Sozial-, Wirtschafts- und Entscheidungspsychologie


Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Blog

Archive for September, 2019

Winter School on Bounded Rationality in Manipal, India

Join me this January at the TAPMI-Max Planck-Chinese Academy Winter School on Bounded Rationality in Manipal, India.

Like its sister event, the Summer Institute for Bounded Rationality at the MPI in Berlin, the winter school seeks to provide an interdisciplinary platform for sharing knowledge, discussing the importance and applications of simple solutions to complex problems from the perspective of bounded rationality.

The winter school, taking place at the T.A. Pai Management Institute (TAPMI), Manipal, India, on January 13-19, invites applications from pre- and post-docs from around the world. The accepted participants receive free accommodation and about CHF 210 towards their travel expenses.

The application deadline is October 15. You can apply here.

This year’s winter school will have a particular focus on financial decision making. Find out more at tapmi.edu.in/winterschool

 

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

Christina Leuker

This coming Thursday’s presentation in the SWE Colloquium will be given by Christina Leuker, postdoc, Adaptive Reality at the MPI for Human Development. 

Who finds what repugnant and why?

Christina Leuker, Lasare Samartzidis, Ralph Hertwig

 

Many people consider it morally impermissible to trade body parts such as kidneys; civil duties such as buying out of jury duty or permits for having children on the free market. All of these are examples of repugnant transactions (Roth, 2007; Sandel, 2013). When and why does repugnance arise? We asked respondents to evaluate 51 disputed market transactions; and to characterise them on various properties (e.g., to what extent does the transaction pose a risk to the seller?). We also assessed individual differences (preferences for different ethical principles; political ideology; market attitudes; personality). A factor analysis revealed that many properties were correlated and could be assigned to five distinct factors—moral outrage, need for regulation, incommensurability, exploitation, and unknown risk. On the individual level, respondents who consider some goods as sacred; consider religion important, subscribe to deontological reasoning and conservative political views all viewed the transactions in our set to be more repugnant; whereas those who value market efficiency made the opposite assessment. These results were consistent in two independent samples. These results can help identify mismatches between peoples’ assessments and current regulations; and help anticipate responses to novel markets that have not yetbeen scrutinised in public debate.

Defending the Power of Faces

Last Thursday the Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology group was attending (and later celebrating) Matt Keller’s successful defense of his doctoral thesis. In his defense talk, Matt discussed the Refined Reverse Correlation Technique, which he developed during his PhD in Basel. This technique allows researchers to visualize the facial representation of stereotypes (e.g., how does a person that might be ostracized look like?) and therefore investigate the consequences of the conclusions that we all draw from other people’s faces. After providing an in-depth introduction into the theory, the method, and the application, Matt successfully answered all of the questions that his PhD committee raised.

We are very happy to congratulate Matt on his successful defense. Matt did not only complete his PhD on that day and received his well-deserved title, he is now also the owner of a very fancy doctoral hat that has been specifically designed for the important occasion. Excitingly, Matt will stay at the Center for Social Psychology as a post-doctoral researcher, where he will continue to work on his research on face perception and teach students in psychology.

 

We are the weather

I read “We are the weather” by Jonathan Safran Foer over the weekend and found it quite stimulating. Foer intertwines science with historical anecdotes and personal history to make for an engaging read.

The book is an ecological manifesto for reducing the consumption of animal products. The main premise is that the world has become an animal farm, with animal husbandry being one of the major contributors to man-made climate change, something between 14% to 51% of CO2e emissions (the epistemic uncertainty about this estimate is discussed in the book’s appendix). 

Foer’s proposal is to forgo meat and dairy before dinner. This seems like a half-measure given the strong case against animal farming that Foer makes earlier in the book – an attempt to spare sensibilities of meat-eaters and flexitarians around the world (after all they buy books too!). Also, surprinsigly, Foer does little to discuss other measures of climate change mitigation, such as transportation (driving or flying) that are also well in the realm of behaviours that individuals can control. 

I find the book is at its strongest not in it’s proposal regarding the consumption of animal products but how Foer discusses the personal struggle of changing one’s own behaviour to match one’s beliefs. For example, Foer describes how he’s failed to adopt a vegan life-style despite his convictions, and how he sometimes has trouble resisting the forbidden burger at the airport, or the enticing dairy at breakfast. After learning everything there is to learn about climate change one can still fail to act in accordance with one’s best knowledge. 

