Sozial-, Wirtschafts- und Entscheidungspsychologie


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Archive for the ‘journal articles’ Category

How do people render self-reports of their willingness to take risks?

Markus Steiner, Florian Seitz, and I have a new paper (just published in Decision) in which we investigate the cognitive processes underlying people’s self-reports of their risk preferences. Specifically, we were interested in the information-integration processes that people may rely on during judgment formation, with a particular focus on the type of evidence people may consider when rendering their self-reports. In doing so, we aimed to contribute to a better understanding of why self-reports typically achieve high degrees of convergent validity and test-retest reliability, thus often outperforming their behavioral counterparts (i.e., monetary lotteries and other lab tasks).

To achieve these goals we employed the process-tracing method of aspect listing, to thus gain “a window into people’s mind” while they render self-reports. Our cognitive modeling analyses illustrated that people are particularly sensitive to the strength of evidence of the information retrieved from memory during judgment formation. Interestingly, people’s self-reported risk preferences and the strength of evidence of the retrieved aspects remained considerable stable in a retest study (i.e., across a one-month interval). Moreover, intraindividual changes in the latter were closely aligned with intraindividual changes in the former – suggesting that a relatively reliable psychological mechanism is at play when people render self-reports.

Beyond our quantitative modeling analyses, the process-tracing method of aspect listing also rendered possible more qualitative insights, such as concerning the sources and contents of the information people retrieved from memory (see the word clouds below). To learn more about all further details on this, please have a look at the paper!

Steiner, M., Seitz, F., & Frey, R. (2021). Through the window of my mind: Mapping information integration and the cognitive representations underlying self-reported risk preference. Decision, 8, 97–122. doi:10.1037/dec0000127 | PDF

First appeared on https://renatofrey.net/blog

New paper in JEP-Gen: Is representative design the key to valid assessments of people’s risk preferences?

A large body of research has documented the relatively poor psychometric properties of behavioral measures of risk taking, such as low convergent validity and poor test–retest reliability. In this project we examined the extent to which these issues may be related to violations of “representative design” – the idea that experimental stimuli should be sampled or designed such that they represent the environments to which measured constructs are supposed to generalize.

To this end, we focused on one of the most prominent behavioral measures of risk taking, the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART). Our analyses demonstrate that the typical implementation of the BART violates the principle of representative design, and strongly conflicts with the expectations people might have formed from real balloons. We conducted two extensive empirical studies (N = 772 and N = 632), aimed at testing the effects of improved representative designs. Indeed, participants acquired more accurate beliefs about the optimal behavior in the BART due to these task adaptions. Yet strikingly, these improvements proved to be insufficient to enhance the task’s psychometric properties (e.g., convergent validity with other measures of risk preference and related constructs). We conclude that for the development of valid behavioral measurement instruments, our field has to overcome the philosophy of the “repair program” (i.e., fixing existing tasks). Instead, the development of valid task designs may require ecological assessments that identify those real-life behaviors and associated psychological processes that lab tasks are supposed to capture and generalize to.

This is a joint project with Markus Steiner (see picture below), who successfully defended his thesis last week – congratulations, Dr. Steiner!

Steiner, M., & Frey, R. (2021). Representative design in psychological assessment: A case study using the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART). Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. doi:10.1037/xge0001036 | PDF

First appeared on https://renatofrey.net/blog

 

New paper: Using brain activation to predict risk taking

Taking risks is an adaptive aspect of human life that can promote happiness and success. However, engagement in maladaptive risk taking can have detrimental effects on individual as well as societal levels of health, wealth and criminality. One approach to understanding and, ultimately, predicting individual differences in risk taking has been to illuminate the biological substrates, specifically the neural pathways. In the past, brain activation has been associated with or even found to be predictive of risky behaviors, yet one fundamental problem of existing studies relates to the challenge of measuring risk taking: convergence between risk-taking measures is low, both at the level of behavior and brain activation. By extension, whether brain activation is merely correlated with or actually predictive of real-life risky behaviors is also likely to vary as a function of the measure used.

