The observing self: Diminishing egocentrism through brief mindfulness meditation

Reflecting the egocentrism that permeates contemporary society, people often believe they stand out in the eyes of others (i.e., the spotlight effect), a conviction that is entirely misplaced. Although considerable efforts have focused on elucidating the consequences of the spotlight effect, much less is known about factors that may attenuate this illusory perception. Accordingly, the current study explored the possibility that, via shifts in perspectives on the self (i.e., first person vs. third person), brief mindfulness-based meditation may reduce a future-oriented variant of this bias. The results revealed that, compared with responses in the control conditions (i.e., control meditation or no mediation), brief mindfulness-based meditation fostered the adoption of a third-person vantage point during mental imagery and diminished perceptions of personal salience

Measuring individual differences in decision biases: methodological considerations

BACKGROUND: Individual differences in people’s susceptibility to heuristics and biases (HB) are often measured by multiple- bias questionnaires consisting of one or a few items for each bias. This research approach relies on the assumptions that (1) different versions of a decision bias task measure are interchangeable as they measure the same cognitive failure; and (2) that some combination of these tasks measures the same underlying construct. Based on these assumptions, in Study 1 we developed two versions of a new decision bias survey for which we modified 13 HB tasks to increase their comparability, construct validity, and the participants’ motivation. The analysis of the responses (N = 1279) showed weak internal consistency within the surveys and a great level of discrepancy between the extracted patterns of the underlying factors. To explore these inconsistencies, in Study 2 we used three original examples of HB tasks for each of seven biases. We created three decision bias surveys by allocating one version of each HB task to each survey. The participants’ responses (N = 527) showed a similar pattern as in Study 1, questioning the assumption that the different examples of the HB tasks are interchangeable and that they measure the same underlying construct. These results emphasize the need to understand the domain-specificity of cognitive biases as well as the effect of the wording of the cover story and the response mode on bias susceptibility before employing them in multiple-bias questionnaires

Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/bdm.495 When Effortful Thinking Influences Judgmental Anchoring: Differential Effects of Forewarning and Incentives on Self-generated and Externally Provided Anchors

Two experiments examined the impact of financial incentives and forewarnings on judgmental anchoring effects, or the tendency for judgments of uncertain qualities to be biased in the direction of salient anchor values. Previous research has found no effect of either manipulation on the magnitude of anchoring effects. We argue, however, that anchoring effects are produced by multiple mechanisms—one involving an effortful process of adjustment from ‘‘self-generated’ ’ anchors, and another involving the biased recruitment of anchor-consistent information from ‘‘externally provided’ ’ anchors— and that only the former should be influenced by incentives and forewarning. Two studies confirmed these predictions, showing that responses to ‘‘self-generated’ ’ anchors are influenced by both incentives and forewarnings whereas responses to ‘‘externally provided’ ’ anchors are not. Discussion focuses on the implications of these effects for debiasing efforts. Copyright # 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. key words anchoring; bias; incentives; effortful though