Outwitting the rational mind: How effortful thinking influences price cognition

Prior research presents mixed findings on how people's degrees of effortful thinking influence their reliance on heuristics and biases. Although the tenets of dual process theory would argue that effortful thinking should attenuate people's reliance on heuristics, a number of contemporary findings suggest otherwise: Effortful thinking may, in fact, enhance biased processing of information in certain instances. This research shows how, in the context of pricing, people's degrees of effortful thinking can amplify their inclination towards biased processing of price information. In five studies (n = 1,339), we find that effortful thinking induces a greater preference for nine‐ending (vs. zero‐ending) prices, and the effect is mainly driven by people's greater propensity for argument‐based decision making. Such predilection to nine‐endings attenuates with lower cognitive effort in processing price information. Moreover, when locus of deliberation shifts from price to quality, consumers' preference for nine‐ending priced options is subdued.     

Metacomprehension judgements reflect the belief that diagrams improve learning from text

In two experiments we systematically explored whether people consider the format of text materials when judging their text learning, and whether doing so might inappropriately bias their judgements. Participants studied either text with diagrams (multimedia) or text alone and made both per-paragraph judgements and global judgements of their text learning. In Experiment 1 they judged their learning to be better for text with diagrams than for text alone. In that study, however, test performance was greater for multimedia, so the judgements may reflect either a belief in the power of multimedia or on-line processing. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and also included a third group that read texts with pictures that did not improve text performance. Judgements made by this group were just as high as those made by participants who received the effective multimedia format. These results confirm the hypothesis that people's metacomprehension judgements can be influenced by their beliefs about text format. Over-reliance on this multimedia heuristic, however, might reduce judgement accuracy in situations where it is invalid.     

Children's judgements and emotions about social exclusion based on weight

This study examined children's judgements and emotions associated with weight‐based social exclusion using an ethnically diverse sample of one hundred and seventeen 9‐ and 13‐year‐old children. Children were interviewed about three scenarios depicting weight‐based exclusion in athletic, academic, and social contexts. Children's judgements of exclusion, emotions attributed to the excluder and excluded targets, and justifications for judgements and emotions were examined. Overall, children judged weight‐based exclusion to be wrong for moral reasons. However, they viewed weight‐based exclusion in athletic contexts as less wrong compared with academic contexts, and they used more social‐conventional reasoning to justify judgements and emotions attributed to excluders in athletic contexts compared with academic and social contexts. Children also expected excluded targets to feel negative emotions, whereas a range of positive and negative emotions was attributed to excluders. In addition, older children were more accepting of weight‐based exclusion in athletic contexts than in academic and social contexts. We discuss the results in relation to the development of children's understanding of, and emotions associated with, exclusion based on weight.     

Pre- versus postdecisional deliberation and goal commitment: The positive effects of defensiveness

Building on Gollwitzer's (1990) mindset theory of action phases, it is proposed that the effects of assigned balanced deliberation on subsequent goal commitment are moderated by people's pre- versus postdecisional status. A balanced deliberation and impartial assessment of pros and cons is expected to reduce goal commitment in predecisional individuals, whereas a distortion of the assigned balanced deliberation and a partial focus on the pros of goal pursuit should defend and strengthen goal commitment in postdecisional individuals. Indeed, in Study 1, assigned deliberation on the pros and cons of pursuing a focal goal promoted stronger reported goal commitment in participants who had decided to pursue this goal, but reduced goal commitment for people who had not yet made such a decision. In Study 2, the same pattern of results emerged when goal commitment was indicated by planning to act on the goal. Study 3 replicated findings using a different decision status manipulation and goal persistence as a measure of commitment. Finally, results of Study 4 suggested that the increase in commitment produced by defensive postdecisional deliberation is consequential as it was found to drive real-life behavior by promoting goal-directed action. Moreover, Study 2: deliberation effects on subsequent planning activity, Study 3: deliberation effects on goal persistence, Study 4: deliberation effects on real-life behavior explored the underlying process and provided evidence that it is the partial focus on the pros of goal pursuit, meant to defend existing goal commitment, that drives postdecisional deliberation's strengthening effects on goal commitment. Implications for mindset theory, goal commitment theory, and decision making are discussed.     

