55 research outputs found
A pessimistic view of optimistic belief updating
Received academic wisdom holds that human judgment is characterized by unrealistic optimism, the tendency to underestimate the likelihood of negative events and overestimate the likelihood of positive events. With recent questions being raised over the degree to which the majority of this research genuinely demonstrates optimism, attention to possible mechanisms generating such a bias becomes ever more important. New studies have now claimed that unrealistic optimism emerges as a result of biased belief updating with distinctive neural correlates in the brain. On a behavioral level, these studies suggest that, for negative events, desirable information is incorporated into personal risk estimates to a greater degree than undesirable information (resulting in a more optimistic outlook). However, using task analyses, simulations and experiments we demonstrate that this pattern of results is a statistical artifact. In contrast with previous work, we examined participantsโ use of new information with reference to the normative, Bayesian standard. Simulations reveal the fundamental difficulties that would need to be overcome by any robust test of optimistic updating. No such test presently exists, so that the best one can presently do is perform analyses with a number of techniques, all of which have important weaknesses. Applying these analyses to five experiments shows no evidence of optimistic updating. These results clarify the difficulties involved in studying human โbiasโ and cast additional doubt over the status of optimism as a fundamental characteristic of healthy cognition
Measuring individual differences in decision biases: methodological considerations
BACKGROUND: Individual differences in peopleโs 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 participantsโ
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
participantsโ 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
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