Essays on social decision making

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references.Essay 1: Self-Control and Altruism: The Moderating Role of Endowments. People exhibit a remarkable ability to cooperate with one another, to an extent that critically distinguishes human society from communities of other primate and animal species. Although altruism plays an essential role in sustaining cooperation among unrelated groups of individuals, little is known about the underlying psychological processes that drive altruistic behavior. While evidence supporting conflicting dual process accounts has appeared in the literature, here we offer an anchoring and adjustment account that clarifies the mechanistic relationship between self-control and the tendency towards altruism or selfishness. We find that participants depleted of self regulatory resources are highly biased by initial endowments and insufficiently adjust away from them when making transfer decisions. Thus, depending on the nature of the initial endowments, individuals may reveal either increased altruism or increased selfishness under self-regulatory depletion. Essay 2: Relative to Them: How Better Brands Reduce Product Efficacy. Across many domains, positive beliefs often lead to self-fulfilling positive outcomes. Here however, we find the opposite to be true. In a series of four studies, we observe that positive beliefs about products can lead to negative performance outcomes in using them when social comparison processes are activated. Although people appear to believe that high status branded products are of superior quality and are willing to pay more for them, these beliefs in fact lead people to evaluate their own expected performance relative to a higher standard of reference. Our findings suggest that when people contrast themselves to these higher reference points, they form negative expectations about their own performance that result in increased levels of intimidation and in turn, reduced product efficacy. Essay 3: Altruistic Patience: When Giving More Beats Giving Now. People are known to take into account the welfare of others when making decisions. Many of these settings also involve tradeoffs in the benefits that others receive at different points in time. For example, donors make decisions between giving to those in immediate need and funding longer-term projects, policy makers impact their constituents by responding to immediate concerns and also supporting larger efforts for reform, and even friends face the perennial gift-giving problem in picking either short lived novelties or necessities that will last. This work identifies a bias in the intertemporal choices that people make when the consequences of those choices are not directly experienced by the decision maker. In particular, I find that people appear to be more patient when conferring benefits to others rather than themselves and that this bias is driven by both relaxed time sensitivity and by diagnostic motivations.by Sachin Banker.Ph.D

The moral foundations of cryptocurrency: evidence from Twitter and survey research

Despite its relatively brief history, cryptocurrency has already had a profound impact on the economy, with some predicting that it will eventually replace traditional fiat currencies. Historically, it had dark associations with illegal activities in the early days, although perceptions and associations likely have, in recent years, changed for the better. Thus, understanding how people perceive the morality of cryptocurrency currently forms the motivation of the current research. We, in particular, examine associations dependent on political ideology. Across both a large-scale analysis of Twitter posts (N = 959,393) and controlled survey research (N = 487), we find that cryptocurrency is currently best understood as being more strongly linked to conservative vs. liberal moral foundations. Cryptocurrency-related posts were more likely to express conservative moral foundations (Authority, Purity, and Loyalty) rather than liberal moral foundations (Fairness and Care), and individual endorsement of these conservative moral foundations was associated with increased interest in crypto investment

A many-analysts approach to the relation between religiosity and well-being

The relation between religiosity and well-being is one of the most researched topics in the psychology of religion, yet the directionality and robustness of the effect remains debated. Here, we adopted a many-analysts approach to assess the robustness of this relation based on a new cross-cultural dataset (N = 10, 535 participants from 24 countries). We recruited 120 analysis teams to investigate (1) whether religious people self-report higher well-being, and (2) whether the relation between religiosity and self-reported well-being depends on perceived cultural norms of religion (i.e., whether it is considered normal and desirable to be religious in a given country). In a two-stage procedure, the teams first created an analysis plan and then executed their planned analysis on the data. For the first research question, all but 3 teams reported positive effect sizes with credible/confidence intervals excluding zero (median reported beta = 0.120). For the second research question, this was the case for 65% of the teams (median reported beta = 0.039). While most teams applied (multilevel) linear regression models, there was considerable variability in the choice of items used to construct the independent variables, the dependent variable, and the included covariates.</p

