Stuck in the Middle: The Use and Interpretation of Mid-Points in Items on Questionnaires

Likert-type scales are commonly used when assessing attitudes, personality characteristics, and other psychological variables. This study examined the effect of varying the number of response options on the same set of 28 attitudinal items. Participants answered items using either a 4-point scale (forced choice), a 5-point scale that included a “neither” mid-point, or a 4-point scale with an option of “no opinion” presented after the item. The questionnaire also included an item asking participants what they believe the midpoint in a scale indicated. As predicted, participants’ interpretations of the midpoint varied widely with the most common responses being: “no opinion,” “don't care,” “unsure,” “neutral,” “equal/both,” and “neither.” The quantitative results showed that participants’ levels of item endorsement varied based on the response options offered. For example, “neither” was chosen more often than “no opinion” on all of the items.     

What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt You,Unless You Don’t Know You’re Wrong

The purpose of this investigation was to determine the impact of students’ background knowledge and how they utilized “don’t know” affordances to comprehend and learn from text. In two studies, over 8,000 middle and high school students interacted with a content-area learning environment in which they answered a series of background knowledge questions before they completed a unit on the same topic. Students were given the opportunity to indicate they “did not know” the answers to the knowledge questions. Higher knowledge was related to higher understanding, and the use of the “don’t know” option further explained variability in students’ understanding of the sources beyond background knowledge. When responding to knowledge questions, students who selected incorrect options before the task understood less and were less likely to learn content when given the opportunity compared to students who indicated they did not know. Thus, low knowledge students were still able to comprehend and learn as long as they acknowledged they lacked background knowledge. One’s comprehension and learning can be facilitated or impaired, depending upon the veracity of their knowledge, and whether students choose to acknowledge their lack of background knowledge. Implications of this work are discussed in terms of learning and instruction.     

助推爱心：利用默认选项促进捐赠行为

本研究采用实验室和现场实验的方法检验了默认选项的助推策略是否能够促进慈善捐赠行为。结果发现：（1）相较于把被试费的“保留选项”设置为默认,把“捐献选项”设置为默认时,被试捐献的概率和金额更高;（2）在多个捐款选项情景中,默认选项的设置总体上提高了默认选项被选择的概率;将最大金额选项设置为默认选项有助于提高被试平均捐赠额。这些发现表明,应用默认选项的助推策略能够有效促进人们的捐赠行为。本研究结果对减少募捐成本、提高募捐效率有所启示。     

Effects of valence and framing in decision-making: Assessing decision-makers' perceived domains of choice

Abstract: In comparison between choice alternatives, judgments of “How much better is a preferred option?” and “How much worse is a less preferred option?” may differ in their magnitudes. Such discrepancies are called “valence effects”. Previously, Yamagishi and Miyamoto (1996 ) observed systematic positive valence effects (“Better” exceeding “Worse”) in the domain of gains and systematic negative valence effects (“Worse” exceeding “Better”) in the domain of losses. The current experiments used the directions of valence effects as a tool to assess decision‐maker's interpretation of choice tasks under “framing effects” ( Tversky & Kahneman, 1986 ). Preferences under the framing effect switch from certain options in the domain of gains to uncertain options in the domain of losses. Two experiments showed that preferences for certain options were associated with positive valence effects, whereas preferences for uncertain options were associated with negative valence effects. Moreover, conditions wherein the framing manipulations lose the effectiveness were examined. Valence effects showed that framing effects ceased to occur when decision‐makers maintained consistent domain perceptions as pertaining to gains or to losses, across the domains of gains and losses. Implications are discussed.     

