Automatic goal inferences

The social psychological literature on automatic social inferences has focused on one construct that helps explaining human behavior—traits (e.g., Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull, 1988; Trope, 1986; Winter & Uleman, 1984). The dispositional roots of behavior, however, go beyond relatively stable constructs such as traits to include more transient causes such as one’s intentions and goals. Evidence from young infants and adult chimpanzees, knowledge acquired in the text-comprehension literature and hypotheses derived from the Automatic Causal Inferences framework (Hassin, Bargh, & Uleman, 2002), seems to converge: they all suggest that perceivers may automatically infer goals from behaviors. This paper reports four studies that examine this hypothesis. The first two use surprise cued-recall, and look at goal inferences when the road to goal achievement seems straightforward and when it seems blocked. Studies 3 and 4 use on-line methodologies—probe recognition task and lexical decision—to examine whether these inferences are made at encoding.     

Detrimental influence of contextual change on spacing effects in free recall

Two experiments were conducted to determine the mechanism underlying the spacing effect in free-recall tasks. Participants were required to study a list containing once-presented words as well as massed and spaced repetitions. In both experiments, presentation background at repetition was manipulated. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that free recall was higher for massed items repeated in a different context than for massed items repeated in the same context, whereas free recall for spaced items was higher when repeated in the same context. Furthermore, a spacing effect was shown for words repeated in the same context, whereas an attenuated spacing effect was revealed for words repeated in a different context. These findings were replicated in Experiment 2 under a different presentation background manipulation. Both experiments seem to be most consistent with a model that combines the contextual variability and the study-phase retrieval mechanism to account for the spacing effect in free-recall tasks.     

Conscious thought beats deliberation without attention in diagnostic decision-making: at least when you are an expert

Contrary to what common sense makes us believe, deliberation without attention has recently been suggested to produce better decisions in complex situations than deliberation with attention. Based on differences between cognitive processes of experts and novices, we hypothesized that experts make in fact better decisions after consciously thinking about complex problems whereas novices may benefit from deliberation-without-attention. These hypotheses were confirmed in a study among doctors and medical students. They diagnosed complex and routine problems under three conditions, an immediate-decision condition and two delayed conditions: conscious thought and deliberation-without-attention. Doctors did better with conscious deliberation when problems were complex, whereas reasoning mode did not matter in simple problems. In contrast, deliberation-without-attention improved novices’ decisions, but only in simple problems. Experts benefit from consciously thinking about complex problems; for novices thinking does not help in those cases.     

A functional analysis of personal autonomy: How restricting ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘how’ affects experienced agency and goal motivation

Personal autonomy is central to people's experiences of agency and abilities to actively take part in society. To address the challenges of supporting autonomy, we propose a functional model of autonomy, according to which the experience of agency is a function of the opportunity to determine what to do, when to act and how to act in goal-pursuit. We tested the model in three experiments where the three goal-pursuit components could be constrained by another person or an artificial intelligence (AI) agent. Results showed that removing any of the three components from one's own decisions reduced experienced agency (Study 1a and 1b) and lowered motivation to pursue goals in organisational contexts (Study 2). In comparison to the strong and robust main effects, interactions between the components and the effects of the source of restriction (human vs. AI) were negligible. Implications for personal autonomy, algorithmic decision-making and behaviour change interventions are discussed.     

Evaluating a ward staff program for increasing spontaneous and varied communicative gesturing with individuals who are mentally retarded

In the present study we assessed the effect of a multifaceted program for ward staff members, which was intended to have severely/profoundly mentally retarded individuals improve their use of communicative gestures. The program consisted of instruction, verbal and visual (publicly posted) graphic feedback. There were two categories of dependent variables. The first category involved the number of gesture prompts by staff, number of unused opportunities to evoke gestures, and number of consequences given for gestures. The second category involved handicapped individuals' number of prompted gestures, number of spontaneous gestures, and number of different gestures. Results show that the program was effective with regard to all these variables. Changes in the number of spontaneous gestures were especially remarkable, as this variable had not been influenced directly. Follow-up data underline the effectiveness of the program.