Michael Bernstein, Psychological & Social Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, USA, will give an online presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 5 May, 17:00-18:00).

Negative reactions to single-group protesters—the role of perceived exclusion

Single-group protesters are groups which advocate for social justice on behalf of a minoritized or stigmatized group (e.g., feminists, Black Lives Matter). These groups are often met with resistance by outsiders, and we hypothesized that some of why this may happen may be due to a perception that these groups are exclusionary. Across multiple studies, we show the effect (that perceptions of exclusion among outsiders drive negative attitudes and behaviors towards such groups), demonstrate the effect remains after controlling for other predictors (e.g., prejudice), and show moderators of the effect supporting the underlying mechanism. We discuss the implications for continuing to understand intergroup relations.

Supporting literature: Bernstein, M. J., Neubauer, A. B., Benfield, J. A., Potter, L., & Smyth, J. M. (2021). Within-person effects of inclusion and exclusion on well-being in daily life. Personal Relationships, 28, 940–960.

Interested in a short introduction to “risk”? Check out this video by the Society for Risk Analysis.

I’ve spent quite some time this week cancelling events, including this week’s SWE colloquium, an event about the use of social media for professional purposes “Let social media find your future job”, this year’s edition of the Bernoulli workshop, as well as a number of in-person lectures and seminars. This sucks! But it’s the right thing to do.

The corona epidemic is on the rise, with doubling of confirmed cases every few days (4!) in Switzerland and many other European countries, including, Italy, France, Germany, and Portugal (hi, Mom!).

According to Richard Neher, virologist professor at Uni Basel, in the worst-case-scenario, the Swiss medical system can become overburden quickly (end of April). This would have implications not only for corona patients but the whole health system and, therefore, society as a whole – we don’t want to be in the yellowish scenario depicted below…

So, what can a single individual do? Here’s my current top 3…

1. Stay safe: There are a number of behaviors we should be adopting (maintaining hygiene, social distancing) – cancelling stuff is just the price we pay for being on the safe side.
2. Stay informed: Our World in Data provides a comprehensive list of data resources concerning the corona epidemic that is worth checking out. And while this may not do much per se, seeing some numbers and graphs can give one (me!) a sense of control that is helpful in the face of great uncertainty.
3. Stay positive: It’s important to find a balance between being paralysed by the fear of a worst-case-scenario and dismissive about the whole thing. The right attitude is a mix of optimism and reasonable concern. Just hope for the best while preparing for the worst!

One of the University of Basel Unirat members has recently noted (in a visit to our Faculty) that it may be important to give future students a good idea of the diverse applications of psychology because psychotherapy may still be the modal category in mind when considering studying psychology (it actually represents only a portion of what psychologists actually do these days – see this old post).

The German Psychological Association seems to have a similar idea in mind and developed a few videos to give future psychology students an idea about the different areas of psychology (such the video above) that could be quite useful in this regard – you can find more of these here.

As writing is an important skill in a researcher’s life, in June, we PhD students (Regina, Matt and Peter) organized for the first time a short writing workshop for PhD students of the SWE. We went to a monastery in the infamous pilgrimage site of Trois Epis in Alsace, France.

For three days, we worked on our respective manuscripts or posters, discussed research and gave feedbacks to each other’s progress. The personnel’s care and reverent calmness of the place supported the productive atmosphere during the time.

Due to the quiet and peaceful environment, I could concentrate more thoroughly on my current manuscript and wrote the whole method and result section for this paper. Additionally, I focused on the introduction part of another paper where I also made a huge progress. In the late and early hours of the days in Trois Epis I read a couple of important. – Matt

During the writing week, I started to give a form to the paper from my first PhD project. First, I prepared the outline and then I continued on writing the introduction, methods and results sections. Moreover, I conceptualized and finished a poster for a summer school. – Regina

I used the time to design a conference poster about one of my current projects. After I finished that, I used the remaining time for writing up a methods section for a future manuscript. All in all, it was a very productive time with no external distractions. I am really grateful for this opportunity. – Peter

Before the writing week started, we attended a “guided writing mini-workshop” in which a writing coach of the University of Basel gave useful recommendations about the style of our manuscripts.

