New bottles for new and old wine : new proposals for the study of spontaneous trait inferences

Tese de doutoramento, Psicologia (Cognição Social), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Psicologia, 2017An important research topic in social cognition concerns the way people understand others’behaviors and the way they use this information to categorize others and infer causes for their actions. More specifically, in this dissertation, we investigated the Spontaneous Trait Inference (STI), a phenomenon that allow people to infer or extract personality traits from others’ overt behaviors and to use those traits to make further judgments. It is a spontaneous mechanism because it occurs without intention or awareness. The dissertation is organized in two parts that deal will two distinct aspects of STI. The first aspect regards the processes responsible for the occurrence of STI. The second is about the paradigms used to detect STI and their limitations. In the first part, we discuss the two perspectives that exist in the literature regarding the processes underlying STI. These two perspectives emerged as a reaction to the discovery of a surprising phenomenon, the Spontaneous Trait Transferences (STT). STTs occur when a trait is inferred from a behavior and associated with someone else that not the actor: a communicator, a bystander or any other irrelevant stimulus present in the context at the encoding moment. Based on empirical differences between STI and STT, a dualistic perspective was proposed in which STI are said to result from attributional thinking and STT from simple associations. A different perspective suggests that the same process, an associative one, can be responsible for both. Our contribution to this debate was to develop a computational model in order to demonstrate that the evidence supporting a dualist view are weak, because a simple associative model can reproduce, not only STI and STT, but also the empirical differences between them. Moreover, as an assumption of the model, we argued that there might be an attentional difference between STI and STT. Thus, next we tested this assumption by using the spatial cueing paradigm and eye-tracking devices, which allowed us to conclude that people pay more attention to the actor of a behavior than to an irrelevant person presented with it. Also in agreement with the attentional difference and with the model, we showed, by using forced recognition paradigm, that in both STI and STT the trait is inferred in a similar way from the behavior, whereas the memory for the photo is better in STI than in STT. In the second part of the dissertation, we discuss the main methodologies used to measure STI. We start by examining a confound present in many studies investigating STI, the word-based priming. This confound consists in the activation of the trait based, not on the interpretation of the whole sentence and the behavior in it described, but on the presence of specific words that alone lead to the priming of the trait. Moreover, we showed that this is only a problem for the immediate measures of STI such probe recognition paradigm, but not for delayed, such the false recognition. A different limitation that affects all the measures based on memory is the contamination with explicit recall of the sentence. The use of online measures can solve, in part, that problem. However, online measures are data-driven, or, in other words, are measures that rely on feature and perceptive processing. This characteristic makes them unsuitable for STI, that is a conceptuallydriven mechanism. Thus, we introduce a new implicit conceptual measure, the modified free association task. In this task people first read trait-implying or control material. Afterwards, they perform a free association task were a word (the inferred trait) is presented and the subject is instructed to say the first word that comes to their mind when reading the presented target. We tested this new paradigm in delayed and immediate modes and we also tested its sensitivity do STI and STT difference

Activation is not always inference: Word-based priming in spontaneous trait inferences

People infer, without any intention or awareness, personality traits about actors enacting diagnostic behaviors. This phenomenon is known as spontaneous trait inferences (STIs). The activation of a trait is considered to be a true inference when it results from processing the meaning of the whole behavioral description. However, a trait can also become activated due to intra-lexical associations with individual words in the description. Here, we suggest a method to distinguish the two sources of activation and explore the influence that word-based priming has on some of the most popular paradigms used to study STIs. Results show that in the probe recognition task, word-based priming plays a considerable role and can, in the absence of an appropriate control, mimic spontaneous trait inference occurrence. However, in the false recognition task and in the explicit trait judgment task, the role of this spurious activation is negligible and the real trait inference can be easily detected.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Inferências espontâneas de traço: Os quatro paradigmaschave

Uma inferência espontânea de traço (IET) ocorre quando, após a observação de um comportamento, se infere um traço de personalidade acerca do actor do comportamento, de forma espontânea (i.e., sem intenção nem consciência) (Uleman, Newman, & Moskowitz, 1996). A evolução desta área de investigação tem sido marcada pela tentativa de desenvolver paradigmas experimentais capazes de capturar a natureza implícita do fenómeno. No presente artigo, descrevemos os pressupostos e procedimentos experimentais dos quatro paradigmas que têm sido mais utilizados para investigar a ocorrência de IETs: (a) paradigma de recordação com pistas; (b) paradigma de re-aprendizagem; (c) paradigma do reconhecimento da palavra-teste; (d) paradigma dos falsos reconhecimentos. A importância destes paradigmas relaciona-se com a sua aplicabilidade ao estudo de processos inferenciais e de memória

