Agency affects adults', but not children's,guessing preferences in a game of chance

Adults and children have recently been shown to prefer guessing the outcome of a die roll after the die has been rolled (but remained out of sight) rather than before it has been rolled. This result is contrary to the predictions of the competence hypothesis (Heath & Tversky, 1991 Heath, C. and Tversky, A. 1991. PREFerence and belief: Ambiguity and competence in choice under uncertainty. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 4: 5–28. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), which proposes that people are sensitive to the degree of their relative ignorance and therefore prefer to guess about an outcome it is impossible to know, rather than one that they could know, but do not. We investigated the potential role of agency in guessing preferences about a novel game of chance. When the experimenter controlled the outcome, we replicated the finding that adults and 5- to 6-year-old children preferred to make their guess after the outcome had been determined. For adults only, this preference reversed when they exerted control over the outcome about which they were guessing. The adult data appear best explained by a modified version of the competence hypothesis that highlights the notion of control or responsibility. It is proposed that potential attributions of blame are related to the guesser's role in determining the outcome. The child data were consistent with an imagination-based account of guessing preferences.     

Guessing imagined and live chance events: Adults behave like children with live events

An established finding is that adults prefer to guess before rather than after a chance event has happened. This is interpreted in terms of aversion to guessing when relatively incompetent: After throwing, the fall could be known. Adults (N=71, mean age 18;11, N=28, mean age 48;0) showed this preference with imagined die‐throwing as in the published studies. With live die‐throwing, children (N=64, aged 6 and 8 years; N=50, aged 5 and 6 years) and 15‐year‐olds (N=93, 46) showed the opposite preference, as did 17 adults. Seventeen‐year‐olds (N=82) were more likely to prefer to guess after throwing with live rather than imagined die‐throwing. Reliance on imagined situations in the literature on decision‐making under uncertainty ignores the possibility that adults imagine inaccurately how they would really feel: After a real die has been thrown, adults, like children, may feel there is less ambiguity about the outcome.     

ON REPORTING RECOLLECTIVE EXPERIENCES AND "DIRECT ACCESS TO MEMORY SYSTEMS"

Abstract— Strack and Förster (1995) showed that, unlike remember responses, know responses in recognition memory were influenced by manipulating response bias. We describe and experiment that replicated theirs but additionally allowed subjects to report guesses. Only guess responses were influenced by this manipulation. Response bias had no effects on either know or remember responses. This outcome suggests that manipulating response bias influence know responses only when guessing is encouraged but not reported as such. More-over, though know responses reflected memory for the study events, guess responses did not.     

Young Children Have Difficulty Predicting Future Preferences in the Presence of a Conflicting Physiological State

This study examined children's predictions about their future preferences when they were in two different physiological states (thirsty and not thirsty). Ninety 3‐ to 7‐year‐olds were asked to predict what they would prefer tomorrow: pretzels to eat or water to drink after having consumed pretzels, and again after having had the opportunity to quench their thirst with water. Results showed that although children initially preferred pretzels to water at baseline, they more often indicated that they would prefer water the next day after they had consumed pretzels. After consuming water, however, the same children indicated they would prefer pretzels the next day. Children's verbal justifications for their choices rarely made reference to their current or future states, but rather justifications were more likely to make reference to their general preferences when they were no longer thirsty compared to when they were thirsty. Results suggest that current physiological states have a powerful influence on future preferences. The findings are discussed in the context of the development of episodic foresight, the Bischof‐Kohler hypothesis, and the important and often overlooked role that children's current states play in future decision making. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Pain in the Past and Pleasure in the Future: The Development of Past–Future Preferences for Hedonic Goods

It seems self-evident that people prefer painful experiences to be in the past and pleasurable experiences to lie in the future. Indeed, it has been claimed that, for hedonic goods, this preference is absolute (Sullivan, 2018). Yet very little is known about the extent to which people demonstrate explicit preferences regarding the temporal location of hedonic experiences, about the developmental trajectory of such preferences, and about whether such preferences are impervious to differences in the quantity of envisaged past and future pain or pleasure. We find consistent evidence that, all else being equal, adults and children aged 7 and over prefer pleasure to lie in the future and pain in the past and believe that other people will, too. They also predict that other people will be happier when pleasure is in the future rather than the past but sadder when pain is in the future rather than the past. Younger children have the same temporal preferences as adults for their own painful experiences, but they prefer their pleasure to lie in the past and do not predict that others' levels of happiness or sadness vary dependent on whether experiences lie in the past or the future. However, from the age of 7, temporal preferences were typically abandoned at the earliest opportunity when the quantity of past pain or pleasure was greater than the quantity located in the future. Past–future preferences for hedonic goods emerge early developmentally but are surprisingly flexible.     