In sum, all of us appreciated the progress we’ve made under these special working conditions and we therefore hope to establish the writing week as an annual event of the SWE doctoral program.

If a patient is no longer able to express his or her treatment preferences (e.g., due to an accident or due to dementia), a surrogate may need to make medical decisions on behalf of this person. Such “surrogate decisions” are among the most difficult decisions under uncertainty that we have to make in our lives. So how to best make surrogate decisions?

In our previous research (Frey, Hertwig, & Herzog, 2014) we found that different approaches to surrogate decision making (e.g., a patient-designated surrogate; all family members rendering a joint decision; etc.) do not differ substantially in terms of their “predictive accuracy”. Therefore, in our most recent paper published in the BMJ Open (Frey, Herzog, & Hertwig, 2018) we investigated people’s “procedural preferences”. That is, how strongly do people endorse different approaches to surrogate decision making?

The figure above shows the results from two representative population surveys that we conducted in Germany and Switzerland. People reported their procedural preferences for six different approaches to surrogate decision making, either from the perspective of an incapacitated patient or from the perspective of a potential surrogate for an incapacitated family member. Fortunately, the procedural preferences of potential “patients” and “surrogates” were mostly aligned. Yet, endorsements for the different approaches varied markedly (see figure). These findings may have direct implications for clinicians and policy makers, as current legislations only provide for individualistic approaches. You can learn more about this topic on my website and / or by downloading our paper including the full set of results.

Frey, R., Herzog, S. M., & Hertwig, R. (2018). Deciding on behalf of others: A population survey on procedural preferences for surrogate decision-making. BMJ Open, 8, e022289. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2018-022289 | PDF

This post has been reposted from http://renatofrey.net/blog.

The summer is the so-called “silly season” – the time when media (and the public?) descend into the mental equivalent of a slumber.

It is therefore not so surprising that the talk of the town where I’m vacationing – Portugal – is less concerned with the fallout of Brexit and the shifting balance of powers and alliances between the USA, Europe, and China or Russia, and much more about whether Madonna’s moving to Portugal and her social media presence has important benefits for Portuguese tourism. 

For those of you less familiar with Madonna’s life, she moved to Lisbon, Portugal, in May 2017 (since a much heralded boon for Portuguese tourism) and was able to extract some (but less popular) benefits from Lisbon’s local government, including a welcoming reception by Lisbon’s Mayor and deal for a number of parking spots in the old town for her fleet of 15 automobiles. 

One popular Portuguese satirical commentary show, Governo Sombra (Shadow Government), has called for scientific studies showing the economic benefits of Madonna’s move to Portugal. 

I have taken up this challenge by analysing the official statistics on the number of overnight stays that are made available by the Instituto Nacional de Estatística (INE; Statistics Portugal). Specifically, I used the time series data between January 2006 and April 2017 to forecast the results for the post-Madonna period of May 2017 to April 2018 (unfortunately INE doesn’t yet provide more recent data). My rationale for this analysis is that an increase of overnight stays after Madonna’s arrival that goes beyond the forecast based on the pre-Madonna period would represent supporting evidence for Madonna’s positive effect on Portuguese tourism. Alas, I am able to report that the data do not reveal a Madonna effect. As one can see in the figure below the actual number of overnight stays falls well within the predicted confidence intervals from the simple forecast model. 

Of course, there are a number of problems with this type of analysis as has been pointed out by Campbell and Ross (1968). Perhaps a good summer reading as a break from the silliness of the season. 

Campbell, D. T., Ross, H. L. (1968). The Connecticut crackdown on speeding: Time-series data in quasi-experimental analysis. Law and Society Review, 3(1), 33. http://doi.org/10.2307/3052794

Today, I’m joining the Digital Nudges event organised by DayOne to help integrate perspectives from science and industry and harness the promise of the behavioural sciences to improve healthcare. Here’s the pitch:

“Let’s stop randomly throwing technology at any healthcare related problem! Instead, let’s pause and understand Human Behaviour and how it can be influenced before we apply technology. Behavioural Economics can help us to design solutions that will successfully nudge patients towards healthier behaviours. Join us to understand the What, Why and How of Behavioural Economics in Healthcare Innovation and Digital Health”

Date and Time: April 11, 18:30 to 22:00
Place: Halle 7, Gundeldingerfeld, Dornacherstrasse 192, 4053 Basel

My students phub me during class a lot. It’s annoying to me and, likely, counterproductive for them: Ravizza et al. (2016) tracked non-academic use of the internet in university classrooms and found that (taraaa!) “nonacademic Internet use was common among students who brought laptops to class and was inversely related to class performance” (r = -.25, between time online and exam performance) even controlling for a number of things like intelligence and motivation/interest. So what can we do about it?

