Political coherence and certainty as drivers of interpersonal liking over and above similarity

Affective polarization and political segregation have become a serious threat to democratic societies. One standard explanation for these phenomena is that people like and prefer interacting with similar others. However, similarity may not be the only driver of interpersonal liking in the political domain, and other factors, yet to be uncovered, could play an important role. Here, we hypothesized that beyond the effect of similarity, people show greater preference for individuals with politically coherent and confident opinions. To test this idea, we performed two behavioral studies consisting of one-shot face-to-face pairwise interactions. We found that people with ambiguous or ambivalent views were nonreciprocally attracted to confident and coherent ingroups. A third experimental study confirmed that politically coherent and confident profiles are rated as more attractive than targets with ambiguous or ambivalent opinions. Overall, these findings unfold the key drivers of the affability between people who discuss politics.Fil: Zimmerman, Federico Guido. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; ArgentinaFil: Garbulsky, Gerry. No especifíca;Fil: Ariely, Dan. University of Duke; Estados UnidosFil: Sigman, Mariano. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; Argentina. Universidad Nebrija; EspañaFil: Navajas Ahumada, Joaquin Mariano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; Argentin

Moral Responses to the COVID-19 Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised complex moral dilemmas that have been the subject of extensive public debate. Here, we study how people judge a set of controversial actions related to the crisis: relaxing data privacy standards to allow public control of the pandemic, forbidding public gatherings, denouncing a friend who violated COVID-19 protocols, prioritizing younger over older patients when medical resources are scarce, and reducing animal rights to accelerate vaccine development. We collected acceptability judgements in an initial large-scale study with participants from 10 Latin American countries (N = 15 420). A formal analysis of the intrinsic correlations between responses to different dilemmas revealed that judgements were organized in two dimensions: one that reflects a focus on human life expectancy and one that cares about the health of all sentient lives in an equitable manner. These stereotyped patterns of responses were stronger in people who endorsed utilitarian decisions in a standardized scale. A second pre-registered study performed in the USA (N = 1300) confirmed the replicability of these findings. Finally, we show how the prioritization of public health correlated with several contextual, personality and demographic factors. Overall, this research sheds light on the relationship between utilitarian decision-making and moral responses to the COVID-19 crisis.Fil: Navajas Ahumada, Joaquin Mariano. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Alvarez Heduan, Facundo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Garbulsky, Gerry. No especifíca;Fil: Tagliazucchi, Enzo Rodolfo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Ariely, Dan. University of Duke; Estados UnidosFil: Sigman, Mariano. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

The interplay between partisanship, forecasted COVID-19 deaths, and support for preventive policies

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis that has forced governments around the world to implement large-scale interventions such as school closures and national lockdowns. Previous research has shown that partisanship plays a major role in explaining public attitudes towards these policies and beliefs about the intensity of the crisis. However, it remains unclear whether and how partisan differences in policy support relate to partisan gaps in beliefs about the number of deaths that the pandemic will cause. Do individuals who forecast fewer COVID-19 deaths show less agreement with preventive measures? How does partisanship correlate with people’s beliefs about the intensity of the crisis and their support for COVID-19 policies? Here, we sought to answer these questions by performing a behavioral experiment in Argentina (Experiment 1, N = 640) and three quasi-replication studies in Uruguay (Experiment 2, N = 372), Brazil (Experiment 3, N = 353) and the United States (Experiment 4, N = 630). In all settings, participants forecasted the number of COVID-19 deaths in their country after considering either a high or low number, and then rated their agreement with a series of interventions. This anchoring procedure, which experimentally induced a large variability in the forecasted number of deaths, did not modify policy preferences. Instead, each experiment provided evidence that partisanship was a key indicator of the optimism of forecasts and the degree of support for COVID-19 policies. Remarkably, we found that the number of forecasted deaths was robustly uncorrelated with participants’ agreement with preventive measures designed to prevent those deaths. We discuss these empirical observations in the light of recently proposed theories of tribal partisan behavior. Moreover, we argue that these results may inform policy making as they suggest that even the most effective communication strategy focused on alerting the public about the severity of the pandemic would probably not translate into greater support for COVID-19 preventive measures.Fil: Freira Polleri, Maria Lucia. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. Escuela de Negocios; ArgentinaFil: Sartorio, Marco. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. Escuela de Negocios; ArgentinaFil: Boruchowicz, Cynthia. Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo.; Estados UnidosFil: Lopez Boo, Florencia. Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo.; Estados UnidosFil: Navajas Ahumada, Joaquin Mariano. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. Escuela de Negocios; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Acciones a largo plazo: El enfoque de la neurociencia en la economía del siglo XXI