In our new paper, out in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, we addressed this issue by analyzing within-participant neuroimaging data for two widely used risk-taking tasks collected from the imaging subsample of the Basel–Berlin Risk Study (N = 116 young human adults). We focused on core brain regions implicated in risk taking, and examined average (that is, group-level) activation for risky versus safe choices in the Balloon Analogue Risk Task and a Monetary Gambles task. Importantly, we also examined associations between individuals’ brain activation in risk-related brain areas and various risk-related outcomes, including psychometrically derived risk preference factors. We found that, on average, risky decisions in both tasks were associated with increased activation in the nucleus accumbens, a small subcortical brain structure with a central role in the brain’s reward circuitry. However, the results from our individual differences analyses support the idea that the presence and directionality of associations between brain activation and risk taking varies as a function of the risk-taking measures used to capture individual differences.

Read the full paper here for a thorough discussion of the findings, including implications for intervention and prevention efforts, and our recommendations for future research aimed at predicting real-life behavior from brain markers.

Citation: Tisdall, L., Frey, R., Horn, A., Ostwald, D., Horvath, L., Pedroni, A., Rieskamp, J., Blankenburg, F., Hertwig, R. and Mata, R., 2020. Brain–Behavior Associations for Risk Taking Depend on the Measures Used to Capture Individual Differences. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 14, p.194.

Registered reports: A way to publish when data collection is paused

During the last few months, COVID-19 has affected everyone’s lives to some extent. For researchers like us psychologists that rely on data collection involving human interaction, this sometimes meant a complete halt of all research activities because laboratories had to be closed. Especially for early-career researchers, several months of not being able to collect data can have serious consequences. They need publications to graduate, but they often need data to publish in journals.

Traditionally, psychologists first collect data and then write an article. Recently, more and more journals in our field have introduced a format that allows us to publish before we collect data, namely “registered reports”. The idea is that the research question, the hypotheses, the study details, and the planned analyses undergo peer review before data collection. Authors thereby receive critical feedback and can improve their studies before they invest valuable resources. This way, the ideas and the soundness of the proposed research are evaluated instead of whether the results are “interesting”. If the manuscript then meets the journal’s requirements, the article receives an in-principle acceptance. That means, it will be published no matter how the results turn out (given that the authors follow the procedures previously agreed upon). Studies that do not yield the expected results are therefore still being published and do not disappear in the “file drawer”, which happens all too often.

Besides these benefits, registered reports enable researchers to add publications to their CV even when they cannot collect data in the lab, as was the case with our registered report. In our article, we propose three studies to examine whether the act of sharing secrets influences the relationship between two people. Intuitively, one might think it does. It might, however, also depend on the nature of the secrets shared, meaning whether they are positive or whether they shine a negative light on the person who shares them.  All of this has not been studied yet.

Before our work was accepted as a first stage registered report at PLOS ONE, it went through peer review at two other journals and the respective feedback helped us to craft the current and more compelling paper. We hope that the COVID-19 situation remains under control and that we will soon be able to collect data. Yet, even during the lockdown, we were able to contribute to the scientific literature and will complement our work with data as soon as possible.

Jaffé, M., & Douneva, M. (2020). Secretive and close? How sharing secrets may impact perceptions of distance. PLOS ONE, 15: e0233953. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0233953

Registered report on competitive decisions from experience published in JDM

We often (have to) make choices between risky options without knowing the possible outcomes upfront. Sometimes, however, we can obtain a preview through active information search (e.g., sampling reviews on Tripadvisor to choose one of two hotels). But what if other people simultaneously pursue the same goal, forcing us to make decisions from experience under competitive pressure (“only one room left at this price”)? In this paper, I studied to what extent competition reduces pre-decisional search (and potentially choice performance) in different choice environments. A set of simulation analyses and empirical studies indicated that reduced search due to competitive pressure was particularly detrimental for choice performance in “wicked” environments, which contain rare events and thus require ample exploration to identify advantageous options. Interestingly, however, from a cost-benefit perspective and taking into account search costs, frugal search may not only be efficient in “kind” but also in “wicked” environments. For the full results, please have a look here:

Frey, R. (2020). Decisions from experience: Competitive search and choice in kind and wicked environments. Judgment and Decision Making, 15, 282-303. Online | PDF

On a side note, in this project I was up for some exploration myself: In the spirit of trying out new avenues for promoting transparent and reproducible research, I was committed to publish this paper as a registered report (RR). The idea of this relatively new publication format is to run the paper’s theoretical rationale through the full peer-review process at a scientific journal, with the goal of obtaining “in-principle acceptance” before the empirical studies are conducted. It was a very interesting but sometimes also difficult process, as it may be particularly hard to convince reviewers of the soundness and importance of the research questions a-priori, without being able to present fancy results yet. So I am glad that this paper found a nice home at JDM, and I hope that more psychological journals will adopt the format of RRs soon!