I’ve let my students know about the movement to stop phubbing (it hurts!) and Ravizza et al.’s findings – hoping they will make the right choice on their own. A new app, Hold, takes a different, less subtle approach: Pay students NOT to look at their cell phones – students get points for time on campus without using their phone (points that can be used to get movie tickets, discounts, etc.). I’m very curious to see reports of long term effects of such approaches based solely on extrinsic motivation… If we do this at university, does this imply that employers will need to start giving out boni to workers for not using their smartphones on the job?

See here for a newspaper article about the new app in the NZZ (in German).

Das Team, vorallem C. Laudenbach, um Prof. Dr. Hackethal (Uni Frankfurt) organisierte mit Unterstützung des LOEWE Center Sustainable Architecture for Finance in Europe (SAFE) den Workshop zum Thema Finanzen der privat Anleger. 20 Doktoranden und Post-Doctoral Researchers diskutierten zusammen über ihre aktuelle Forschung und loteten weitere Ideen aus. Die meisten Projekte waren empirische Arbeiten mit beeindruckend detailreichen Datensätzen von individuellen Haushalten und ihren Finanztransaktionen.

Gern würde ich über mehrere spannende Projekte schreiben, leider sind viele noch nicht aufgeschrieben. Ein interessantes Projekt in Working Paper Format ist von A. Hoffmann, I. Zwetelina und L. Jaroszek mit dem Titel «Wall Street Crosses Memory Lane: How Witnessed Returns Affect Professionals’ Expected Returns». Sie untersuchen den Effekt von erfahrenen Returns der Aktienmärkte auf die Erwartungen für zukünftige Entwicklung bei Professionellen Wirtschaftsprognostikern. Neben dem schon bekannten «recency» Effekt finden sie eine Art «anchor» Effekt für den Karrierebeginn der Prognostiker.

Who wouldn’t want to write more and better papers in a more efficient fashion? Here are ten simple rules that could help!

Mensh, B., & Kording, K. (2017). Ten simple rules for structuring papers. PLoS Computational Biology, 13(9): e1005619. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005619

The two core papers of the Basel-Berlin Risk Study have recently been published and are now available online (please see below for the full references). In these two publications we investigated to what extent there is a broad and general factor of risk preference (akin to g, the general factor of intelligence), and whether risk preference can be considered a stable psychological trait. We addressed these questions by implemented 39 risk-taking measures from three different measurement traditions: Propensity measures assessing “stated preferences”, (incentivized) behavioral measures assessing “revealed preferences”, and frequency measures assessing actual real-world risky activities. This battery was completed by 1,507 participants, with 109 participants completing a retest–session after a period of six months.

The results indicate that the propensity and frequency measures converge relatively well, thus forming a “positive manifold”, whereas the (incentivized) behavioral measures show poor consistency (with the measures of the other measurement traditions, but also between each other). Moreover, our findings suggest that there is a broad general factor of risk preference, R, that accounts for 61% of the explained variance. This general factor is complemented by a series of domain-specific factors. Finally, the general factor proved to be highly reliable across a period of six months. To learn more about these results, please have a look at:

• Frey, R., Pedroni, A., Mata, R., Rieskamp, J., & Hertwig, R. (2017). Risk preference shares the psychometric structure of major psychological traits. Science Advances, 3, e1701381. doi:10.1126/sciadv.1701381 Online | Download PDF

A second paper focuses exclusively on the behavioral measures (using the same dataset) and reports an extensive cognitive modeling analysis. The goal of this analysis was to investigate potential reasons for the lack of consistency across the various behavioral elicitation methods. People were found to differ substantially in the strategies they used in the various tasks, yet they did not do so in a very systematic way. Even at the level of model parameters, the consistency across behavioral tasks was poor, thus further calling into question the validity of behavioral measures as indicators of a person’s risk preference. The detailed analyses on the behavioral tasks are published in:

• Pedroni, A., Frey, R., Bruhin, A., Dutilh, G., Hertwig, R., & Rieskamp, J. (2017). The risk elicitation puzzle. Nature Human Behaviour. doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0219-x Online

All in all, our results suggest that risk preference has a similar psychometric structure as other major traits. In particular the observation of the general and stable factor may have important implications for future investigations of the biological foundations of risk preference. Moreover, as the lack of consistency across behavioral tasks showed, more attention needs to be given to the assessment of risk preference.

Please also see our official press release.

Network plot showing the correlations between different measures of risk preference.

Marc Schreiber of the ZHAW School of Applied Psychology will visit us this week and present the tools he uses for ecological assessments of situational and personality characteristics in the job context. Marc will be around for coffee after the presentation, so feel free to stop by at the CDS meeting room if you like to talk to him. Please note that this talk will be in German!

Prof. Dr. Marc Schreiber hat an der Universität Zürich Psychologie, Volks- und Politikwissenschaften studiert und im Bereich der Laufbahnpsychologie promoviert. Am IAP Institut für Angewandte Psychologie der ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften leitet er das Zentrum Berufs-, Studien- und Laufbahnberatung. Er ist als Berufs-, Studien- und Laufbahnberater sowie Dozent in den Bereichen Laufbahn-, Outplacementberatung, Persönlichkeitspsychologie und Diagnostik

Marc Schreiber wird die App «Persönlichkeitsdiagnostik» vorstellen. Die App wurde am IAP auf der Basis der Whole Trait Theory, welche besagt, dass sich ein Trait als intraindividuelle Verteilung von States darstellen lässt, entwickelt. Mit der App, welche künftig in Beratungen und Therapien eingesetzt werden soll, können Daten zur Persönlichkeit zu mehreren Messzeitpunkten pro Tag erfasst und dargestellt werden. Die App kann kostenlos bei iTunes und Google Play heruntergeladen werden.

Vom 21.-25. August war ich auf der Jahreskonferenz der European Economic Association, welche diesmal in Lissabon stattfand. Neben der schönen Hauptstadt Portugals, gab es auch einige interessante Beiträge zum Thema Investitionsverhalten und Erfahrung.

Lukas und Nöth (2017) zeigen in ihrem Artikel «What makes children save more? Evidence from an Experiment with Elementary School Pupils» mit einem Experiment indem Grundschulkindern in Gummibärchen sparen können, dass diese schon auf Anreize und Institutionen reagieren. So erhöht sich die Sparrate, wenn die Kinder aus einer Schale die Gummibärchen nehmen müssen, statt sie in die Schale hinein zu legen. Ferner nimmt die Sparrate ab, wenn die Zeit bis zur Auszahlung der investierten Gummibärchen zu nimmt. Hierbei ist die Rolle der kognitiven Entwicklung und Erfahrung vor allem ausgeprägt. Kinder die älter sind, reagieren stärker auf diese Anreize, ebenso Kinder welche etwas Taschengeld erhalten von ihren Eltern.

It has become a tradition for me to conduct a quiz with History of Psychology students about their interests and probing their knowledge of eminent psychologists. This year 132 students participated in the survey (about 80% of students are 1st year psych majors, with the rest from other fields, such as economics, biology, or sports sciences). Overall, the results look very similar to those from 2015 and 2016. Freud and Jung again make it to the top of the list of psychologists recalled by students; and, again, others like Wundt get mentioned infrequently; Kahneman barely makes it to the list. I also asked students to name up to 10 books about psychology they have read and found that the median of books students were able (or could be bothered) to mention was 1…

