Commentary : effects of age and initial risk perception on balloon analog risk task: the mediating role of processing speed and need for cognitive closure

A commentary on Effects of Age and Initial Risk Perception on Balloon Analog Risk Task: The Mediating Role of Processing Speed and Need for Cognitive Closure by Koscielniak, M., Rydzewska, K., and Sedek, G. (2016). Front. Psychol. 7:659. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00659 Existing research strongly suggests that age-related changes in the cognitive system influence preferential choice. While the reduction of fluid cognitive ability can lead to sub-optimal decision outcomes (Finucane et al., 2000), experience garnered during one's lifespan can also improve one's decision making (Mata et al., 2007; Bruine de Bruin et al., 2014). How can research on aging and decision making explain such mixed results? A reasonable approach is to adhere to a clear definition of optimality in choice behavior, which must be grounded in principles of cognitive psychology. Indeed, this approach has led many researchers to identify distinct cognitive processes that may be responsible for suboptimal decisions among older adults. Among many, these include memory (Buckner, 2004), perception (Schneider and Pichora-Fuller, 2000), and executive functions (Schiebener and Brand, 2015)

Context dependent sensitivity to losses : range and skew manipulations

The assumption that losses loom larger than gains is widely used to explain many behavioral phenomena in judgment and decision-making. It is also generally accepted that loss aversion is a stable, traitlike individual difference characterizing people’s sensitivity to gains and losses. This interpretation was recently challenged by Walasek and Stewart (2015), who showed that by manipulating the range of the gains and losses used in the accept−reject task it is possible to find loss aversion, loss neutrality, and a reversal of loss aversion. Here, we reexamined the claim that these context effects arise as a result of people being sensitive to the rank position of a given gain among other gains and the rank position of a loss among other losses. We used skewed distributions of outcomes to manipulate the rank position of gains and losses while keeping the range of possible outcomes constant. We found a small but robust effect of skew on the propensity to accept mixed gambles. We compared the sizes of skew and range effects and found that they are of similar magnitude but that the range effects are smaller than those reported by Walasek and Stewart. We were able to attenuate loss aversion, but we were not able to replicate Walasek and Stewart’s reversal of loss aversion. We conclude that rank effects are, at least in part, responsible for the loss aversion seen in the accept−reject task

Event construal and temporal distance in natural language

Construal level theory proposes that events that are temporally proximate are represented more concretely than events that are temporally distant. We tested this prediction using two large natural language text corpora. In study 1 we examined posts on Twitter that referenced the future, and found that tweets mentioning temporally proximate dates used more concrete words than those mentioning distant dates. In study 2 we obtained all New York Times articles that referenced U.S. presidential elections between 1987 and 2007. We found that the concreteness of the words in these articles increased with the temporal proximity to their corresponding election. Additionally the reduction in concreteness after the election was much greater than the increase in concreteness leading up to the election, though both changes in concreteness were well described by an exponential function. We replicated this finding with New York Times articles referencing US public holidays. Overall, our results provide strong support for the predictions of construal level theory, and additionally illustrate how large natural language datasets can be used to inform psychological theory

Association and response accuracy in the wild

We studied contestant accuracy and error in a popular television quiz show, Jeopardy!. Using vector-based knowledge representations obtained from distributional models of semantic memory, we computed the strength of association between clues and responses in over 5,000 televised games. Such representations have been shown to play a key role in memory and judgment, and consistent with this work, we find that contestants are more likely to provide correct responses when these responses are strongly associated with their clues, and more likely to provide incorrect responses when correct responses are weakly or negatively associated with their clues. This effect is stronger for easier questions with low monetary values, and for questions in which contestants compete to respond quickly. Our results show how distributional models of semantic memory can be used to predict human behavior in naturalistic high-level judgment tasks with skilled participants and significant monetary and social incentives

You cannot accurately estimate an individual’s loss aversion using an accept-reject task

Prospect theory’s loss aversion is often measured in the accept–reject task, in which participants accept or reject the chance of playing a series of gambles. The gambles are 2-branch 50/50 gambles with varying gain and loss amounts (e.g., 50% chance of winning $20 and a 50$10). Prospect theory quantifies loss aversion by scaling losses up by a parameter λ. Here, we show that λ suffers from extremely poor parameter recoverability in the accept–reject task. The λ cannot be reliably estimated even for a simple version of prospect theory with linear probability weighting and value functions. The λ cannot be reliably estimated even in impractically large experiments with participants subject to thousands of choices. The poor recoverability is driven by a tradeoff between λ and the other model parameters. However, a measure derived from these parameters is extremely well recovered—and corresponds to estimating the area of gain–loss space in which people accept gambles. This area is equivalent to the number of gambles accepted in a given choice set. That is, simply counting accept decisions is extremely reliably recovered—but using prospect theory to make further use of exactly which gambles were accepted and which were rejected does not work

