta-analyses showed, however, that task conflict can have a positive effect, a negative effect, or no effect at all on decision-making quality (De Dreu & Weingart, 2003; De Wit, Greer, & Jehn, 2012). In two studies, we built upon the suggestion of both meta-analyses that the presence of relationship conflict determines whether a task conflict is positively or negatively related to decision making. We hypothesized and found that the level of perceived relationship conflict during task conflict (Study 1), and the actual presence (vs. absence) of relationship conflict during task conflict (Study 2), increased group members’ rigidity in holding onto suboptimal initial preferences during decision making and thus led to poor decisions. In both studies the effect of relationship conflict on decision making was mediated by biased use of information.     

On the short horizon of spontaneous iterative reasoning in logical puzzles and games

A reasoning strategy is iterative when the initial conclusion suggested by a set of premises is integrated into that set of premises in order to yield additional conclusions. Previous experimental studies on game theory-based strategic games (such as the beauty contest game) observed difficulty in reasoning iteratively, which has been partly attributed to bounded individual rationality. However, this difficulty has also been attributed to problems in adequately representing the beliefs, actions, and goals of other agents involved in the games. In four experiments, we observed similar difficulties in iterative reasoning in a variety of puzzles and games that did not involve social interactions with other agents, where they can only be caused by individual cognitive boundaries. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that an intrinsic difficulty in iterative reasoning originates from a tendency not to revise our initial mental representation of a problem in light of the initial conclusions that it implies.