An availability bias in professional judgment

When branches of a fault tree are pruned, subjects do not fully transfer the probability of those branches to the ‘all other’ category. This underestimation of the catch-all probability has been interpreted as an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ form of the availability bias. The present work replicates this underestimation bias with professional managers. It then demonstrates the effectiveness of a corrective tactic, extending the tree by generating additional causes, and also reveals that more easily retrieved short-term causes dominate the generation process. These results do not differ across managers' culture, education or experience. After evaluating such alternative explanations as category redefinition, we conclude that availability is a major cause, though possibly not the sole cause, of the underestimation bias.     

Task bias and the accuracy of judgment: Setting a baseline for expected group performance

When a judgment task evokes unbiased estimates (i.e. the errors in individual judgments are distributed randomly around the true value), mathematical aggregation of individual estimates, even by a simple arithmetic mean, often will outperform all group members. However, when a task evokes biased estimates, mathematical aggregation does not perform so well. In this study, simulated data were accumulated to specify the expected' accuracy of mathematical aggregation relative to the accuracy of observed judgment of individual group members under varying conditions of task bias. Three types of judgment tasks were employed: (1) single-estimate, holistic tasks, (2) multiple-estimate, ranking tasks, and (3) multi-cue, decomposed tasks. Findings indicated across all task types that a large percentage of judgment-making group estimates formed strictly by computing the arithmetic mean of individual estimates performed better than their most capable members when a judgment task evoked little or no bias, a result particularly pronounced for ranking tasks. When the task was more greatly bias-evoking, a large percentage of parallel groups performed more poorly than average (or median) members, again a pattern more starkly evident for ranking tasks. These results suggest that the extent to which a judgment task evokes bias in a population of prospective group members is an important explanatory variable deserving much greater attention in the study of group performance. For example, an assertion about the efficacy of a particular group intervention based on a reliable demonstration of group performance as accurate as the most capable members may be unfounded when a task evokes no bias, since the baseline standard under such conditions should be much higher. By selecting tasks and populations that jointly produced highly biased estimates, researchers can lower the performance floor enough to detect (with reasonably small samples of groups) experimental effects should they occur.     

An evaluation of differential prediction of WIAT achievement scores from WISC-III FSIQ across ethnic and gender groups

This study examines differential prediction of WIAT achievement scores based on WISC-III FSIQ in white as compared with African American and Hispanic children, and in females as compared with males. A procedure which allows simultaneous comparisons of slopes and intercepts across groups is employed. The results are consistent with previous research findings in supporting the general absence of bias in predicting achievement from IQ.     

What is agentic about the Spatial Agency Bias? How pragmatic relevance contributes to the spatial representations of actions

The mental imagination of (social) actions has been shown to follow a left‐to‐right trajectory, with the thematic agent associated with the left position (Spatial Agency Bias, Suitner & Maass in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 53, 2016, p. 245–301). For example, individuals asked to choose a picture that visualizes the sentence “Tom kicks George” tend to choose an image where the agent, Tom, is positioned on the left‐hand side rather than on the right‐hand side. However, as an alternative to the thematic role of the agent, such findings may reflect a mental representation following pragmatic relevance. Specifically, a pragmatic perspective holds that word order and syntactic functions are strategic devices to communicate that the element is important for the sentence. Thus, positioning in the described picture‐matching task may actually reflect the agent's pragmatic relevance instead of agency per se. As a test, we vary whether sentences are written in the active versus the passive voice. Results from five studies indicate that the passive voice results in the tendency to place the agent on the right‐hand side rather than on the left‐hand side of a picture. Instead, the acted‐upon person is positioned on the left‐hand side of a picture. A sixth experiment reveals that for the passive voice, the agent is still seen as more agentic than the receiver, but is considered less relevant. The findings are congruent with the proposed pragmatic relevance account. Implications for the Spatial Agency Bias as well as for building mental representations in general are discussed.     

