The affect heuristic in judgments of risks and benefits

This paper re‐examines the commonly observed inverse relationship between perceived risk and perceived benefit. We propose that this relationship occurs because people rely on affect when judging the risk and benefit of specific hazards. Evidence supporting this proposal is obtained in two experimental studies. Study 1 investigated the inverse relationship between risk and benefit judgments under a time‐pressure condition designed to limit the use of analytic thought and enhance the reliance on affect. As expected, the inverse relationship was strengthened when time pressure was introduced. Study 2 tested and confirmed the hypothesis that providing information designed to alter the favorability of one's overall affective evaluation of an item (say nuclear power) would systematically change the risk and benefit judgments for that item. Both studies suggest that people seem prone to using an ‘affect heuristic’ which improves judgmental efficiency by deriving both risk and benefit evaluations from a common source—affective reactions to the stimulus item. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Seek and ye shall find: test results are what you hypothesize they are

Expert clinicians were given batteries of psychodiagnostic test results (Rorschach, TAT, Draw-A-Person, Bender-Gestalt, Wechsler) to analyze. For half, a battery came along with a suggestion that the person suffers from Borderline Personality disorder, and for half, that battery was accompanied by a suggestion that he suffers from Paranoid Personality disorder. In Study 1, the suggestion was made indirectly, through a background story that preceded the test results. In Study 2, the suggestion was made directly, by the instructions given. The experts saw in the tests what they hypothesized to be there. In particular, the target diagnoses were rated higher when they were hypothesized than when they were not. Copyright © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Demonstrating the effect of context on order effects for an army air defense task using the patriot simulator

The results reported herein support the hypotheses that (1) situation-specific, contextual features of a task can cause people to use explanation-based reasoning (Pennington and Hastie, 1993); (2) such reasoning can cause experienced personnel, both individually and in two-person teams, to reinterpret the meaning of the same information when it is presented in two different ordered sequences; and (3) the result will be primacy or recency (or no) effects depending on whether the most recent conflicting information can be explained away or not, respectively. These results extend the belief-adjustment model proposed by Hogarth and Einhorn (1992), which does not address information reinterpretations, and always predicts recency effects for an evaluation task with a short series of conflicting information. More generally, the results demonstrate the importance of situation-specific, contextual features in understanding judgment processes. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Similarity,multiple estimations,and the anchoring effect

This paper compares the Selective Accessibility and Scale Distortion theories of anchoring as explanations for anchoring tasks involving (1) perceived dissimilarity between comparison and estimation objects and (2) successive estimation tasks. We begin by describing the two theories of anchoring and what each would predict for these conditions. Two studies are presented in which multiple estimates are made following a single comparison task and the effect sizes of these estimates are correlated to operationalizations of similarity. In the first study, the stimuli varied with respect to how well they fit within an existing category reasonably familiar to the participant population: aircraft. In the second study, the stimuli varied with respect to external features that did not define the category: the brand and location of hotels. In both studies, we find that the anchoring effect size has a positive correlation with the semantic similarity between the comparison and estimation objects, a finding consistent with Selective Accessibility.     

The relationship between social status and the components of agency

Building on the two fundamental dimensions of social judgment distinguishing communion from agency, the purpose of the present work was to show that the strength of the relationship between social status and agency depends on specific components at issue: assertiveness, competence, and effort. Four experimental studies were conducted using two complementary paradigms. In Studies 1 and 2, we manipulated social status, and participants had to rate the target on competence, assertiveness, and effort. In Studies 3 and 4, we reversed the design. Results consistently showed that social status was primarily related to assertiveness, somewhat related to competence, and only slightly related to effort. The present research provides a better understanding of how the dimensions of social judgment are used to explain differences in social status.     

