Prof. Dr. Michael Bosnjak, Director, Leibniz-Institute for Psychology (ZPID – Leibniz Institute), University of Trier, will outline open science services offered by ZPID. The virtual meeting will take place on Thursday 10 June, starting at 13:30. Register here
Rava Azeredo da Silveira, Head, Theoretical & Computational Neuroscience Group, Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel, will give a presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 3 June).
While the faculty of rational thinking defines, at least to an extent, our human nature, it suffers from a remarkably long list of so-called “cognitive biases”—systematic deviations from rational information processing. Human behavior is also variable, even when an optimal observer would behave in a deterministic fashion. Biases and variability are particularly salient in situations in which humans update their beliefs as a function of a stream of stochastic observations, and cannot be explained on the basis of a sound, Bayesian manipulation of probabilities. In this talk, I will introduce a theoretical framework in which biases and variability emerge from a trade-off between Bayesian inference and the cognitive cost of carrying out probabilistic computations. After discussing the theoretical implications of this framework, I will present data from behavioral experiments in humans and their analysis in the context of our framework. If time allows, I will contrast this approach and predictions with those of an alternative framework in which cognitive costs impose limits on the precision of memory. The various theoretical approaches I will outline point to the fact that biases and variability in human cognition can reflect optimality under constraints—”resource-rational cognition”—rather than ad hoc erroneous beliefs or heuristics.
Stephan Lewandowsky, University of Bristol, will give a presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 20 May).
We are said to live in a “post-truth” era in which “fake news” has replaced real information, denial has compromised science, and the ontology of knowledge and truth has taken on a relativist element. I argue that to defend evidence-based reasoning and knowledge against those attacks, we must understand the strategies by which the post-truth world is driven forward. I depart from the premise that the post-truth era did not arise spontaneously but is the result of a highly effective political movement that deploys a large number of rhetorical strategies. I focus on three strategies: The deployment of conspiracy theories, the use of “micro-targeting” and “bots” online, and agenda-setting by attentional diversion. I present evidence for the existence of each strategy and its impact, and how it might be countered.
Isabella Kooij, University of Zurich Department of Banking and Finance will give a presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 6 May).
Using data from the social trading platform Wikifolio, we analyze the performance, characteristics and risk-return profile of professional and non-professional traders managing virtual portfolios. In line with the literature traders are not able to earn significant positive returns. Portfolios earning positive returns before they become investable for other users mostly cannot maintain their performance afterwards. In line with findings from the mutual fund industry, persistence in performance is generally low. Supporting previous findings on social trading, we find that risk and return of portfolios are not generally positively correlated. Trader and trading characteristics such as high confidence, high turnover and low diversification tend to negatively influence portfolio returns. Social trading platforms allow their users to exchange information and trade real world securities in an online setup. Some users are thereby invested with actual money, while others use it as a learning opportunity.
Isabel Thielmann, University of Koblenz-Landau Cognitive Psychology Lab, will give a presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 29 April).
Dishonesty constitutes a widespread aspect of human social interaction, ranging from private contexts (e.g., cheating in romantic relationships), over semi-public settings (e.g., tax evasion), to large public crises (e.g., cheating on pollution emissions tests). Despite the high prevalence of immoral behavior, however, most people feel moral and indeed more moral than others. In my talk, I will bring together evidence showing how people manage to act immorally but still feel moral. Specifically, I will present research using behavioral decision-making tasks (i.e., cheating paradigms) to illuminate how (i) the justifiability of lying, (ii) the magnitude of (objective and subjective) incentives, and (iii) personality influence dishonest behavior. Overall, these findings show that people are well-versed at balancing the psychological costs and the tangible benefits of lying – and yet, some individuals are just honest.
Amber Gayle Thalmayer, University of Lausanne, will give a presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 22 April).