How Humans Judge Machines

How people judge humans and machines differently, in scenarios involving natural disasters, labor displacement, policing, privacy, algorithmic bias, and more. How would you feel about losing your job to a machine? How about a tsunami alert system that fails? Would you react differently to acts of discrimination depending on whether they were carried out by a machine or by a human? What about public surveillance? How Humans Judge Machines compares people's reactions to actions performed by humans and machines. Using data collected in dozens of experiments, this book reveals the biases that permeate human-machine interactions. Are there conditions in which we judge machines unfairly? Is our judgment of machines affected by the moral dimensions of a scenario? Is our judgment of machine correlated with demographic factors such as education or gender? César Hidalgo and colleagues use hard science to take on these pressing technological questions. Using randomized experiments, they create revealing counterfactuals and build statistical models to explain how people judge artificial intelligence and whether they do it fairly. Through original research, How Humans Judge Machines bring us one step closer to understanding the ethical consequences of AI. Written by César A. Hidalgo, the author of Why Information Grows and coauthor of The Atlas of Economic Complexity (MIT Press), together with a team of social psychologists (Diana Orghian and Filipa de Almeida) and roboticists (Jordi Albo-Canals), How Humans Judge Machines presents a unique perspective on the nexus between artificial intelligence and society. Anyone interested in the future of AI ethics should explore the experiments and theories in How Humans Judge Machines

Desvio de caráter ou simplesmente humano? Economia comportamental aplicada ao comportamento desonesto

Neste artigo, apresentamos uma abordagem de combate à corrupção e ao comportamento desonesto baseada na economia comportamental, psicologia cognitiva e psicologia social. A economia comportamental tem sido extensivamente aplicada à criação de políticas eficazes de alteração de comportamentos na área da saúde e educação, sendo, a aplicação ao combate à corrupção uma área ainda incipiente. Neste artigo, tendo por base uma revisão da literatura científica sobre o comportamento desonesto, demonstramos que as pessoas nem sempre agem de forma racional, coerente e previsível e nem sempre incorporam análises de custo-benefício nas suas decisões, tal como é previsto pelos modelos econômicos tradicionais. Também demonstramos que existem fatores inconscientes e mais sutis que podem estar contribuindo para o comportamento desonesto. Estes fatores são: i) a cognição humana e os vieses que afetam a tomada de decisão (racionalização motivada, licença moral, dissonância cognitiva etc.); ii) as características do contexto que nos podem influenciar em direção a determinado comportamento desonesto (ambiguidade nos procedimentos, falta de clareza, distância psicológica em relação ao dinheiro etc.); iii) os fatores sociais que decorrem da interação com as outras pessoas (reciprocidade, difusão da responsabilidade, normas sociais etc.). Uma vez conhecidos estes fatores, um rol de intervenções pode ser sugerido para conduzir as pessoas a agirem de forma mais honesta. Este artigo é direcionado a atores do setor público e privado interessados na temática do combate à corrupção e tem dois objetivos: i) descrever os fatores psicológicos que influenciam o comportamento desonesto e ii) apresentar soluções de fácil implementação e baixo custo (nudges), que podem ser integradas nas políticas de integridade e combate à corrupção