Effects of Mood on Evaluative Judgements: Influence of Reduced Processing Capacity and Mood Salience

Schwarz and Clore (1983) proposed that the effects of mood on evaluative judgements are due to people's use of a “feeling heuristic”. Results of the present study suggest that this heuristic is particularly likely to be used under conditions of reduced processing capacity, induced by time pressure and competing task demands, as both factors intensified the effects of mood on evaluative judgements. In addition, previous findings that increasing the salience of a judgement-irrelevant cause disrupts the effects of mood on evaluative judgements were replicated. All of these effects were, however, obtained only when mood was salient to the participants, suggesting that to be effective, mood must exceed a threshold of salience. Taken together, the findings further support the hypothesis that at least in some situations, the effects of moods on evaluative judgements are based on a controlled inference strategy, rather than on automatic priming effects.     

Metamemory and reality monitoring

Metamemory judgements and reality monitoring judgements were compared for real and imagined stimuli. Line drawings of everyday items were either perceived or imagined in differing ratios, to (a) investigate people's ability to predict the class of item that would be better recalled (Judgements of Learning, JOL), and the class of item which would be better sourced (Judgements of Source, JOS) in a future recall test, and (b) test the hypothesis that participants would show a bias towards calling remembered items real when the source had been forgotten. Although participants' JOLs indicated that they believed real items would be more memorable than imagined, in both experiments a larger proportion of items from either class (real or imagined) was only recalled when presentation modality was less frequent for that class. By contrast, JOSs were no different for real or imagined items, even though source attribution was more accurate for real than imagined items. An attribution of memories to real rather than to imagined events that often occurs when participants are unsure about the source (labelled a ‘bias towards the real’) was due to phenomenological qualities of the memories. The results are discussed in terms of Johnson and Raye's ( 1981 ) reality‐monitoring model. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Can negative mood improve your conversation? Affective influences on conforming to Grice's communication norms

Can temporary mood influence people's communication strategies? According to Grice's cooperative principle, conversational utterances should ideally conform to the maxims of quantity, relevance, quality, and manner. Three experiments predicted and found that participants in a negative mood complied significantly better with Grice's maxims than did participants in a positive mood when using natural language to describe a previously observed social event. Experiments 2 and 3 further confirmed that mood influenced communication strategies, and not merely the encoding (Exp. 2) and retrieval (Exp. 3) of the relevant information. These findings are consistent with affect–cognition theories predicting that positive affect promotes a more internally focused and assimilative thinking and communication style, and negative mood promotes more externally focused and accommodative thinking, resulting in the closer observance of communication norms. The relevance of these findings for recent affect/cognition theories is considered, and the practical implications of the results for everyday conversational strategies are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Concepts of kinship relations and inheritance in childhood and adolescence

This paper examines the development and consistency of children's (4, 7, 10, and 14 years) naïve concepts of inheritance using three tasks. A modified adoption task asked participants to distinguish between biological and social parentage in their predictions and explanations of the origins of different feature types (physical characteristics, disabilities, and personality traits). The causal mechanisms task asked participants to rate their preference for various mechanisms of inheritance for physical features. The family relatedness task required participants to provide judgements on the relatedness of family members and explain their understanding of kinship terms. Developmental trends were revealed in all three tasks. There was a trend towards increased consistency in judgements across tasks with age, but low correlations between explanations given in different task contexts. Findings are discussed with reference to the onset and variability of inheritance concepts and the implications for education and future research.     

Rawlsian Justice and the Social Determinants of Health

In this article, we suggest that the evidence regarding the social determinants of health calls for a deep re‐thinking of our understanding of distributive justice. Focusing on John Rawls's theory of distributive justice in particular, we argue that a full reckoning with the social determinants of health requires a re‐working of Rawls's principles of justice. We argue first that the social bases of health – a Rawlsian conception of the social determinants of health – should be considered a social primary good. We argue second that including the social bases of health as a social primary good would lead the parties to the original position to choose an additional principle of justice and assign it lexical priority over Rawls's second principle. According to this principle, inequalities in people's share of the social bases of health are to be arranged so as to improve the health status of those least advantaged on the social health gradient.     