For more on my research on decisions from experience, please also see the research section.

First appeared on https://renatofrey.net/blog

New paper in JPSP: Identifying robust correlates of risk preference

In the behavioral sciences it has long been a goal to identify variables that are systematically associated with people’s risk preferences. Yet, evidence concerning many “candidate correlates” (e.g., wealth, age, sex, education) has been mixed, because previous studies tended to focus on single variables (i.e., not taking into account many competing predictors) and to implement few operationalizations of risk preference. In our paper recently published in JPSP (see here for the PDF), we tackled this issue in a novel way: using specification curve analysis (SCA), we assembled all possible model specifications given the variables of our dataset, which resulted in over 1 million models (incl. simulation analyses). Thanks to our powerful sciCORE at the University of Basel, we could efficiently estimate these models using traditional OLS and Bayesian methods.

A key advantage of SCA is its possibility to visualize results of extensive modeling analyses transparently. The main findings indicated that a person’s sex and age have robust and consistent associations with people’s risk preferences, whereas other candidate correlates showed less consistent or no associations. The results also demonstrate the important role of construct operationalization when assessing people’s risk preferences: self-report measures picked up various associations with the proposed correlates, but behavioral measures largely failed to do so. In sum, we hope that our paper illustrates how exhaustive modeling analyses can provide conclusive answers to important theoretical issues in the behavioral sciences.

Frey, R., Richter, D., Schupp, J., Hertwig, R., & Mata, R. (2020). Identifying robust correlates of risk preference: A systematic approach using specification curve analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. doi:10.1037/pspp0000287 | PDF

First appeared on https://renatofrey.net/blog

No effect of birth order on adult risk taking

Research in personality psychology has explored many potential sources for the emergence of individual differences. One of them is birth order: According to Sulloway’s childhood niche hypothesis, later-borns develop a more pronounced propensity to take risks than firstborns, because “risk taking is a useful strategy in the quest to find an unoccupied niche”. That is, in their competition for parents’ limited resources, risk taking might be instrumental for later-borns to attract attention. But do such early experiences shape personality lastingly, potentially leading to stable adult differences in risk taking?

We analyzed three datasets to address this question. First, we employed an exhaustive modeling approach (i.e., specification curve analysis) to analyze a large panel dataset with self-report data. Second, we analyzed a large set of self-report and behavioral measures from the Basel-Berlin Risk Study. Third, we analyzed historical data on explorers and revolutionaries. The analyses of our three-pronged approach speak with one voice and suggest a clear conclusion: There exists no effect of birther order on adult risk taking. For the full details, please see here.

First appeared on http://renatofrey.net/blog

Lejarraga, T., Frey, R., Schnitzlein, D. D., & Hertwig, R. (2019). No effect of birth order on adult risk taking. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201814153. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1814153116

New Perspectives on the Aging Lexicon

Rui and I have a new paper out in which we discuss the role of environmental exposure and several cognitive mechanisms in producing changes in the mental lexicon, our storage of linguistic and semantic information, across the adult life span. We argue that models of the aging mental lexicon must integrate both ecological and psychological factors and propose a research framework that distinguishes environmental exposure from cognitive mechanisms of learning, representation, and retrieval of information. This article, co-authored with 21 colleagues from the fields of Linguistics, Psychology, and Neuroscience, is the product of the Symposium of the Aging Lexicon held in Basel, Switzerland, on June 7-9, 2018. Learn more about the Symposium and its contributors at aginglexicon.github.io.

Wulff, D. U., De Deyne, S., Jones, M. N., Mata, R., & Aging Lexicon Consortium. (2019). New perspectives on the aging lexicon. Trends in cognitive sciences, 23(8), 686-698. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2019.05.003

Toss and turn or toss and stop?

Rainer Greifeneder, Mariela Jaffé, and I have a new paper out in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, in which we examine how simply seeing a random device such as a coin flip providing a suggestion can influence the need for information before settling for a decision. No matter whether it’s a hypothetical decision about prolonging someone’s contract, judging which one of two backpacks costs more, or deciding which medical charity receives money – coin participants are less likely to request additional information and indicate a lower need for additional information compared to control participants without a coin flip. Interestingly, participants do not necessarily adhere to the coin but stick to their preliminary decision as much as or even more than the control group. A coin flip may thereby help to avoid decision blocks or the collection of too much information.