当代社区和谐观的质性探索

为探索社区居民及社区骨干的社区和谐观,在13个社区对24名受访者进行深度访谈。立足社区心理学中国化的视角,对27万字访谈文本进行主题分析发现:(1)社区和谐可划分为安定式和谐、融洽式和谐、共赢式和谐三种形态,三者层层递进,分别反映了大众对“不吵不闹”的良好社区秩序、“仁慈友爱”的良好社区氛围和“蓬勃发展”的良好社区局面的理解和期盼;(2)社区和谐的成因包可以从宏观和微观两个角度把握,其结果可以从时程(长期/短期)和场域(全局/局部)两个角度归纳。总之,当代社区和谐观是对中华优秀传统文化的继承,并具有时代的特色。     

Effects of valence and framing in decision making II: Estimating subjective weighting1

Abstract: In comparison between choice options, judgments of “How much better is a preferred option?” and “How much worse is a less preferred option?” may differ in their magnitudes. Such discrepancies are called “valence effects.” Previously, Yamagishi and Miyamoto (1996) observed systematic positive valence effects (“Better” exceeding “Worse”) in the domain of gains and systematic negative valence effects (“Worse” exceeding “Better”) in the domain of losses. The current experiment used the directions of valence effects as a tool to assess the decision maker's interpretation of choice tasks under the “framing effect” ( Tversky & Kahneman, 1986 ). Preferences under the framing effect switch from certain options in the domain of gains to uncertain options in the domain of losses. This study examined whether preferences for certain options were associated with positive valence effects, whereas preferences for uncertain options were associated with negative valence effects. Moreover, conditions under which preference reversals under the framing manipulations ceased to occur were examined. The effects of valence showed that framing effects ceased to occur when decision makers maintained consistent task interpretations as pertaining to gains or to losses. Most importantly, the pattern of subjective weighting under the valence effects was consistent with previous explanation of valence effects ( Yamagishi & Miyamoto, 1996 ). Possibilities for extending the current findings to understanding related psychological phenomena are discussed.     

Models of best–worst choice and ranking among multiattribute options (profiles)

We develop and characterize new representations for the maxdiff model (Marley & Louviere, 2005) for best–worst choice between multiattribute options; in particular, we state conditions under which the scale value of a multiattribute option is a product of independent ratio scales on each attribute. We show that there is a vector of simple “scores” that are sufficient for the model, with each score a closed-form function of the maximum likelihood estimates of the model’s parameters. Several related models are developed for rank orders obtained by repeated best and/or worst choices, and two of these models are tested on stated preferences between mobile phones.     

The effects of explicit “Not Present” and “Don't Know” response options on identification decisions in computer-administered lineups

Eyewitness researchers recommend that “not present” and “don't know” response options should be presented with police lineups. Although it is important that witnesses—most of whom are unlikely to be familiar with the identification task—are fully cognizant of all response options available to them, an understanding of how explicit non-identification options affect performance is lacking. Across four experiments, including 3,633 participants and 8 different stimulus sets, we tested the effects of including non-identification options in computer-administered lineups. When explicit non-identification options were presented, target-present and -absent choosing decreased. This decrease in choosing was characterized by a shift from filler identifications to lineup rejections. ROC analyses revealed that there was no overall difference in discriminability between guilty and innocent suspects depending on response option condition. On balance, the findings suggest that, in addition to informing witnesses about acceptable responses, displaying non-identification response options does not undermine identification performance.     

Training and Generalization of a ”Yes-No” Discrimination with a Developmentally Delayed Child

By watching and responding to the way a shill answered “yes-no” questions about food items, a developmentally delayed preschool boy not only greatly improved over his poor baseline “yes-no” answers to these same items, but also to “yes-no” answers during generalization probe sessions to untrained objects that included picture cards and body parts. Correct “yes-no” answers during follow-up sessions was also high for both the trained and untrained objects. The suggested mechanism for improvement was the elaborated from of answers the shill issues, which served to highlight and prompt “yes” versus “no” answers. Generalized “yes-no” answers improved as the training components (removing the shill and prior labeling questions) approximated the form of the generalized probe sessions. Experiment II confirmed that as soon as the labels for new objects were taught, “yes-no” answers to all labeled objects was immediately perfect and remained so thereafter. To nonlabled objects, “yes-no” answers were initially at chance level, but these answers for certain nonlabeled objects subsequently improved and their names were learned without explicit training, apparently through prior correct “yes-no” responding.     