Further problems with projectivism

From David Hume onwards, many philosophers have argued that moral thinking is characterised by a tendency to ‘project’ our own mental states onto the world. This metaphor of projection may be understood as involving two empirical claims: the claim that humans experience morality as a realm of objective facts (the experiential hypothesis), and the claim that this moral experience is immediately caused by affective attitudes (the causal hypothesis). Elsewhere I argue in detail against one form of the experiential hypothesis. My main aim in this paper is to show that, considering recent psychological studies about folk metaethics and the relation between moral judgements and emotions, the causal hypothesis must be considered problematic too. First, the most common argument in favour of the causal hypothesis is based on an implausible premise and a dubious assumption. Second, ordinary people's moral experience is influenced by a non-affective factor, namely their openness to divergent moral views. And third, projectivism in general and its causal hypothesis in particular might not even hold true for affective moral judgements. This negative assessment of projectivism is significant both for our understanding of moral cognition as an empirical phenomenon and for metaethics.     

Beliefs about interactions between factors in the natural environment: a causal network study

This research is concerned with the structure of people's beliefs about causal processes in complex natural systems. A set of entities was derived from an expert analysis of important factors in relation to forest ecosystems and climate change. These included human population, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, fires and several biological features such as extinction rates. In two experiments participants were presented with each pair of entities and asked whether change in one would produce change in the other. From the judgements made, causal networks were constructed that reflected consensual causal beliefs. The resultant causal network was unidirectional, with some entities, such as humans, functioning as causal origins and others, such as extinction rates, functioning as effects. This is consistent with previous research showing unidirectional patterns of thinking about causality in natural systems. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Counterfactual thinking and stereotypes: The nonconformity effect

Past research has shown that counterfactual thinking (‘if only…’) is related to judgements of responsibility for negative events. It has also shown that behaviours deviating from the target's own behavioural standard (intrapersonal norm) are likely to trigger counterfactuals—the so‐called exceptional‐routine effect. In the present research, we demonstrate that behaviours deviating from a social category's behavioural standard (social norm) are also likely to trigger counterfactuals—what may be called the nonconformity effect. Two studies investigated counterfactual thinking regarding a rape case, classifying counterfactuals according to their conformity versus nonconformity to relevant social norms, and their focus on actions versus inactions. In Study 1, participants with higher endorsement of the rape victim stereotype generated more counterfactuals on the victim's non‐conforming inactions than did participants with lower stereotype endorsement. The presence of a nonconformity effect was confirmed in Study 2, where participants rated their agreement with externally generated counterfactuals. Moreover, in Study 2, counterfactuals focused on the victim's non‐conforming inactions predicted responsibility attribution to the victim through the mediating role of perceived avoidability of the event. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Working memory supports inference learning just like classification learning

Recent research has found a positive relationship between people's working memory capacity (WMC) and their speed of category learning. To date, only classification-learning tasks have been considered, in which people learn to assign category labels to objects. It is unknown whether learning to make inferences about category features might also be related to WMC. We report data from a study in which 119 participants undertook classification learning and inference learning, and completed a series of WMC tasks. Working memory capacity was positively related to people's classification and inference learning performance.     

Explaining High Conjunction Fallacy Rates: The Probability Theory Plus Noise Account

The conjunction fallacy occurs when people judge the conjunctive probability P(A ∧ B) to be greater than a constituent probability P(A), contrary to the norms of probability theory. This fallacy is a reliable, consistent and systematic part of people's probability judgements, attested in many studies over at least 40 years. For some events, these fallacies occur very frequently in people's judgements (at rates of 80% or more), while for other events, the fallacies are very rare (occurring at rates of 10% or less). This wide range of fallacy rates presents a challenge for current theories of the conjunction fallacy. We show how this wide range of observed fallacy rates can be explained by a simple model where people reason according to probability theory but are subject to random noise in the reasoning process. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Production of basic emotions by children with congenital blindness: Evidence for the embodiment of theory of mind

Children with congenital blindness are delayed in understanding other people's minds. The present study examined whether this delay was related to a more primitive form of inter‐subjectivity by which infants draw correspondence between parental mirroring of the infant's display and proprioceptive sensations. Twenty children with congenital blindness and 20 typically‐developing sighted children aged between 4 and 12 years were administered a series of tasks examining false belief and emotion understanding and production. The blind children scored lower on the false belief tasks and did not convey emotions facially to adult observers as accurately as sighted participants. The adults' ratings of the children's expressions were correlated with the children's scores on the false belief tasks. It is suggested that understanding people's minds might be anchored in primitive embodied forms of relatedness.     