The Big Five model of personality trait structure plays a central role in personality psychology, and Big Five inventories have been translated and exported around the globe. This model was established from initial cross-cultural evidence using lexical studies, a method uniquely well suited to inter-language comparisons. However, later lexical studies in European and Asian languages were equivocal about the Big Five, and recent work in African languages does not replicate the model. What does this mean about the Big Five? In what ways is it appropriate to use globally, and in what ways is it not? In this talk I will present our recent mixed-methods lexical study of personality in Khoekhoegowab, in press at the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. I will share the approach we used to achieve the largest lexical study yet conducted in Africa, one of few anywhere to rely on community rather than student samples, and a first to incorporate qualitative interviews to supplement quantitative results. The results will be discussed in the context of other evidence from Africa and in Asia, and what this body of work suggests about the Big Five, a model that may reveal as much about the cultural conditions of the industrialized West as about universal human variation.
Thalmayer, A. G., Job, S., Shino, E. N., Robinson, S. L., & Saucier, G. (2020, November 30). ǂŪsigu: A Mixed-Method Lexical Study of Character Description in Khoekhoegowab. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000372
Zhansheng Chen, Department of Psychology, University of Hong Kong, will give a presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 15 April).
The current research proposed a generalized compensation belief hypothesis that individuals, as observers, would grant moral permission to someone paying forward unfair treatment to an innocent person as a means to compensate for the perpetrator’s previously experienced mistreatment. Across nine studies, we showed that participants were more likely to morally permit and engage in the same negative act once they knew about previous maltreatment to which an actor was subjected. Required compensation acted as the mediator to account for the effect of previous treatment on moral permission. Besides, this belief was less pronounced when the maltreatment was received a long (versus short) time ago. When it comes to downstream consequences, such generalized compensation belief results in subsequent unethical behavior via moral relativism.
Franziska Ehrke, University Koblenz-Landau Department of Social, Environmental and Economic Psychology, will give a presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 8 April).
Social and entertainment media provide the opportunity for indirect contact and have become an important tool for minorities to share tolerance-promoting messages via the internet. Thus, they could be powerful tools in reducing intergroup conflict and promoting tolerance towards diversity and marginalized groups. Despite being popular, wide-spread, and easily accessible for a diverse audience, there is a lack of research evaluating if and how vicarious contact succeeds. Therefore, this research evaluated the effectiveness of a YouTube campaign video that used vicarious contact to improve attitudes towards gay men. Extending previous research that demonstrated the positive impact of perspective-taking and empathy with outgroups, this research examined the mediating role of perspective-taking and empathy with both the outgroup as well as the ingroup protagonists in the video for improving outgroup attitudes with media interventions.
The pre-registered hypotheses were tested with heterosexual adult participants in two well-powered experiments: Experiment 1 used a German sample (N = 274, 53% employees, 24% students, 55% women, Age: M = 42, SD = 16) and Experiment 2 an Italian sample (N = 330, 27% employees, 41% students, 65% women, Age: M = 33, SD = 13). In both experiments, participants were randomly allocated to a control-group design (campaign vs. control video). Whereas the campaign video presents a gay couple asking by-passers to translate an email that confronted them with anti-gay discrimination, in the control condition the same video was presented muted with alternative subtitles about two brothers facing corruption.
As pre-registered, in Experiment 1 the campaign video improved heterosexuals’ explicit and implicit attitudes (IAT) towards gay men. Explorative analyses revealed that increased perspective-taking with the ingroup protagonists mediated increased empathy with the gay outgroup protagonists, and both ingroup perspective-taking and outgroup empathy sequentially mediated more positive outgroup attitudes. This serial indirect effect was then pre-registered for Experiment 2 which used a repeated-measures design. As pre-registered, repeated-measurement ANOVAs showed that watching the campaign video improved explicit outgroup attitudes. Path analyses replicated the pre-registered serial indirect effect on explicit outgroup attitudes found in Experiment 1. Nevertheless, there was no total effect of the video on explicit post-measure outgroup attitudes. This is consistent with the finding from the repeated-measures ANOVA that there was no significant difference between the experimental and the control group in post-measures of outgroup attitudes.
As previous research showed that contact as an intervention was most effective for people with less contact with sexual minorities, future research should test the effects targeting participants with little to no pre-existing contact. Additionally, future research should go beyond measuring empathy with the protagonists in the video and test whether the video also increases empathy with the outgroup in general.