A many-analysts approach to the relation between religiosity and well-being

The relation between religiosity and well-being is one of the most researched topics in the psychology of religion, yet the directionality and robustness of the effect remains debated. Here, we adopted a many-analysts approach to assess the robustness of this relation based on a new cross-cultural dataset (N=10,535 participants from 24 countries). We recruited 120 analysis teams to investigate (1) whether religious people self-report higher well-being, and (2) whether the relation between religiosity and self-reported well-being depends on perceived cultural norms of religion (i.e., whether it is considered normal and desirable to be religious in a given country). In a two-stage procedure, the teams first created an analysis plan and then executed their planned analysis on the data. For the first research question, all but 3 teams reported positive effect sizes with credible/confidence intervals excluding zero (median reported β=0.120). For the second research question, this was the case for 65% of the teams (median reported β=0.039). While most teams applied (multilevel) linear regression models, there was considerable variability in the choice of items used to construct the independent variables, the dependent variable, and the included covariates

A Many-analysts Approach to the Relation Between Religiosity and Well-being

The relation between religiosity and well-being is one of the most researched topics in the psychology of religion, yet the directionality and robustness of the effect remains debated. Here, we adopted a many-analysts approach to assess the robustness of this relation based on a new cross-cultural dataset (N = 10, 535 participants from 24 countries). We recruited 120 analysis teams to investigate (1) whether religious people self-report higher well-being, and (2) whether the relation between religiosity and self-reported well-being depends on perceived cultural norms of religion (i.e., whether it is considered normal and desirable to be religious in a given country). In a two-stage procedure, the teams first created an analysis plan and then executed their planned analysis on the data. For the first research question, all but 3 teams reported positive effect sizes with credible/confidence intervals excluding zero (median reported β = 0.120). For the second research question, this was the case for 65% of the teams (median reported β = 0.039). While most teams applied (multilevel) linear regression models, there was considerable variability in the choice of items used to construct the independent variables, the dependent variable, and the included covariates

Neural mechanisms of credit card spending

Credit cards have often been blamed for consumer overspending and for the growth in household debt. Indeed, laboratory studies of purchase behavior have shown that credit cards can facilitate spending in ways that are difficult to justify on purely financial grounds. However, the psychological mechanisms behind this spending facilitation effect remain conjectural. A leading hypothesis is that credit cards reduce the pain of payment and so ‘release the brakes’ that hold expenditures in check. Alternatively, credit cards could provide a ‘step on the gas,’ increasing motivation to spend. Here we present the first evidence of differences in brain activation in the presence of real credit and cash purchase opportunities. In an fMRI shopping task, participants purchased items tailored to their interests, either by using a personal credit card or their own cash. Credit card purchases were associated with strong activation in the striatum, which coincided with onset of the credit card cue and was not related to product price. In contrast, reward network activation weakly predicted cash purchases, and only among relatively cheaper items. The presence of reward network activation differences highlights the potential neural impact of novel payment instruments in stimulating spending—these fundamental reward mechanisms could be exploited by new payment methods as we transition to a purely cashless society

Machine-Assisted Social Psychology Hypothesis Generation

Social psychology research projects begin with generating a testable idea that relies heavily on a researcher’s ability to assimilate, recall, and accurately process available research findings. However, an exponential increase in new research findings is making the task of synthesizing across the multitude of topics challenging and could result in potentially overlooked research connections. In this research, we leverage the fact that social psychology research is based on verbal models and train a natural language model to generate hypotheses that can serve as an aid to psychology researchers. Our hypotheses-generation model uses a pre-trained language model to generate text that is meaningful and coherent. We then fine-tune the model on thousands of abstracts published in more than 50 social psychology journals, in the past 55 years as well as on pre-print repositories (PsyArXiv). Finally, social psychology experts rated model-generated and human-generated hypotheses on the dimensions of clarity, originality and impact