Rapport-building: Chat versus in-person witness interviews

Tactics recommended for rapport-building consist of verbal (e.g., finding common ground or shared experiences) and non-verbal (e.g., affirmations, displaying empathy) behaviours. Most of the research on rapport, however, has examined it in in-person contexts, where both verbal and non-verbal behaviours are present. In this study, we were interested in the effectiveness of rapport-building when conducting online witness interviews via chat, which de-emphasises the use non-verbal rapport behaviours, compared to traditional in-person interviews. Participants (N = 131) experienced a virtual reality (VR) scenario depicting a mock crime and were interviewed either in person or online via the chat function in Skype. Participants perceived rapport more positively when interviewed in person for three measures: attentiveness, trust and respect and expertise. Two other measures, cultural similarity and connected flow, were not perceived differently across interview medium. Participants interviewed online via chat disclosed similar amounts of crime-related information and were just as accurate as participants interviewed in person. We found that in-person interviews yielded better rapport ratings than interviews via chat but were equally productive in terms of the quality of information obtained, as measured by crime-related details and accuracy. If witnesses are to be interviewed via chat, investigators must carefully consider how to compensate for the lack of those non-verbal rapport tactics that influence witnesses' perceptions of attentiveness, trust/respect and investigator's expertise.     

Online dating system design and relational decision making: Choice,algorithms, and control

One of the most popular ways to initiate romantic relationships today is through online dating. Typical dating systems follow one of three formats, see‐and‐screen (e.g., Match.com ), algorithm (e.g., eHarmony.com ), and blended (e.g., OkCupid.com ), which differ in the amount of individual control and algorithmic involvement they offer users. Do different features affect daters' decisions and expectations regarding relational development with selected partners? Study 1 indicated that although daters appreciated the personal control over mate selection afforded by see‐and‐screen systems, they also enjoyed using algorithmic systems. Study 2 found that blended systems provided “the best of both worlds” by offering dual benefits of control and algorithmic validation during mate selection. Findings shed light on self‐determination theory, decision making, and relationship formation more broadly.     

Mobile Persuasion: Can Screen Size and Presentation Mode Make a Difference to Trust?

Guided by the Modality, Agency, Interactivity, and Navigability (MAIN) model of technology effects and the heuristic–systematic model (HSM) of information processing, this study explicates underlying mechanisms by which variations in screen size (large vs. small) and presentation mode (video vs. text) contribute to user perceptions of media content on their smartphones. Results from a between‐subjects experiment (N = 120) indicate that large screen size and video mode promote heuristic processing while small screen size and text mode encourage systematic processing. Heuristic processing leads to greater affective and behavioral trust while systematic processing is associated with cognitive trust. Phantom model analysis reveals the effects of large screen size and video mode on purchase intentions are sequentially mediated by type of information processing and multidimensional trust.     

Children's trust in unexpected oral versus printed suggestions: Limitations of the power of print

Children have a bias to trust spoken testimony, yet early readers have an even stronger bias to trust print. Here, we ask how enduring is the influence of printed testimony: Can the learning be applied to new scenarios? Using hybrid pictures more dominant in one animal species (e.g., squirrel) than another (e.g., rabbit), we examined 3–6‐year‐olds' (N = 130) acceptance of an unexpected, non‐dominant label suggested only orally or via print. Consistent with previous findings, early readers, but not pre‐readers, accepted printed labels more frequently than when spoken. Children were then presented with identical but unlabelled hybrid exemplars and frequently applied the non‐dominant labels to these. Despite early readers' prior greater acceptance of text, when oral suggestions were accepted they retained a greater influence. Findings highlight potential implications for educators regarding knowledge being applied to new scenarios: For early readers, unexpected information from text may be fragile, while a greater confidence might be placed in such information gained from spoken testimony.     

