Perceived informativeness of verbal information

When people are asked to rate verbal material (texts, statements, and statements forming part of a text) according to informativeness, their judgments will to a large extent depend upon how much they already know about the subject, and how novel the communication is to them. This will in some cases make them stress novelty and in other cases familiarity as the most important determinants for expected or perceived informativeness. It is argued that these apparently contradictory trends are reconcilable by a propositional (subject-predicate) model of information, which presupposes an identifiablesubject of the communication (“what it is all about”), as well as something to be predicated about this subject, topic, or theme. This kind of information structure allows the communication to contain both novel and familiar elements at the same time, with informativeness being at a peak when something quite new and unexpected is told about a familiar subject, or when a new subject is made familiar (i.e., satisfactorily explained) to the person. This article was written when the author was on sabbatical leave at the University of Leicester. The study was supported by a grant from the Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities.     

Are lies more wrong than errors? Accuracy judgments of inaccurate statements

People are often mistaken when estimating and predicting quantities, and sometimes they report values that they know are false: they lie. There exists, however, little research devoted to how such deviations are being perceived. In four vignette studies, participants were asked to rate the accuracy of inaccurate statements about quantities (prices, numbers and amounts). The results indicate that overstatements are generally judged to be more inaccurate than understatements of the same magnitude; self-favorable (optimistic) statements are considered more inaccurate than unfavorable (pessimistic) statements, and false reports (lies) are perceived to be more inaccurate than equally mistaken estimates. Lies about the future did not differ from lies about the past, but own lies were perceived as larger than the same lies attributed to another person. It is suggested that estimates are judged according to how close they come to the true values (close estimates are more correct than estimates that are less close), whereas lies are judged as deviant from truth, with less importance attached to the magnitude of the deviation.     

The Probability of Guilt in Criminal Cases: Are People Aware of Being ‘Beyond Reasonable Doubt’?

Data from a series of studies presenting video recorded witness statements to laypersons and legal professionals were examined to trace the relationship between judged probability of guilt and the willingness to vote guilty or not guilty in hypothetical trials, in the absence of specific jury instructions. The results show that a majority of jury‐eligible young and elderly participants, and police officers, were willing to convict a defendant when the judged probability of guilt exceeded .6. This is considerably below the legally accepted standard of ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, which usually is equated with a very high, around .9 perceived certainty. When jury deliberations were allowed, the threshold for conviction rose, approaching the standard evinced by trial judges under the same conditions. The results suggest that people prefer to vote for guilt according to a balance of probabilities principle, considering only the individual case, and disregarding the implied frequencies of false convictions. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Revisions and Regret: The Cost of Changing your Mind

Decision reversals often imply improved decisions. Yet, people show a strong resistance against changing their minds. These are well‐established findings, which suggest that changed decisions carry a subjective cost, perhaps by being more strongly regretted. Three studies were conducted to explore participants' regret when making reversible decisions and to test the hypothesis that changing one's mind will increase post‐outcome regret. The first two studies employed the Ultimatum game and the Trust game. The third study used a variant of the Monty Hall problem. All games were conducted by individual participants playing interactively against a computer. The outcomes were designed to capture a common characteristic of real‐life decisions: they varied from rather negative to fairly positive, and for every outcome, it was possible to imagine both more and less profitable outcomes. In all experiments, those who changed their minds reported much stronger post‐outcome regret than those who did not change, even if the final outcomes were equally good (Experiments 2 and 3) or better (Experiment 1).This finding was not because of individual differences with respect to gender, tendency to regret, or tendency to maximize. Previous studies have found that those who change from a correct to wrong option regret more than those who select a wrong option directly. This study indicates that this finding is a special case of a more general phenomenon: changing one's mind seems to come with a cost, even when one ends up with favorable outcomes. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Can > Will: Predictions of What Can Happen are Extreme,but Believed to be Probable

Predictions of uncertain events are often described in terms of what can or what will happen. How are such statements used by speakers, and what are they perceived to mean? Participants in four experiments were presented with distributions of variable product characteristics and were asked to generate natural, meaningful sentences containing either will or can. Will was typically associated with either low or intermediate numeric values, whereas can consistently suggested high (maximum) values. For instance, laptop batteries lasting from 1.5 to 3.5 hours will last for 1.5 hours or for 2.5 hours, but they can last for 3.5 hours. The same response patterns were found for positive and negative events. In will‐statements, the most frequent scalar modifiers were at least and about, whereas in can‐statements, the most frequent modifier included up to. A fifth experiment showed that will indicates an outcome that may be certain but more often simply probable. Can means possible, but even can‐statements are perceived to imply probable outcomes. This could create a communication paradox because most speakers use can to describe outcomes that because of their extremity are at the same time quite unlikely. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reducing delusional speech in chronic, paranoid schizophrenics

Four schizophrenic patients with paranoid and grandiose delusions who had been hospitalized for an average of 17 yr were exposed to social reinforcement contingencies in a multiple baseline design. During the baseline period, each patient was interviewed for four 10-min sessions each day. The elapsed time from onset of conversation to onset of delusional talk was recorded. At the end of each day, the patients engaged in a 30-min informal chat with a nurse-therapist while relaxing with coffee, snacks, and cigarettes. The intervention introduced two contingencies: (1) The 10-min interviews were terminated as soon as the patient began talking delusionally; (2) The patients earned time for their evening chat by talking rationally during their daytime interviews. Increases of from 200 to 600% in the amount of rational talk exhibited during the interviews occurred as the contingencies were introduced for each patient sequentially over time. These increases were maintained in three patients when the amount of reinforcement was halved, but declined when the patients were confronted directly with their delusional ideas. A modest amount of generalization occurred from the day-time interviews to the evening chats but did not extend to the behavior of the patients on the ward.     

When the past becomes history: effects of temporal order on explanations of trends

When people are asked to ‘explain’ a time series consisting of population statistics, they will suggest factors responsible for later events rather than for earlier events. This is shown in Experiment 1 for pairs of events and in Experiment 2 for triads of events with one deviant member. When the deviant statistic is the most recent one, it will in most cases be singled out for explanation. When it comes first, it is rarely explained, but accepted as a given fact. This is seen as an instance of the temporal order effect, where the first event in a pair or a series is taken for granted, whereas later events are considered more ‘mutable’, i.e. they could have been different. In line with this, later statistics are considered to be more in need of support from additional information than earlier statistics (Experiment 3). The focus on temporally later events can be distinguished from other primacy and recency effects by being due to chronological order, rather than order of presentation. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

To read two pages,I need 5 minutes,but give me 5 minutes and I will read four: how to change productivity estimates by inverting the question

Past research has shown that people underestimate the time they need to complete large tasks, whereas completion times for smaller tasks are often overestimated, suggesting higher productivity estimates for larger than for smaller tasks. By replacing the traditional question about how much time a given work will take with a question about how much work can be completed within a given amount of time, we also found the opposite pattern. Both trends could reflect a general tendency to underestimate large amounts (of work as well as time) relatively to small ones. This ‘magnitude bias’ was explored in two studies where students estimated reading tasks, a third where IT‐professionals estimated software projects, and a fourth where participants imagined a familiar walk, divided into time segments or part distances of varying lengths. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.