High‐Stakes Decision‐Making Within Complex Social Environments: A Computational Model of Belief Systems in the Arab Spring

People experiencing similar conditions may make different decisions, and their belief systems provide insight about these differences. An example of high‐stakes decision‐making within a complex social context is the Arab Spring, in which large numbers of people decided to protest and even larger numbers decided to stay at home. This study uses qualitative analyses of interview narratives and social media addressing individual decisions to develop a computational model tracing the cognitive decision‐making process. The model builds on work by Abelson and Carroll (1965), Schank and Abelson (1977), and Axelrod (1976) to systematically trace the inferences connecting beliefs to decisions. The findings show that protest decisions were often based on positive emotions such as pride, hope, courage, and solidarity, triggered by beliefs about successful protest and self‐sacrifice. By contrast, decisions to stay at home were triggered by beliefs about safety, state approval, and living conditions. As one participant said, “When I heard about the revolution in Tunisia, my heart was filled with solidarity for the people.” In the words of a non‐participant: “When people are killed, we must be careful. There are more important things than protest: safety and stability.” This study of individual explanations about events identifies the role of emotions in high‐stakes decision‐making within complex social environments.     

Understanding the coherence of the severity effect and optimism phenomena: Lessons from attention

Claims that optimism is a near-universal characteristic of human judgment seem to be at odds with recent results from the judgment and decision making literature suggesting that the likelihood of negative outcomes are overestimated relative to neutral outcomes. In an attempt to reconcile these seemingly contrasting phenomena, inspiration is drawn from the attention literature in which there is evidence that both positive and negative stimuli can have attentional privilege relative to neutral stimuli. This result provides a framework within which I consider three example phenomena that purport to demonstrate that people’s likelihood estimates are optimistic: Wishful thinking; Unrealistic comparative optimism and Asymmetric belief updating. The framework clarifies the relationships between these phenomena and stimulates future research questions. Generally, whilst results from the first two phenomena appear reconcilable in this conceptualisation, further research is required in reconciling the third.     

Belief in a just world and organisational loyalty: Trust as an underlying mechanism

This research examined whether employees' personal belief in a just world (BJW) is associated with their organisational loyalty and whether this relationship is statistically mediated by organisational trust. To test these hypotheses, we conducted two studies with employees from China (study 1, N = 314) and Germany (study 2, N = 189). The results from both studies supported the proposed model. In addition, study 2 revealed that the relationship between BJW and organisational loyalty persisted when controlling for global personality traits. These suggest that managers and organisations may increase employees' loyalty by providing an environment that fosters their sense of justice and trust.     

‘Protective donation’: When refusing a request for a donation increases the sense of vulnerability

May refusing a request for a donation be conceived as ‘tempting fate’? Do people feel more vulnerable when they do not comply with such a request? In this paper we examine the link between subjective perceptions of vulnerability and people's willingness to help address a threatening cause. Results of five studies, examining a real life situation, hypothetical scenarios and a controlled lab game with actual monetary costs and rewards, show first, that deliberately helping is positively correlated with the perceived likelihood of becoming a victim of the same misfortune. Second, we show that refusing to donate to a threatening misfortune increases sense of vulnerability. Both phenomena occur especially for people with strong belief in a just world, who believe in a causal relationship between people's behavior and their fortune (rewards and punishments).     

The functional nature of conspiracy beliefs: Examining the underpinnings of belief in the Da Vinci Code conspiracy

Focusing on a contemporary conspiracy theory popularized in the novel The Da Vinci Code (Brown, 2002), we examined the underlying psychological factors and individual differences that may predict belief in conspiracy theories, and assessed such beliefs’ resistance to counterevidence. Our results suggest that belief in the Da Vinci Code conspiracy may be associated with coping with existential threat and death-related anxiety. In addition, the extent to which participants believed in the conspiracy was associated with the endorsement of congruent (New Age spiritual) and competing (Christian religious) beliefs, in opposite directions. Finally, exposure to counterevidence resulted in belief reduction, specifically among more religious participants (i.e. among those endorsing a competing belief system). We suggest that belief in modern conspiracy theories may help individuals attain or maintain a sense of meaning, control, and security.     

True overconfidence: The inability of rational information processing to account for apparent overconfidence

The better-than-average effect describes the tendency of people to perceive their skills and virtues as being above average. We derive a new experimental paradigm to distinguish between two possible explanations for the effect, namely rational information processing and overconfidence. Experiment participants evaluate their relative position within the population by stating their complete belief distribution. This approach sidesteps recent methodology concerns associated with previous research. We find that people hold beliefs about their abilities in different domains and tasks which are inconsistent with rational information processing. Both on an aggregated and an individual level, they show considerable overplacement. We conclude that overconfidence is not only apparent overconfidence but rather the consequence of a psychological bias.     

A Meadian account of social understanding: Taking a non-mentalistic approach to infant and verbal false belief understanding

Performance on false belief tasks has long been considered a key indicator of the development of social understanding in young children. We consider the enabling conditions for performing non-verbal and verbal false belief tasks as well as a typical developmental path toward false belief understanding. We argue that, in early ontogenesis, children anticipate the coordination of activity with others rather than read, probe, or reflectively engage with the psychological states of others. As linguistically mediated reflective thought emerges, children gradually become able to parse and isolate the myriad of incipient somatic, affective, and intentional responses that arise in any given moment. With reflective thought, children also begin to develop distinct and temporally coherent understandings about the minds of self and other. We provide an account of how the reflective thought that facilitates false belief understanding emerges. Our account focuses on a gradually developing refinement of social coordination and the shared perspectival understandings inherent in social coordination.     

Belief merging and the discursive dilemma: an argument-based account to paradoxes of judgment aggregation

The aggregation of individual judgments on logically interconnected propositions into a collective decision on the same propositions is called judgment aggregation. Literature in social choice and political theory has claimed that judgment aggregation raises serious concerns. For example, consider a set of premises and a conclusion where the latter is logically equivalent to the former. When majority voting is applied to some propositions (the premises) it may give a different outcome than majority voting applied to another set of propositions (the conclusion). This problem is known as the discursive dilemma (or paradox). The discursive dilemma is a serious problem since it is not clear whether a collective outcome exists in these cases, and if it does, what it is like. Moreover, the two suggested escape-routes from the paradox—the so-called premise-based procedure and the conclusion-based procedure—are not, as I will show, satisfactory methods for group decision-making. In this paper I introduce a new aggregation procedure inspired by an operator defined in artificial intelligence in order to merge belief bases. The result is that we do not need to worry about paradoxical outcomes, since these arise only when inconsistent collective judgments are not ruled out from the set of possible solutions.     

无辜受害事件对公正世界信念的威胁:观察者的角色偏倚

无辜受害者信息往往打破民众“好人有好报”的公正世界,而这种公正世界信念的威胁也因人而异。通过情绪Stroop效应验证这一心理现象,并探讨观察者与无辜受害者的群体归属以及观察者的不公正体验是否会影响公正世界信念威胁的程度。结果表明:(1)无论观察者是否与无辜受害者属于同一群体,或者观察者有无不公正体验,无辜受害者信息均会激活观察者的公正世界信念。(2)相比于外群体,当观察者与受害者属于同一群体类型(内群体)时,其公正世界信念的激活程度更强。(3)内群体观察者在有和无不公正体验的条件下,公正世界信念的威胁程度不存在显著差异。