大学生对穷人的消极刻板印象及猜测偏向

主要考察大学生对穷人的消极刻板印象及猜测偏向。实验1中的两个单类内隐联想测验结果与前人研究基本一致：虽然被试对穷人热情的评价相对积极,但总体上认为穷人低能力、低热情。实验2通过源监测任务发现,在忘记特质词来源的情况下,被试倾向于猜测消极特质词来自贫困者,积极特质词来自小康者。研究不仅证实了大学生对穷人的消极刻板印象,而且进一步发现大学生存在对穷人的消极猜测偏向。     

Parent-offspring conflict over mating: The case of mating age

Parents and offspring have asymmetrical preferences with respect to mate choice. So far, several areas of disagreement have been identified, including beauty, family background, and sexual strategies. This article proposes that mating age constitutes another area of conflict, as parents desire their children to initiate mating at a different age than the offspring desire it for themselves. More specifically, the hypothesis is tested that individuals prefer for their offspring to start having sexual relationships at a later age than they prefer for themselves to do so. Furthermore, it is hypothesized that individuals prefer to marry at a later age than they prefer their offspring to marry. Finally, the hypothesis is tested that parents prefer their daughters to marry at an earlier age and start sexual relationships later than their sons. Evidence from two independent studies employing 751 British parents provides support for all three hypotheses.     

Children's sex-role preferences: Stronger among girls than boys

Criticisms were raised about methods used in previous studies which have led to the conclusion that, compared to boys, girls have weaker preferences for their own versus the opposite sex role. In addition, it was argued that if children's own conceptions of sex roles — rather than an a priori adult definition — were investigated, girls would prefer their conception of femininity more than boys would prefer their conception of masculinity. This argument rested on evidence that for children, masculine traits often meet with social disapproval. Results indicated that both boys and girls judged their own sex role as more desirable than the opposite sex role. Results were stronger for the girls; and girls judged traits they assigned to the feminine sex role to be, on the average, more desirable than boys judged traits they assigned to masculinity. The difference between present findings and previous findings in regard to children and adults was discussed.Dennis Quintana assisted with the initial selection of items for the questionnaires described below. Elizabeth Bates, Ph.D., offered helpful suggestions for rewriting an earlier draft of this paper.     

重量对元认知监控的无意识影响

采用结构知识归因的方法,以学习判断和项目优先选择作为元认知监测和控制的指标,考察重量对元认知监控的影响是否是无意识的。被试学习粘贴在不同重量纸盒上的词对,进行学习判断(实验1)或项目选择(实验2),并报告其判断或选择的依据。结果:(1)重量影响学习判断和项目优先选择,相对于轻纸盒,被试给予重纸盒上的词对更高的JOL并优先选择重纸盒上的词对进行学习;(2)重量对学习判断的影响只发生在判断依据为猜测的情况下,重量对项目优先选择的影响只发生在判断依据为猜测和直觉的情况下。上述结果支持了元认知的具身性,并提示重量对元认知监控的影响可能是无意识的。     

Imagining what might be: why children underestimate uncertainty

Children’s well-documented tendency to behave as if they know more than they do about uncertain events is reduced under two conditions: when the outcome of a chance event has yet to be determined and when one unknown outcome has occurred but is difficult to imagine. In Experiment 1, in line with published findings, 5- and 6-year-olds (N = 61) preferred to guess the unknown location of a known object when the object was in place rather than before its location had been determined. There was no such preference when the object’s identity was unknown. In Experiment 2, 29 5- and 6-year-olds were more likely to correctly mark both possible locations when an already hidden object’s identity was unknown rather than known. We conclude that children’s vivid imaginations can lead them to underestimate uncertainty in a similar way to imagination inflation or fluency effects in adults.     

