Pete Wegier

Pete Wegier, Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto, Canada, will give a presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 25 November, 15:00-16:00).

ARISE—Aiding Risk Information learning through Simulated Experience

 Conditional probabilities—the likelihood that one event will occur given that another event has already occurred—are common in medical decision making. “What’s the probability I have a disease given a screening test returned a positive result? 100%? 50%? 1%?” Properly understanding conditional probabilities is vital to informed medical decision making. Research has shown that people learn the probabilities in a choice differently if the decision is presented from description versus from experience. We will present a series of studies using the ARISE—Aiding Risk Information learning through Simulated Experience—paradigm, a visual method for simulating large numbers of results as a way for a decision maker to learn probably from experience.

Lene Aarøe

Lene Aarøe, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, will give a presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 11 November, 12:00-13:00).

Psychological biases for cheater detection shape social transmission of political news stories and trust

People receive a central part of their political news via interpersonal communication. The persistent circulation on social media of stories about for example Donald Trump’s tax avoidance or the “Bill Gates’ microchip” conspiracy theory about the Corona vaccine illustrate how political information spreads and endures in social networks. Yet not all types of political news stories are equally likely to “go viral” in interpersonal communication. Why are some stories transmitted massively in interpersonal communication and have strong impact on political opinions while others die out almost immediately? In this talk, I integrate cognitive and evolutionary psychology into the political science literature on the two-step communication flow to address this question. I argue that political news stories that resonate with deep-seated psychological biases for cheater detection will be transmitted more and have stronger impact on opinions in interpersonal communication. I present experimental evidence collected in the United States supporting this argument. The experiments employ the Chain Transmission Design which specifically detects psychological biases by tracking how information deteriorates in social transmission. The findings advance understanding of biases in social information circulation and the sources of political distrust: These democratic challenges are not merely driven by strategic elites but also by evolved “psychological news criteria” of the human mind.

Jennifer Trueblood

Jennifer Trueblood, Psychological Sciences, Vanderbilt University, will give a presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 4 November, 16:00-17:00).

Attentional dynamics explain the elusive nature of context effects

Over the past several decades, there has been extensive empirical and theoretical work on understanding “context effects” (attraction, compromise, and similarity) in multi-alternative, multi-attribute choice. These effects occur when choices among existing alternatives are altered by the addition of a new alternative to the choice set. While numerous studies have been published documenting the existence of the effects, recent studies have shown that the effects often disappear or reverse. In this talk, we show how changes in attentional processes account for the diversity of observed outcomes. In particular, we hypothesize that attention allocation based on (1) the spatial arrangement of options and (2) the similarity of options explains the elusiveness of context effects. With regards to the former, we reanalyze context effects data from Trueblood et al. (2015) showing that the spatial ordering of options (i.e., left to right placement of alternatives on the screen) impacts the strength of context effects, leading to null or reversed effects in some cases. These results likely arise because spatial layout biases attention towards particular options. With regards to similarity-based attention, we use model simulations to show that when similar options receive enhanced attention, standard effects emerge. However, when dissimilar options receive enhanced attention, the attraction and compromise effects reverse and the similarity effect strengthens. We test this hypothesis in new experiments manipulating similarity-based attention processes. We conclude by showing that differences in attentional processes could explain individual differences observed in context effects.