Douneva, M., Jaffé, M., & Greifeneder, R. (2019). Toss and turn or toss and stop? A coin flip reduces the need for information in decision-making Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 83, 132-141. doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2019.04.003

Beyond attractiveness: A multimethod approach to study enhancement in self-recognition on the Big Two personality dimensions

Matt Keller and I have a new paper out in which we present two methods to measure biases in individuals’ self-perception. These methods have the advantage that they neither involve introspection nor any external standards of comparison. One of these methods (Study 1) allows systematic modeling of specific personality dimensions in participants’ own faces in a theory-driven way and measurement of self-enhancement regarding these dimensions. The other method (Study 2) allows measurement of self-enhancement in a purely data-driven way by extracting the dimensions of self-enhancement from random noise patterns applied to participants’ own faces. Results from two studies reveal that individuals self-enhance regarding both Big Two personality dimensions (i.e., agency and communion).

The Figure above visualizes the female (A) and male (B) color (row 1), shape (row 2), and full self-enhancement vector applied to the female (A) and the male (B) average face from the Basel Face Model (row 3) and to individual participants’ faces (row 4) extracted in Study 2.

These novel methods might advance theory regarding self-enhancement in the long run, because they allow investigation of self-enhancement (and self-protection) regarding various dimensions (e.g., facial, personality, typicality of a certain group membership), various groups of individuals (e.g., from different cultural backgrounds, age groups), and individuals in different situations (e.g., by temporarily manipulating self-esteem or
group membership), thus providing information about inter-group, inter-individual, and intra-individual differences in self-enhancement.

With regard to the benefits of self-enhancement, such as being happy and caring about the self and others (Taylor & Brown, 1988), detecting the groups or individuals who are successful, and the situations that facilitate doing so, seems to be a critical endeavor for future research.

Walker, M., & Keller, M. (2019). Beyond attractiveness: A multi-method approach to study enhancement in self-recognition on the Big Two personality dimensions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000157   

bright young things in economics

The xmas issue of The Economist presents a (gender-balanced!) list of 8 new stars of economics. I found it interesting to learn about the work of these very accomplished “bright young things” but derived even more pleasure from the historical narrative in the piece (perhaps, I admit, because it mostly matched my preconceptions about the recent history of economics…). 

The Economist has compiled such lists 4 times by now (1988, 1998, 2008, 2018) and so the piece compares the pool of chosen individuals to provide an historical overview of the field. 

According to The Economist, in 1988, empirical work enjoyed little prestige in economics and so most of the individuals picked as representing promise in the field were theorists with little concern for data analysis (think Paul Krugman). The piece quotes a poignant statement from the 80s by Edward Leamer: “Hardly anyone takes data analysis seriously. Or perhaps more accurately, hardly anyone takes anyone else’s data analysis seriously”. 

In 1998, a wave of empiricism started that continued since, with the application of economics to many different applied fields (think Levitt’s Freakonomics) and a focus on quasi-experimental methods for causal inference (think Angrist and Pischke’s Mostly harmless economics). This empirical turn of economics has been criticised for neglecting theory, being too “cute and clever”, and “looking for keys under lampposts”. In a nutshell, the bright economists of the 98/08 cohorts were criticised for showing more allegiance to their preferred tools (e.g., regression discontinuity, instrumental variable regression) than to substantive theory and questions, which led to a “hit-and-run” strategy of publishing on a given topic/dataset that allowed applying the method rather than a long-term strategy to explore a fundamental question. 

The 2018 cohort, The Economist suggests, has liberated itself from the empiricist growingpains of its predecessors and is allying methodological sophistication with the pursuit of important theoretical questions and societal problems, such as the economics education or inequality. In sum, the field has finally found the right balance of important issues, theory, and empirics (ah, what a bright future awaits us!). Ok, this sounds a bit too good to be true but it’s the Xmas issue after all…

You can read the full piece here. 

new year resolutions

The start of a new year is often a time for self-improvement and setting new goals. Here are a number of laudable goals for 2019 focusing on “a systemic change for science, to turn away from a growth paradigm and to refocus on quality, characterized by curiosity, surprise, discovery, and societal relevance.” (Seppelt et al., 2018). 