“By the early 1990s a lot of people thought it was a good idea to bring together psychologists and economists, to allow them to get to know each other better. But as it turned out, they didn’t particularly want to know each other better. Economists were brash and self-assured. Psychologists were nuanced and doubtful. “Psychologists as a rule will only interrupt a presentation for clarifications,” says psychologist Dan Gilbert. “Economists will interrupt to show how smart they are.” “In economics it is completely normal to be rude,” says economist George Lowenstein.”We tried to create a psychology and economics seminar at Yale. We had our first meeting. The psychologists came out completely bruised. We never had a second meeting.” In the early 1990s, Amos’ former student Steven Sloman invited an equal number of economists and psychologists to a conference in France, “And I swear to God I spent three-quarters of my time telling the economists to shut up,” said Sloman. “The problem”, says Harvard social psychologist Amy Cuddy, “is that psychologists think economists are immoral and economists think psychologists are stupid.”

from Michael Lewis’ “The Undoing Project”

Fortunately, times have changed: https://bernoulli.unibas.ch

“The March for Science champions robustly funded and publicly communicated science as a pillar of human freedom and prosperity. We unite as a diverse, nonpartisan group to call for science that upholds the common good and for political leaders and policy makers to enact evidence based policies in the public interest.”

Our guest this week at the SWE colloquium is Marcus Lindskog from Uppsala University, Sweden. Marcus studies how, from infancy to adulthood, humans rely on a basic cognitive system called the Approximate Number System (ANS) and how they extract statistical information from the environment. Here are the title and abstract of his talk:

Intuitive statistics – Cognitive representations and early development

Statistical information is ubiquitous in everyday life, and one of the most important features of the human mind is its ability to extract regularities and make inferences from such data. At least since the work by Brunswik, it has been suggested that people are intuitive statisticians who spontaneously estimate statistical properties in their environment and make accurate statistical inferences. In this talk I will explore the idea of people as intuitive statisticians from a cognitive and a developmental perspective. First, I will present a series of studies investigating the cognitive processes people are engaged in when making intuitive statistical judgments from sequentially presented data. This work contrasts two models for intuitive statistical judgments, summarized in the metaphors of the lazy and eager intuitive statistician. In short, the lazy statistician postpones judgments to the time of a query when the properties of a small sample of values retrieved from memory serve as proxies for population properties. In contrast, the eager statistician abstracts summary representations of population properties online from incoming data. In the second part of the talk, I will present studies exploring intuitive statistical judgments from a developmental perspective. Recently, several studies have investigated if already infants have rudimentary abilities to summarize and make inductive inferences from small sets of data. However, very little is known about the complexity of these abilities, how they develop, or how infants process statistical information. Here, I will present a series of studies that begin addressing such questions.

The University Library is organizing a course in publication strategies on Tuesday, May 2, 16.15-17.45.

Content:

You are interested in publishing your recent research or in enhancing the visibility and impact of your research? In the workshop we will outline present possibilities and address best practices of today’s electronic publishing, amongst other things pros and cons of open access publishing. We will present a few tools to help you finding the right place to publish and will make some suggestions, how your papers will be easily accessible for other researchers:

• Which journal? Which publisher? Which platform?
• Visibility and sustainability of academic publications in the digital era
• Open access: Threat or necessity for my career?
• Publishing research data?
• Support at the University of Basel: From author’s copyright to the establishment of
new journals

Target group:

For PhD students, Postdocs and other researchers of all disciplines

Requirements:

Please bring your notebooks.

Register here! until 28.04.2017

Paul Slovic is a towering figure in the field of decision sciences, having made important contributions to understanding how people deal with risk in multiple domains, from decisions between gambles to technological risks such as nuclear power. More recently, Slovic has focused on understanding the psychological principles underlying empathy in decisions to donate to charity and other societal issues dealing with the processing of risk and statistical information.

A profile of Slovic’s life and work has recently come out in PNAS that could be interesting for those less familiar with his work…

Ahmed, F. (2017). Profile of Paul Slovic. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114(10), 2437–2439. http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1701967114

I’m in the process of writing a grant application (aren’t we all?) and wanted to know what the typical funding amounts are for psychology grants awarded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). Fortunately, I didn’t have to guesstimate but could simply go online to get the appropriate csv file and find out.

The figure above shows beanplots for all psychology grants awarded since 2000 (but perhaps Nathaniel could make a more informative and aesthetically pleasing figure using a pirateplot?!).

Go SNSF!