Supporting literature:
Batson, C. D., & Ahmad, N. Y. (2009). Using empathy to improve intergroup attitudes and relations. Social Issues and Policy Review, 3(1), 141–177. doi: 10.1111/j.1751-2409.2009.01013.x
Sudeep Bhatia, University of Pennsylvania, will give a presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 1 April, 16:00-17:00).
Information stored in memory influences the formation of preferences and beliefs in most everyday decision tasks. The richness of this information, and the complexity inherent in interacting memory and decision processes, makes the quantitative model-driven analysis of such decisions very difficult. In this paper we present a general framework that can address the theoretical and methodological barriers to building formal models of naturalistic memory-based decision making. Our framework implements established theories of memory search and decision making within a single integrated cognitive system, and uses computational language models to quantify the thoughts over which memory and decision processes operate. It can thus describe both the content of the information that is sampled from memory, as well as the processes involved in retrieving and evaluating this information in order to make a decision. Furthermore, our framework is tractable, and the parameters that characterize memory-based decisions can be recovered using thought-listing and choice data from existing experimental tasks, and in turn be used to make quantitative predictions regarding choice probability, length of deliberation, retrieved thoughts, and the effects of decision context. We showcase the power and generality of our framework by applying it to naturalistic binary choices from domains such as risk perception, consumer behavior, financial decision making, ethical decision making, legal decision making, food choice, and social judgment.
Supporting literature:
Zhao, W. J., Richie, R., & Bhatia, S. (2019). Process and content in decisions from memory.
Die Fachgruppe Psychologie präsentiert: Zoom-Workshop aus der Reihe „Rein in die Praxis„ (13.04.2021 16:15-17:45)
Link: https://unibas.zoom.us/j/5298344739
Scott Brown, School of Psychology, The University of Newcastle, Australia, will give a presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 25 March, 10:15-11:15).
The phrase bench to bedside describes research—often medical—which has elements across the continuum from very basic science (bench) through to direct application with end-users (bedside). This approach to research is increasingly demanded by funding agencies and other bodies, at least where I work. I will describe efforts I have made to get a bit closer to the bedside end of the continuum, with applications in clinical populations and with defence force personnel. The applications focus on simple decision-making, and use insights gained from the basic cognitive science and computational modelling work to make real improvements for end users.
Heiner Stuckenschmidt, Chair of Artificial Intelligence, University of Mannheim, will give a presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 18 March, 12:00-13:00).
Helene Willadsen, University of Copenhagen, will give a presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 11 March, 12:00-13:00).
The paper* discussed presents a validated survey questionnaire for measuring time, risk and social preferences (altruism, positive reciprocity, negative reciprocity and trust) with children as young as 9 years old. The survey questions are validated against incentivized games measuring the same preference. We show that 1-4 survey questions can be used as a proxy for the experimentally elicited behavior with an explanatory power between 11% and 34.8%.
Supporting literature:
*Falk, A., Becker, A., Dohmen, T., Huffman, D., & Sunde, U. (2016). The preference survey module: A validated instrument for measuring risk, time, and social preferences. IZA Discussion Papers No. 9674.
The first talk in the Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar will be given at 12:00 on Thursday 4 March by Ori Plonsky of the Technion Israel Institute of Technology. The talk will be totally virtual, streamed live through Zoom.
Similarity-based learning and the wavy recency effect of rare events
Many behavioral phenomena can be the product of a tendency to rely on small samples of past experiences. Previous studies suggest that this can be a product of a cognitively efficient tendency to rely on the most recent outcomes. Congruently, the most popular models of learning assume that people mostly rely on a few recent outcomes. In this talk, I will review research suggesting a very different explanation: People rely on a small set of the most similar past experiences. My investigation explores settings of repeated binary choice with feedback. I will present a model, designed for these settings, that judges similarity as a function of sequential patterns of outcomes. A computational analysis shows this model can be extremely effective across wide classes of dynamic decision settings (more effective than basic reinforcement learning models).It further shows that in static settings with rare events the model predicts a unique wavy recency pattern. Empirical analysis of multiple datasets (including decisions from experience with full or with partial feedback, probability learning tasks, and repeated decisions under risk with feedback) support this wavy recency prediction, a pattern that was ignored by prior research and violates the basic assumption of recency in popular learning models. a pattern that was ignored by prior research and violates the basic assumption of recency in popular learning models. a pattern that was ignored by prior research and violates the basic assumption of recency in popular learning models.
