The rational side of egocentrism in social comparisons

Prior work has found that when people compare themselves with others they egocentrically focus on their own strengths and achievements more than on the (equally relevant) strengths and achievements of the comparison group. As a consequence, people tend to overestimate their comparative standing when absolute standing is high and underestimate their comparative standing when absolute standing is low. The present research investigated a rational discounting explanation of this bias—namely, that people weight the target of the comparison (the self) more than the referent of the comparison (others) because they typically have more knowledge about the former than the latter. In three studies, we found that the tendency to focus on the target in social comparisons—and the over and underestimation of relative standing that tendency engenders—was reduced (but not eliminated) as people’s knowledge about the comparison group increased. These results suggest that there may be a rational side to egocentrism in social comparisons.     

Evidence for a Data-Based Environmental Policy: Induction of a Behavior-Based Decision Support System

To advise policy‐makers about possible courses of action in the environmental domain, psychological science should employ a support system that allows for evidence‐based decisions with respect to the three generic policy questions: what, where, and how. The key to such a system is a measurement instrument in which environmental motivation becomes tangible in individual actions. In this article, we provide empirical examples of such a decision support system in the environmental domain. It consists of (a) evidence about environmental motivation of persons, (b) evidence about motivation's spatial distribution, (c) knowledge about the socio‐cultural conditions that affect individuals when they translate motivation into action (i.e. structural information), and (d) a forecast of the environmental impact—the concrete conservation potential of various behaviors. Pour conseiller les décideurs à propos de lignes de conduite possibles dans le domaine de l’environnement, la science psychologique devrait utiliser un système qui tienne compte des décisions provenant des trois questions génériques suivantes: quoi, ou et comment? La clé d’un tel système consiste en un instrument de mesure dans lequel la motivation environnementale devient tangible dans les actions individuelles. Dans cet article, nous prenons des exemples empiriques de telles aides à la décision dans le domaine de l’environnement. Peut être ainsi montré a) la motivation environnementale des personnes, b) la distribution spatiale de la motivation, c) l’influence de la connaissance des conditions socioculturelles des individus quand ils transforment motivation en action (i.e. information structurale) et (d) la prévision de l’impact environnemental sur le maintien potentiel de divers comportements.     

Time and decision making in humans

Decision making requires evaluating alternatives that differ on a number of attributes. During this evaluation process, selection of options depends on the duration of the options, the duration of the expected delay for realizing the options, and the time available to reach a decision. This article reviews the relationship between time and decision making in humans with respect to this evaluation process. Moreover, the role of psychological time, as compared with physical time, is accentuated. Five topics have been selected that illustrate how time and mental representations of time affect decision making. These are (1) the duration of options, (2) temporal decision making, (3) the time between having made a decision and experiencing the consequences of that decision, (4) the temporal perspective of decision makers, and (5) the duration of the decision process. The discussion of each topic is supplemented by suggestions for further research. It is shown that psychological time is often neglected in human decision making but seems to play an important role in the making of choices.     

Environmental attitude as a mediator of the relationship between psychological restoration in nature and self-reported ecological behavior

Environmental attitude and ecological behavior were investigated in relation to the use of nature for psychological restoration. Specifically, with survey data from 468 German university students, the role of environmental attitude was investigated as a mediator of the restoration-behavior relationship. Assuming that positive experiences in nature can have a broad influence on environmental attitudes, the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) scale, an attitudinal measure with broad scope, was adopted. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated partial mediation by environmental concern. The study helps to consolidate the restoration theme in the growing literature on positive motivations for ecological behavior.     

Challenges for interactivist-constructivist robotics

The interactivist-constructivist (IC) approach offers an attractive framework for the development of intelligent robots. However, we still lack genuinely intelligent robots, capable of representing the world, in the IC sense. Here we argue that the reason for this situation is the lack of learning mechanisms that would allow the components of the robotic controller to learn constructively while they direct the robot's action in accordance to its value system. We also suggest that spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) may be such a learning mechanism that operates in the brain.     

A new look at sensory attenuation. Action-effect anticipation affects sensitivity, not response bias

The systematic association of an action that a person performs with its sensory effects is thought to attenuate that person's perception of the effect of the action. However, whether learned sensorimotor contingencies truly affect perception, rather than just inducing a response bias, has yet to be determined. The experiment presented in this article comprised two parts: an action-effect association phase and a test phase, during which the actions' perceptual effects were tested. During the association phase, specific actions (left-key and right-key presses) were associated with specific visual effects (tilted Gabor patches). In the test phase, participants' left-key presses and right-key presses triggered the onset of a low-contrast tilted Gabor patch in 50% of trials (no stimulus was presented on the remaining 50% of trials). Participants were required to report the presence or absence of this tilted Gabor patch. Our results showed that participants' sensitivity (d') to the Gabor patches was reduced by 10% when the patches were triggered by the action they had previously been associated with. This finding indicates that a person's action does not induce a response bias (c), but changes the perception (d') of the learned action effect.     

Understanding the foot‐in‐the‐door effect as a pseudo‐effect from the perspective of the Campbell paradigm

Compliance with a small request (a metaphorical foot‐in‐the‐door) promotes compliance with a subsequent big request. Whereas some explanations expect a drop in the behavioural costs of the big request, others suspect that the effect comes from boosting the underlying attitude. However, evidence for both explanations is equivocal and circumstantial, at best. Drawing on what Kaiser et al. (2010) call the Campbell paradigm, we present an integrative account: Compliance with any request demands a corresponding attitude to counterbalance the costs of the request. In our research, 229 participants were randomly assigned to either a foot‐in‐the‐door (i.e., initially asked to sign a pro‐environmental petition) or a control condition. Small‐request‐compliant participants were more likely than control participants to also comply with the big request and to continue filling out environmental‐issues‐related questionnaires. However, this foot‐in‐the‐door effect occurred without diminishing behavioural costs or increasing attitude levels. Accordingly, the greater likelihood of small‐request‐compliant participants to also comply with the big request can be parsimoniously explained by baseline variability in people's attitude levels that manifests in their compliance with the initial request. We conclude that several of the foot‐in‐the‐door effects reported in the literature carry the risk of representing mere pseudo‐effects.     

Automatic Bayes Factors for Testing Equality- and Inequality-Constrained Hypotheses on Variances

In comparing characteristics of independent populations, researchers frequently expect a certain structure of the population variances. These expectations can be formulated as hypotheses with equality and/or inequality constraints on the variances. In this article, we consider the Bayes factor for testing such (in)equality-constrained hypotheses on variances. Application of Bayes factors requires specification of a prior under every hypothesis to be tested. However, specifying subjective priors for variances based on prior information is a difficult task. We therefore consider so-called automatic or default Bayes factors. These methods avoid the need for the user to specify priors by using information from the sample data. We present three automatic Bayes factors for testing variances. The first is a Bayes factor with equal priors on all variances, where the priors are specified automatically using a small share of the information in the sample data. The second is the fractional Bayes factor, where a fraction of the likelihood is used for automatic prior specification. The third is an adjustment of the fractional Bayes factor such that the parsimony of inequality-constrained hypotheses is properly taken into account. The Bayes factors are evaluated by investigating different properties such as information consistency and large sample consistency. Based on this evaluation, it is concluded that the adjusted fractional Bayes factor is generally recommendable for testing equality- and inequality-constrained hypotheses on variances.