The Name-Pronunciation Effect: Further Evidence from Chinese

This study examined the Chinese name-pronunciation effect. The easy-to-pronounce and difficult-to-pronounce Chinese names were created using the same characters in order to control for visual perceptual and conceptual fluency. In Experiment 1, participants rated each name in terms of liking, electability as a state leader, income level, and baby name preference. An additional rating of prevalence was used to estimate familiarity. In Experiment 2, participants did not read the name aloud before rating and performed intentional recall and recognition tests. In both experiments, the easy-to-pronounce names were rated higher than difficult-to-pronounce names on liking. This effect generalized to judgments of electability and baby name preference but not to prevalence and income level. There were no differences in memory performances between the two types of names. Results are discussed in terms of the boundary condition of the name-pronunciation effect and the advantage of using Chinese names to study this effect.     

Emotional reactivity,self-control and children's hostile attributions over middle childhood

Hostile attribution bias, a child's tendency to interpret ambiguous social information as threatening or hostile, has been discussed as an important point in which social, emotional and cognitive information intersect. This study explores the natural changes that occur in children's hostile attributions across three grades during middle childhood and examines how emotional reactivity and self-control at third, fourth and fifth grade independently and interactively relate to these trajectories. Participants included 919 children whose mothers reported on their emotional reactivity, whose teachers reported on their self-control and who completed an attribution bias interview, all at grades 3, 4 and 5. Results revealed that among children with a greater tendency to make hostile attributions at third grade, lower self-control at third grade was associated with greater initial hostile attribution bias and less decline in biases over time. Additionally, greater emotional reactivity at fourth grade was associated with declines in these children's hostile attributions, but only when self-control was also higher at fourth grade.     

True Overconfidence in Interval Estimates: Evidence Based on a New Measure of Miscalibration

Overconfidence is often regarded as one of the most prevalent judgment biases. Several studies show that overconfidence can lead to suboptimal decisions of investors, managers, or politicians. Recent research, however, questions whether overconfidence should be regarded as a bias and shows that standard “overconfidence” findings can easily be explained by different degrees of knowledge of agents plus a random error in predictions. We contribute to the current literature and ongoing research by extensively analyzing interval estimates for knowledge questions, for real financial time series, and for artificially generated charts. We thereby suggest a new method to measure overconfidence in interval estimates, which is based on the implied probability mass behind a stated prediction interval. We document overconfidence patterns, which are difficult to reconcile with rationality of agents and which cannot be explained by differences in knowledge as differences in knowledge do not exist in our task. Furthermore, we show that overconfidence measures are reliable in the sense that there exist stable individual differences in the degree of overconfidence in interval estimates, thereby testing an important assumption of behavioral economics and behavioral finance models: stable individual differences in the degree of overconfidence across people. We do this in a “field experiment,” for different levels of expertise of subjects (students on the one hand and professional traders and investment bankers on the other hand), over time, by using different miscalibration metrics, and for tasks that avoid common weaknesses such as a non‐representative selection of trick questions. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Duty to Support Nationalistic Policies

We demonstrate that citizens perceive a duty to support policies that benefit their nation, even when they themselves judge that the consequences of the policies will be worse on the whole, taking outsiders into account. In terms of actions, subjects think they would do their perceived duty rather than violate it for the sake of better consequences. The discrepancy between duty and judged consequences does not seem to result from self‐interest alone. When asked for reasons, many subjects felt an obligation to help their fellow citizens before others, and they also thought that they owed something to their nation, in return for what it did for them. The obligation to help fellow citizens was the strongest predictor of perceived duty. In an experiment with Israeli and Palestinian students, group membership affected both perceived overall consequences and duty, but the effect of group on perceived consequences did not account for the effect on perceived duty. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Normative and Descriptive Models of Military Decisions to Deploy Precision Strike Capabilities

Precision strike capabilities represent a significant and highly controversial part of present day military operations. And yet, there is a surprising dearth of empirical research on military decision making in this domain. In this article, we therefore review different psychological perspectives on how these decisions can be made. Specifically, we compare the application of normative models of judgment and choice against the empirical research on human decision making, which suggests that people are more likely to employ heuristic strategies. We suggest that several features of decision tasks in the precision strike domain evoke the use of intuitive (heuristic) decision making whereas other features such as the sometimes unfamiliar (or novel) nature of the decision task requires analytic strategies to generate good solutions. Therefore, decisions about precision strike capabilities are best made with a mixture of intuitive and analytic thought, a mode of thinking known as quasirationality.     