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Seppelt, R., Beckmann, M., Václavík, T., & Volk, M. (2018). The Art of Scientific Performance. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 33(11), 805–809. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2018.08.003

New publication on the interplay of attention and decision making

In this work, we sought to resolve a current debate on the influence of a third (distractor) option on the probability of choosing the better out of two other alternatives. One study reported that more valuable distractors make it more difficult to pick the best option (Louie et al., 2013, PNAS), but another study found just the opposite (Chau et al., 2014, Nature Neuroscience). In four experiments with a total of 147 participants, we used the paradigm of Chau and colleagues, added a specific set of trials, manipulated decision time, measured eye movements, and applied cognitive modeling to make sense of this controversy.

Remarkably, we neither found a positive nor a negative effect of the distractor’s value on the relative probability of choosing the best or the second-best option. Instead, better distractors were chosen more often themselves (even though participants were instructed not to pick them) and slowed down the choice process, thereby leading to longer response times and more failures to stay within the time limit. The best explanation for these effects was that the amount of attention spent on the distractor increased with its value. This was confirmed by eye-tracking data (see the figure): Participants looked more on high-value distractors (D), which made it more difficult for them to choose accurately. Finally, we analyzed the behavioral data of Chau and colleagues and found out that their effect resulted from a statistical artifact. Our study highlights the role of attention in speeded decision making as well as the importance of testing the robustness of previously published results.

Gluth, S.*, Spektor, M.S.*, & Rieskamp, J. (2018). Value-based attentional capture affects multi-alternative decision making. eLife, 7, e39659.

New paper on the influence of information structuring in discharge communication

We investigated the effects of information structuring and its potential interaction with pre-existing medical knowledge on recall in simulated discharge communications. Specifically, we asked students to view a set of well-controlled videos of a simulated discharge communication filmed from the point-of-view of a patient (the videos and data are available for download on OSF). Our goal was to investigate whether different ways of structuring information could provide differential memory benefits.

For this purpose, we randomly assigned our proxy-patients to one of four conditions: A natural conversation (NC) condition, that was not explicitly structured, a structure (S) condition that presented information organized by topics, and a book metaphor (BM) and post organizer (PO) conditions that also presented information structured by topics but, in addition, included a synopsis, either at the beginning or at the end of discharge communication, respectively. We assessed proxy-patients’ recall, perception of communication quality, and the students’ pre-existing medical knowledge.

The main results were that we did not find an overall difference in recall between the conditions, albeit in comparison to the natural conversation (i.e., unstructured) condition, proxy-patients in all information structuring conditions (S, BM, PO) more strongly recommended the physician to family and friends. More interestingly, we found an interaction between pre-existing medical knowledge and recall in the structured Book Methaphor (BM) condition (see figure below). This suggests that structured discharge communication complemented by the initial synopsis may be particularly beneficial to individuals with lower pre-existing medical knowledge.

Siegrist, V., Langewitz, W., Mata, R., Maiori, D., Hertwig, R., & Bingisser, R. (2018). The influence of information structuring and health literacy on recall and satisfaction in a simulated discharge communication. Patient Education and Counseling. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2018.08.008

New paper on emergency patients’ end-of-life decisions

We investigated emergency patients’ end-of-life decisions in to assess prevalence of decisions not to receive resuscitation (“do not attempt resuscitation”, or DNAR). We also examined potential medical and economic consequences and estimated the relative contributions of patient characteristics (such as age) and physicians to such decisions. The study was a single-centre retrospective observation at the University Hospital of Basel, including emergency patients with subsequent hospitalization between 2012 and 2016.

We found that decision to NOT receive resuscitation are common in emergency patients (ca. 23%) and that these decisions are associated with age (OR = 4.0, 95% CI = 3.6–4.3) and non-trauma presentation (OR = 2.3, 95% CI = 1.9–2.9). In other words, older and chronic disease patients are more likely to forego resuscitation. Mortality was significantly higher (OR = 5.4, CI = 4.0–7.3) and use of resources significantly lower (OR = 0.7, CI = 0.6–0.8) in patients with DNAR, suggesting that these decisions have important personal and economic consequences. One thing that was really interesting and, potentially, important, is that we found evidence for physician effects! This implies that there were significant effects of physician on whether someone decided to in principle forego resuscitation. Unfortunately, we cannot tell what about the physician or his/her communication led to such an effect but this finding raises questions about the autonomy of patients in their end-of-life decisions. It could be important to investigate further how these decisions are being made and how physicians impact these outcomes.

Siegrist, V., Eken, C., Nickel, C. H., Mata, R., Hertwig, R., & Bingisser, R. (2018). End-of-life decisions in emergency patients: Prevalence, outcome, and physician effect. QJM: An International Journal of Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1093/qjmed/hcy112