Sozial-, Wirtschafts- und Entscheidungspsychologie


Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Blog

Archive for February, 2017

age differences in decisions under risk

cpt

Thorsten Pachur, Ralph Hertwig, and I have a new paper out on age differences in risky choice (title, abstract, and reference follow).

Who Dares, Who Errs? Disentangling Cognitive and Motivational Roots of Age Differences in Decisions Under Risk

We separate for the first time the roles of cognitive and motivational factors in shaping age differences in decision making under risk. Younger and older adults completed gain, loss, and mixed-domain choice problems as well as measures of cognitive functioning and affect. The older adults’ decision quality was lower than the younger adults’ in the loss domain, and this age difference was attributable to the older adults’ lower cognitive abilities. In addition, the older adults chose the more risky option more often than the younger adults in the gain and mixed domains; this difference in risk aversion was attributable to less pronounced negative affect among the older adults. Computational modeling with a hierarchical Bayesian implementation of cumulative prospect theory revealed that the older adults had higher response noise and more optimistic decision weights for gains than did the younger adults. Moreover, the older adults showed no loss aversion, a finding that supports a positivity-focus (rather than a loss-prevention) view of motivational reorientation in older age.

Pachur, T., Mata, R., & Hetwig, R. (2017). Who dares, who errs? Disentangling cognitive and motivational roots of age differences in decisions under risk. Psychological Science. 

Graduate Consulting Club and Competition

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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.

Fiction and (schm)Empathy

I’ve been reading The Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante and I’m deeply impressed by the depth of her novels and how much they force the (male?) reader to take on a different perspective on human relations. Perhaps to assuage my guilty conscience about the opportunity costs involved (isn’t there some psych literature I should be reading?), I found myself trying to learn about research concerning the benefits/costs of reading fiction.

It turns out that there’s quite a bit out there and I found a TICS paper by Keith Oakley claiming that people who read may improve their empathy skills and that “this effect is especially marked with literary fiction, which also enables people to change themselves.”

By the way, I found that a similar argument has been made for watching West Wing (my favourite show and perhaps a good escapist way to deal with the harsh reality of the current political climate!).

Unfortunately, it’s not all roses when it comes to empathy. In fact, Paul Bloom has been arguing against empathy because it may often make us take irrational, parochial decisions, think “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic” (see here for a popular science article in German or here for his TICS paper on this topic).

Oh well, I’ll simply enjoy the Neapolitan Quartet and get back to reading psych soon enough…

Oatley, K. (2016). Fiction: Simulation of social worlds. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(8), 618–628. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.06.002

Bloom, P. (2017). Empathy, schmempathy: Response to Zaki. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21(2), 60–61. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.12.003

Bernoulli Symposium on Risk

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The Bernoulli Symposium on Risk took place Feb 2-4, 2017. A group of international researchers visited Basel to discuss individual variation in risk preference and risk-taking behaviour. It was a very stimulating and productive meeting involving a discussion of theoretical and measurement issues, and covering novel developmental, neural, and genetic approaches. The group will be writing a joint summary that describes the different views expressed in the symposium and that we hope will be helpful to many in the field – stay tuned!

19th Conference for Personality and Social Psychology

Selma Rudert and I, Mariela Jaffé, participated in the 19th Conference for Personality and Social Psychology, which took place end of January 2017 in San Antonio, Texas. Different topics were covered, such as big data, preregistration, new research tools such as automated text or image analysis, and many more. Additional sessions also offered an overview about job opportunities for social psychologists outside of academia. And of course every other talk had some side remark about the ongoing political changes in the US (yes, it was inauguration day during the conference).

Selma and I attended a lot of sessions on social groups and belonging, as well as morality and social cognition. During the conference Selma chaired a symposium on ostracism and social exclusion together with Andrew Hales and gave a talk about the importance of receiving acknowledgement after a social exclusion episode. I presented a poster on the topic of diversity, to show work in which I investigated the potential double standard of individuals’ choices that show that individuals themselves might prefer to work with a similar other, while they think that others should rather work with a more different person.

SanAntontioWe both very much enjoyed the discussions during the conference and collected lots of good input and ideas for our further research.

