Sozial-, Wirtschafts- und Entscheidungspsychologie


Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Blog

Archive for June, 2021

Renzo Bianchi

Renzo Bianchi, SNF Ambizione Researcher, Université de Neuchâtel, will give a presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 1 July).

Burnout or occupational depression? An overview of recent developments in job distress research

This talk will address the issue of burnout-depression overlap and present a new instrument, the Occupational Depression Inventory. An emphasis will be put on cognitive bias and cognitive performance in the examination of burnout-depression overlap.

Marie Crouzevialle

Marie Crouzevialle, ETH Zürich, will give a presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 24 June).

Construal level and achievement motivation: Beliefs and meta-motivational knowledge about the benefits and downsides of low-level and high-level construal

Construal level theory (Liberman & Trope, 2008) identifies abstraction as the key process that allows forming representations of distal objects such as goals, ambitions, and plans, and affords expansion of one’s regulatory scope beyond the here-and-now (Fujita, Trope, & Liberman, 2015). We relied on a meta-motivational approach to test whether people recognize the selective motivational benefits of abstract vs. concrete mindset. In the first line of research, results across eight experiments (N = 1110) shows that people associate abstraction with incremental theories and detect its relevance in situations that require progressing and projecting one’s competences into the future; we investigate how those beliefs about abstraction guide impression formation and mentalizing. In the second line of research (N = 430), we report evidence that individuals do recognize the benefits of low-level construal for task focus and performance when the achievement situation carries distraction and threat.

Nicolas Sommet

Nicolas Sommet, University of Lausanne, will give a presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 17 June).

Income inequality fosters competitiveness at school

In four preregistered studies, we tested whether contexts with high income inequality foster an ethos of competitiveness among the workforce of tomorrow: Is income inequality associated with more competitiveness and less cooperativeness at school? Three preregistered observational studies using OECD PISA data (a total of ≈850,000 15-year-old students from 75+ countries observed in 2018, 2003, and/or 2000) and one preregistered experiment (≈850 young adults imagining going back to school) led to four sets of findings. Income inequality systematically predicted (i) higher perceived competitiveness, (ii) lower perceived cooperativeness, (iii) an orientation toward competitiveness, and (iv) an orientation towards instrumental rather than intrinsic cooperativeness (i.e., using cooperation as a strategic tool to achieve academic success rather than for the enjoyment of the activity itself). Results are discussed in relation to the literature on the psychology of income inequality, the selective function of school systems, and the concept of competition.

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