The Science of Behaviour Change

Psychology is of course a science of behaviour change and it has much to help in guiding both individuals and institutions in this regard. Importantly, our field is moving away from single hyped-up panaceas (e.g., nudges) to more encompassing theories that include changes of the physical and social environment, as well as cognitive and motivational processes. Susan Michie has done a lot to put this work on a solid footing by creating a taxonomy of behaviour change techniques and an empirical agenda to assess their efficacy (you can find an introduction to Michie et al.’s behaviour change wheel  in Michie, van Stralen, & West, 2011).

This work stems from the field of health psychology, concerned with issues like obesity, physical activity, and smoking, and so its straightforward to apply it to the nutrition choices that Foer discusses. One can also see how similar principles can be translated into other life style changes, such as transportation choices.

The science is in and we’ve got the tools – it’s time for psychologists to suit up for: “Behaviour change, not climate change!”

Michie, S., van Stralen, M. M., & West, R. (2011). The behaviour change wheel: A new method for characterising and designing behaviour change interventions. Implementation Science, 6(1), 42. http://doi.org/10.1186/1748-5908-6-42

Jörn Hurtienne

Jörn Hurtienne, Professor of Psychological Ergonomics at the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, visits this week to speak in the SWE Colloquium on Thursday 26 September.

Metaphor, intuitive interaction and the design of innovative products

Social psychology has produced a wide range of research into the effects of conceptual embodied metaphor on judgement and decision making. We know, for example, that holding a warm (vs. cold) beverage influences judgements of friendliness and that the weight of a book influences its perceived importance. Starting from the same premises in cognitive linguistics, I have been applying conceptual metaphors to the design of intuitive product interaction—via semantic associations and bodily experiences. It can be shown that image-schematic metaphors contribute to finding innovative solutions for interactive products that are intuitive to use and can be age-inclusive.

flying less

Ok, so the world is going to pieces and I feel I haven’t been helping much in the past years. Of course, I’m not alone. Statistically speaking, as you can see from the figure below, Europeans have a heavy ecological footprint, and it looks like Switzerland is no exception.

Ecological footprint by country: This figure shows the national ecological surplus (or deficit), measured as a country’s biocapacity per person minus its ecological footprint per person in 2013.

But what can I personally do about this? Short of dying, having fewer children could be the best way to reduce carbon emissions (see Figure below; Wynes & Nicholas, 2017), but, for me personally, deciding to not have more children doesn’t seem like much – I’m already the father of two and wasn’t planning on having more. I also don’t own a car and I’m a flexitarian…

Flying

Then there’s flying. Flying accounts for “only” about 2% of global carbon emissions but it is one of the few things I feel I can control as an individual. I have flown quite a bit for personal and professional reasons. I may also have contributed to other people’s flying by inviting researchers to visit Basel for talks/workshops and encouraging co-workers to attend conferences (“You’ve got to get yourself out there!”). Also, for most of these, I did not atone by offsetting associated carbon emissions. My sins have caught up with me – I’m experiencing a bad case of “flight shame”.

My Personal Fight Against Flight Shame

The problem is that there is a clear trade-off between the ecological costs of flying and professional development. Attending conferences and workshops is an important way to stay up to date on latest scientific developments and build (or keep) a network of collaborators – and science is more and more a collaborative enterprise.

After considerable soul-searching, I have come up with some personal rules to help me navigate this trade-off and accept a life in which flying is an exception:

  1. Think before booking. I now check the footprint of my travel using sites like ecopassanger. This may not seem like much but it now allows me to engage in an internal soliloquy pitting scientific/personal benefits agains ecological costs (in CO2 tonnes).
  2. Cut down on conferences. I’ve cut down on the number of conferences and workshops I attend, in particular those that would require intercontinental flights. This is sometimes tough. For example, I was recently invited to present at a a workshop that was a perfect fit for my research profile but would imply flying (involving over 4 tones CO2 emissions); unfortunately, the event would take place during the semester so I had trouble combining this trip with other scientific events or personal visits that would make me feel comfortable with the benefits/ecological-footprint ratio. Even though I ended up saying no, I wavered quite a bit, going back on forth on pros and cons (quantifying the ecological costs was helpful though).
  3. Taking the train. I’ve switched to taking trains for trips that I used to fly (e.g., Basel-Berlin) or, for long trips, doing 1-trip by train and then flying back (e.g., Basel-Lisbon).
  4. Carbon offsetting. When I do fly, I offset using sites like myclimate or atmosfair.
  5. Meeting remotely. I have a few international collaborations that I kindle using technology (e.g., Skype). It does not eliminate the need for personal interaction but it substitutes some meetings and can be used to help planning and increase productivity when one does end up meeting face-to-face. In our lab, we also have some good experience doing cross-lab collaboration using software, like covidence, which allows to have researchers (coders for meta-analysis) in two sites that interact remotely through the covidence software and Skype meetings.
  6. Letting the world come to me. I try to make the most of guests at our faculty (SWE Colloquium), other faculties at the University of Basel (such as the Faculty of Economics), and other meetings in Switzerland.
  7. Raise awareness. I’m trying to raise awareness by discussing this issue in our department (for example, by writing this blog post), and developing some guidelines concerning flying in our center (stay tuned, CDSers!).
  8. Thing globally, act locally. Finally, I have realised I need to get more active at a local level, supporting regional scientific networks and societies, making sure that we can do the best science right here at home.

I’m no trailblazer: This is a conversation that many want to have in science, as attested by recent papers in Nature, movements at German Universities, and some institutional programs at Swiss institutions, like the ETH. Of course, my personal set of rules and such trends may not be enough to save the world but #flyingless surely can’t hurt.

Wynes, S., & Nicholas, K. A. (2017). The climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions. Environmental Research Letters, 12(7), 074024–10. http://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541

Jan Peters

On 19 September, Jan Peters (Professor of Biological Psychology at the University of Cologne) visits to give the first talk in this semester’s SWE Colloquia series.

Value-based decision-making in gambling disorders

Gambling disorder is a behavioural addiction that shares core features with substance-use disorders, in particular in the areas of decision-making and cognitive control. First, I will present data from a restless bandit task showing that gambling disorder attenuates directed exploration during reinforcement learning, a process that I will show in a pharmacological approach in healthy controls under dopaminergic control. I will then show that reinforcement learning impairments in gamblers also extend to simpler stationary environments. In the second part of my talk, I will show data from a behavioural study in real-world contextual settings highlighting that gambling-related environments can substantially potentiate decision-making impairments in gamblers, a finding that will be discussed in the context of transdiagnostic processes in psychiatry. If time permits, I will finally discuss data on the role of frontal dopamine in risky decision-making in gambling disorder. Taken together, findings highlight how specific impairments in gambling disorder can be further characterised via computational modelling, and how these processes are shaped by environmental factors.

Factfulness

I read Factfulness over the summer, the posthumously published book by Hans Rosling (coauthored with Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Ola Rosling). The book is an easy and entertaining read. You may know some of these authors’ work from  their TED talks – and the book does justice to the message and entertainer quality of the Rosling team. 

Factfulness is a strong manifesto for combating ignorance with data. The idea that evidence-based decisions are needed to improve living conditions around the world may seem a truism but the Roslings really bring the message home by, first, letting readers assess their own ignorance (readers are asked to do an initial quizz that is likely to make one feel rather ignorant about demographics, living conditions, and other aspects of life around the world). Second, the Roslings list “heuristics” that both experts and laypeople may use to make sense of the world from their rather limited knowledge (labelled Gap, Negativity, Straight Line, Fear, Size, Generalization, Destiny, Single, Blame, and Urgency) and that they suggest we must keep in check by considering (up to date) data. As a psychologist, one may wonder whether these “heuristics” are actually used or what the cognitive mechanisms underlying the discussed phenomena really are but, that aside, the 10-point program works to keep us engaged and figuring out how data (when visualized appropriately) can help correct false assumptions. 