Supporting literature: Plonsky, O., Teodorescu, K., & Erev, I. (2015). Reliance on small samples, the wavy recency effect, and similarity-based learning. Psychological Review, 122(4), 621.
Die Fachgruppe Psychologie präsentiert: Zoom-Workshop aus der Reihe “Rein in die Praxis“ (04.03.2021 16:15-17:45)
Link: https://unibas.zoom.us/j/5298344739
The SWE colloquium on Thursday 17 December (12:00-13:00) will be presented by Stefan Pfattheicher, Department of Psychology and Behavioural Sciences. The talk will be totally virtual, streamed live through Zoom.
On the relation of boredom and sadism (and other cruelties)
The beauty of human goodness is clouded when we turn our focus to humans’ inclination for destructiveness. The present talk focuses on one particular type of destructiveness: sadism (i.e., harming others for pleasure). There is a substantial gap in the literature regarding the question of which (situational) conditions actually motivate sadistic tendencies. In fact, we know very little about when and why sadistic tendencies actually emerge. In this talk it is argued that boredom plays a crucial role in the emergence of sadistic tendencies. Empirical evidence is presented from (a) a personality perspective by including trait boredom and trait sadism in the analysis, (b) an applied perspective by presenting evidence from studies at public schools, in the military, on the internet (online bullying), and the private space (sadistic fantasies), and (c) experimental behavioral studies. The talk will end with a discussion of challenges in the analysis of cruel behavior.
Reading: Westgate, E. C. (2020). Why boredom is interesting. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 29(1), 33-40. doi: 10.1177/0963721419884309
The SWE colloquium on Thursday 10 December (12:00-13:00) will be presented by Maria Wimber, Senior Lecturer, University of Birmingham School of Psychology. The talk will be totally virtual, streamed live through Zoom.
Memory recall as a dynamic and reconstructive process
Our memories are not static. Each attempt to recall a past event can adaptively change the underlying memory space. Here I discuss my work on the neurocognitive mechanisms that enable the selective retrieval of episodic memories. I present behavioural and electrophysiological (M/EEG) work that provides insight into how the mnemonic reconstruction process unfolds in time, on a sub-trial scale. Further, I show evidence from a series of fMRI studies in which we track the representational changes that occur in a memory trace over time and across repeated retrievals. The latter findings demonstrate that retrieval adaptively modifies memories by strengthening behaviourally relevant and weakening behaviourally irrelevant, interfering components. Together, this work sheds light onto the neural dynamics of the retrieval process, and informs theories of adaptive memory.
The SWE colloquium on Thursday 3 December (12:00-13:00) will be presented by Zwetelina Iliewa, Assistant Professor in Finance, University of Bonn. The talk will be totally virtual, streamed live through Zoom.
Dynamic inconsistency in risky choice: evidence from the lab and field
Many economically important settings, from financial markets to consumer choice, involve dynamic decisions under risk. People are willing to accept risk as part of a sequence of choices—even when it is fair or has a negative expected value—while at the same time rejecting positive-expected value gambles offered in isolation. We use a unique brokerage dataset containing traders’ ex-ante investment plans and their subsequent decisions (N=190,000) and two pre-registered experiments (N=940) to study what motivates decisions to take risk in dynamic environments. In both settings, people accept risk as part of a “loss-exit” strategy—planning to take more risk after gains and stop after losses. Notably, this strategy generates a positively-skewed outcome distribution that is not available when the same gambles are offered in isolation. People’s actual behavior exhibits the reverse pattern, deviating from their intended strategy by cutting gains early and chasing losses. More individuals are willing to accept risk when offered a commitment to the initial strategy, which suggests at least partial sophistication about this dynamic inconsistency. We use our data to formally identify a model of decision-making that predicts both the observed deviations in planned versus actual behavior, as well as the discrepancy in risk-taking in static and dynamic environments. We then use this model to quantify the welfare costs of naivete in our setting. Together, our results have implications for evaluating the welfare consequences of behavioral biases in dynamic settings, such as the disposition effect, and highlight potentially unintended effects of regulation mandating non-binding commitment.