反应选项对时序知觉重复启动效应的影响

先前研究采用两项反应任务发现了时序知觉重复启动效应, 这可能是反应选项导致的虚假效应, 本研究采用三项反应任务对此进行了检验。实验1运用三项判断任务以消除缺乏中间选项所致的反应偏向, 结果发现重复启动显著影响“哪个图形先出现”和“两个图形同时出现”的时序判断; 实验2在实验1的基础上对“同时出现”反应选项进行两种指导语操作, 实验结果不仅与实验1一致, 而且“有把握时判断为同时出现”和“有无把握都判断为同时出现”之间没有显著差异, 说明被试能够识别时序加以判断, 不支持反应偏向的前提条件。因此, 时序知觉重复启动效应不是反应选项产生的反应偏向引发的虚假效应, 重复启动对“系列性”和“同时性”时序知觉都存在显著影响。     

情感强度不同负性生活事件对个体情感反应和行为选择的影响

采用系列实验方法探讨不同情感强度负性生活事件对个体情感反应和行为选择的影响。结果发现：（1）复合生活事件（1高负性+1低负性）为异类时,个体对复合事件的负性感受比单独1高负性事件更低,选择经历前者,出现平均效应;（2）复合生活事件为同类时,其负性感受比单独1高负性事件更高,选择经历后者,出现累加效应;（3）复合事件有明显的时间特点时,其情感和行为选择受事件发生时间影响,符合峰-终定律。结论：人们对负性生活事件的加工受其特点的影响,加工方式不同。     

Would you rather teleport or spend some time commuting? Investigating individuals’ teleportation preferences

The “teleportation test” is a unique question—used in some travel behavior research since the 2000s—to examine individuals’ perceptions towards travel time and affinities for travel. It gives people a hypothetical choice between teleporting or spending some time traveling. All studies (using different methods, including focus groups, interviews, and questionnaires) have consistently reported high teleportation preferences (about 70%). Yet, few correlates of teleportation preferences (especially sociodemographic and perceptual characteristics) have been investigated. Using data from an online questionnaire of 648 commuters in Portland, Oregon, this study investigated factors affecting individuals’ teleportation preferences. While generally representative of the area’s commuters, the sample did have higher shares of high-income workers and people using active modes or transit. Overall, 62% of respondents preferred to teleport than to spend some time commuting. Results from binary logit models identified actual commute duration, typical mode of travel, and “ideal” travel time (but no demographic attributes) as major predictors of preferences to teleport. As expected, people with longer commute durations had a greater desire to teleport, whereas bicyclists and pedestrians more often preferred to commute. People with longer ideal travel times had a greater affinity to commute and were less keen to teleport. Analysis of follow-up questions exploring reasons for respondents’ answers suggested that most “teleporters” were motivated by saving time to do other things, while most “commuters” found parts of their commutes to be enjoyable or productive. Findings from this study are consistent with related studies in implying that a teleportation preference does not necessarily represent zero ideal travel time or viewing travel time as wasted. Finally, this study discusses several travel behavior policy implications of the teleportation test, along with limitations and areas for future research.     

Cognitive Factors Affecting Freeze-like Behavior in Humans

Contemporary research on survival-related defensive behaviors has identified physiological markers of freeze/flight/fight. Our research focused on cognitive factors associated with freeze-like behavior in humans. Study 1 tested if an explicit decision to freeze is associated with the psychophysiological state of freezing. Heart rate deceleration occurred when participants chose to freeze. Study 2 varied the efficacy of freezing relative to other defense options and found “freeze” was responsive to variations in the perceived effectiveness of alternative actions. Study 3 tested if individual differences in motivational orientation affect preference for a “freeze” option when the efficacy of options is held constant. A trend in the predicted direction suggested that naturally occurring cognitions led loss-avoiders to select “freeze” more often than reward-seekers. In combination, our attention to the cognitive factors affecting freeze-like behavior in humans represents a preliminary step in addressing an important but neglected research area.     

