Evidence for an equality heuristic in social decision making

Subjects read a story in which five business partners needed to allocate the profits and expenses of the partnership in a fair and reasonable manner. Each of the partners worked independently and produced different gross incomes between $140 and $285. The gross incomes were to be divided into expenses and profits. Subjects were asked to fill in fair allocations in an accounting ledger. Three factors were manipulated: the target of the allocation task (either the expenses or the profits), the causal attributions for the differences in gross incomes (internal, external, or both), and whether the subjects were asked to fill in both columns (expenses and profits) or just one.

The results supported the hypothesis that the subjects heuristically used equality to make their allocations. Over 70% of the subjects allocated at least one column equally (although the frequency of equality use varied as a function of both the target of the allocation and the attribution given). Subjects allocated the target columns equally more often than non-target columns, even though equality for one column implied inequality for the other. The use of equality was also sensitive to the attribution given for the performance differences. Differences due to external factors, i.e., the number of people showing up at the market, produced the most equal allocations of profits (with unequal expenses) while the internal attribution produced the highest proportion of equal expense allocations (with unequal profits).     

On mediating equity,equality, and self-interest: The role of self-presentation in social exchange

Do individuals conform to various norms of reward allocation not necessarily in response to internal standards but rather, to win approval from relevant others? This study examined the role of self-presentation in mediating equity, equality, and self-interest within reward allocations. It was hypothesized that when others were aware of a subject's behavior, distributions would reflect that person's normative definition of the situation. Subjects allocated a $5.00 payment among themselves and three partners with unequal performance inputs. Informing the experimenter of one's decisions resulted in more equitable divisions, characterizing the employment-productivity relationship between experimenter and subject. When co-workers, defined as peers, were aware of allocations, an equality-based solution was favored. Allocators enhanced their own rewards beyond normative values only when their choices were completely private. Evidence was also found of postdecisional cognitive changes which maintained the belief that one acted justly in giving each partner what he deserved. These findings are consistent with the proposition that individuals maximize their own rewards, defined broadly to include social impression-formation and intrapsychic benefits. Apparently, self-presentational concerns mediate the relative salience of equity, equality, and self-interest in social exhange.     

Dividing attention between color and shape: Evidence of coactivation

When attention is divided between spatially distinct objects, the time-to detect a target decreases when two or more targets are present. This redundancy gain can be accounted for by an interactive race model (Mordkoff & Yantis, 1991) in which separate decisions are made about each object, but environmental contingencies among the objects can influence decision times. In the present study, we examined whether the model also accounts for performance when attention must be divided between stimulus attributes other than spatial location. Subjects made target-present responses when displays included a prespecified color, a prespecified letter, or both target features. The data violated the predictions of all separate-activations models, including the interactive race model. Two control experiments ruled out an alternative account based on task complexity. We conclude that coactivation occurs when target attributes from two separable dimensions are simultaneously present, but not when target attributes come from the same dimension. A modular hybrid of race and coactivation models is tentatively proposed.     

Interaction among auditory dimensions: timbre, pitch, and loudness

In two experiments, we examined whether or not pairs of auditory dimensions--timbre-loudness (Experiment 1) and timbre-pitch (Experiment 2)--interact in speeded classification. Subjects classified values from one dimension while the other dimension was (1) held constant (baseline), (2) varied orthogonally (filtering), or (3) correlated linearly. The subjects showed substantial Garner interference when classifying all dimensions--that is, poor performance at filtering relative to baseline. Timbre and loudness displayed redundancy gain (i.e., performance faster than baseline) when correlated positively, but redundancy loss (i.e., interference) when correlated negatively. Timbre and pitch displayed redundancy gain however dimensions were correlated. Both pairs of dimensions showed substantial effects of congruity: Attributes from one dimension were classified faster when paired with "congruent" attributes from the other dimension. The results are interpreted in terms of an interactive multichannel model of auditory processing.     

"Fair" Allocations of Pay and Workload: Tests of a Subtractive Model with Nonlinear Judgment Function

An allocation is commonly regarded as "fair" if the ratio of outcome of two persons equals the ratio of their respective inputs. In allocation of pay, however, a subtractive model with sigmoidal-shaped judgment function has recently been reported. The present research further tested the plausibility of the subtractive model in allocations of pay and workload. Subjects decided either pay (N = 17) or workload (N = 17) for Person A using three pieces of information - the pay of B and the input of A and B or the workload of B and the pay of A and B. As hypothesized, factorial plots of the input (or pay) of Persons A and B across the low, moderate, and high levels of pay (or workload) of Person B yielded the diverging, slanted barrel, and converging patterns, respectively. Monotonic transformations of the data rescaled nonparallelism to perfect parallelism. The judgment function had a sigmoidal shape characterized by "floor" and "ceiling" effects. These results support the subtractive model but question the ratio model of "fair" allocations.     

