Chairmen, Cocaine, and Car Crashes: The Knobe Effect as an Attribution Error

In this paper, we argue that the so-called Knobe-Effect constitutes an error. There is now a wealth of data confirming that people are highly prone to what has also come to be known as the ‘side-effect effect’. That is, when attributing psychological states—such as intentionality, foreknowledge, and desiring—as well as other agential features—such as causal control—people typically do so to a greater extent when the action under consideration is evaluated negatively. There are a plethora of models attempting to account for this effect. We hold that the central question of interest is whether the effect represents a competence or an error in judgment. We offer a systematic argument for the claim that the burden of proof regarding this question is on the competence theorist. We sketch an account, based on the notion of the reactive attitudes, that can accommodate both the idea that these sorts of judgments are fundamentally normative and that they often constitute errors.     

The Assessment of Self-Oriented and Socially Prescribed Perfectionism: Subscales Make a Difference

Campbell and Di Paula (2002) Campbell, J. D. and Di Paula, A. 2002. “Perfectionistic self-beliefs: Their relation to personality and goal pursuit”. In Perfectionism, Edited by: Flett, G. L. and Hewitt, P. L. 181–198. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.  [Google Scholar] suggested differentiating Perfectionistic Striving and Importance of Being Perfect subscales when measuring self-oriented perfectionism and Others’ High Standards and Conditional Acceptance subscales when measuring socially prescribed perfectionism. In this study, we investigated the utility of this differentiation by analyzing data from 1,041 students and examining correlations with positive striving and maladaptive evaluation concerns aspects of perfectionism and with positive and negative indicators of well-being and psychological adjustment. As expected, (a) Perfectionistic Striving scores showed higher correlations with positive striving aspects of perfectionism and with positive indicators of well-being and adjustment than Importance of Being Perfect scores, and (b) Conditional Acceptance scores showed higher correlations with maladaptive evaluation concerns aspects of perfectionism and with negative indicators of well-being and adjustment than Others’ High Standards scores. The findings indicate that Campbell and Di Paula's differentiation provides for a more detailed and informative assessment of multidimensional perfectionism and its different aspects. Moreover, it provides for new insights into self-oriented and socially prescribed perfectionism and their relationships and associations.     

Rationality,perception, and the all-seeing eye

Seeing—perception and vision—is implicitly the fundamental building block of the literature on rationality and cognition. Herbert Simon and Daniel Kahneman’s arguments against the omniscience of economic agents—and the concept of bounded rationality—depend critically on a particular view of the nature of perception and vision. We propose that this framework of rationality merely replaces economic omniscience with perceptual omniscience. We show how the cognitive and social sciences feature a pervasive but problematic meta-assumption that is characterized by an “all-seeing eye.” We raise concerns about this assumption and discuss different ways in which the all-seeing eye manifests itself in existing research on (bounded) rationality. We first consider the centrality of vision and perception in Simon’s pioneering work. We then point to Kahneman’s work—particularly his article “Maps of Bounded Rationality”—to illustrate the pervasiveness of an all-seeing view of perception, as manifested in the extensive use of visual examples and illusions. Similar assumptions about perception can be found across a large literature in the cognitive sciences. The central problem is the present emphasis on inverse optics—the objective nature of objects and environments, e.g., size, contrast, and color. This framework ignores the nature of the organism and perceiver. We argue instead that reality is constructed and expressed, and we discuss the species-specificity of perception, as well as perception as a user interface. We draw on vision science as well as the arts to develop an alternative understanding of rationality in the cognitive and social sciences. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our arguments for the rationality and decision-making literature in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics, along with suggesting some ways forward.     