Supporting literature: Heimer, R., Iliewa, Z., Imas, A., and Weber, M. (2020). Dynamic inconsistency in risky choice: Evidence from the lab and field. Available at: SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3600583 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3600583
The SWE colloquium on Thursday 19 November (12:00-13:00) will be presented by Daniel Lakens, Associate Professor, Human-Technology Interaction Group, Eindhoven University of Technology. The talk will be totally virtual, streamed live through Zoom.
The new heuristics
Scientific reform in the last decade has lead to a wide range of proposed changes in how we design, analyze, report, and publish scientific findings. As the implementation of better research practices spreads through the scientific community, there is a risk of merely changing old flawed heuristics with new flawed heuristics. In this talk, the speaker will discuss some examples of norms scientists rely on when they design and analyze studies, and that editors rely on when evaluating work, without knowing why these norms exist, or whether these norms make sense. The speaker will try to argue this is a problem, and invite you to think along about ways in which scientists can learn to justify the choices they make when they do or evaluate research, instead of merely following norms.
The SWE colloquium on Thursday 12 November (12:00-13:00) will be presented by Thomas Hancock, Research Fellow in the Institute for Transport at the University of Leeds. The talk will be totally virtual, streamed live through Zoom.
Decision Field Theory for choices in real-world settings
Psychologists and economists have separately constructed many different choice models that are used to understand and predict the choices we make in a wide variety of contexts. Thus far, these models have been used to pursue different research agendas, with economists typically interested in forecasting future choices and psychologists focusing on understanding the decision-making process in of itself. In our work, we look at bridging the gap by improving the underlying mechanics of Decision Field Theory, a model developed by psychologists, such that it can “step out of the laboratory” to perform in the real-world settings that are typically studied by economists. We then show how our updated version of DFT can be implemented in a number of case studies including transport mode choice for trips to London and driving behaviour problems such as modelling the choice of when to merge lanes onto a motorway.
The SWE colloquium on Thursday 5 November (12:00-13:00) will be presented by Ulrich Ebner-Priemer, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. The talk will be totally virtual, streamed live through Zoom.
Monitoring the dynamics of real life using ambulatory assessment
Real-time mobile smartphone sampling of psychopathological symptoms and behaviour, sometimes also called Ambulatory Assessment [1], has become more and more popular in psychological research, offering three key advantages: (1) real-time assessment eliminates retrospective biases; (2) real-life assessment enables investigating symptomatology in the most important context: the everyday lives of our patients; (3) the within-subject perspective offers the possibility to elucidate psychopathological mechanisms in everyday life. According to current research, the dynamics of affective states and the intentional regulation of emotions are even more important to psychological health and maladjustment than the affective states itself. However, capturing the ebb and flow in everyday life is not trivial. Recent technical developments resulted in both fancy hardware to collect data in everyday life and powerful data-modelling techniques to analyse it. All three advantages come with the promise of increasing validity and reliability and therewith decreasing costs and sample size for future studies. In the talk, the speaker will focus on examples of ambulatory assessment to illustrate opportunities in psychological research: using high-frequency data assessment to model affective dynamics, using location-triggered e-diaries to investigate the relation between stress-reactivity and environmental components, monitoring physical activity and telecommunication behaviour to predict upcoming episodes in bipolar patients. The speaker will conclude by specifying disadvantages and pitfalls of ambulatory assessment. In conclusion, ambulatory assessment offers a wealth of methodological approaches to enhance the understanding of psychopathological symptoms in the most important context: the daily lives of our patients.
Reference
The SWE colloquium on Thursday 22 October (12:00-13:00) will be presented by Michael Siegrist, Professor of Consumer Behavior, ETH Zürich. The talk will be totally virtual, streamed live through Zoom.
