Power and overconfident decision-making

Five experiments demonstrate that experiencing power leads to overconfident decision-making. Using multiple instantiations of power, including an episodic recall task (Experiments 1–3), a measure of work-related power (Experiment 4), and assignment to high- and low-power roles (Experiment 5), power produced overconfident decisions that generated monetary losses for the powerful. The current findings, through both mediation and moderation, also highlight the central role that the sense of power plays in producing these decision-making tendencies. First, sense of power, but not mood, mediated the link between power and overconfidence (Experiment 3). Second, the link between power and overconfidence was severed when access to power was not salient to the powerful (Experiment 4) and when the powerful were made to feel personally incompetent in their domain of power (Experiment 5). These findings indicate that only when objective power leads people to feel subjectively powerful does it produce overconfident decision-making.     

When promoting a charity can hurt charitable giving: A metacognitive analysis

Charities need to come to mind to enter a potential donor's consideration set. However, feeling familiar with a charity and its cause can facilitate or impair giving. In most cases, perceived good memory for details of the cause fosters the impression of personal importance, which increases giving (Studies 1 and 3). But when the charity aims to increase awareness of a cause, good memory for the cause suggests that awareness is already high, which impairs giving (Studies 2 and 3). Hence, promotions for awareness-raising charities can actually have negative consequences, confirming the predictions of a metacognitive analysis.     

Confirmatory factor analysis on separability of planning and insight constructs

This study aimed to investigate the separability of planning, a form of noninsight problem solving, from insight problem solving by means of using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The relationships of these two types of problem-solving tasks with meta-cognitive awareness were also assessed. Participants performed a set of planning tasks, a set of insight tasks and a self-report inventory on metacognitive ability. The CFA results revealed that planning and insight problem solving were closely related constructs and were not clearly separable. Model comparisons indicated that the fit of the alternative one-factor model was slightly better than the fit of the two-factor model. The correlational results showed that both planning task performance and insight problem-solving performance had no correlations with the metacognitive knowledge or the metacognitive regulation components of the metacognitive awareness inventory.     

Induced Rotational Motion With Nonabutting Inducing and Induced Stimuli: Implications Regarding Two Forms of Induced Motion

Induced motion is the illusory motion of a static stimulus in the opposite direction to a moving stimulus. Two types of induced motion have been distinguished: (a) when the moving stimulus is distant from the static stimulus and undergoes overall displacement, and (b) when the moving stimulus is pattern viewed within fixed boundaries that abut the static stimulus. Explanations of the 1st type of induced motion refer to mediating phenomena, such as vection, whereas the 2nd type is attributed to local processing by motion-sensitive neurons. The present research was directed to a display that elicited induced rotational motion with the characteristics of both types of induced motion: the moving stimulus lay within fixed boundaries, but the inducing and induced stimuli were distant from each other. The author investigated the properties that distinguished the two types of induced motion. In 3 experiments, induced motion persisted indefinitely, inter-ocular transfer of the aftereffect of induced motion was limited to about 20%, and the time-course of the aftereffect of induced motion could not be attributed to vection. Those results were consistent with fixed-boundary induced motion. However, they could not be explained by local processing. Instead, the results might reflect the detection of object motion within a complex flow-field that resulted from the observer's motion.     

Breakdown in the metacognitive chain: Good intentions aren’t enough in high school

Two experiments examined the effects of a metacognitive betting implementation in high school Biology students. The results showed that people were generally good at monitoring their own knowledge in that students performed better on items judged with high bets than items judged with low bets. We also found that those who were required to make bets, as compared to those who did not, had higher intentions of studying for longer periods of time, prior to the test. However, there were no differences in actual study time. Nor was there a difference in final performance, as one would expect, between the betters and the non-betters. In summary, we found indication of (1) good intentions when using the betting procedure, but (2) breakdown in the metacognitive chain during control. That is, while requiring students to make deliberate judgments improves their intentions to study, they, unfortunately, fail to carry out those intentions.     

Can I see the real me? Leadership ability and the better-than-average effect

Military organizations typically emphasize the importance of leadership. The quality of military leadership might be inhibited because individuals tend to overestimate their respective leadership abilities. We hypothesized that military professionals generally overestimate how well they lead compared to their peers (Hypothesis 1). We also hypothesized that an egocentric bias, where self-ratings are weighted more strongly than other-ratings, contributes to this better-than-average effect (Hypothesis 2). The results obtained across two studies supported both hypotheses. Most notably, 242 of 251 United States Air Force Academy cadets and 31 of 34 United States Air Force officers rated themselves as above average compared to their peers. The obtained results have important implications for understanding the better-than-average effect generally and leadership in military and nonmilitary organizations.     

Sense and Sensibility Educated: A Note on Experience and (Minimal) Empiricism

Abstract

McDowell’s minimal empiricism holds that experience, understood as providing conceptually articulated contents, plays a role in the justification of our beliefs. We question this idea by contrasting the role of perceptual experience in moral and non-moral judgments and conclude that experience per se is irrelevant in the former case and should also be so in the latter one: only with the help of adequate beliefs experience can provide a connection with the world. We conclude with some remarks concerning the importance of experience.     

How to Make Decisions in An Uncertain World: Heuristics,Biases, and Risk Perception

From the seventies onward a large quantity of theoretical and empirical studies have investigated the heuristic principles and cognitive strategies that individuals use to deal with risky and uncertain situations. This research has shown how the explicative and predictive shortcomings of normative risk analysis depend in many respects on undervaluing the continuous interaction between the individual and the environment. There are factors that, day by day, represent significant obstacles to decision making.