Sozial-, Wirtschafts- und Entscheidungspsychologie


Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Blog

Archive for September, 2017

EEA Lisabon

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.

psychology = freud?

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…

Jana Jarecki

Image result for Jana Jarecki

We have Jana Jarecki, Center for Economic Psychology, University of Basel, giving a talk in the Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Colloquium this Thursday (13:00; title and abstract follow)!

Exemplar-based processes for preferential choices

Most work on preferential choices assumes that people evaluate choice options by a weighting-and-adding of subjective values of the attributes of that option. Such linear models are widely used in consumer research and usually they account well for human choice data. We here propose a different process: people evaluate choice options based on comparisons with their previous experiences. Accordingly, preferences result from the similarity between a present option and previously experienced positively or negatively evaluated objects, resembling ideas of exemplar-based inferential judgment and categorization processes. Using cognitive modeling and computer simulations we identified a preference-learning task to optimally contrast the standard linear-weighting and the similarity-based view on preferences. Predicting the preferential choices of 33 participants in the resulting four-attribute unsupervised preference learning task showed that, for 20 of 33 participants, the out-of-sample predictions made by the exemplar-similarity-based preference model outperformed the linear-weighting model. These results show how individuals’ past experiences in a preferential domain can strongly impact preferential decisions in the future.

Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Colloquium HS2017

We have a full and promising schedule of talks for this fall’s Social, Economic, Decision Psychology Colloquium:

28.09.2017: Jana Jarecki, Economic Psychology, University of Basel

05.10.2017: Alex Koch, Social Cognition Center, University of Cologne

12.10.2017: Marc Schreiber, ZHAW School of Applied Psychology

19.10.2017: Pascal Gygax, University of Fribourg

26.10.2017: Yaacov Trope, New York University

02.11.2017: Jonas MB Haslbeck, University of Amsterdam

16.11.2017: Paolo Riva, University of Milano-Bicocca

23.11.2017: Sabina Hunziker Schütz, University Hospital Basel

30.11.20107: Jan Dijkstra, University of Groningen

07.12.2017: Martin Weber, Universität Mannheim

14.12.2017: Jiska Peper, Leiden University

 

Darwin

  

Any student of psychology should be familiar with Darwin and evolutionary theory – that’s why my History of Psychology students have to suffer through a couple of hours of Darwin and evolution each semester!

For this year’s lecture, I read two books that I can highly recommend, a biography by Desmond and Moore and Darwin’s autobiography.

Darwin started his work on natural selection shortly after his Beagle voyage but it took him 20 years to actually publish his ideas. Desmond and Moore aim to explain this by portraying Darwin as a “closet evolutionist” that is torn between science and religion (in particular the philosophical/religious implications of evolution). According to Desmond and Moore, Darwin is conflicted and anxious, fearful of loosing his standing in his Anglican conservative society, and hurting his deeply religious wife. The two books also make clear how Darwin’s “discovery” of natural selection is not the product of the work of an isolated genius but, rather, a good example of how (some?) scientific hypotheses emerge from a given social and historical context – Darwin himself points out how Malthusian ideas about scarcity and competition (that pervaded the political discourse of the time), the concept of long periods of time having shaped the geological record (advocated by Charles Lyell), and the accumulation of facts concerning variation and similarities between species, combined to help him think up natural selection.

Above all, the two books help put a human face to Darwin and it’s good fun to learn about Darwin as a boy and young man, chiefly interested in hunting and poetry, rather than more serious pursuits; so much so, that his father wagered the following rather poor forecast: “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”

Modeling Choices in Delay Discounting

Wouter van den Bos and I have published a commentary in Psychological Science showing that – contrary to the claim of an earlier paper by Ericson et al. (2012) – heuristic models of delay discounting do not outperform traditional utility-based models. Through reanalysis of their data, we further demonstrate that modeling delay discounting crucially depends on at least three aspects of the model comparison: The level of analysis (aggregate- or subject-level), the auxiliary assumptions used to map the models to behavior (exponential- vs. power choice rule), and the loss functions used to evaluate the models (e.g., MAD vs. LogLoss).

Wulff, D. U., & van den Bos, W. (2017). Modeling Choices in Delay Discounting. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797616664342

 

on economists and psychologists

“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

Towards an Ecological Perspective on Age–Performance Relations

Ralph Hertwig and I have written an ecological manifesto on how to study age-performance relations! We argue for the need to understand environment structure to predict whether older adults will do well (or poorly) in specific contexts and present some fun examples like aging in soccer and politics (title and abstract below)!

Towards an Ecological Perspective on Age–Performance Relations

The layperson’s view associates aging with biological and cognitive losses, which could be associated with decrements in work productivity and overall contributions to society. In turn, ecological approaches to life span development suggest that successful performance can result from an adaptive employment of an individual’s physical, cognitive, or social capital in the appropriate environment. This ecological framework suggests that one must understand the demands of particular ecologies (i.e., niches) to predict whether aging is associated with failure, maintenance, or even improvements in performance. We provide examples that illustrate the importance of an ecological approach to understanding adaptation to challenging decision tasks both in the laboratory and in the wild. Overall, we propose that there are specific strategies and niches that can help older adults thrive and that more work is needed to understand the exact characteristics that lead to good performance in old age.

Mata, R., & Hertwig, R. (2017). Towards an ecological perspective on age–performance relations. European Psychologist, 22, 151-158. https://doi.org/10.1027/1016-9040/a000292.