The yuck emotion: How disgust influences people’s risk perceptions and behavior
Food intake, sexuality or interactions with other humans do not only have obvious benefits, but these activities are also associated with the risk of getting in contact with pathogens. Disgust is part of the behavioral immune system that reduces the contact with and thus the likelihood of infections from bacteria, parasites and viruses. The mouth is one important entry point for pathogens. Therefore, we developed a food disgust sensitivity scale that has been shown to be reliable and valid. I will present results of various experiments and surveys suggesting that disgust sensitivity is not only related to hygienic behavior, food intake and food waste production, but also how immigrants are perceived. High food disgust sensitive people are more afraid of illnesses brought into the country from immigrants compared with low food disgust sensitive people. We could further demonstrate that people with high food disgust sensitivity have difficulties to ignore disgust evoking cues that are clearly not associated with the risk of pathogens. Disgust is also a factor that influences people’s risk perceptions of food hazards and the acceptance of novel food technologies. Disgust is an important emotion that protects us, but there is also a dark side to this emotion.
The SWE colloquium on Thursday 8 October (12:00-13:00) will be presented by Björn Meder, University of Potsdam. The talk will be totally virtual, streamed live through Zoom.
Understanding of and reasoning with verbal uncertainty terms
Dealing with different degrees of frequency and probability is important not only in science, but also in our everyday lives. Relevant information, however, does not always come in the form of numerical estimates or direct experiences, but is instead obtained through qualitative, rather vague verbal terms (e.g., “the virus often causes coughing” or “it’s likely to rain”). Understanding how people make sense of such verbal expressions and how they represent and utilize this kind of information is therefore critical to understand cognition and behavior in many real-world situations. I will focus on three key issues. First, when does a shared understanding of verbal uncertainty terms emerge in development? Second, how can we formally represent the vagueness of verbal uncertainty terms and build computational models of reasoning with such information? Third, how good are people when making probabilistic inferences based on verbal uncertainty terms, compared to reasoning with numerical information and relative to normative benchmarks? I conclude by discussing ideas and pathways for investigating judgment and decision making with verbal information within a computational modeling framework.
The first speaker (24 September) in this semester’s SWE colloquium series is Sandro Ambühl, UBS Foundation Assistant Professor of Behavioral Economics of Financial Markets at the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich. One focus of his research studies how to help people make good financial decisions. The other strand of research concerns policies for the exchange of goods about which people have strong ethical intuitions, as is the case, for example, with living organ donation, or when incentive systems place a price on the natural environment. He addresses these questions using a combination of controlled experiments and economic theory. His research has been featured in the popular press, including The Washington Post, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Incentives and the Quality of Decision Making
An Offer You Can’t Refuse? Experimental Tests of ‘Undue Inducement’
Around the world, laws limit incentives for transactions such as clinical trial participation, human egg donation, or gestational surrogacy. A key reason is the notion of undue inducement—the conceptually vague and empirically untested idea that incentives can lead to bad decision making by distorting individuals’ beliefs about the transaction. Three experiments show that participation incentives induce selective information search and thus alter beliefs. These changes, however, do not lower measured decision quality. They are consistent with Bayes-rational, costly information processing, which is shown to generate information acquisition that resembles motivated reasoning.
Attention and Selection Effects (with Axel Ockenfels and Colin Stewart, submitted)
Many transactions involve uncertain but learnable consequences. Who responds more to incentives to participate, individuals who find it easier to learn about consequences or those for whom it is more difficult? We show theoretically and experimentally that incentives disproportionately attract those with high learning costs. These participants’ decisions rest on worse information, rendering ex post regret more likely. Selection based on learning costs is substantially more pronounced than selection on risk preferences in many of our treatments. Our results apply to a wide range of economic transactions and, moreover, highlight a conflict between participation incentives and ethical principle
The final speaker in this semester’s SWE colloquium series is Dr Jan Schmitz, ETH Zürich (Thursday 19 December).
Trustworthiness and new financial technologies
In most situations, economic agents have differing information about the quality of goods and services they exchange. In other words, there is asymmetric information and actors need to trust their trading partners to engage in exchange. In financial markets, trust plays a particularly important role. Consumer credit markets, for example, are plagued by uncertainty about the ability and willingness of borrowers to repay. Recent developments in financial technologies (Fintech) additionally change the classical bilateral borrower lender relationship and crowdlending platforms provide borrowers the possibility to borrow from many lenders at the same time. This paper examines how the number of people who trust (provide credit) affects trustworthiness (repayment). Data from peer to peer lending platforms indicate that there is a negative correlation between loan repayment and the number of investors involved. Laboratory and online experiments in which borrowers face the trade-of between repayment and strategically defaulting show that the number of lenders involved significantly increases default rates. Moral appeals highlighting the number of people who trust, however, significantly reduce default rates. The appeals impact the propensity to default more strongly if more people are affected by the borrowers’ repayment decisions.
