The anchoring bias reflects rational use of cognitive resources

Cognitive biases, such as the anchoring bias, pose a serious challenge to rational accounts of human cognition. We investigate whether rational theories can meet this challenge by taking into account the mind’s bounded cognitive resources. We asked what reasoning under uncertainty would look like if people made rational use of their finite time and limited cognitive resources. To answer this question, we applied a mathematical theory of bounded rationality to the problem of numerical estimation. Our analysis led to a rational process model that can be interpreted in terms of anchoring-and-adjustment. This model provided a unifying explanation for ten anchoring phenomena including the differential effect of accuracy motivation on the bias towards provided versus self-generated anchors. Our results illustrate the potential of resource-rational analysis to provide formal theories that can unify a wide range of empirical results and reconcile the impressive capacities of the human mind with its apparently irrational cognitive biases.     

Questioning Pygmalion in the twenty-first century: the formation,transmission, and attributional influence of teacher expectancies

Teacher expectancy effects, the class of phenomena in which teacher beliefs about students influence student outcomes, are widely believed to operate through recursive processes of teacher-student interaction. Recent work in “wise” interventions has shown profound and robust effects in educational domains, and has attributed these effects to similar recursive processes (Yeager and Walton 2011). In this paper, we lay a foundation for forging connections between what we know about expectancy effects and how we might envision applying that knowledge as a lever in intervention research. We review the evidence for the existence and significance of teacher expectancy effects, as well as their possible mediators, including perceptual biases, confirmation biases, stereotyping, and attributional biases. We also hypothesize that empathy could play a role in mediating a relationship between expectancies and attributions. Finally, we propose a research agenda focused on the transmission, mediation, and attributional effects of teacher expectancies.     

Cueing listeners to attend to a target talker progressively improves word report as the duration of the cue-target interval lengthens to 2,000 ms

Endogenous attention is typically studied by presenting instructive cues in advance of a target stimulus array. For endogenous visual attention, task performance improves as the duration of the cue-target interval increases up to 800 ms. Less is known about how endogenous auditory attention unfolds over time or the mechanisms by which an instructive cue presented in advance of an auditory array improves performance. The current experiment used five cue-target intervals (0, 250, 500, 1,000, and 2,000 ms) to compare four hypotheses for how preparatory attention develops over time in a multi-talker listening task. Young adults were cued to attend to a target talker who spoke in a mixture of three talkers. Visual cues indicated the target talker’s spatial location or their gender. Participants directed attention to location and gender simultaneously (“objects”) at all cue-target intervals. Participants were consistently faster and more accurate at reporting words spoken by the target talker when the cue-target interval was 2,000 ms than 0 ms. In addition, the latency of correct responses progressively shortened as the duration of the cue-target interval increased from 0 to 2,000 ms. These findings suggest that the mechanisms involved in preparatory auditory attention develop gradually over time, taking at least 2,000 ms to reach optimal configuration, yet providing cumulative improvements in speech intelligibility as the duration of the cue-target interval increases from 0 to 2,000 ms. These results demonstrate an improvement in performance for cue-target intervals longer than those that have been reported previously in the visual or auditory modalities.     

An ecological study of professors' memory for student names and faces: A replication and extension

Abstract

This experiment measured university professors' memory for the names and faces of current and former students over a two-semester span. If courses function as contextual retrieval cues for professors to remember their students, the passing of each semester should diminish the distinctiveness of these cues. Based on the Bruce and Young (1986) model of face recognition, we hypothesised that as contextual cues become less distinctive, performance should suffer more on name recall tests than on name or face recognition tests. We found that name free recall and portrait-cued name recall declined very sharply after one semester (6 months), and face recognition declined after two semesters (12 months), whereas name recognition remained perfect These results provide a general replication and extension of Bahrick (1984), and show that difficulties in recalling names cannot be due to any weakening of name representations in memory. We suggest that name recall may be dependent on contextual cues that become less distinctive with succeeding semesters.     

Corporations,Rights, and Lobbying

While there may be several practical concerns regarding the practice of corporate lobbying of government officials, there is the more basic question of a corporation’s moral right to do so. I argue that group agents such as corporations have no moral rights, and thereby cannot have the right to lobby. There may be a basis for some legal rights for corporations, but I argue that lobbying cannot be one of the legal rights, even by reference to the rights of the individuals that make up the corporation. I end the paper by a discussion of how this argument applies to all private organizations, including public interest organizations.     

Problems With John Earman's Attempt To Reconcile Theism With General Relativity

Discussions of the intersection of general relativity and thephilosophy of religion rarely take place on the technical levelthat involves the details of the mathematical physics of generalrelativity. John Earman's discussion of theism and generalrelativity in his recent book on spacetime singularities is anexception to this tendency. By virtue of his technical expertise,Earman is able to introduce novel arguments into the debatebetween theists and atheists. In this paper, I state and examineEarman's arguments that it is rationally acceptable to believethat theism and general relativity form a mutually consistent oreven mutually supportive pair. I conclude that each of hisarguments is unsound.     

Cognitive Bias Modification for Behavior Change in Alcohol and Smoking Addiction: Bayesian Meta-Analysis of Individual Participant Data

Neuropsychology Review - Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM) refers to a family of interventions targeting substance-related cognitive biases, which have been found to play a role in the maintenance...     

Decision-making in rectal and colorectal cancer: systematic review and qualitative analysis of surgeons’ preferences

Surgeons are experiencing difficulties implementing recommendations not only owing to incomplete, confusing or conflicting information but also to the increasing involvement of patients in decisions relating to their health. This study sought to establish which common factors including heuristic factors guide surgeons’ decision-making in colon and rectal cancers. We conducted a systematic literature review of surgeons’ decision-making factors related to colon and rectal cancer treatment. Eleven of 349 identified publications were eligible for data analyses. Using the IRaMuTeQ (Interface of R for the Multidimensional Analyses of Texts and Questionnaire), we carried out a qualitative analysis of the significant factors collected in the studies reviewed. Several validation procedures were applied to control the robustness of the findings. Five categories of factors (i.e. patient, surgeon, treatment, tumor and organizational cues) were found to influence surgeons’ decision-making. Specifically, all decision criteria including biomedical (e.g. tumor information) and heuristic (e.g. surgeons’ dispositional factors) criteria converged towards the factor ‘age of patient’ in the similarity analysis. In the light of the results, we propose an explanatory model showing the impact of heuristic criteria on medical issues (i.e. diagnosis, prognosis, treatment features, etc.) and thus on decision-making. Finally, the psychosocial complexity involved in decision-making is discussed and a medico-psycho-social grid for use in multidisciplinary meetings is proposed.