The choice between allocation principles: amplifying when equality dominates

One hundred and ninety participants (95 undergraduates and 95 employees) responded to a factorial survey in which a number of case-based organizational allocation tasks were described. Participants were asked to imagine themselves as employees in fictitious organizations and chose among three allocations of employee-development schemes invested by the manager in different work groups. The allocations regarded how such investments should be allocated between two parties. Participants chose twice, once picking the fairest and once the best allocation. One between-subjects factor varied whether the parties represented social (i.e., choosing among allocations between two different work groups) or temporal comparisons (i.e., choosing among allocations between the present and the following year). Another between-subjects factor varied whether participants' in-group was represented by the parties or not. One allocation maximized the outcome to one party, another maximized the joint outcome received by both parties, and a third provided both parties with equal but lower outcomes. It was predicted that equality, although always deficient to both parties, would be the preferred allocation when parties represented social comparisons and when choices were based on fairness. When parties represented temporal comparisons, and when choices were based on preference, maximizing the joint outcome was hypothesized to be the preferred allocation. Results supported these hypotheses. Against what was predicted, whether the in-group was represented by the parties or not did not moderate the results, indicating that participants' allocation preferences were not affected by self-interest. The main message is that people make sensible distinctions between what they prefer and what they regard as fair. The results were the same for participating students who imagined themselves as being employees and participants who were true employees, suggesting that no serious threats to external validity are committed when university students are used as participants.     

Age and outcome allocation: A new test of the subtractive model

The no, moderate, and large differences between shares of outcome allocated to the high and low performers are interpreted as the respective rules of equality, ordinal equity, and proportional equity. The ability to employ the proportional rule is also believed to develop around the age of 13 years. The authors hypothesized that: (i) the rule of outcome allocation is subtraction; and (ii) age differences in outcome allocation are mediated by age differences in perceived inputs. In an experiment on Chinese aged 8–20 years, measures of perceived inputs were taken after or before outcome allocation. Results from the input-allocation order supported the hypotheses. Obviously, age effects in outcome allocations by Asians can sometimes be mediated by age differences in the ability to perceive the inputs accurately.     

Choosing versus rejecting: Why some options are both better and worse than others

A previously unobserved pattern of choice behavior is predicted and corroborated. In line with the principle of compatibility, according to which the weighting of inputs is enhanced by their compatibility with output, the positive and negative dimensions of options (their pros and cons) are expected to loom larger when one is choosing and when one is rejecting, respectively. Subjects are presented with pairs of options, one of which—theenriched option—has more positive as well as more negative dimensions than does the other,impoverished, option. Because positive dimensions are weighted more heavily in choosing than in rejecting, and negative dimensions are weighted more heavily in rejecting than in choosing, the enriched option tends to be chosen and rejected relatively more often than the impoverished option. These findings are extended to nonbinary decision problems, and their implications for the rational theory of choice and for everyday decisions are discussed.     

Situational moderators of gender differences in reward allocations

This experiment investigated the impact of four variables, hypothesized to convey cues as to sex-role appropriate behavior, on gender differences in reward allocations between self and a co-worker. These variables were: expectations for future interactions with the co-worker, sex of co-worker, type of reward, and type of allocation decision. Males and females were asked to indicate how they would allocate money or course points between themselves and a same or opposite sex co-worker with inferior performance. Females allocated either type of reward more equitably than males when making independent allocations. When making joint (zero-sum) allocations, however, both sexes allocated rewards more equitably with a same-sex co-worker than with an opposite-sex co-worker when future interaction with the co-worker was expected. Grades were seen as more important than money by both sexes, and both men and women allocated course points more equitably than money. Type of reward did not, however, differentially affect men's and women's allocation patterns. Overall, independent allocations were more equitable than joint allocations. Results are discussed as suggesting that gender differences in reward allocations are not a result of inherent personality differences between the sexes but rather reflect the influence of situational factors that can arouse sex-role specific self-presentational concerns.     