Dr Dolores Albarracin, Professor of Psychology, Business, and Medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, visits Basel on 5 December to give a talk in the SWE colloquium series.
Action dominance: Action and inaction in a social world
My colleagues and I have proposed that behavior is often controlled by general goals to be active or inactive regardless of the specific behaviors meeting these goals (trivial and important behaviors, planned and impulsive behaviors). However, action is more likely to become a goal than is inaction. Action (vs. inaction) attracts more interest and attention, produces richer representations, and is idealized as positive and intentional. In many ways, this construal is adaptive; in many others, in produces more performance errors and likely decreases the closeness of our social connections.
Thomas T Hills, Director, Bridges-Leverhulme Doctoral Training Centre in Mathematical and Social Sciences, University of Warwick, will be giving a talk on Wednesday, 4 December (12:00-13:00, Seminar Room 00.008, ground floor, Missionsstrasse 64a) as part of the SWE colloquia.
The dark side of information proliferation
There are well-understood psychological limits on our capacity to process information. As information proliferation— the consumption and sharing of information—increases through social media and other communications technology, these limits create an attentional bottleneck, favoring information that is more likely to be searched for, attended to, comprehended, encoded, and later reproduced. In information-rich environments, this bottleneck influences the evolution of information via four forces of cognitive selection, selecting for information that is belief-consistent, negative, social, and predictive. Selection for belief-consistent information leads balanced information to support increasingly polarized views. Selection for negative information amplifies information about downside risks and crowds out potential benefits. Selection for social information drives herding, impairs objective assessments, and reduces exploration for solutions to hard problems. Selection for predictive patterns drives overfitting, the replication crisis, and risk-seeking. This talk will summarize the negative implications of these forces of cognitive selection representing severe pitfalls for the naive “informavore,” accelerating extremism, hysteria, herding, and the proliferation of misinformation.
On 28 November, our guest speaker in the SWE Colloquium is Professor June P. Tangney, Department of Psychology, George Mason University, Fairfax Virginia, USA.
Borrowing from social psychology: A clinical psychologist’s tale
In this talk, I emphasize the ways in which social and personality psychology can inform clinical practice in community and criminal justice settings. Trained as a clinical psychologist, I initially “defected” to social and personality psychology to examine basic research questions about shame and guilt. I’ll summarize key findings from this line of work, and then present a framework for thinking about the many different kinds of events that evoke these moral emotions. I’ll also describe our most recent TOSCA-4, with some findings that illustrate its increased flexibility and discuss of its limitations.
I then describe how I became interested in the plight of jail inmates, a large, high-risk, underserved population, in effect reclaiming my identity as a clinical psychologist. In our studies of inmates, we initially focused on shame and guilt as potential points of intervention to reduce recidivism, but have since looked more broadly at how social psychological theory and methods can inform the development of a range of brief novel interventions for incarcerated people soon to join the community.
On Thursday 21 November, Prof. Dr. Urte Scholz, Head, Applied Social and Health Psychology, University of Zurich, will give a presentation as part of the SWE colloquium series.
Benefits and pitfalls of social relationships for health-relevant behaviors
Health-related behaviors such as eating or smoking usually happen in a social context. Most of the standard theories of health-behavior change, however, strongly focus on individual self-regulation and neglect the health behavior’s social side. Recent theories highlight the importance of going beyond the individual and of focusing on social and dyadic influences on behavior. In this talk, I will emphasize the need for concise theories and systematic research of the role on social processes for health behavior change. I will present research from randomized controlled trials, and intensive-longitudinal studies highlighting the role of social support, social control and companionship for different health-behaviours and related outcomes. Moreover, I will address the benefits, but also the challenges and the complexity of social processes for health behavior change.