Subjective qualities of memories associated with the picture superiority effect in schizophrenia

Patients with schizophrenia (n = 24) matched with 24 normal subjects were presented with both words and pictures. On a recognition memory task, they were asked to give remember, know, or guess responses to items that were recognized on the basis of conscious recollection, familiarity, or guessing, respectively. Compared with normal subjects, patients exhibited a lower picture superiority effect selectively related to remember responses. Unlike normal subjects, they did not exhibit any word superiority effect in relation to guess responses; this explains why the overall picture superiority effect appeared to be intact. These results emphasize the need to take into account the subjective states of awareness when analyzing memory impairments in schizophrenia.     

Preferred perceptual tempo for sound sequences: comparison of adults, children, and infants

Previous motor and perceptual tasks have found optimal processing for sound sequences of a rate of around 600 msec. IOI (Interonset Interval). This zone of optimal processing (the rate at which discrimination is optimal) slows with age and is also found with infants. The current work investigated whether listeners "prefer" sequences at the rate for which they demonstrate optimal processing. In the present study, three experiments were done. Exp. 1 measured tempo preferences in adults who listened to pairs of isochronous sound sequences varying in tempo (from 100- to 1500-msec. IOI) and were required to indicate which they preferred. As expected, highest preferences were expressed for the intermediate tempi, supporting the hypothesis of a zone of preferred tempi comparable to the zone of optimal processing. Moreover, this preference for intermediate tempi was not affected by the temporal context (absence of differences between a fast, a slow, and a wide set of tempi). In Exp. 2, the same procedure was applied to 6- and 10-yr.-olds. Children in both groups had systematic preferences for the fastest tempi within a set, and the older children generally preferred slower sequences. Exp. 3 used a preference paradigm for sound sequences with 4-mo.-old infants, comparing sequences of 100- vs 300-msec. IOI, 300- vs 900-msec. IOI, and 100- vs 900-msec. IOI. No systematic tempo preferences were observed. We conclude that tempo discrimination and tempo preference may have some commonality (perhaps related to a zone of optimal processing), especially in adults, but that they also involve quite distinct processes which undergo different developmental sequences. Whereas adults prefer what they process the best, children prefer what is fastest (and therefore more attention-getting), and we have not been able to detect preferences in infants.     

How the Eyes Tell Lies: Social Gaze During a Preference Task

Social attention is thought to require detecting the eyes of others and following their gaze. To be effective, observers must also be able to infer the person's thoughts and feelings about what he or she is looking at, but this has only rarely been investigated in laboratory studies. In this study, participants' eye movements were recorded while they chose which of four patterns they preferred. New observers were subsequently able to reliably guess the preference response by watching a replay of the fixations. Moreover, when asked to mislead the person guessing, participants changed their looking behavior and guessing success was reduced. In a second experiment, naïve participants could also guess the preference of the original observers but were unable to identify trials which were lies. These results confirm that people can spontaneously use the gaze of others to infer their judgments, but also that these inferences are open to deception.     

Children’s reasoning about norms and traits as motives for behavior

Two important sources of information for social judgments are personality dispositions (traits) and social norms. Existing research suggests that young children do not find traits salient. To what extent might they rely on a different source of information? Two experiments explored how information about preferences (what someone likes) and rules (what is allowed or forbidden) affected social judgments. Five-year-olds predicted people’s future behavior would be consistent with rules, but appeared insensitive to information about preferences. Preferences were better predictors than rules for 8-year-olds. Older children and adults consistently judged that actors would want to, and be happy to, satisfy preferences rather than rules. Younger children were more likely to use rules to infer people’s psychological states. Results are consistent with the hypothesis that deontic relations, such as rules and norms play a central role in young children’s social cognition, with ideas of individual psychological dispositions emerging in middle childhood.     

Prospect theory analysis of guessing in multiple choice tests

The guessing of answers in multiple choice tests adds random error to the variance of the test scores, lowering their reliability. Formula scoring rules that penalize for wrong guesses are frequently used to solve this problem. This paper uses prospect theory to analyze scoring rules from a decision‐making perspective and focuses on the effects of framing on the tendency to guess. In three experiments participants were presented with hypothetical test situations and were asked to indicate the degree of certainty that they thought was required for them to answer a question. In accordance with the framing hypothesis, participants tended to guess more when they anticipated a low grade and therefore considered themselves to be in the loss domain, or when the scoring rule caused the situation to be framed as entailing potential losses. The last experiment replicated these results with a task that resembles an actual test. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Children's awareness of their own certainty and understanding of deduction and guessing

We conducted three studies that investigated first through third grade children's ability to identify and remember deductive inference or guessing as the source of a belief, to detect and retain the certainty of a belief generated through inference or guessing and to evaluate another observer's inferences and guesses. Immediately following a deductive inference or guess, first and third grade children rated inferences as more certain than guessing, but following a brief delay, only third grade children rated inferences as more certain than guessing. Children generally were accurate at identifying inference or guessing as the source of their belief, either immediately or after a delay. Rating another observer's deductions as more certain than guesses increased between first and third grade, and among second grade children, was correlated with retention of children's own certainty. Implications of the results for the development of meta‐cognitive knowledge are discussed.     

Preferences,Welfare, and the Status-Quo Bias

Preferences play a role in well-being that is difficult to escape, but whatever authority one grants to preferences, their malleability seems to cause problems for any theory of well-being that employs them. Most importantly, preferences appear to display a status-quo bias: people come to prefer what they are likely rather than unlikely to get. I try to do two things here. The first is to provide a more precise characterization of the status-quo bias, how it functions, and how it infects commonly accepted theories of well-being. The second is to give an alternative characterization of an agent's preferences that succeeds in avoiding the status-quo bias.     

The test taker's fallacy: How students guess answers on multiple‐choice tests

Many students and applicants take multiple‐choice tests to demonstrate their competence and achievement. When they are unsure, they guess the most likely answer to maximize their score. Despite the impact of guessing on test reliability and individual performance, studies have not examined how patterns of answer sequences in multiple‐choice tests affect guessing. This research presents the test taker's fallacy, which refers to an individual's tendency to expect a different answer to appear for the next question given a run of the same answer choices. The test taker's fallacy exhibits negative recency, similar to the gambler's fallacy. However, extending the sequential judgment literature, the test taker's fallacy shows that negative recency arises even when sequences may or may not be randomly generated. In three studies, including a survey and experiments, the test taker's fallacy is robustly observed. The test taker's fallacy is consistent with the operation of the representativeness heuristic. This research explains what and how test takers guess given a streak of answers and extends judgment under uncertainty to the test‐taking context.     

Controllability and human stress: method, evidence and theory.

Concepts are defined and evidence reviewed on whether control reduces stress in man. Individuals seem to prefer instrumental control over an aversive event, seem to prefer to administer it to themselves, and are less aroused when waiting for a controllable event. When groups without control have equal predictability, having control is still less arousing; as potential (but unexercised) control seems to be. The evidence also suggests that controllable events may hurt less. Methodological weaknesses and empirical gaps in these data are pointed out. These data are grossly inconsistent with Relevant Feedback theory and rather inconsistent with Information-seeking theory and Safety Signal theory. A Minimax hypothesis is proposed: When individuals control aversive events, they believe relief to be caused by a stable source—their own response. This belief entails that maximum future danger will be minimized. When they have no control, they believe relief to be less stable, which entails no guarantee that maximum future danger will be minimized. The data are largely consistent with the Minimax hypothesis and wholly consistent when Minimax is supplemented by the premise that aversive events hurt less when encountered against a background of relaxation.     

Guessing versus choosing – and seeing versus believing – in false belief tasks

Three‐ and 4‐year‐old children were tested using videos of puppets in various versions of a theory of mind change‐of‐location situation, in order to answer several questions about what children are doing when they pass false belief tests. To investigate whether children were guessing or confidently choosing their answer to the test question, a condition in which children were forced to guess was also included, and measures of uncertainty were compared across conditions. To investigate whether children were using simpler strategies than an understanding of false belief to pass the test, we teased apart the seeing‐knowing confound in the traditional change‐of‐location task. We also investigated relations between children's performance on true and false belief tests. Results indicated that children appeared to be deliberately choosing, not guessing, in the false belief tasks. Children performed just as well whether the protagonist gained information about the object visually or verbally, indicating that children were not using a simple rule based on seeing to predict the protagonist's behaviour. A true belief condition was significantly easier for children than a false belief condition as long as it was of low processing demands. Children's success rate on the different versions of the standard false belief task was influenced by factors such as processing demands of the stories and the child's verbal abilities.