Attention,instruction, and response representation

A two-dimensional Simon-type task was devised to investigate the impact of task requirements and explicit instructions on spatial action coding. Subjects performed actions that were defined on two spatial dimensions: horizontal (left-right) or vertical (top-bottom). The relevant stimulus feature was nonspatial but the stimuli varied on the horizontal and the vertical dimension, so that horizontal and vertical S-R compatibility effects could be measured separately. Implicit task requirements were manipulated by having the subjects perform an unrelated task before the Simon task—a task in which only one of the two spatial dimensions was relevant. Instructions were varied by describing the responses in the unrelated priming task and/or in the Simon task in spatial terms or by referring to nonspatial features of the response keys. Priming a particular dimension increased the Simon effect on that dimension, whereas instructions had no differential effect. These findings suggest that, first, drawing attention to a particular dimension leads to a stronger contribution to event representation of those features defined on that dimension (intentional weighting) and, second, that instructions do not affect action coding if the manipulation does not change the task goal.     

Spatial Repetition Blindness Is Modulated by Selective Attention to Color or Shape

Subjects reported either the colors or shapes of two simultaneous masked letters. Our first study found that they were less accurate when the reported features were identical ("repetition blindness," or RB), while repetition along the unreported dimension had no effect. Three follow-up studies confirmed that when the same dimension was judged (overtly or covertly) for both stimuli, performance was only affected by repetition along that dimension. However, when different dimensions were judged for the two stimuli, performance was affected by repetition on both dimensions. These findings support new conclusions about both RB and visual attention. First, RB depends critically on visual attention, rather than simply on the stimulus presented or the overt response required. Second, while attention can be restricted to a single visual dimension, this is efficient only when the same dimension is selected for both objects. Selecting the color of one object and the shape of another simultaneous object results in both dimensions being accessed for both objects.     

The stroop effect: It is not the robust phenomenon that you have thought it to be

Five experiments demonstrate that context has a powerful effect on the ease with which people can name (Experiments 1-3) or categorize (Experiments 4-5) a stimulus while ignoring another stimulus, irrelevant or conflicting with the target. Selectivity of attention to the target dimension was gauged through Stroop and Garner effects. When the stimulus values along the target dimension and the to-be-ignored dimension were correlated over the experimental trials, large effects of Stroop and Garner influenced performance. However, when random allocation of values created zero dimensional correlation, the Stroop effects vanished. These results imply that when the nominally irrelevant dimension is in fact correlated with the relevant dimension, participants then attend to the irrelevant dimension and thus open themselves up to Stroop interference. Another variable of context, the relative salience of the constituent dimensions, also affected performance with the more discriminable dimension disrupting selective attention to the less discriminable dimension. The results demonstrate the importance of context in engendering the failure of selective attention and challenge traditional automaticity accounts of the Stroop effect.     

决策者角色及相关变量对风险偏好的影响

采用IAT技术测查被试的内隐自尊, 并引入收益和损失两种任务框架, 综合探讨了内隐自尊水平、任务得失框架对自我决策和为他人决策时风险偏好的影响。结果发现：(1)在收益框架下, 被试为他人决策时更冒险, 而在损失框架下, 为自我和他人决策的风险偏好无显著差异; (2)与为自我决策相比, 低内隐自尊者为他人决策时更冒险, 而高内隐自尊者为自我和他人决策的风险偏好无显著差异; (3)内隐自尊水平与任务框架的交互作用及内隐自尊水平、任务框架和决策者角色之间的三级交互作用均不显著。依据相关的理论和发现对这种结果进行了分析和讨论。     

ASSESSING INFLUENTIAL DIMENSIONS OF REINFORCERS ON CHOICE IN STUDENTS WITH SERIOUS EMOTIONAL DISTURBANCE

We examined how reinforcer rate, quality, delay, and response effort combined to influence the choices of 6 youths with learning and behavior difficulties, and the viability of an assessment methodology derived from matching theory for determining differential responsiveness to those reinforcer and response dimensions. The students were given two concurrent sets of math problems that were equal on two dimensions but competed on two other dimensions (e.g., one set yielded higher rate and lower quality reinforcement than the other). Competing dimensions were counterbalanced across the six conditions of the initial assessment phase, permitting assessment of each dimension on time allocation. The conditions resulting in the most and least time allocated to one problem set alternative relative to the other were then replicated. Time allocated to each of the problems within sets was differentially affected by the reinforcer and/or response dimensions, with allocation patterns varying across students. The results are discussed in the context of implications for the design of treatments and extrapolations from basic research on matching and behavioral economics.     