The test taker's fallacy: How students guess answers on multiple‐choice tests

Many students and applicants take multiple‐choice tests to demonstrate their competence and achievement. When they are unsure, they guess the most likely answer to maximize their score. Despite the impact of guessing on test reliability and individual performance, studies have not examined how patterns of answer sequences in multiple‐choice tests affect guessing. This research presents the test taker's fallacy, which refers to an individual's tendency to expect a different answer to appear for the next question given a run of the same answer choices. The test taker's fallacy exhibits negative recency, similar to the gambler's fallacy. However, extending the sequential judgment literature, the test taker's fallacy shows that negative recency arises even when sequences may or may not be randomly generated. In three studies, including a survey and experiments, the test taker's fallacy is robustly observed. The test taker's fallacy is consistent with the operation of the representativeness heuristic. This research explains what and how test takers guess given a streak of answers and extends judgment under uncertainty to the test‐taking context.     

The effects of physical contact and decision type on moral decision making: A study of harm to save moral behavior

This study examined the relationship between physical contact and decision type in predicting “harm to save” behavior. Participants were assigned to making either a judgment or a choice involving moral dilemmas. All participants were presented with dilemmas that either required or did not require having physical contact with potential victims. Participants were asked to decide whether to sacrifice fewer people to save more (utilitarian responses) or not to do so and thus more people would die (deontological responses). The study sample included 345 participants who completed a set of self‐report measures. Results indicated an interaction between physical contact and decision type. In the choice condition only, participants reported significantly less utilitarian responses to the dilemmas that required having physical contact with the person to be harmed than to dilemmas that did not require physical contact. This difference was not found in the judgment condition. These results contribute to a greater understanding of the nature and potential malleability of human morality.     

Do emotions play an essential role in moral judgments?

The past few decades of moral psychology research have yielded empirical anomalies for rationalist theories of moral judgments. An increasing number of psychologists and philosophers argue that these anomalies are explained well by sentimentalism, the thesis that the presence of an emotion is necessary for the formation of a sincere moral judgment. The present review reveals that while emotions and moral judgments indeed often co-occur, there is scant evidence that emotions directly cause or constitute moral judgments. Research on disgust, anger, sympathy, and guilt indicates that people only reliably experience emotions when judging conduct that is relevant to the welfare of the self and valued others. Moreover, many recent studies have either failed to replicate or exposed crucial confounds in the most cited evidence in support of sentimentalism. Moral psychologists should jettison sentimentalism, and focus instead on how considerations of harm and welfare—the core concepts of rationalist theories— interact with empirical beliefs to shape moral judgments.     

帮助情境中的预测偏差:成因与应对

理解帮助情境中社会性判断的特征对促成高效率和满意度的互动具有深远的现实意义.帮助与被帮助者因占据不同角色, 对帮助可能性,质量,心理感受和偏好方式等存在不对称的知觉, 进而在预测对方心理与行为时发生偏差, 可能阻碍合作的产生和亲社会行为的传递.此类偏差具有必然性, 受个体认知策略局限性和社会性因素的影响, 并可根据其成因有的放矢地应对.未来可以探讨帮助发生的媒介,双方的社会关系以及帮助的类型与偏差的关系.     

Causal judgments about empirical information in an interrupted time series design

Empirical information available for causal judgment in everyday life tends to take the form of quasi-experimental designs, lacking control groups, more than the form of contingency information that is usually presented in experiments. Stimuli were presented in which values of an outcome variable for a single individual were recorded over six time periods, and an intervention was introduced between the fifth and sixth time periods. Participants judged whether and how much the intervention affected the outcome. With numerical stimulus information, judgments were higher for a pre-intervention profile in which all values were the same than for pre-intervention profiles with any other kind of trend. With graphical stimulus information, judgments were more sensitive to trends, tending to be higher when an increase after the intervention was preceded by a decreasing series than when it was preceded by an increasing series ending on the same value at the fifth time period. It is suggested that a feature-analytic model, in which the salience of different features of information varies between presentation formats, may provide the best prospect of explaining the results.