New Journal “Nature Human Behaviour”

Volume 1 Issue 1

From the editorial:

“Individual and collective human behaviour is studied by numerous fields, spanning the social and natural sciences and beyond. Genuine progress in understanding human behaviour can only be achieved through a multidisciplinary community effort. Nature Human Behaviour aims to foster that effort.

The study of human behaviour is key to improving the human condition and addressing pressing societal challenges — discrimination, poverty, inequality, conflict, unsustainable development, disease. Progress in achieving any of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development partly hinges on making progress in understanding, predicting, and changing human behaviour. Nonetheless, research in human behaviour has had no dedicated home. There are excellent discipline-specific journals serving each of the many fields that study human behaviour, but no forum for the publication of the most timely and broadly relevant research and opinion from across disciplines.

Nature Human Behaviour fills this gap, offering an outlet for cutting-edge research from any of the social and natural sciences that has a bearing on understanding human behaviour — its causes and consequences, its biological bases, the contexts that shape it, its evolutionary and developmental trajectories, its collective dynamics, the ways it can break down as well as the ways it can be changed. We welcome submissions from a very broad range of disciplines — including, but not limited to, psychology, economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, geography, epidemiology, behavioural ecology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, psychiatry, genetics, physics and computer science — that represent a major leap forward in describing, explaining, predicting or changing human behaviour.

We want to publish the research that matters the most to each field but that will also be of interest and influential for others working on human behaviour from different angles. We particularly welcome interdisciplinary research that combines theory or methods from two or more disciplines, as well as research that engages with urgent societal issues.

Scientific advances take different forms — some of the research we will be publishing will be characterized by high conceptual novelty; other by innovative methods; still other by its direct relevance in addressing a pressing societal challenge. Science advances by both discovery and (dis)confirmation, though, and for this reason we will also be publishing high-value replication studies, as well as studies that, due to their scale and rigour, supersede earlier research and significantly strengthen our confidence in a scientific discovery or convincingly dispel it.

Some of the disciplines that study human behaviour have long and rich individual traditions; others are newer arrivals, spun from recent technological advances or societal needs. The methods used in studying human behaviour are as varied as the disciplines that study it — but none takes precedence over the other in this journal. We are open to research using any methods — be they experimental or observational; based on primary or secondary data; formal or computational; qualitative, mixed, or case studies. What we are looking for is ‘best in class’ research that uses methods appropriate for the question asked. […]

The magazine section includes thought-provoking perspectives, incisive commentary, highlights from the literature and more, focusing on issues of societal relevance and significance. For instance, Duncan Watts highlights in a Perspective (article no. 0015) the negative consequences of disciplinary silos and advocates for social science to place more emphasis on solving practical problems that are of direct interest to decision makers and the public. Gary Slutkin argues that violence of any form (from street violence to war) can be effectively reduced if it is recognized as a contagious epidemic and treated with the methods of epidemic control (article no. 0025). James Heckman and Jorge Luís García discuss (article no. 0019) the social policy implications of research reported by Caspi et al. (article no. 0005), which shows that a small segment of the population accounts for a disproportionate share of costly service use in a society’s health-care and social welfare systems, and that this group can be predicted with high accuracy from as early as age 3 years. Elke Weber explains in a Comment (article no. 0013) the cognitive biases that stand in the way of making decisions for a sustainable future and how they can be overcome. Featured in other pieces are authoritative, insightful perspectives on policymaker behaviour, education policy, corruption, voter emotions and electoral decision-making, and the impact of technology on behaviour and the brain.

The journal is committed to publishing robust, rigorous science (see also companion Editorial) and incisive, provocative opinion. We will not shy away from covering controversial topics and will strive for pluralism of voices, including engaging stakeholders outside academia.

Ultimately, we aim to create a community space for all researchers working on human behaviour and those interested in advances in human behaviour research to interact, engage, and stay up to date with the most significant developments in the field. By fostering a diverse multidisciplinary community we hope to enable human behaviour research fulfil its mission of improving the human condition.”

URL: http://www.nature.com/nathumbehav/