“Who said it?” How contextual information influences perceived profundity of meaningful quotes and pseudo-profound bullshit

Psychological research on pseudo-profound bullshit—randomly assembled buzz words plugged into a syntactic structure—has only recently begun. Most such research has focused on dispositional traits, such as thinking styles or political orientation. However, none has investigated contextual factors. In two studies, we introduce a new paradigm by investigating the contextual effect on pseudo-profound bullshit and meaningful quotes. In Study 1, all participants rated the profundity of statements in three contexts: (a) isolated, (b) as allegedly said by a famous author, or (c) within a vignette (short story). Study 2 serves as a conceptual replication in which participants rated statements in only one of three contexts. Overall, our results demonstrate that although contextual information such as author's name increases the perceived profundity of bullshit, it has an inconsistent effect on meaningful quotes. The present study helps to better understand the bullshit receptivity while offering a new line of research.     

Probabilistic numerical discrimination in mice

Previous studies showed that both human and non-human animals can discriminate between different quantities (i.e., time intervals, numerosities) with a limited level of precision due to their endogenous/representational uncertainty. In addition, other studies have shown that subjects can modulate their temporal categorization responses adaptively by incorporating information gathered regarding probabilistic contingencies into their time-based decisions. Despite the psychophysical similarities between the interval timing and nonverbal counting functions, the sensitivity of count-based decisions to probabilistic information remains an unanswered question. In the current study, we investigated whether exogenous probabilistic information can be integrated into numerosity-based judgments by mice. In the task employed in this study, reward was presented either after few (i.e., 10) or many (i.e., 20) lever presses, the last of which had to be emitted on the lever associated with the corresponding trial type. In order to investigate the effect of probabilistic information on performance in this task, we manipulated the relative frequency of different trial types across different experimental conditions. We evaluated the behavioral performance of the animals under models that differed in terms of their assumptions regarding the cost of responding (e.g., logarithmically increasing vs. no response cost). Our results showed for the first time that mice could adaptively modulate their count-based decisions based on the experienced probabilistic contingencies in directions predicted by optimality.     

Perceived risk: an experimental investigation of consumer behavior when buying wine

The purpose of this paper is to investigate differences in expressed attitude as a function of the manner in which information on perceived risk is communicated. The experiments are conducted through a choice‐based questionnaire to reflect the consumer‐oriented decision of the purchase of a bottle of wine based on posted prices. The experiments reported in this paper are based on questionnaires distributed to 323 participants in multiple samples and examine the behavior of people when faced with different information on the probability of loss. The present study demonstrates that changes in the manner in which information is presented, without any underlying change in problem structure, affects observed preferences when buying wine. The impact of perceived risk and character on the willingness to buy and to pay for a bottle is analyzed and show that price habits and perceived risk are the main factors affecting the willingness to pay for a bottle of wine. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Chronic Childhood Peer Rejection is Associated with Heightened Neural Responses to Social Exclusion During Adolescence

This functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) study examined subjective and neural responses to social exclusion in adolescents (age 12–15) who either had a stable accepted (n?=?27; 14 males) or a chronic rejected (n?=?19; 12 males) status among peers from age 6 to 12. Both groups of adolescents reported similar increases in distress after being excluded in a virtual ball-tossing game (Cyberball), but adolescents with a history of chronic peer rejection showed higher activity in brain regions previously linked to the detection of, and the distress caused by, social exclusion. Specifically, compared with stably accepted adolescents, chronically rejected adolescents displayed: 1) higher activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) during social exclusion and 2) higher activity in the dACC and anterior prefrontal cortex when they were incidentally excluded in a social interaction in which they were overall included. These findings demonstrate that chronic childhood peer rejection is associated with heightened neural responses to social exclusion during adolescence, which has implications for understanding the processes through which peer rejection may lead to adverse effects on mental health over time.