Permitting immoral behaviour: A generalized compensation belief hypothesis

When are we more likely to permit immoral behaviours? The current research examined a generalized compensation belief hypothesis that individuals, as observers, would morally tolerate and accept someone paying forward unfair treatment to an innocent person as a means to compensate for the perpetrator's previously experienced mistreatment. Across five experiments (N = 1107) based on economic games (Studies 1–4) and diverse real-life scenarios (Study 5), we showed that participants, as observing third parties, were more likely to morally permit and engage in the same negative act once they knew about previous maltreatment of the perpetrator. This belief occurred even when the content of received and paid-forward maltreatment was non-identical (Study 2), when the negative treatment was received from a non-human target (Study 3) and when the maltreatment was intangible (e.g. material loss) or relational (e.g. social exclusion; Study 5). Perceived required compensation mediated the effect of previous maltreatment on moral permission (Studies 4 and 5). The results consistently suggest that people's moral permission of immoral behaviours is influenced by perpetrator's previous mistreatment, contributing to a better understanding of the nature and nuances of our sense of fairness and contextualized moral judgement.     

Intuitive Political Theory: People's Judgments About How Groups Should Decide

Societies must make collective decisions even when citizens disagree, and they use many different political processes to do so. But how do people choose one way to make a group decision over another? We propose that the human mind contains an intuitive political theory about how to make collective decisions, analogous to people's intuitive theories about language, physics, number, minds, and morality. We outline a simple method for studying people's intuitive political theory using scenarios about group decisions, and we begin to apply this approach in three experiments. Participants read scenarios in which individuals in a group have conflicting information (Experiment 1), conflicting interests (Experiment 2), and conflicting interests between a majority and a vulnerable minority who have more at stake (Experiment 3). Participants judged whether the group should decide by voting, consensus, leadership, or chance. Overall, we find that participants prefer majority‐rule voting over consensus, leadership, and chance when a group has conflicting interests or information. However, participants' support for voting is considerably diminished when the group includes a vulnerable minority. Hence, participants showed an intuitive understanding of Madison's concerns about tyranny of the majority.     

Dividing Attention Between Tasks: Testing Whether Explicit Payoff Functions Elicit Optimal Dual‐Task Performance

We test people's ability to optimize performance across two concurrent tasks. Participants performed a number entry task while controlling a randomly moving cursor with a joystick. Participants received explicit feedback on their performance on these tasks in the form of a single combined score. This payoff function was varied between conditions to change the value of one task relative to the other. We found that participants adapted their strategy for interleaving the two tasks, by varying how long they spent on one task before switching to the other, in order to achieve the near maximum payoff available in each condition. In a second experiment, we show that this behavior is learned quickly (within 2–3 min over several discrete trials) and remained stable for as long as the payoff function did not change. The results of this work show that people are adaptive and flexible in how they prioritize and allocate attention in a dual‐task setting. However, it also demonstrates some of the limits regarding people's ability to optimize payoff functions.     

Intuitions about sample size: the empirical law of large numbers

According to Jacob Bernoulli, even the ‘stupidest man’ knows that the larger one's sample of observations, the more confidence one can have in being close to the truth about the phenomenon observed. Two-and-a-half centuries later, psychologists empirically tested people's intuitions about sample size. One group of such studies found participants attentive to sample size; another found participants ignoring it. We suggest an explanation for a substantial part of these inconsistent findings. We propose the hypothesis that human intuition conforms to the ‘empirical law of large numbers’ and distinguish between two kinds of tasks–one that can be solved by this intuition (frequency distributions) and one for which it is not sufficient (sampling distributions). A review of the literature reveals that this distinction can explain a substantial part of the apparently inconsistent results. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The powerful disregard social comparison information

Social comparisons are important because other people can serve as benchmarks to determine one's own capabilities and act as sources for inspiration. Despite this, people do not always fully utilize social comparison information. The present paper demonstrates that feelings of power may reduce use of social comparison information. In three experiments, participants were first induced to feel high or low in power, or were in a control condition. Then, they were exposed to either upward or downward comparison targets. In all three experiments, low power participants responded to targets with contrast or assimilation, whereas high power participants did not. This has important implications for our understanding of how people's positions in the social and organizational hierarchies affect their basic psychological functioning.