Causal Attribution: Analysis of Patterns and Influencing Factors Among Learners at a Higher Education Institution

The study explored the academic patterns and implications of academic attributions made by students who had been given test feedback at a higher learning institution in Zimbabwe. A random sample of 8 (female = 4; male= 4; mean age = 21.9, passed a test = 4; failed the test = 4) participants was purposefully selected from a class of second year students majoring in psychology and human resources management. Audio-taped semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect data. Thematic content analysis was used to analyse data. Results indicate that culture and gender moderate academic causal attributions.     

人格判断的准确性:特质特性的作用

特质特性是影响人格判断准确性的重要调节变量。已有的研究表明,可观察性高的特质容易判断,判断的准确性和一致性也更高;特质的可评估性干扰了自我知觉的准确性,与中性特质相比,可评估性特质的自我—他人一致性更低;与清晰特质相比,模糊特质的自我—同伴判断间的一致性更低,且随特质模糊性的增加而递减。不仅如此,特质特性经常与其他因素如熟悉度交互作用于人格判断的准确性,在考查特质特性的作用时,必须提高研究的生态效度,将该变量与特性匹配、特质分类、个体差异及文化差异等因素综合起来考虑。     

跨文化判断与决策(英文)

本文对判断和决策研究领域所发现的跨文化差异进行了回顾。鉴于大多数判断和决策的跨文化研究都集中于对亚洲和西方文化的比较,本文也主要关注这方面的研究发现。具体来说,本文回顾了在概率判断及信心、风险知觉、冒险行为、消费者行为以及经济判断和决策中所存在的跨文化差异。综述结果表明尽管亚洲人和西方人的判断和决策行为存在很大的跨文化差异,研究也发现了显著的文化内差异。目前关于判断和决策的跨文化差异的研究还相对匮乏,未来还需要更多的研究来进一步了解判断和决策行为的跨文化差别及机制。     

The association of relational and physical victimization with hostile attribution bias,emotional distress,and depressive symptoms: A cross‐cultural study

The purpose of the present study was to examine the association between relational victimization and socio‐cognitive patterns (i.e. hostile attribution biases and emotional distress) or social–psychological adjustment problems (i.e. depressive symptoms) in Japanese and European American children (N = 272; ages 9–10). Results showed that relational victimization, which was conceptually different from physical victimization, was associated with a greater level of emotional distress for an overall sample; however, the links between relational victimization and hostile attribution biases and depressive symptoms were evidenced only for Japanese children. A follow‐up analysis revealed that hostile attribution biases had a direct effect on depressive symptoms for European American children; however, these biases mediated the link between relational victimization and depressive symptoms for Japanese children. These findings are discussed from normative and cross‐cultural perspectives.     

Ambivalence over emotional expression and symptom attribution are associated with self‐reported somatic symptoms in Singaporean school adolescents

Although somatization is common across cultures, its meanings may differ as culture shapes emotional experience. Thus, instead of treating somatization as a form of psychopathology, it is more useful to conceptualize it as an idiom of distress, and how complaints of somatic symptoms are related to social relationships, patterns of emotional expression and symptom attribution in a cultural context. This study seeks to explore whether ambivalence over emotional expression and causal attribution would shed light on the meanings of somatization among Asian adolescents. Three hundred secondary school adolescents in Singapore participated in this study. The main results show that emotional ambivalence, biomedical and Traditional Chinese Medicinal causal beliefs, and magical attribution contributed to additional variance in somatic symptoms over and above the variance explained by emotional distress. These findings are discussed from both psychological and cultural perspectives.