It is more than personal: Development and validation of a multidimensional privacy orientation scale

This study summarizes the development and validation of a multidimensional privacy orientation scale designed for measuring privacy attitudes of Social Network Site (SNS) users. Findings confirm the existence of four dimensions: (1) belief in the value of “privacy as a right”; (2) “other-contingent privacy”; (3) “concern about own informational privacy” and (4) “concern about privacy of others.” Moreover, a segmentation of SNS users based on these attitude scores reveals three types of users: (1) privacy advocates, who are concerned about both their own and other people’s privacy; (2) privacy individualists, who are concerned mostly about their own privacy, and (3) privacy indifferents, whose score on all dimensions are lower than other segments. The results indicate that the four privacy orientation dimensions and three user segments predict key differences in terms of privacy protective behavior, information disclosure, and viewing personal information of others.     

Reclaiming “Natural Partnership and Communication”

The massive scale of forced displacement across the globe discloses the fractured state of the modern international order. Francisco de Vitoria’s theological approach to the law of nations, in the context of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, had a significant influence on this order’s development. This paper argues that recovering his innovative insights today can help refurbish a collective sense of international responsibility for refugees. Vitoria’s bold assertion of indigenous Americans’ dominion affirmed all human beings as members of a world commonwealth with equal claims to basic rights. The “right to travel” he articulated, by its orientation to “natural partnership and communication,” can promote refugee rights and global fraternity.     

The accessibility of the term “contempt” and the meaning of the unilateral lip curl

Four studies are reported investigating the conditions under which various proposed facial expressions of contempt are labelled “contempt”. Only under forced-choice conditions are any of these expressions labelled “contempt” above chance; free responses are at or below chance. Contrary to predictions from Rosenberg and Ekman's (1995) explanation of poor free-response performance, participants demonstrating the best understanding of “contempt”, and those primed by prior tasks to have the concept readily accessible did not do better than other subjects. Using the forced-choice paradigm, supposedly neutral expressions were labelled “contempt” by 70% of respondents. It is concluded that poor performance in free-response studies is not due to inaccessibility or unfamiliarity of “contempt”, that the unilateral lip curl included in the JACFEE set of expressions of basic emotions (Matsumoto & Ekman, 1988) is not decoded as contempt, and that good performance in forced-choice studies results from artifacts of the method.     

Examining the cross‐cultural validity of the positive affect and negative affect schedule between an Asian (Singaporean) sample and a Western (American) sample

The positive affect and negative affect schedule (PANAS) is a popular measure of positive (PA) and negative affectivity (NA). Developed and validated in Western contexts, the 20‐item scale has been frequently administered on respondents from Asian countries with the assumption of cross‐cultural measurement invariance. We examine this assumption via a rigorous multigroup confirmatory factor analysis, which allows us to assess between‐group differences in both strength of scale item‐to‐latent factor relationship (metric invariance test) and mean of each scale item (scalar invariance test), on a large sample of 1,065 respondents recruited from Singapore (Asian sample) and the United States (Western sample). We found that two items assessing PA (“excited” and “proud”) and three items assessing NA (“guilty,” “hostile,” and “ashamed”) exhibited metric noninvariance whereas 11 of the remaining metric invariant items exhibited scalar noninvariance, suggesting that the PA and NA constructs differ from what the PANAS is expected to measure for Asian respondents. Our findings serve as a cautionary note to researchers who intend to administer the PANAS in future studies as well as to researchers interpreting the results of past studies involving respondents from Asian countries.     

Iranian Psychotherapists’ Behaviors and Beliefs Toward Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

The aim of this study is to investigate Iranian psychotherapists’ behaviors and beliefs toward sexual orientation and gender identity. The sample consisted of 358 Iranian psychotherapists, of whom 29.3% (n = 105) were male and 67% (n = 24) were female. Results from the chi-square analyses showed that more male participants reported accepting homosexual clients and treating them as having a pathological disorder than their female counterparts; and licensed respondents reported engaging more in accepting only male or female clients, accepting more homosexual and transgender clients for treatment, and treating them as having a pathological disorder when compared with their unlicensed counterparts. Furthermore supervised respondents reported accepting more homosexual clients than their unsupervised counterparts. However results from the multivariate analysis of variance has indicated that the female participants reported “accepting homosexuals or transgender clients for treatment” more often than the male participants; unsupervised participants reported “accepting homosexual or transgender clients for treatment” and “treating homosexuality per se as a pathological disorder” more often than their supervised counterparts.     

