Choice theories: What are they good for?

Simonson et al. present an ambitious sketch of an integrative theory of context. Provoked by this thoughtful proposal, I discuss what is the function of theories of choice in the coming decades. Traditionally, choice models and theory have attempted to predict choices as a function of the attributes of options. I argue that to be truly useful, they need to generate specific and quantitative predictions of the effect of the choice environment upon choice probability. To do this, we need to focus on rigorously modeling and measuring the underlying processes causing these effects, and use the Simonson et al. proposal to provide some examples. I also present some examples from research in decision-making and decision neuroscience, and argue that models that fail, and fail spectacularly are particularly useful. I close with a challenge: How would consumer researcher aid the design of real world choice environments such as the health exchanges under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act?     

“Owning” the personal past: Adolescents’ and adults’ autobiographical narratives and ratings of memories of recent and distant events

Adults and adolescents are characterised as having different perspectives on their personal or autobiographical memories. Adults are recognised as having vivid recollections of past events and as appreciating the meaning and significance of their autobiographical memories. In development, these qualities are noted as absent as late as adolescence. To evaluate the assumption of developmental differences, we directly compared autobiographical memories of adults and adolescents drawn from each of several periods in the past, using measures of narrative quality (coded independently) and participants’ own subjective ratings of their memories. Adults’ narratives of events from the previous year and for the “most significant” event of their lives were coded as more thematically coherent relative to those of adolescents’; the groups did not differ on thematic coherence of narratives of early-life events (ages 1–5 and 6–10 years). The ratings that adults and adolescents provided of their autobiographical memories were similar overall; differences were more apparent for early-life events than for more recent events and indicated stronger mnemonic experiences among adolescents than adults. The pattern of findings suggests that whereas adults have more sophisticated narrative tools for describing the significance of events and their relation to the corpus of autobiographical memories, adolescents as well as adults have vivid recollective experiences as well as personal and subjective perspective on the events of their lives and their memories thereof.     

When Is Perception Top‐Down and When Is It Not? Culture,Narrative, and Attention

Previous findings in cultural psychology indicated that East Asians are more likely than North Americans to be attentive to contextual information (e.g., Nisbett & Masuda, 2003 ). However, to what extent and in which conditions culture influences patterns of attention has not been fully examined. As a result, universal patterns of attention may be obscured, and culturally unique patterns may be wrongly assumed to be constant across situations. By carrying out two cross‐cultural studies, we demonstrated that (a) both European Canadians and Japanese attended to moving objects similarly when the task was to simply observe the visual information; however, (b) there were cultural variations in patterns of attention when participants actively engaged in the task by constructing narratives of their observation (narrative construction). These findings suggest that cultural effects are most pronounced in narrative construction conditions, where the need to act in accordance with a culturally shared meaning system is elicited.     

Toward a Comprehensive Theology of Divine Action

This paper proposes a fundamental premise for the conversation between science and theology: In our experience of the natural world we encounter an excess of awareness and of meaning that overwhelm our perceptions, language, and thought. We attempt to construct the coherence of our awareness through our science, and we attempt to render it meaningful in our thoughts and language. Metaphor and symbol are primary vehicles for our attempts at meaning. Since its task is to articulate meaning, theology must acknowledge this premise, if it is to engage the sciences adequately.     

Prediction,events, and the advantage of Agents: The processing of semantic roles in visual narrative

Agents consistently appear prior to Patients in sentences, manual signs, and drawings, and Agents are responded to faster when presented in visual depictions of events. We hypothesized that this “Agent advantage” reflects Agents’ role in event structure. We investigated this question by manipulating the depictions of Agents and Patients in preparatory actions in wordless visual narratives. We found that Agents elicited a greater degree of predictions regarding upcoming events than Patients, that Agents are viewed longer than Patients, independent of serial order, and that visual depictions of actions are processed more quickly following the presentation of an Agent vs. a Patient. Taken together these findings support the notion that Agents initiate the building of event representation. We suggest that Agent First orders facilitate the interpretation of events as they unfold and that the saliency of Agents within visual representations of events is driven by anticipation of upcoming events.     

Making Sense of Climate Change: How Story Frames Shape Cognition

In 2006, Adam J. Berinsky and Donald R. Kinder published findings in the Journal of Politics that demonstrated that framing news as a story influences how individuals cognitively organize concepts and information. The study presented here moves forward in this tradition. This research combines samples obtained in the springs of 2009 and 2010 while conducting online experiments. In these experiments, slightly over 2,000 respondents are asked to organize concepts presented in one of three culturally nuanced stories about climate change or where information is presented as a list. Hierarchical cluster analysis indicates that when respondents are exposed to culturally congruent stories, respondent organizational patterns are more likely to mirror the story. We discuss the implications of these findings.