Link: YaRrr! The Pirate’s Guide to R in March Methodology Madness issue of the APS Observer

This month’s issue of the APS Observer is a special issue on research methodology called March Methodology Madness. As part of the issue, Dr. Nathaniel Phillips, a researcher at Basel’s Economic Psychology group, was featured for his work on his R package yarrr and book YaRrr! The Pirate’s Guide to R. In the article, Nathaniel explains how he used R to solve a persistent data visualisation problem: despite the fact that statisticians have been complaining about bad data visualisations for years (see Cleveland, 1983), researchers are still stubbornly using notoriously deceptive barplots to represent their data. The problem with barplots is that they reduce data to a single descriptive statistic, usually a mean, with an additional interval usually representing a 95% confidence interval (whatever those mean: see Hoekstra et al., 2014 and Morey et al., 2016). While barplots tell simple stories, they do so at the cost of hiding potential important distributional information like influential outliers and skewed distributions which, in some cases, can completely change their story.

Sadly, despite that we’ve been told that barplots are terrible for years, and even a — I’m not joking — successful Kickstarter campaign to Bar barplots, barplots haven’t gone anywhere. A look at any recent psychology publication will show that we still can’t help but to reduce our data to a simple set of bars.

To try and banish barplots for good, Nathaniel created the pirateplot() function. A pirateplot is an “RDI” plot inspired by the beanplot (Kampstra, 2008) and violin plot (Hintze & Nelson, 1998) that which shows Raw data (individual points), Descriptive statistics (means, medians, and/or quantiles), and Inferential statistics (densities and frequentist or Bayesian confidence intervals) in one elegant and colorful plot. Pirateplots are not only much more informative than standard barplots, they are also much easier to create and customise.

For more details on why pirateplots are so fun and easy to create, read on for the full article at http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/yarrr-the-pirates-guide-to-r

If you are an R user (and you should be!), you can also start creating your own pirateplots in seconds in R with the following code:


install.packages("yarrr") # Install the yarrr package
library("yarrr") # Load the yarrr package
yarrr.guide() # Open the package guide


4 elements of a pirateplot: Points representing raw data, Lines representing a descriptive summary statistic, beans representing smoothed distributions, and bands representing inference.

References

Cleveland, W. S. (1984). Graphs in scientific publications. The American Statistician, 38(4), 261-269.

Hintze, J. L., & Nelson, R. D. (1998). Violin plots: a box plot-density trace synergism. The American Statistician, 52(2), 181-184.

Hoekstra, R., Morey, R. D., Rouder, J. N., & Wagenmakers, E. J. (2014). Robust misinterpretation of confidence intervals. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 21(5), 1157-1164.

Kampstra, P. (2008). Beanplot: A boxplot alternative for visual comparison of distributions. Journal of statistical software, 28(1), 1-9.

Morey, R. D., Hoekstra, R., Rouder, J. N., Lee, M. D., & Wagenmakers, E. J. (2016). The fallacy of placing confidence in confidence intervals. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 23(1), 103-123.

The Graduate Consulting Club will host the first ETH & UniBasel case competition on April 8th 2017 in Zürich (pdf). Graduate students can apply to solve an exciting business case, expand their network, and compete to win an attractive prize – a trip to New York City for the Global Case Competition, where teams from around the world will be participating. 

At the Local Case Competition Zürich, students will compete in teams to deliver innovative and creative solutions for real-world business challenges in front of an expert jury made up of industry leaders and partners from consulting companies.

More generally, the Graduate Consulting Club holds case solving sessions once a week and students are welcome to join and gain some practice before the event.

Once again it’s a jolly exam season here at the University of Basel and I just read this press release for a forthcoming study in Psychological Science…

Internet Use in Class Tied to Lower Test Scores

“Researchers studied laptop use in an introductory psychology course and found that the average time students spent browsing the web for non-class-related purposes was 37 minutes. (…). And their academic performance seemed to suffer as a result. Internet use was a significant predictor of students’ final exam score even when their intelligence and motivation were taken into account.”

I wonder what we, as psychologists, will find next! Perhaps a nice follow-up could involve showing that students that failed to attend class or didn’t show up for the exam failed that course?!

Dirk Wulff has rejoined CDS after his stint at the Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. We’re glad to have you back in Basel!