Waiting by mistake: Symbolic representation of rewards modulates intertemporal choice in capuchin monkeys,preschool children and adult humans

In the Delay choice task subjects choose between a smaller immediate option and a larger delayed option. This paradigm, also known as intertemporal choice task, is frequently used to assess delay tolerance, interpreting a preference for the larger delayed option as willingness to wait. However, in the Delay choice task subjects face a dilemma between two preferred responses: “go for more” (i.e., selecting the larger, but delayed, option) vs. “go for sooner” (i.e., selecting the immediate, but smaller, option). When the options consist of visible food amounts, at least some of the choices of the larger delayed option might be due to a failure to inhibit a prepotent response towards the larger option rather than to a sustained delay tolerance. To disentangle this issue, we tested 10 capuchin monkeys, 101 preschool children, and 88 adult humans in a Delay choice task with food, low-symbolic tokens (objects that can be exchanged with food and have a one-to-one correspondence with food items), and high-symbolic tokens (objects that can be exchanged with food and have a one-to-many correspondence with food items). This allows evaluating how different methods of representing rewards modulate the relative contribution of the “go for more” and “go for sooner” responses. Consistently with the idea that choices for the delayed option are sometimes due to a failure at inhibiting the prepotent response for the larger quantity, we expected high-symbolic tokens to decrease the salience of the larger option, thus reducing “go for more” responses. In fact, previous findings have shown that inhibiting prepotent responses for quantity is easier when the problem is framed in a symbolic context. Overall, opting for the larger delayed option in the visible-food version of the Delay choice task seems to partially result from an impulsive preference for quantity, rather than from a sustained delay tolerance. In capuchins and children high-symbolic stimuli decreased the individual’s preference for the larger reward by distancing from its appetitive features. Conversely, the sophisticated symbolic skills of adult humans prevented the distancing effect of high-symbolic stimuli in this population, although this result may be due to methodological differences between adult humans and the other two populations under study. Our data extend the knowledge concerning the influence of symbols on both human and non-human primate behavior and add a new element to the interpretation of the Delay choice task. Since high-symbolic stimuli decrease the individual’s preference for the larger reward by eliminating those choices due to prepotent responses towards the larger quantity, they allow to better discriminate responses based on genuine delay aversion. Thus, these findings invite greater caution in interpreting the results obtained with the visible-food version of the Delay choice task, which may overestimate delay tolerance.     

Can People Identify “Deceptive” or “Misleading” Items that Tend to Produce Mostly Wrong Answers?

In many domains, two‐alternative forced‐choice questions produce more correct responses than wrong responses across participants. However, some items, dubbed “deceptive” or “misleading”, produce mostly wrong answers. These items yield poor calibration and poor resolution because the dominant, erroneous response tends to be endorsed with great confidence, even greater than that of the correct response. In addition, for deceptive items, group discussion amplifies rather than mitigates error while enhancing confidence in the erroneous response. Can participants identify deceptive items when they are warned about their existence? It is argued that people's ability to discriminate between deceptive and non‐deceptive items is poor when the erroneous responses are based on the same process assumed to underlie correct responses. Indeed, participants failed to discriminate between deceptive and non‐deceptive perceptual items when they were warned that some of the items (Experiment 1) or exactly half of the items (Experiment 2) were deceptive. A similar failure was observed for general‐knowledge questions (Experiment 3) except when participants were informed about the correct answer (Experiment 4). Possibly, for these tasks, people cannot escape the dangers lurking in deceptive items. In contrast, the results suggest that participants can identify deceptive problems for which the wrong answer stems from reliance on a fast, intuitive process that differs from the analytic mode that is likely to yield correct answers (Experiment 5). The practical and theoretical implications of the results were discussed. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.