Judgments of Decision Effectiveness: Actor-Observer Differences in Overconfidence

Subjects playing the role of psychiatrists (actors) engaged in a simulated medical decision-making task in which they attempted to bring the value of a patient indicator variable into a desired range. For each treatment recommended by the actor, both the actor and an observer subject playing the role of a nurse assessed the probability that the treatment would be effective. Both actors and observers were overconfident. Actors were more confident in their treatment recommendations than were observers, but this difference was eliminated when observers were given the opportunity to offer their own alternative recommendation. Under the latter circumstances, actors and observers were equally confident in the actors' decisions but observers were more confident than actors in the observers' decisions. These findings suggest that while control over the outcome of the decision has little influence on actor-observer differences in confidence, feedback regarding this outcome plays a crucial role.     

‘Coming out’ and sexual debut: understanding the social context of HIV risk-related behaviour

This paper explores HIV risk-related behaviour in the context of men's entry into the gay community. It is an exploratory study which employed a qualitative approach to describe men's accounts of the process of acculturation. Twenty in-depth interviews were conducted with working-class gay men from Barnsley, UK. These were translated and analysed, using interpretative phenomenological analysis, for recurrent themes which reflect the way gay men thought about HIV risk-related behaviour, ‘coming out’ and their sexual debut. As men began to socialize with other gay men in their local community they had much to learn with regard to local gay culture, e.g. a distinct new vocabulary and local sexual mores. By virtue of their lack of experience and the personal impact of first sexual experiences, some men reported feelings of disempowerment with their initial sexual partners. Theoretical accounts relating to gay men's sexual health would benefit from a consideration of the way gay men report the process of acculturation. Sexual debut and the particular vulnerabilities of entry into the gay community highlight a temporal context in which affective experiences are privileged above considerations of sexual health. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Collecting information: Optimizing outcomes, screening options, or facilitating discrimination?

Collection of information prior to a decision may be integrated into a compensatory choice process; if it is, the information packet that is collected should be the one that produces the highest net gain. Alternatively,information may be collected in order to screen out options that fail to meet minimum standards; if this is the case, people should not choose options on which they have not collected available information. We tested these and other predictions from the two approaches in four experiments. Participants were given specific information about three attributes of each choice option but only probabilistic information about a fourth one. They rated attractiveness of options, decidedwhether to collect specific information about the fourth attribute of each one, rated options again, and then selected one of them. Data were consistent with neither of the above approaches. Instead they suggested that people collect information in order to facilitate their ability to discriminate between the attractiveness of options.     

Understanding Workaholism: Data Synthesis, Theoretical Critique, and Future Design Strategies

Workaholism involves a personal reluctance to disengage from work, which is evidenced by the tendency to work irrespective of external demands. While the term workaholism has been widely used by the public for over 30 years, scientists are only beginning to explore the behavior in depth. To date, most research has occurred on an ad hoc basis, emerging from a wide variety of paradigms without being explicitly linked to theory. The current article presents three methods for defining workaholism and a précis of relevant measures, then provides an integrated overview of research relating workaholism to individual well-being. Three models implicit in existing workaholism research (addiction, learning, and trait theory) are expounded and critiqued, and four new procedures for researching workaholism are suggested. Finally, an integrated, multidisciplinary approach is proposed as an essential element in encouraging rigorous debate and continued development of workaholism theory.     

Biased forecasting of postdecisional affect

Although anticipated postdecisional regret is a significant contributor to people's decision-making processes, the accuracy of people's regret forecasts has yet to be assessed systematically. Here we report two studies to fill this lacuna. In Study 1, we found that subjects who made reasonably high offers overpredicted the regret that they experienced after they unexpectedly failed at a negotiation. In Study 2, we found that subjects overpredicted the rejoicing and marginally underpredicted the regret that they experienced when they received higher marks than they had expected for their course work. Systematic affective misprediction implies that people making decisions should discount the regret and rejoicing that they anticipate will be associated with potential outcomes arising from those decisions.     

application of the social marketing model to unemployment counseling: a theoretical perspective

A. R. Andreasen's (1995) social marketing model (SMM) is applied to structure feedback counseling for individuals who are unemployed. The authors discuss techniques used in commercial marketing and how they are equally applicable to solving societal problems; SMM and its application to social interventions; and structured feedback that moves a person from contemplating change to sustained behavioral modification, which can facilitate attitudinal and behavioral change. The relationship of SMM to motivational theories that support the potential of SMM for unemployment counseling is also discussed. The article concludes with a review of the integration of SMM by the New Zealand Employment Service.     

Self-relevance and wishful thinking: Facilitation and distortion in source monitoring

When making source attributions, people tend to attribute desirable statements to reliable sources and undesirable statements to unreliable sources, a phenomenon known as the wishful thinking effect (Gordon, Franklin, & Beck, 2005). In the present study, we examined the influence of wishful thinking on source monitoring for self-relevant information. On one hand, wishful thinking is expected, because self-relevant desires are presumably strong. However, self-relevance is known to confer a memory advantage and may thus provide protection from desire-based biases. In Experiment 1, source memory for self-relevant information was contrasted against source memory for information relevant to others and for neutral information. Results indicated that self-relevant information was affected by wishful thinking and was remembered more accurately than was other information. Experiment 2 showed that the magnitude of the self-relevant wishful thinking effect did not increase with a delay.