Two theories of group agency

Philosophical Studies - Two theories dominate the current debate on group agency: functionalism, as endorsed by Bryce Huebner and Brian Epstein, and interpretivism, as defended by Deborah...     

Similarity bias in credit decisions for entrepreneurs on the brink of bankruptcy

For entrepreneurs in financial distress, it is of vital importance that investors and bankers accurately assess the viability of their business, free of unwanted biases that bear no relevance to the assessment of the chance of survival. Despite the prevalence of entrepreneurs facing financial distress, little research has yet investigated the role of cognitive biases in funding decisions in this important context. The current research attends to this issue and investigated whether entrepreneurs who are perceived by a banker as more similar are more likely to receive capital to save their business from bankruptcy than entrepreneurs who are perceived as less similar to the banker. Additionally, we investigated whether similarity bias affected bankers' attributions of what caused the financial distress as well as their perceptions of entrepreneurs' trustworthiness. Using an experimental research design, we found a similarity bias in bankers' causal attributions and trustworthiness judgments, but not in their credit decisions. We contrast our findings with similarity bias research among equity investors and discuss the implications for theory and practice.     

Are There Cross-Cultural Legal Principles? Modal Reasoning Uncovers Procedural Constraints on Law

Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have argued that laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In the present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in 11 different countries. Are there cross-cultural principles of law? In a between-subjects design, participants (N = 3,054) were asked whether there could be laws that violate certain procedural principles (e.g., laws applied retrospectively or unintelligible laws), and also whether there are any such laws. Confirming our preregistered prediction, people reported that such laws cannot exist, but also (paradoxically) that there are such laws. These results document cross-culturally and –linguistically robust beliefs about the concept of law which defy people's grasp of how legal systems function in practice.     

Hindsight bias and outcome bias in judging directors’ liability and the role of free will beliefs

Following a corporate disaster such as bankruptcy, people in general and damaged parties, in particular, want to know what happened and whether the company's directors are to blame. The accurate assessment of directors’ liability can be jeopardized by having to judge in hindsight with full knowledge of the adverse outcome. The present study investigates whether professional legal investigators such as judges and lawyers are affected by hindsight bias and outcome bias when evaluating directors’ conduct in a bankruptcy case. Additionally, to advance our understanding of the mechanisms underlying these biases, we also examine whether free will beliefs can predict susceptibility to hindsight bias and outcome bias in this context. In two studies (total N = 1,729), we demonstrate that legal professionals tend to judge a director's actions more negatively and perceive bankruptcy as more foreseeable in hindsight than in foresight and that these effects are significantly stronger for those who endorse the notion that humans have free will. This contribution is particularly timely considering the many companies that are currently going bankrupt or are facing bankruptcy amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.     

Bypassing the gatekeeper: incidental negative cues stimulate choices with negative outcomes

The Theory of Event Coding (TEC) predicts that exposure to affective cues can automatically trigger affectively congruent behaviour due to shared representational codes. An intriguing hypothesis from this theory is that exposure to aversive cues can automatically trigger actions that have previously been learned to result in aversive outcomes. Previous work has indeed found such a compatibility effect on reaction times in forced-choice tasks, but not for action selection in free-choice tasks. Failure to observe this compatibility effect for aversive cues in free choice tasks suggests that control processes aimed at directing behaviour toward positive outcomes may overrule the automatic activation of affectively congruent responses in case of aversive cues. The present study tested whether minimising such control could cause selection of actions that have been learned to result in aversive outcomes. Results showed incidental exposure to aversive cues biased selection of behaviours with learned aversive outcomes over behaviours with positive outcomes, despite a preference to execute the positive- over the negative-outcome actions evidenced by a separate behaviour measurement and self-reports. These results suggest motivational processes to select actions with positive consequences may sometimes be bypassed.

Data and Materials: http://doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/ym7qu