On this note, I recently found a worthy initiative that seems to embody the “factfulness” spirit: Our world in data. The initiative led by Max Roser, University of Oxford, is to use “research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems”. Our World in Data publishes short online “articles”, each focusing on a specific topic and typically providing a mix of review and many visualisations of (mostly publicly available) data. One particularly interesting piece I read recently was “Does the news reflect what we die from?”

The piece reports analyses of the causes of deaths in the USA (from public records), Google search trends for causes of deaths, as well as mentions of causes of deaths in the New York Times and The Guardian. As you can see in the figure below, “the news doesn’t reflect what we die from” and this of course has implications for issues of risk perception and communication: If the public is given wrong (non-representative) information, can we expect public opinion to have adequate preferences for action concerning these causes of death? 

Of course, knowledge isn’t everything. After all, many people know that smoking and sugary drinks are bad for one’s health but this does not keep many individuals from cigarettes and soda. Be that as it may, some more factfulness in our lives is probably a good thing and it’s good to see the social sciences make use of data to understand the world.

Open Science in Aging Research

Last week, I attended the 8th edition of the Geneva Aging Series, organised by the Cognitive Aging Lab (Matthias Kliegel, University of Geneva). This year’s topic was “Cognition meets emotion” and included keynotes by Carien van Reekum, University of Reading, UK, who presented work on the neural basis of individual and age differences in emotional processing, and Derek Isaacowitz, Northeastern University, USA, who gave an overview on experimental work aiming to assess the links between aging and emotion identification/regulation and included some food-for-thought about open science in aging research. 

Derek pointed out that most work on aging focuses on identifying differences between age groups (while similarities are likely to be considered of less importance) and argued that this is likely to have led to a large rate of false positives in aging research. Derek suggested that this state of affairs may imply we need to reassess some preconceptions about key findings in our field, for example, those related to positivity effects in emotional processing with increased age (“older adults look on the brighter side of life”). 

More generally, Derek suggested that aging journals have a responsibility to foster open sciences practices (e.g., encourage replications and registered reports, encourage/mandate publishing of data and code) to help counteract the tendency of reporting only “significant” age differences and reduce researcher-degrees-of-freedom to put aging research on firmer empirical ground. 

I for one, as reviewer, would very much appreciate clearer guidelines from aging journals about what to expect/demand from authors. These days, I end most of my reviews encouraging authors to make their data and code available (Yes! I’m Reviewer #2) but it would be nice if this went without saying and there were checklists in place that could help authors and reviewers in this process. Fortunately, there are some initiatives in this direction at Journals of Gerontology B: Psychological Sciences (for which Derek is an editor-in-chief) and, somewhat more timidly, at Psychology and Aging (where I serve as a consulting editor). It would be great to see open science gain some traction in aging research… 

taming uncertainty

Ralph Hertwig et al. have a new book out, Taming Uncertainty, that covers much of the recent work done at the Center for Adaptive Rationality, which aims to understand how humans deal with uncertainty. The book features some chapters from CDS researchers including Dirk Wulff et al. (“Adaptive exploration: What you see is up to you”) and Renato Frey and myself (“The life-span development of risk preference”). Here’s is the summary from MIT Press:

Taming Uncertainty

An examination of the cognitive tools that the mind uses to grapple with uncertainty in the real world.

How do humans navigate uncertainty, continuously making near-effortless decisions and predictions even under conditions of imperfect knowledge, high complexity, and extreme time pressure? Taming Uncertainty argues that the human mind has developed tools to grapple with uncertainty. Unlike much previous scholarship in psychology and economics, this approach is rooted in what is known about what real minds can do. Rather than reducing the human response to uncertainty to an act of juggling probabilities, the authors propose that the human cognitive system has specific tools for dealing with different forms of uncertainty. They identify three types of tools: simple heuristics, tools for information search, and tools for harnessing the wisdom of others. This set of strategies for making predictions, inferences, and decisions constitute the mind’s adaptive toolbox.

The authors show how these three dimensions of human decision making are integrated and they argue that the toolbox, its cognitive foundation, and the environment are in constant flux and subject to developmental change. They demonstrate that each cognitive tool can be analyzed through the concept of ecological rationality—that is, the fit between specific tools and specific environments. Chapters deal with such specific instances of decision making as food choice architecture, intertemporal choice, financial uncertainty, pedestrian navigation, and adolescent behavior.