Dimensões estruturais dos objectos : do reconhecimento à nomeação

Tese de mestrado, Psicologia (Cognição Social Aplicada), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Psicologia, 2011O reconhecimento de objectos é um tema central em psicologia cognitiva e experimental. É uma capacidade humana fundamental que permite identificar um objecto, categorizá-lo e atribuir-lhe um nome. O modelo em cascata (Humphreys, Riddoch, & Quinlan, 1988) propõe que o reconhecimento de objectos é um processo hierárquico, interactivo e em cascata, onde representações estruturais, semânticas e fonológicas interagem. Segundo o modelo, a semelhança estrutural entre conceitos cria competição aquando do reconhecimento e nomeação de objectos. Neste trabalho pretende-se investigar qual o papel de variáveis estruturais no reconhecimento, categorização e nomeação de objectos. Partindo do estudo de Marques & Raposo (in press) examinou-se a influência de quatro dimensões estruturais fundamentais – partes dos objectos, detalhes internos, contornos e variabilidade da representação – no desempenho de diferentes tarefas. O Estudo I apresenta três experiências comportamentais com o objectivo de estudar a interacção e o peso que as diferentes dimensões estruturais têm nos vários níveis de processamento cognitivo (estrutural, semântico e fonológico). Recorrendo a análises de regressão verificou-se que dimensões estruturais distintas afectam diferencialmente o desempenho em tarefas de nomeação, categorização e decisão se a figura denota um objecto real ou não. No Estudo II propõe-se uma investigação em que se manipula o grau e o tipo de degradação de figuras de objectos com o objectivo de investigar a evolução do desempenho consoante a variação na degradação dos estímulos. Essa degradação permitiu manipular algumas das mais relevantes dimensões estruturais dos objectos (detalhes internos e contornos) e verificar o seu impacto no desempenho em tarefas distintas. No seu conjunto, estes estudos permitem clarificar a contribuição de dimensões estruturais no reconhecimento e nomeação de objectos e as suas implicações para o modelo em cascata e o conceito de semelhança estrutural.Object recognition is a central topic in cognitive and experimental psychology. It is a fundamental human ability that allows us to identify an object, categorize it and give it a name. The cascade model (Humphreys, Riddoch, & Quinlan, 1988) proposes that object recognition is a hierarchical, interactive process that occurs in cascade, and where structural, semantic and phonological representations interact. According to the model, the structural similarity between concepts creates competition during object recognition and naming. This study aims to investigate the role of structural variables in object recognition, categorization and naming. Following the study of Marques & Raposo (in press), we analyzed the influence of four structural dimensions – object parts, internal details, contours and variability of representation – in the performance of different tasks. Study I presents three behavioral experiments that aim to study the interaction and the weight that the different structural dimensions have at different levels of cognitive processing (structural, semantic and phonological). Using regression analysis we demonstrated that distinct structural dimensions differentially affect the performance of naming, categorization and object decision tasks. In Study II we propose a research that manipulates the degree and type of degradation of pictures of objects in order to investigate the evolution of variation in performance depending on the degradation of the stimuli. This degradation allowed us to manipulate some of the most relevant structural dimensions of the objects (internal details and contours) and verify their impact in the performance of different tasks. Taken together, these studies help clarify the contribution of structural dimensions to object recognition and naming and their implications for the cascade model and the concept of structural similarity

The Case of Portuguese Parliamentary Debates

Zúquete, M., Orghian, D., & Pinheiro, F. L. (2023). A Moral Foundations Dictionary for the European Portuguese Language: The Case of Portuguese Parliamentary Debates. In J. Mikyška, C. de Mulatier, M. Paszynski, V. V. Krzhizhanovskaya, J. J. Dongarra, & P. M. Sloot (Eds.), Computational Science – ICCS 2023: 23rd International Conference, Prague, Czech Republic, July 3–5, 2023, Proceedings, Part IV (Vol. Part. I, pp. 421–434). (Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Vol. 10476). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35995-8_30Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) has shown that American liberals and conservatives rely on fundamentally different moral principles, offering a different perspective on the deepening political divide in US politics. However, results outside the US have been less clear, particularly in countries with a more diverse political landscape that does not fall into the traditional Liberal/Conservative dichotomy. Here, we expand the Moral Foundations Dictionary to European Portuguese, which we then use to analyze 10 years of transcripts of parliamentary sessions using standard Data Science and Text Mining techniques. Despite a larger number of represented parties, we show that no traditional parties fall into the Conservative or Liberal characterization and that the political landscape in Portugal is relatively homogeneous with the major difference observed concerning the dichotomy between Government and the parliament.authorsversionpublishe

You are Cruel Even If He Did It: Behavior and Face Processing in Spontaneous Trait Inference and Transference

Spontaneous trait inferences (STIs) occur when people infer, without intention or awareness, personality traits from other people’s behaviors. Spontaneous trait transferences (STTs) occur when the trait inferred from the behavior of an actor is erroneously transferred to a person who is not the actor of the behavior. Here, we show that STIs and STTs are similar in the activation of the trait from the behavior and they differ in the link that is established between the inferred trait and the person, with stronger link being created in the STIs than in STTs.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Acknowledging the role of word-based activation in spontaneous trait inferences

The first goal of the present paper is to call attention to a confounder in studies that explore Spontaneous Trait Inferences (STI). These studies use, most of the times, behavioral descriptions which strongly imply personality traits about the actor of the behavior. However, a potential limitation of this material is the possibility of the trait being activated by specific words in the sentence (wordbased priming) and not, or not only, by an inference made based on the comprehension of the behavioral sentence as a whole (text-based priming). This aspect has been recurrently ignored in previous studies. In the present paper, we discuss how the word-based priming may have obscured the interpretation of previous results in the STI literature. A second goal of this paper is to present a potential solution for this problem. We created a set of 122 trait-implying sentences and their correspondent control versions. These control sentences have approximately the same words as the trait-implying sentences, but the words are rearranged in such a way that the sentences no longer imply the target traits. By keeping the words constant, we control for the activation from individual words in the sentences (word-based priming). Thus, differences in trait activation between the two sentences can only be attributed to text-based priming. Researchers interested in investigating STI in the Portuguese language can use these materials in their studies. With this paper, we hope to stimulate a discussion about the mechanisms responsible for the trait activation in STI studies.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio