Whose idea is it anyway? The importance of reputation in acknowledgement

Six‐year‐old children negatively evaluate plagiarizers just as adults do (Olson & Shaw, 2011), but why do they dislike plagiarizers? Children may think plagiarism is wrong because plagiarizing negatively impacts other people's reputations. We investigated this possibility by having 6‐ to 9‐year‐old children evaluate people who shared their own or other people's ideas (stories). In Experiment 1, we found that children consider it acceptable to retell someone else's story if the source is given credit for their story (improving the source's reputation), but not if the reteller claims credit for the story (steals credit away from someone else). Experiments 2 and 3 showed that children do not consider it bad to lie by giving someone else credit for one's own good story (improving someone else's reputation), but do consider it bad to give someone else credit for one's own bad story (improving one's own reputation at the expense of someone else's). Experiment 4 demonstrated that children think it is equally bad to take credit for someone else's idea for oneself as it is to take someone else's idea and give credit to someone else, suggesting that children dislike when others take credit away from someone else, regardless of whether or not it improves the plagiarizer's reputation. Our results suggest that children dislike plagiarism because it negatively affects others' reputations by taking credit away from them.     

How probable is probably? It depends on whom you're talking about

Two studies tested whether people interpreted verbal chance terms in a self‐serving manner. Participants read statements describing the likelihood of events in their own future and in the future of a randomly chosen other. They interpreted the chance terms numerically. Chance terms were interpreted as denoting a higher probability when they were used to describe the likelihood of pleasant events in one's own future than when they were used to describe the likelihood of pleasant events in someone else's future (Study 1). Similarly, chance terms were interpreted as denoting a lower probability when they were used to describe the likelihood of unpleasant events in one's own future than when they were used to describe the likelihood of unpleasant events in someone else's future (Studies 1 and 2). These differences occurred primarily when the risk statements were threatening. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

I,me, mine: Automatic attentional capture by self‐related stimuli

Drawing on decades of research suggesting an attentional advantage for self‐related information, researchers generally assume that self‐related stimuli automatically capture attention. However, a literature review reveals that this claim has not been systematically examined. We aimed to fill in this dearth of evidence. Following a feature‐based account of automaticity, we set up four experiments in which participants were asked to respond to a target preceded by a cue, which was self‐related or not. In Experiment 1, larger cuing effects (faster reaction times to valid versus invalid trials) were found with a participant's own name compared with someone else's name. In Experiment 2, we replicated these results with unconscious cues. Experiment 3 suggested that these effects are not likely driven by familiarity. In Experiment 4, participants experienced greater difficulties from having their attention being captured by their own compared with someone else's name. We conclude that attentional capture by self‐related stimuli is automatic in the sense that it is unintentional, unconscious, and uncontrolled. Implications for self‐regulation and intergroup relations are discussed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What Am I Looking at? Interpreting Dynamic and Static Gaze Displays

Displays of eye movements may convey information about cognitive processes but require interpretation. We investigated whether participants were able to interpret displays of their own or others' eye movements. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants observed an image under three different viewing instructions. Then they were shown static or dynamic gaze displays and had to judge whether it was their own or someone else's eye movements and what instruction was reflected. Participants were capable of recognizing the instruction reflected in their own and someone else's gaze display. Instruction recognition was better for dynamic displays, and only this condition yielded above chance performance in recognizing the display as one's own or another person's (Experiments 1 and 2). Experiment 3 revealed that order information in the gaze displays facilitated instruction recognition when transitions between fixated regions distinguish one viewing instruction from another. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

The better-than-my-average effect: The relative impact of peak and average performances in assessments of the self and others

We examine whether people call to mind different manifestations of various traits when considering what they are like than when considering what others are like. Specifically, do people think that peak manifestations of their traits and abilities best capture who they are themselves, but that other people are better captured by their average performances or trait expressions? In Studies 1a and 1b, participants were more likely to believe that their own most attractive photographs best represent their typical appearance than others' do. In Study 2, participants' estimates of where they stand on various trait dimensions coincided with their highest possible standing, whereas their estimates of an acquaintance's standing coincided with the midpoint between the latter's highest and lowest possible standing. In Study 3, regression analyses revealed that students' predictions of their own final exam score were based most heavily on their highest score received to that point, but their predictions of someone else's final exam score was based most heavily on that student's average score. We discuss how this tendency fits in the broader literature on self-other differences in evaluation and how it contributes to above-average effect.     

Empathic forecasting: How do we predict other people's feelings?

When making affective forecasts, people commit the impact bias. They overestimate the impact an emotional event has on their affective experience. In three studies we show that people also commit the impact bias when making empathic forecasts, affective forecasts for someone else. They overestimate the impact an emotional event has on someone else's affective experience (Study 1), they do so for friends and strangers (Study 2), and they do so when other sources of information are available (Study 3). Empathic forecasting accuracy, the correlation between one person's empathic forecast and another person's actual affective experience, was lower than between-person forecasting correspondence, the correlation between one person's empathic forecast and another person's affective forecast. Empathic forecasts do not capture other people's actual experience very well but are similar to what other people forecast for themselves. This may enhance understanding between people.     

The perceived impact of tax and regulatory changes

People believe that shared events, events that impact everyone to the same degree, will nonetheless impact them more than others. Across four studies we examined whether this impacts people's reactions to proposed changes to tax and regulatory policies. We found that participants thought that tax (Study 1a and 1b) and regulatory (Study 2) changes would have more of an impact on their own lives than on the lives of people in their same financial situation. We then examined whether these findings are the product of a broad focalism bias or its narrower relative, egocentrism. Because we observed the bias both when participants were asked about their own financial situation or that of someone else, the former appears to be the better explanation (Study 3). We discuss the implications of this bias for people's willingness to embrace policy proposals designed to advance the common good.     

Freedom,moral responsibility,and the failure of universal defeat

Proponents of manipulation arguments against compatibilism hold that manipulation scope (how many agents are manipulated) and manipulation type (whether the manipulator intends that an agent perform a particular action) do not impact judgments about free will and moral responsibility. Many opponents of manipulation arguments agree that manipulation scope has no impact but hold that manipulation type does. Recent work by Latham and Tierney (2022, 2023) found that people's judgments were sensitive to manipulation scope: people judged that an agent was less free and responsible when a manipulation was existential (impacting at least one but not all agents) than when the manipulation was universal (impacting every agent). This study examines people's judgements about existential and universal manipulation cases that involve both intentional and non-intentional outcomes. We found that manipulation scope also affects people's free will and responsibility judgments in manipulation cases involving both intentional and non-intentional outcomes. Interestingly, we also found that manipulation type influences the effect that manipulation scope has on people's free will judgments but not their moral responsibility judgments, which indicates that people's free will and responsibility judgments can come apart. This puts pressure on the prevalent assumption that judgments about free will and moral responsibility are conceptually bound together.     

Does alcohol loosen the tongue? Intoxicated individuals' willingness to report transgressions or criminal behavior carried out by themselves or others

Police commonly interview intoxicated suspects. This is concerning when suspects are innocent because intoxication often leads to a higher risk for impulsive decision making and reduces inhibition. However, the manner in which intoxication affects people's reporting of unethical or criminal actions carried out by themselves or others is unknown and was thus addressed in the current study. Participants (N = 116) were randomly assigned to one of six conditions based on a 2 (transgression: self, other) × 3 (alcohol condition: low‐to‐moderate intoxication, placebo, sober‐control) between‐participants design. After drinking their assigned beverages, participants were asked to disclose a transgression. No main effect of alcohol emerged. However, the odds that participants would report a transgression were significantly higher if they were asked to report a personal, rather than someone else's, transgression. Overall, low‐to‐moderate intoxication did not increase the likelihood of sensitive information disclosure in this initial study, but additional research is needed.     

Lay Persons' and Police Officers' Beliefs Regarding Deceptive Behaviour

Research on the detection of deception, via non-verbal cues, has shown that people's ability to successfully discriminate between truth and deception is only slightly better than chance level. One of the reasons for these disappointing findings possibly lies in people's inappropriate beliefs regarding ‘lying behaviour’. A 64-item questionnaire originally used in Germany, which targets participants' beliefs regarding truthful and deceptive behaviour, was used. The present study differed from previous research in three ways: (i) instead of a student population, police officers and lay people were sampled, (ii) both people's beliefs regarding others' deceptive behaviour and their beliefs regarding their own deceptive behaviour were examined, and (iii) both non-verbal cues to, and content characteristics of, deceptive statements were examined. Results were consistent with previous studies, which found significant differences between people's beliefs regarding deceptive behaviour and experimental observations of actual deceptive behaviour. Further, police officers held as many false beliefs as did lay people and finally, participants were more accurate in their beliefs regarding their own deceptive behaviour than they were in their beliefs regarding others' behaviour.     

Properties of the diversity effect in category-based inductive reasoning

Four experiments investigated how people judge the plausibility of category-based arguments, focusing on the diversity effect, in which arguments with diverse premise categories are considered particularly strong. In Experiment 1 we show that priming people as to the nature of the blank property determines whether sensitivity to diversity is observed. In Experiment 2 we find that people's hypotheses about the nature of the blank property predict judgements of argument strength. In Experiment 3 we examine the effect of our priming methodology on people's tendency to bring knowledge about causality or similarity to bear when evaluating arguments, and in Experiment 4 we show that whether people's hypotheses about the nature of the blank property were causal predicted ratings of argument strength. Together these results suggest that diversity effects occur because diverse premises lead people to bring general features of the premise categories to mind. Although our findings are broadly consistent with Bayesian and Relevance-based approaches to category-based inductive reasoning, neither approach captures all of our findings.     

Evaluating arguments during instigations of defence motivation and accuracy motivation

When people evaluate the strength of an argument, their motivations are likely to influence the evaluation. However, few studies have specifically investigated the influences of motivational factors on argument evaluation. This study examined the effects of defence and accuracy motivations on argument evaluation. According to the compatibility between the advocated positions of arguments and participants' prior beliefs and the objective strength of arguments, participants evaluated four types of arguments: compatible‐strong, compatible‐weak, incompatible‐strong, and incompatible‐weak arguments. Experiment 1 revealed that participants possessing a high defence motivation rated compatible‐weak arguments as stronger and incompatible‐strong ones as weaker than participants possessing a low defence motivation. However, the strength ratings between the high and low defence groups regarding both compatible‐strong and incompatible‐weak arguments were similar. Experiment 2 revealed that when participants possessed a high accuracy motivation, they rated compatible‐weak arguments as weaker and incompatible‐strong ones as stronger than when they possessed a low accuracy motivation. However, participants' ratings on both compatible‐strong and incompatible‐weak arguments were similar when comparing high and low accuracy conditions. The results suggest that defence and accuracy motivations are two major motives influencing argument evaluation. However, they primarily influence the evaluation results for compatible‐weak and incompatible‐strong arguments, but not for compatible‐strong and incompatible‐weak arguments.     

Asymmetries in perceptions of self and others' hypocrisy: Rethinking the meaning and perception of the construct

This article examines how people recall and describe instances of hypocrisy in their own and others' behavior. Participants (N = 302) provided two written examples. The first example recalled a time when someone called the participant a hypocrite, whereas the other recalled an instance when the participant perceived someone else's behavior as hypocritical. The first goal of the study was to discover if real‐world examples of hypocrisy reflect only mere inconsistency, consistent with the construct's narrow use in psychology, or if they contain other distinctive defining features. A typology was used to code the examples, based loosely on Crisp and Cowton's philosophical distinction between four forms of hypocrisy: direct inconsistency, pretense, blame, and complacency. The second goal was to uncover reliable actor–observer differences in perceptions of hypocrisy. Results indicated that the four forms occur in real‐world examples of both self and others' hypocrisy. Interestingly, a new fifth form, indirect inconsistency, emerged from the data, adding nuance to the initial hypothesis. Finally, several actor–observer differences in perceptions of hypocrisy arose and are discussed. The results indicate that hypocrisy is a much more complicated phenomenon than previously considered and provide the impetus for new areas of research. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effect of perspective-taking on reasoning about strong and weak belief-relevant arguments

This study investigated whether perspective-taking reduces belief bias independently of argument strength. Belief bias occurs when individuals evaluate belief-consistent arguments more favourably than belief-inconsistent arguments. Undergraduates (n = 93) read arguments that varied with respect to belief-consistency (i.e., belief-consistent or belief-inconsistent) and strength (i.e., strong or weak) about the topic of climate change. After participants read each argument, those in the perspective-taking condition rated the argument's strength from a perspective of a climate scientist and then from their own perspectives, whereas those in the no perspective-taking condition only rated the arguments from their own perspectives. Perspective-taking eliminated belief bias for weak arguments, but not for strong arguments. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed, and directions for future research are provided.     

Mental time travel for self and other in three- and four-year-old children

Humans possess the unique ability to mentally travel backward in time to re-experience past events (i.e., episodic memory) and forward in time to pre-experience future events (i.e., episodic foresight). Although originally viewed as different cognitive skills, they are now both viewed as components of the episodic memory system. Recently, it has been suggested that the episodic system may allow us to not only pre-experience and predict our own future but also that of another person. In the current study, we investigate this possibility by examining the ability of three- and four-year-old children to plan for their own future and for that of another person. We found that both three- and four-year-old children performed equally, when planning for their own future or when planning for the experimenter's future. These data are consistent with the finding that planning for someone else's future recruits the same neural structures that are used when planning for one's own future.     

The Epistemological Problem of Other Minds and the Knowledge Asymmetry

The traditional epistemological problem of other minds seeks to answer the following question: how can we know someone else's mental states? The problem is often taken to be generated by a fundamental asymmetry in the means of knowledge. In my own case, I can know directly what I think and feel. This sort of self‐knowledge is epistemically direct in the sense of being non‐inferential and non‐observational. My knowledge of other minds, however, is thought to lack these epistemic features. So what is the basic source of my knowledge of other minds if I know my mind in such a way that I cannot know the minds of others? The aim of this paper is to clarify and assess the pivotal role that the asymmetry in respect of knowledge plays within a broadly inferentialist approach to the epistemological problem of other minds. The received dogma has always been to endorse the asymmetry for conceptual reasons and to insist that the idea of knowing someone else's mental life in the same way as one knows one's own mind is a complete non‐starter. Against this, I aim to show that it is at best a contingent matter that creatures such as us cannot know other minds just as we know a good deal of our own minds and also that the idea of having someone else's mind in one's own introspective reach is not obviously self‐contradictory. So the dogma needs to be revisited. As a result, the dialectical position of those inferentialists who believe that we know about someone else's mentality in virtue of an analogical inference will be reinforced.     

Willingness to transmit and the spread of pseudoscientific beliefs

Pseudoscientific beliefs are widespread and can be damaging. If several studies have examined the factors leading people to accept pseudoscientific beliefs, no attention has been paid to the factors contributing to people's willingness to transmit these beliefs. To test whether the willingness to transmit pseudoscientific beliefs contributes to their spread, independent of their believability, we asked participants to rate statements corresponding either to pseudoscientific beliefs (Myths), or to their (correct) negations (Non‐Myths). Statements were rated on believability, on how willing participants would be to transmit them, and on how knowledgeable they would make someone who produces them. Results revealed that participants who believed in Myths were more willing to transmit them than the participants who believed in Non‐Myths were willing to transmit Non‐Myths. A potential factor driving the increased willingness to transmit both Myths and Non‐Myths might be participants' belief that holding the beliefs makes one seem more knowledgeable.     

Artifacts as Conventional Objects

What underlies children's understanding of artifacts? Studies suggest that beginning around age 7, people reason about artifacts in terms of the inventor's purpose—termed the design stance. Our two studies emphasize another component of artifact understanding—the cultural nature of artifacts—by demonstrating people's sensitivity to an artifact's conventional use. In past studies participants were shown a novel artifact and told that someone invented it for a certain purpose and that later another person used it for a different purpose. Here we demonstrate that if participants are told that many people, as opposed to just one person, use an artifact differently, 5-year-olds, 7-year-olds, and adults do not strictly judge the artifact in terms of its invented purpose. We conclude that people's conceptions of artifacts are more complex and dynamic than has been suggested.     

Biased assimilation: the role of source position

Biased assimilation is the tendency to evaluate belief‐consistent information more positively than belief‐inconsistent information. Previous research has demonstrated that biased assimilation is due to an inconsistency between an argument and the recipient's position toward this argument. The present research revealed that an inconsistency between a source's position (independently of the argument) and the recipient's position is also responsible for biased assimilation. In two studies, participants evaluated arguments stated by a politician. Party affiliation of the politician was correctly labeled, incorrectly labeled, or not labeled. The politicians' arguments were evaluated more favorably by their respective voters when party affiliation was correctly labeled. This biased evaluation diminished when party affiliation was not labeled and even slightly reversed when party affiliation was incorrectly labeled. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.