Enduring consequences of experimentally induced biases in interpretation

Previous research has demonstrated that it is possible to induce biases in the interpretation of ambiguous text passages by training. Participants consistently trained to interpret emotionally ambiguous passages in either a negative or positive direction show training-congruent effects when presented with new ambiguous material. These training effects are demonstrated by participants' subsequent recognition ratings for disambiguating sentences, which represent both possible meanings of the novel ambiguous test passages. In this series of experiments, we investigated the durability of these training effects over time spans of up to 1 day and found them to be robust. The findings encourage us to believe that induced biases may serve as a useful analogue to those observed clinically.     

The Physical Appearance Ambiguous Feedback Scale (PAAFS): a measure for indexing body image related cognitive bias

Recent conceptualizations of body image disturbance have included an information processing model that includes a focus on an interpretive information processing bias. Study 1 involved the development and validation of a measure of appearance-based cognitive bias, the Physical Appearance Ambiguous Feedback Scale (PAAFS). In Studies 2 and 3, two samples of college females (n=313) were tested and the psychometric characteristics of the PAAFS were evaluated. Reliability was acceptable and convergence with measures of body image and eating disturbance was moderate. In Study 4, 313 college females completed the PAAFS in the laboratory based on an instructional content designed to induce processing bias. Preliminary evidence indicates that the PAAFS appears to be sensitive to instructional set manipulations and dispositional level of body dissatisfaction.     

Defying conventional wisdom: A meta-analytical examination of the differences between demographic and job-related diversity relationships with performance

Conventional wisdom in the diversity literature holds that job-related dimensions of diversity are the domain of positive performance, whereas demographic dimensions of diversity are the domain of negative performance effects. In a meta-analysis (N = 146 studies, 612 effect sizes), we show that this conclusion may be based on rater biases; it does not apply to studies involving more objective assessments of performance, assessments that cannot be influenced by knowledge of a team’s composition. We also show that the influence of job-related diversity is moderated by task complexity and that job-related diversity is more positively related to innovative performance than to in-role performance. We discuss how these results invite a reconsideration of the role of the job-related/demographic diversity distinction and provide suggestions on how to further advance our understanding of diversity’s effects.     

Problems with single interest scales: Implications of the general factor

The presence of the general factor in interest and self-efficacy assessment and its meaning are reviewed. The general factor is found in all interest and self-efficacy assessment and has been viewed as (a) a nuisance factor with little effect on assessment, (b) a variable having substantive meaning and thus worthy of including in interpretation, and (c) as systematic bias that distorts the interpretation of the meaning of assessments. The premise of this article is that each interpretation is correct but only depending upon the context of the assessment. The main implication is that narrow single content interest scales are very subject to contaminating effects of the general factor making interpretation very difficult. Methods of correcting this contamination are presented.     

Liberal bias mediates emotion recognition deficits in frontal traumatic brain injury

It is well-known that patients having sustained frontal-lobe traumatic brain injury (TBI) are severely impaired on tests of emotion recognition. Indeed, these patients have significant difficulty recognizing facial expressions of emotion, and such deficits are often associated with decreased social functioning and poor quality of life. As of yet, no studies have examined the response patterns which underlie facial emotion recognition impairment in TBI and which may lend clarity to the interpretation of deficits. Therefore, the present study aimed to characterize response patterns in facial emotion recognition in 14 patients with frontal TBI compared to 22 matched control subjects, using a task which required participants to rate the intensity of each emotion (happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise and fear) of a series of photographs of emotional and neutral faces. Results first confirmed the presence of facial emotion recognition impairment in TBI, and further revealed that patients displayed a liberal bias when rating facial expressions, leading them to associate intense ratings of incorrect emotional labels to sad, disgusted, surprised and fearful facial expressions. These findings are generally in line with prior studies which also report important facial affect recognition deficits in TBI patients, particularly for negative emotions.     

The Effects of Prior Learned Strategies on Updating an Opponent's Strategy in the Rock,Paper, Scissors Game

To explore how model building adapts to changing environments, we had participants play “rock‐paper‐scissors” against a computer that played a frequency bias or a player‐dependent bias and then switched. Participants demonstrated their use of prior experience in how quickly they recognized and exploited changes in the computer's play strategy; in general, the more similar the strategies, the more efficient the updating. These findings inform our understanding of previously reported updating impairments in right‐brain damaged patients.