No overall right-left prevalence for horizontal

The present study confirmed that there is no overall right—left prevalence effect for Simon tasks, in which stimulus location is irrelevant, when (1) the stimulus and response sets vary along both horizontal and vertical dimensions simultaneously, (2) the stimulus set varies along both dimensions, but the response set varies along only one dimension, and (3) the stimuli and responses vary in one of four possible locations and responses are made by a unimanual joystick movement. In all experiments, Simon effects of similar magnitude were evident for both the horizontal and the vertical dimensions. The findings suggest that the right—left prevalence effect observed with two-dimensional location-relevant tasks is not due to stronger overall automatic activation of horizontal codes but to different translation efficiencies in intentional response selection processes.     

How do people learn to allocate resources? Comparing two learning theories

How do people learn to allocate resources? To answer this question, 2 major learning models are compared, each incorporating different learning principles. One is a global search model, which assumes that allocations are made probabilistically on the basis of expectations formed through the entire history of past decisions. The 2nd is a local adaptation model, which assumes that allocations are made by comparing the present decision with the most successful decision up to that point, ignoring all other past decisions. In 2 studies, participants repeatedly allocated a capital resource to 3 financial assets. Substantial learning effects occurred, although the optimal allocation was often not found. From the calibrated models of Study 1, a priori predictions were derived and tested in Study 2. This generalization test shows that the local adaptation model provides a better account of learning in resource allocations than the global search model.     

A Dissociation Between Attention and Selection

It is widely assumed that the allocation of spatial attention results in the "selection" of attended objects or regions of space. That is, once a stimulus is attended, all its feature dimensions are processed irrespective of their relevance to behavioral goals. This assumption is based in part on experiments showing significant interference for attended stimuli when the response to an irrelevant dimension conflicts with the response to the relevant dimension (e.g., the Stroop effect). Here we show that such interference is not due to attending per se. In two spatial cuing experiments, we found that it was possible to restrict processing of attended stimuli to task-relevant dimensions. This new evidence supports two novel conclusions: (a) Selection involves more than the focusing of attention per se; and (b) task expectations play a key role in determining the depth of processing of the elementary feature dimensions of attended stimuli.     

The impact of stimulus and response variability on S-R correspondence effects

Six experiments investigated how variability on irrelevant stimulus dimensions and variability on response dimensions contribute to spatial and nonspatial stimulus-response (S-R) correspondence effects. Experiments 1-3 showed that, when stimuli varied in location and number, S-R correspondence effects for location or numerosity occurred when responses varied on these dimensions but not when responses were invariant on these dimensions. These results are consistent with the response-discrimination account, according to which S-R correspondence effects should only arise for a dimension that is used for discriminating between responses in working memory. Experiments 4-6 showed that, when responses varied in location and number, both invariant and variable stimulus number produced correspondence effects in S-R numerosity. In summary, the present results indicate that the usefulness of a particular dimension for response discrimination can be sufficient for producing S-R correspondence effects, whereas variability of a stimulus dimension is not sufficient for producing such effects.     

Children's understanding of equity in the context of inequality

In the context of a pre‐existing resource inequality, the concerns for strict equality (allocating the same number of resources to all recipients) conflict with the concerns for equity (allocating resources to rectify the inequality). This study demonstrated age‐related changes in children's (3–8 years old, N = 133) ability to simultaneously weigh the concerns for equality and equity through the analysis of children's judgements, allocations, and reasoning in the context of a pre‐existing inequality. Three‐ to 4‐year‐olds took equity into account in their judgements of allocations, but allocated resources equally in a behavioural task. In contrast, 5‐ to 6‐year‐olds rectified the inequality in their allocations, but judged both equitable and equal allocations to be fair. It was not until 7–8 years old that children focused on rectifying the inequality in their allocations and judgements, as well as judged equal allocations less positively than equitable allocations, thereby demonstrating a more complete understanding of the necessity of rectifying inequalities. The novel findings revealed age‐related changes from 3 to 8 years old regarding how the concerns for equity and equality develop, and how children's judgements, allocations, and reasoning are coordinated when making allocation decisions.     

Cross-dimensional perceptual selectivity

Three visual search experiments tested whether top-down selectivity toward particular stimulus dimensions is possible during preattentive parallel search. Subjects viewed multielement displays in which two salient items, each unique in a different dimension--that is, color and intensity (Experiment 1) or color and form (Experiments 2 and 3)--were simultaneously present. One of the dimensions defined the target; the other dimension served as distractor. The results indicate that when search is performed in parallel, top-down selectivity is not possible. These findings suggest that preattentive parallel search is strongly automatic, because it satisfies both the load-insensitivity and the unintentionality criteria of automaticity.