Investigating the origins of political views: biases in explanation predict conservative attitudes in children and adults

We tested the hypothesis that political attitudes are influenced by an information‐processing factor – namely, a bias in the content of everyday explanations. Because many societal phenomena are enormously complex, people's understanding of them often relies on heuristic shortcuts. For instance, when generating explanations for such phenomena (e.g., why does this group have low status?), people often rely on facts that they can retrieve easily from memory – facts that are skewed toward inherent or intrinsic features (e.g., this group is unintelligent). We hypothesized that this bias in the content of heuristic explanations leads to a tendency to (1) view socioeconomic stratification as acceptable and (2) prefer current societal arrangements to alternative ones, two hallmarks of conservative ideology. Moreover, since the inherence bias in explanation is present across development, we expected it to shape children's proto‐political judgments as well. Three studies with adults and 4‐ to 8‐year‐old children (N = 784) provided support for these predictions: Not only did individual differences in reliance on inherent explanations uniquely predict endorsement of conservative views (particularly the stratification‐supporting component; Study 1), but manipulations of this explanatory bias also had downstream consequences for political attitudes in both children and adults (Studies 2 and 3). This work contributes to our understanding of the origins of political attitudes.     

虚拟销售代理的拟人效应

网络购物中的虚拟销售代理(Virtual Sales Agent)是指通过口头或非口头形式与消费者互动和交流的具有拟人化特征的动态人物形象, 它可以为消费者提供商品和服务的信息以及必要的帮助。近年来, 大量研究证实了虚拟销售代理的拟人效应, 即当在网络购物环境中加入拟人化的销售代理时, 就会对购物者的在线购物过程感知体验和购物意向产生积极影响。相关理论从不同视角解释了虚拟销售代理拟人效应发生的原因。综述以往的实证研究发现, 虚拟销售代理拟人效应的发生受到虚拟销售代理特征、消费者因素以及商品因素等方面的影响; 社会临场感、个性化服务知觉、社会支持感、信任和风险感知是拟人效应发生的内在心理机制。未来研究应关注虚拟销售代理拟人效应的神经生理基础, 丰富拟人效应发生的影响因素, 加强对个性化定制虚拟销售代理的研究, 探讨虚拟销售代理的消极影响, 以及不利于虚拟销售代理使用的障碍性因素。     

In conflict with ourselves? An investigation of heuristic and analytic processes in decision making

Many theorists propose two types of processing: heuristic and analytic. In conflict tasks, in which these processing types lead to opposing responses, giving the analytic response may require bothdetection andresolution of the conflict. The ratio bias task, in which people tend to treat larger numbered ratios (e.g., 20/100) as indicating a higher likelihood of winning than do equivalent smaller numbered ratios (e.g., 2/10), is considered to induce such a conflict. Experiment 1 showed response time differences associated with conflict detection, resolution, and the amount of conflict induced. The conflict detection and resolution effects were replicated in Experiment 2 and were not affected by decreasing the influence of the heuristic response or decreasing the capacity to make the analytic response. The results are consistent with dual-process accounts, but a single-process account in which quantitative, rather than qualitative, differences in processing are assumed fares equally well in explaining the data.     

Negation in context: Evidence from the visual world paradigm

Literature assumes that negation is more difficult to understand than affirmation, but this might depend on the pragmatic context. The goal of this paper is to show that pragmatic knowledge modulates the unfolding processing of negation due to the previous activation of the negated situation. To test this, we used the visual world paradigm. In this task, we presented affirmative (e.g., her dad was rich) and negative sentences (e.g., her dad was not poor) while viewing two images of the affirmed and denied entities. The critical sentence in each item was preceded by one of three types of contexts: an inconsistent context (e.g., She supposed that her dad had little savings) that activates the negated situation (a poor man), a consistent context (e.g., She supposed that her dad had enough savings) that activates the actual situation (a rich man), or a neutral context (e.g., her dad lived on the other side of town) that activates neither of the two models previously suggested. The results corroborated our hypothesis. Pragmatics is implicated in the unfolding processing of negation. We found an increase in fixations on the target compared to the baseline for negative sentences at 800?ms in the neutral context, 600?ms in the inconsistent context, and 1450?ms in the consistent context. Thus, when the negated situation has been previously introduced via an inconsistent context, negation is facilitated.     

Why do U.S. conservatives take fewer COVID-19 precautions? The role of worry,perceived risk,and governmental trust

Research suggests a U.S. political ideology gap for taking COVID-19 precautions, but we do not know the role of cognitive risk (assessed here as perceived risk) and affective risk (assessed here as worry) in explaining why conservative Americans participated in fewer recommended precautions (e.g., mask wearing) and whether governmental trust attenuates the effect. We predicted that conservatives (compared with liberals) would take fewer precautions because they thought they were less at risk and were less worried about COVID-19, but that this would be more pronounced for those with low governmental trust. In this study, U.S. adults (representative sample: N = 738; M_age = 46.8; 52% women; 78% white) who had not had COVID-19 took two online surveys 2 weeks apart during the first wave of the pandemic (April 2020). Participants reported ideology, perceived risk of getting or dying of COVID-19, worry about COVID-19, and trust in the CDC and state officials at baseline. At follow-up, participants reported on COVID-19 precautions: (1) prevention behavior participation (e.g., mask wearing) and (2) behavioral willingness for future behaviors (e.g., vaccination). Results showed that, politically conservative Americans took fewer precautions due to lower worry (but unexpectedly not due to lower perceived risk). As predicted, when trust was high, the ideology gap was muted for predicting precautions as well as for predicting perceived risk and worry. In sum, conservatives worried less about COVID-19 which predicted fewer precautions, but trust in governmental institutions reduced this ideological gap. Improving governmental trust could be one fruitful path to increasing COVID-19 precautions.     

Conserving Energy by Inducing People to Drive Less

We attempted to reduce college students' use of their cars with an online intervention. Every other day for 2 weeks, students reported the number of miles they had avoided driving. In a 2 × 2 design, participants received feedback about pollution avoided (e.g., CO₂ saved), financial feedback (e.g., gas money saved), or no feedback. A control group did not monitor their driving. Participants in all Web conditions reported driving less than the no‐Web control group. In addition, Web participants who received both kinds of feedback reported driving less than did those who received one kind or none. We discuss implications for research on energy conservation and offer an online feedback form to help readers reduce their own driving.     

When credibility attacks: The reverse impact of source credibility on persuasion

Recent research on the self-validation hypothesis suggests that source credibility identified after message processing can influence the confidence people have in their own thoughts generated in response to persuasive messages (Briñol, Petty, & Tormala, 2004). The present research explored the implications of this effect for the possibility that high credibility sources can be associated with more or less persuasion than low credibility sources. In two experiments, it is demonstrated that when people generate primarily positive thoughts in response to a message (e.g., because the message contains strong arguments) and then learn of the source, high source credibility leads to more favorable attitudes than does low source credibility. When people have primarily negative thoughts in response to a message (e.g., because it contains weak arguments), however, this effect is reversed—that is, high source credibility leads to less favorable attitudes than does low source credibility.     

Integration of parafoveal orthographic information during foveal word reading: beyond the sub-lexical level?

Prior research has shown that processing of a given target word is facilitated by the simultaneous presentation of orthographically related stimuli in the parafovea. Here we investigate the nature of such spatial integration processes by presenting orthographic neighbours of target words in the parafovea, considering that neighbours have been shown to inhibit, rather than facilitate, recognition of target words in foveal masked priming research. In Experiment 1, we used the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm to manipulate the parafoveal information subjects received while they fixated a target word within a sentence. In Experiment 2, we used the Flanking Letters Lexical Decision paradigm to manipulate parafoveal information while subjects read isolated words. Parafoveal words were either a higher-frequency orthographic neighbour of targets words (e.g., blue-blur) or a high-frequency unrelated word (e.g., hand-blur). We found that parafoveal orthographic neighbours facilitated, rather than inhibited, processing of the target. Thus, the present findings provide further evidence that orthographic information is integrated across multiple words and suggest that either the integration process does not enable simultaneous access to those words’ lexical representations, or that lexical representations activated by spatially distinct stimuli do not compete for recognition.     

A motivated information processing perspective on the antecedents of empowering leadership

Empowering leadership is an important influence on team effectiveness. This makes the question of what the antecedents of team empowering leadership are an important issue to consider. To address this question, we propose a motivated information processing perspective that holds that engaging in empowering leadership is based on social information processing, and that there are individual differences in how elaborate that information processing is. We argue that a key consideration in shifting control from the leader to the team is the extent to which empowering leadership is driven by leaders’ consideration of their trust in the team (i.e., an instance of social information processing), and that leader need for closure (a trait capturing the disposition to carefully consider decisions and actions) moderates the relationship between leader trust in team and empowering leadership. A survey of N = 156 work teams supported these hypotheses.     

The Development of Strategic Processing of Ambiguous Words: Riddles Versus Neutral Context

Children in Grades 4 and 6 read isolated target words following the auditory presentation of an ambiguous word (e.g., deck). The ambiguous word occurred as the last word in either a neutral sentence (e.g., “There is the deck”) or as the last word in a riddle (“Why couldn't anybody play poker on the ark? Because Noah sat on the deck). Related target words were consistent with either the dominant meaning (e.g., porch) or the subordinate meaning (cards) of the ambiguous word. In the neutral context, Grade 4 children showed equivalent facilitation for dominant and subordinate targets relative to unrelated target words; Grade 6 children showed facilitation only for the dominant targets. In the riddle context, both groups of children showed equivalent facilitation for the two types of related targets. The neutral context results supported the hypothesis that the two bases of context effects—automatic lexical access and selective access—develop at different rates (Simpson &; Foster, 1986). The results obtained from the riddles suggest that the selective process is strategic (Ceci, 1989).     

Trust in hybrid human-automated decision-support

Research has examined trust in humans and trust in automated decision support. Although reflecting a likely realization of decision support in high-risk tasks such as personnel selection, trust in hybrid human-automation teams has thus far received limited attention. In two experiments (N₁ = 170, N₂ = 154) we compare trust, trustworthiness, and trusting behavior for different types of decision-support (automated, human, hybrid) across two assessment contexts (personnel selection, bonus payments). We additionally examined a possible trust violation by presenting one group of participants a preselection that included predominantly male candidates, thus reflecting possible unfair bias. Whereas fully-automated decisions were trusted less, results suggest that trust in hybrid decision support was similar to trust in human-only support. Trust violations were not perceived differently based on the type of support. We discuss theoretical (e.g., trust in hybrid support) and practical implications (e.g., keeping humans in the loop to prevent negative reactions).     

An investigation into the online processing of counterfactual and indicative conditionals

The ability to represent conditional information is central to human cognition. In two self-paced reading experiments we investigated how readers process counterfactual conditionals (e.g., If Darren had been athletic, he could probably have played on the rugby team) and indicative conditionals (e.g., If Darren is athletic, he probably plays on the rugby team). In Experiment 1 we focused on how readers process counterfactual conditional sentences. We found that processing of the antecedent of counterfactual conditionals was rapidly constrained by prior context (i.e., knowing whether Darren was or was not athletic). A reading-time penalty was observed for the critical region of text comprising the last word of the antecedent and the first word of the consequent when the information in the antecedent did not fit with prior context. In Experiment 2 we contrasted counterfactual conditionals with indicative conditionals. For counterfactual conditionals we found the same effect on the critical region as we found in Experiment 1. In contrast, however, we found no evidence that processing of the antecedent of indicative conditionals was constrained by prior context. For indicative conditionals (but not for counterfactual conditionals), the results we report are consistent with the suppositional account of conditionals. We propose that current theories of conditionals need to be able to account for online processing differences between indicative and counterfactual conditionals.     

Processing of perceptual information is more robust than processing of conceptual information in preschool-age children: evidence from costs of switching

Is processing of conceptual information as robust as processing of perceptual information early in development? Existing empirical evidence is insufficient to answer this question. To examine this issue, 3- to 5-year-old children were presented with a flexible categorization task, in which target items (e.g., an open red umbrella) shared category membership with one test item (e.g., a folded umbrella) and perceptual characteristics with another test item (e.g., a red mushroom). Participants were instructed to either categorize stimuli by the same dimension (i.e., perceptual similarity or category membership) in both phases of the task, or switch from categorizing by one dimension to categorizing by the other dimension. Results pointed to a strong asymmetry in switch costs: conceptual switch costs were higher than perceptual switch costs. These results suggest that processing of perceptual information remains more robust than processing of conceptual information at least until 5 years of age.     

Raven's matrices and working memory: A dual-task approach

The cognitive system does not just act as a mirror from the sensory input; instead, it tends to normalize this information. Given that letter processing seems to be much more specialized than digit processing in the cortex, we examined whether the regularization process occurs differently from digits to letters than from letters to digits: We employed a masked priming same/different experiment (e.g., probe, VESZED; prime, V35Z3D ; and target, VESZED). When embedded in letter strings, digits that resemble letters (e.g., 3 and 5 in V35Z3D -VESZED) tend to be encoded in a letter-like manner, whereas when embedded in digit strings, letters that resemble digits (e.g., E and S in 9ES7E2–935732) tend not to be encoded in a digit-like manner.     

Trusting me,trusting you: Evaluating three forms of trust on an information‐rich consumer review website

When faced with a lack of information, consumers turn to trust to make a decision; but what happens to trust when individuals are confronted with the wealth of data on the Internet? This study evaluates three forms of trust in information‐abundant contexts: trust in the site, trust in the reviewers, and a postulated third form, trust‐in‐self. It looks at the roles of these three forms of trust in the information‐rich travel review website TripAdvisor. Two studies of site users, interviews (N = 30) and a survey (N = 237), found trust‐in‐self was highly influential in purchase decision making. Further, even with so much information, consumers sought more; the site is just one source they turn to, and they cross‐check among sources. The study concludes that any trust consumers have in TripAdvisor is not so much in the reviewers or the site, but in their own selves. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Preliminary Evidence of Differences Between Stigma Source Versus Type With Individual Functioning Variables in National Guard/Reserve Troops

Extant military studies show that stigma has a variable association with seeking mental health treatment and mental health distress. Previous studies used a general measure of stigma that does not differentiate between stigma source or type. Stigma source can be either self-perceived or perceived from others, and stigma type can include stigma for disorder or stigma for help-seeking. Civilian literature demonstrates that self-stigma is more detrimental to individual functioning than stigma perceived from others, and prior studies in National Guard service members (NGSMs) show that self-stigma and stigma perceived from unit leaders were associated with lower help-seeking intentions relative to stigma perceived from unit members or family members. No military study has simultaneously explored the associations of demographic and distress variables with various stigma types and sources. To determine if prior mixed findings were due to the use of a general measure of stigma, NGSMs (n = 163) completed demographic and distress measures, as well as stigma source (e.g., self, leader) and type (i.e., general, disorder, help-seeking) assessments. General stigma was positively associated with all stigma types and sources as well as a college education. Disorder stigma was positively associated with stigma from nonmilitary sources, and self-stigma for help-seeking was negatively associated with help-seeking intentions. Likelihood of deploying again was positively associated with disorder and help-seeking stigma when perceived from someone in authority. Given the unique associations observed, future studies should utilize specific measures of stigma when examining factors related to postdeployment functioning.