Effector-related sequence learning in a bimanual-bisequential serial reaction time task

In a bimanual-bisequential version of the serial reaction time (SRT) task participants performed two uncorrelated key-press sequences simultaneously, one with fingers of the left hand and the other with fingers of the right hand. Participants responded to location-based imperative stimuli. When two such stimuli appeared in each trial, the results suggest independent learning of the two sequences and the occurrence of intermanual transfer. Following extended practice in Experiment 2, transfer of acquired sequence knowledge was not complete. Also in Experiment 2, when only one stimulus appeared in each trial specifying the responses for both hands so that there was no basis for separate stimulus-stimulus or separate response-effect learning, independent sequence learning was again evident, but there was no intermanual transfer at all. These findings suggest the existence of two mechanisms of sequence learning, one hand-related stimulus-based and the other motor-based, with only the former allowing for intermanual transfer.     

A diffusion model decomposition of the practice effect

When people repeatedly perform the same cognitive task, their mean response times (RTs) invariably decrease. The mathematical function that best describes this decrease has been the subject of intense debate. Here, we seek a deeper understanding of the practice effect by simultaneously taking into account the changes in accuracy and in RT distributions with practice, both for correct and error responses. To this end, we used the Ratcliff diffusion model, a successful model of two-choice RTs that decomposes the effect of practice into its constituent psychological processes. Analyses of data from a 10,000-trial lexical decision task demonstrate that practice not only affects the speed of information processing, but also response caution, response bias, and peripheral processing time. We conclude that the practice effect consists of multiple subcomponents, and that it may be hazardous to abstract the interactive combination of these subcomponents in terms of a single output measure such as mean RT for correct responses. Supplemental materials may be downloaded from http://pbr .psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

A Hierarchical Ornstein–Uhlenbeck Model for Continuous Repeated Measurement Data

In this paper, we present a diffusion model for the analysis of continuous-time change in multivariate longitudinal data. The central idea is to model the data from a single person with an Ornstein–Uhlenbeck diffusion process. We extend it hierarchically by allowing the parameters of the diffusion process to vary randomly over different persons. With this approach, both intra and interindividual differences are analyzed simultaneously. Furthermore, the individual difference parameters can be regressed on covariates, thereby providing an explanation of between-person differences. Unstructured and unbalanced data pose no problem for the model to be applied. We demonstrate the method on data from an experience sampling study to investigate changes in the core affect. It can be concluded that different factors from the five factor model of personality are related to features of the trajectories in the core affect space, such as the cross-correlation and variability of the changes.     

The assessment of self-oriented and socially prescribed perfectionism: subscales make a difference

Campbell and Di Paula (2002) suggested differentiating Perfectionistic Striving and Importance of Being Perfect subscales when measuring self-oriented perfectionism and Others' High Standards and Conditional Acceptance subscales when measuring socially prescribed perfectionism. In this study, we investigated the utility of this differentiation by analyzing data from 1,041 students and examining correlations with positive striving and maladaptive evaluation concerns aspects of perfectionism and with positive and negative indicators of well-being and psychological adjustment. As expected, (a) Perfectionistic Striving scores showed higher correlations with positive striving aspects of perfectionism and with positive indicators of well-being and adjustment than Importance of Being Perfect scores, and (b) Conditional Acceptance scores showed higher correlations with maladaptive evaluation concerns aspects of perfectionism and with negative indicators of well-being and adjustment than Others' High Standards scores. The findings indicate that Campbell and Di Paula's differentiation provides for a more detailed and informative assessment of multidimensional perfectionism and its different aspects. Moreover, it provides for new insights into self-oriented and socially prescribed perfectionism and their relationships and associations.     

Twilight of a Dilemma: A Réplique

In light of the nine open peer commentaries, we further explicate the social projection model and highlight its boundaries. We acknowledge that our model—like any extant model—cannot account for all the available empirical data. Yet the model is strong because it explains cooperation in a variety of social dilemmas and experimental games while deploying only one psychological construct as a parameter. Compared with its competitors, the social projection model more openly recognizes the struggle with uncertainty a person caught in a social dilemma must confront. In a series of simulations (and brute math), we show that cooperation can survive when players (humans) stay the Bayesian course.