Trait associations for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in news media : a computational analysis

We study media representations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the 2016 United States presidential election. In particular, we train models of semantic memory on a large number of news media outlets that published online articles during the course of the election. Based on the structure of word co-occurrence in these media outlets, our models learn semantic representations for the two presidential candidates, as well as for widely studied personality traits. We find that models trained on media outlets most read by Clinton voters and media outlets most read by Trump voters differ in the strength of association between the two candidates’ names and trait words pertaining to morality. We observe some differences for trait words pertaining to warmth, but none for trait words pertaining to competence

Workforce commuting and subjective well-being

Commuting to and from work can constitute a significant proportion of a person’s day and can have a considerable impact on one’s well-being. Using the UK Time Use Survey (UKTUS) dataset, the experienced well-being effects of commuting, in terms of enjoyment, were evaluated relative to other daily activities. Commutes using passive modes of transport (e.g., car, train) were found to be the least enjoyable activities carried out in the day. Commuting using active modes of transport (e.g., cycle, walk) was also amongst the least enjoyable activities, although enjoyment of active commuting was significantly higher than that of passive commuting. This paper also assessed differences in the experienced well-being of other daily activities (such as working and physical exercise) during the workday between those who did and those who did not commute. Using a series of multilevel analyses, commuting was shown to have little impact on an individual’s enjoyment of the other daily activities in which they partake. Enjoyment of all daily activities was found to be just as high on workdays on which participants commuted using active modes of transport as on non-commuting workdays. With the exception of only Personal Care activities and Sleep, there were no meaningful differences in enjoyment of any daily activities between any of the three commuting workday groups and non-commuting workdays

Adaptive cooperation in the face of social exclusion

The extent to which socially excluded individuals are willing to collaborate with others is an important theoretical and practical question. We consider four contrasting predictions based on the existing psychological literature. The first two are derived from the need-threat literature: Following social rejection individuals may withdraw from cooperative interaction in general (aggression hypothesis), or cooperate more in general (reconnection hypothesis). Alternatively, performance of the excluded individuals in cooperative tasks may worsen reflecting reduced ability to deliberate (cognitive depletion hypothesis). Finally, excluded individuals may cooperate less with those who rejected them (revenge hypothesis). We tested these hypotheses in three incentivized experiments. In each, we first varied whether participants were excluded or included in a virtual ball-passing game. In the second part, participants entered a two-player investment game, in which their earnings were partly dependent on the cooperativeness of their partner. We varied how cooperative the co-player was, and measured whether our participants were willing to cooperate or not. All participants entered the game twice, once with an unknown player, and once with a person who they previously encountered during the ball-passing task. Our findings were consistent with the revenge hypothesis – excluded participants were less cooperative when they were paired with the individual who previously excluded them. Interactions with unknown players were unaffected – excluded and included participants were equally cooperative. We propose a straightforward explanation of our findings: People do not like to cooperate with those who previously rejected them, but the experience of rejection does not have broad implications for people's overall willingness to cooperate

Why do people reject mixed gambles?

Decision makers often reject mixed gambles offering equalprobabilities of a larger gain and a smaller loss. This importantbehavioral pattern is generally seen as evidence for lossaversion, a psychological mechanism according to whichlosses are given higher utility weights than gains. In this paperwe consider an alternate mechanism capable of generatinghigh rejection rates: A predecisional bias towards rejectionwithout the calculation of utility. We use a drift diffusionmodel of decision making to simultaneously specify and testfor the effects of these two psychological mechanisms in agambling task. Our results indicate that high rejection rates formixed gambles result from multiple different psychologicalmechanisms, and that a predecisional bias applied prior to thecomputation of utility (rather than loss aversion) is the primarydeterminant of this important behavioral tendency

The effect of consumer ratings and attentional allocation on product valuations

Online marketplaces allow consumers to leave reviews about the products they purchase, which are visible to potential customers and competitors. While the impact of reviews on valuations of worth and purchasing decisions has been intensively studied, little is known about how the reviews themselves are attended to, and the relation between attention and valuations. In three studies we use eye-tracking methodologies to investigate attention in subjective monetary valuations of consumer goods. We find that, when evaluating consumer goods, individuals’ attention to ratings are related to their frequencies, attention to positive or negative information is related to subjective valuations, and that perspective (owner vs. non-owner) influences the type of information attended to. These findings extend previous research regarding the valuations of risky prospects as implemented in abstract monetary gambles and suggest that similar cognitive processes might underlie both types of tasks