La neurociencia explica tres áreas que son centrales para la integración y el comercio latinoamericanos: la percepción del riesgo, la cooperación y la innovación.· Un grupo de agentes individualmente óptimos puede producir un comportamiento colectivo equivocado, lo que se conoce como "cascada de información", por la que muchos economistas explican fenómenos globales como las crisis financieras.· Formar sub-redes de colaboración autónomas dentro de una red más extensa de alguna manera imita la arquitectura del cerebro, formado también por módulos que realizan cómputos independientes en paralelo para luego integrar esa información a nivel global y producir pensamientos, emociones y decisiones.Fil: Navajas Ahumada, Joaquin Mariano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; ArgentinaFil: Sigman, Mariano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; Argentin

El trabajo se transforma: Implicancias de la automatización y el comercio en el mercado laboral

El experimento muestra que en toda la región la pérdida del empleo por la apertura comercial es menos aceptable que el desempleo ocasionado por el avance de las tecnologías. El 46% de los participantes considera aceptable prohibir la importación de ropa para preservar el empleo, mientras que solo el 33% aceptaría prohibir el uso de tecnologías con este fin. · Si se introduce al gobierno como responsable de las medidas que generarían pérdidas de empleo, el nivel de aceptación de las tecnologías y de la apertura comercial se equipara. · El estudio corrobora que, debido al sesgo de contabilidad mental, las personas suelen ser irracionales para categorizar el uso del dinero. Por ejemplo, la mayoría considera más aceptable recibir un curso de capacitación de 300 dólares que recibir un bonus por ese mismo monto.Fil: Sartorio, Marco. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; ArgentinaFil: Navajas Ahumada, Joaquin Mariano. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Eye fixations indicate men's preference for female breasts or buttocks

Evolutionary psychologists have been interested in male preferences for particular female traits that are thought to signal health and reproductive potential.While the majority of studies have focused on what makes specific body traits attractive- such as the waist-To-hip ratio, the body mass index, and breasts shape and size-There is little empirical research that has examinedindividual differences inmale preferences for specific traits (e.g., favoring breasts over buttocks). The current study begins to fill this empirical gap. In the first experiment (Study 1), 184 male participants were asked to report their preference between breasts and buttocks on a continuous scale. We found that (1) the distribution of preference was bimodal, indicating that Argentinean males tended to define themselves as favoring breasts or buttocks but rarely thinking that these traits contributed equally to their choice and (2) the distributionwas biased towardsbuttocks. Inasecondexperiment(Study2), 19maleparticipants were asked to rate pictures of female breasts and buttocks. This studywas necessary to generate three categories of pictures with statistically different ratings (high, medium, and low). In a third experiment (Study 3), we recorded eye-movements of 25 male participants while they chose the more attractive between twowomen, only seeing their breasts and buttock.We found that the first and last fixations were systematically directed towards the self-reported preferred trait. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012.Fil: Dagnino, Bruno. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Física. Laboratorio de Neurociencia Integrativa; ArgentinaFil: Navajas Ahumada, Joaquin Mariano. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Física. Laboratorio de Neurociencia Integrativa; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Sigman, Mariano. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Física. Laboratorio de Neurociencia Integrativa; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; Argentin

Dynamics of visibility, confidence, and choice during eye movements

We study the dynamics of objective and subjective measures of visibility and choice in brief presentations occurring within a fixation during free eye-movements. We show that brief presentations yield homogeneous levels of performance in a window that extends almost throughout the entire fixation. Instead, confidence judgments vary for presentations occurring at different moments of the fixations. When the target occurs close to the onset of the fixation, it is reported accurately but with lower values of confidence; when it occurs close to the end of the fixation, it is reported with high confidence (Experiments 1 and 2). Consistently, in experiments in which participants can freely choose to report items, we observe a report bias toward the end of the fixation, where the maximum of confidence occurs for experiments with a single target (Experiments 3 and 4). Hence, these results suggest that confidence is not merely a measure of accumulated stimulus energy but instead varies reflecting an endogenous integration process by which later stimuli are assigned greater confidence. © 2014 American Psychological Association.Fil: Navajas Ahumada, Joaquin Mariano. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentina. University of Leicester; Reino UnidoFil: Sigman, Mariano. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Kamienkowski, Juan Esteban. Universidad Diego Portales; Chile. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; Argentin

Aggregated knowledge from a small number of debates outperforms the wisdom of large crowds

The aggregation of many independent estimates can outperform the most accurate individual judgement 1-3. This centenarian finding 1,2, popularly known as the 'wisdom of crowds' 3, has been applied to problems ranging from the diagnosis of cancer 4 to financial forecasting 5. It is widely believed that social influence undermines collective wisdom by reducing the diversity of opinions within the crowd. Here, we show that if a large crowd is structured in small independent groups, deliberation and social influence within groups improve the crowd's collective accuracy. We asked a live crowd (N = 5,180) to respond to general-knowledge questions (for example, "What is the height of the Eiffel Tower?"). Participants first answered individually, then deliberated and made consensus decisions in groups of five, and finally provided revised individual estimates. We found that averaging consensus decisions was substantially more accurate than aggregating the initial independent opinions. Remarkably, combining as few as four consensus choices outperformed the wisdom of thousands of individuals.Fil: Navajas Ahumada, Joaquin Mariano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; ArgentinaFil: Niella, Tamara. State University of Oregon; Estados Unidos. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; ArgentinaFil: Garbulsky, Gerry. TED; ArgentinaFil: Bahrami, Bahador. University College London; Estados Unidos. Universidad de Múnich; AlemaniaFil: Sigman, Mariano. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Extracting information from the shape and spatial distribution of evoked potentials

Background Over 90 years after its first recording, scalp electroencephalography (EEG) remains one of the most widely used techniques in human neuroscience research, in particular for the study of event-related potentials (ERPs). However, because of its low signal-to-noise ratio, extracting useful information from these signals continues to be a hard-technical challenge. Many studies focus on simple properties of the ERPs such as peaks, latencies, and slopes of signal deflections. New method To overcome these limitations, we developed the Wavelet-Information method which uses wavelet decomposition, information theory, and a quantification based on single-trial decoding performance to extract information from evoked responses. Results Using simulations and real data from four experiments, we show that the proposed approach outperforms standard supervised analyses based on peak amplitude estimation. Moreover, the method can extract information using the raw data from all recorded channels using no a priori knowledge or pre-processing steps. Comparison with existing method(s) We show that traditional approaches often disregard important features of the signal such as the shape of EEG waveforms. Also, other approaches often require some form of a priori knowledge for feature selection and lead to problems of multiple comparisons. Conclusions This approach offers a new and complementary framework to design experiments that go beyond the traditional analyses of ERPs. Potentially, it allows a wide usage beyond basic research; such as for clinical diagnosis, brain-machine interfaces, and neurofeedback applications requiring single-trial analyses.Fil: Lopes-dos-Santos, Vítor. Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte; Brasil. University of Leicester; Reino UnidoFil: Rey, Hernan G.. University of Leicester; Reino UnidoFil: Navajas Ahumada, Joaquin Mariano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. University of Leicester; Reino Unido. University College London; Estados UnidosFil: Quian Quiroga, Rodrigo. University of Leicester; Reino Unid

The idiosyncratic nature of confidence

Confidence is the 'feeling of knowing' that accompanies decision-making. Bayesian theory proposes that confidence is a function solely of the perceived probability of being correct. Empirical research has suggested, however, that different individuals may perform different computations to estimate confidence from uncertain evidence. To test this hypothesis, we collected confidence reports in a task in which subjects made categorical decisions about the mean of a sequence. We found that for most individuals, confidence did indeed reflect the perceived probability of being correct. However, in approximately half of them, confidence also reflected a different probabilistic quantity: the perceived uncertainty in the estimated variable. We found that the contribution of both quantities was stable over weeks. We also observed that the influence of the perceived probability of being correct was stable across two tasks, one perceptual and one cognitive. Overall, our findings provide a computational interpretation of individual differences in human confidence.Fil: Navajas Ahumada, Joaquin Mariano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. University College London; Estados Unidos. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; ArgentinaFil: Hindocha, Chandni. University College London; Estados UnidosFil: Foda, Hebah. University College London; Estados UnidosFil: Keramati, Mehdi. University College London; Estados UnidosFil: Latham, Peter E.. University College London; Estados UnidosFil: Bahrami, Bahador. University College London; Estados Unido