The Effects Of Accessibility On Judgment And Decision-Making

When making decisions, individuals may only use a subset of all available information. The experience of thinking about and attending to this accessible information can, atop of the actual content, exert an impact on what information (and the weighting thereof) is employed in judgments. In this dissertation, I examine how experiences associated with memory-based accessibility (i.e., ease-of-recall) and stimulus-based accessibility (i.e., amount of attention allocated, salience) influence decision-making. Accessibility serves as the connecting construct for two essays of this dissertation for a meta-analysis of the ease-of-retrieval effect and how salience affects valuation. In essay one, I meta-analyze an instantiation of how accessibility experiences (i.e., feelings associated with trying to retrieve information from memory) affect decisions: the ease-of-retrieval effect. The ease-of-retrieval effect contends people employ cognitive feelings of ease from recall as an input to judgment. I explore this idea through a common manipulation of ease-of-retrieval in which individuals generate either few or many examples of a given topic such as times they behaved assertively (Schwarz et al. 1991). This manipulation is argued to affect subjective ease and thereby other downstream dependent measures. Specifically, I test whether subjective ease fully mediates the impact of the manipulation. I also test several theoretical moderators of the use of cognitive feelings of ease as information (e.g., misattribution) and how much of the effect may be attributable to publication bias. Across over twenty-years of studies using conceptually-similar manipulations, I find evidence for several theoretical moderators, and find that publication bias only explains a small portion of the effect. Further, I find that subjective ease only partially explains the ease-of-retrieval effect, which means other explanations of the effect may also exist, yet they are understudied in the literature. In essay two, I turn to stimulus-based forms of accessibility: namely, salience, or the amount of attention devoted to a stimulus. While prior theories of decision-making contend greater salience increases information accessibility, they do not specify how salience influences the weighting and valuation of said information. Instead, these theories mostly distinguish between low versus high accessibility due to salience as affecting information used in judgments, and that information valuation occurs separately based on task goals. I demonstrate through three rating-based conjoint experiments across multiple product categories (e.g., cars) that even when all information is highly accessible, differences in salience may have an impact on the valuation and weighting of that information. I show these effects can arise from both perceptual (e.g., position effects) and cognitive (i.e., elaboration in working memory) sources. However, I also demonstrate the persistence of salience-biases differs between these two sources: biases due to cognitive salience decline over repeated decisions, whereas biases from perceptual salience do not

Does Ease Mediate the Ease-of-Retrieval Effect? A Meta-Analysis

A wealth of literature suggests individuals use feelings in addition to facts as sources of information for judgment. This paper focuses on a manipulation in which participants list either a few or many examples of a given type, and then make a judgment. Instead of using the number of arguments or evidence strength, participants are hypothesized to use the subjective ease of generating examples as the primary input to judgment. This result is commonly called the ease-of-retrieval effect, and the feeling of ease is typically assumed to mediate the effect. We use meta-analytic methods across 142 papers, 263 studies, and 582 effect sizes to assess the robustness of the ease-of-retrieval effect, and whether or not the effect is mediated by subjective ease. On average, the standard few/many manipulation exhibits a medium-sized effect. In experimental conditions designed to replicate the standard effect, about one third to one half of the total effect is mediated by subjective ease. This supports the standard explanation, but suggests that other mediators are present. Further, we find evidence of publication bias that reduces the standard effect by up to one-third. We also find that (1) moderator manipulations that differ from the standard manipulation lead to smaller, often reversed effects that are not as strongly mediated as ease, (2) several manipulations of theory-based moderators (e.g., polarized attitudes, misattribution) yield strong theory-consistent effects, (2) method-based moderators have little or no effects on the results, and (4) the mediation results are robust with respect to assumptions about error structure

From Primed Concepts to Action: A Meta-Analysis of the Behavioral Effects of Incidentally Presented Words

A meta-analysis assessed the behavioral impact of and psychological processes associated with presenting words connected to an action or a goal representation. The average and distribution of 352 effect sizes (analyzed using fixed-effects and random-effects models) was obtained from 133 studies (84 reports) in which word primes were incidentally presented to participants, with a nonopposite control group, before measuring a behavioral dependent variable. Findings revealed a small behavioral priming effect (dFE = 0.332, dRE = 0.352), which was robust across methodological procedures and only minimally biased by the publication of positive (vs. negative) results. Theory testing analyses indicated that more valued behavior or goal concepts (e.g., associated with important outcomes or values) were associated with stronger priming effects than were less valued behaviors. Furthermore, there was some evidence of persistence of goal effects over time. These results support the notion that goal activation contributes over and above perception-behavior in explaining priming effects. In summary, theorizing about the role of value and satisfaction in goal activation pointed to stronger effects of a behavior or goal concept on overt action. There was no evidence that expectancy (ease of achieving the goal) moderated priming effects

Measurement of the nuclear modification factor for muons from charm and bottom hadrons in Pb+Pb collisions at 5.02 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Heavy-flavour hadron production provides information about the transport properties and microscopic structure of the quark-gluon plasma created in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. A measurement of the muons from semileptonic decays of charm and bottom hadrons produced in Pb+Pb and pp collisions at a nucleon-nucleon centre-of-mass energy of 5.02 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider is presented. The Pb+Pb data were collected in 2015 and 2018 with sampled integrated luminosities of 208 mu b(-1) and 38 mu b(-1), respectively, and pp data with a sampled integrated luminosity of 1.17 pb(-1) were collected in 2017. Muons from heavy-flavour semileptonic decays are separated from the light-flavour hadronic background using the momentum imbalance between the inner detector and muon spectrometer measurements, and muons originating from charm and bottom decays are further separated via the muon track's transverse impact parameter. Differential yields in Pb+Pb collisions and differential cross sections in pp collisions for such muons are measured as a function of muon transverse momentum from 4 GeV to 30 GeV in the absolute pseudorapidity interval vertical bar eta vertical bar < 2. Nuclear modification factors for charm and bottom muons are presented as a function of muon transverse momentum in intervals of Pb+Pb collision centrality. The bottom muon results are the most precise measurement of b quark nuclear modification at low transverse momentum where reconstruction of B hadrons is challenging. The measured nuclear modification factors quantify a significant suppression of the yields of muons from decays of charm and bottom hadrons, with stronger effects for muons from charm hadron decays

A search for an unexpected asymmetry in the production of e+μ− and e−μ+ pairs in proton-proton collisions recorded by the ATLAS detector at root s = 13 TeV

This search, a type not previously performed at ATLAS, uses a comparison of the production cross sections for e(+)mu(-) and e(-)mu(+) pairs to constrain physics processes beyond the Standard Model. It uses 139 fb(-1) of proton-proton collision data recorded at root s = 13 TeV at the LHC. Targeting sources of new physics which prefer final states containing e(+)mu(-) and e(-)mu(+), the search contains two broad signal regions which are used to provide model-independent constraints on the ratio of cross sections at the 2% level. The search also has two special selections targeting supersymmetric models and leptoquark signatures. Observations using one of these selections are able to exclude, at 95% confidence level, singly produced smuons with masses up to 640 GeV in a model in which the only other light sparticle is a neutralino when the R-parity-violating coupling lambda(23)(1)' is close to unity. Observations using the other selection exclude scalar leptoquarks with masses below 1880 GeV when g(1R)(eu) = g(1R)(mu c) = 1, at 95% confidence level. The limit on the coupling reduces to g(1R)(eu) = g(1R)(mu c) = 0.46 for a mass of 1420 GeV

Factors Associated with Revision Surgery after Internal Fixation of Hip Fractures

Background: Femoral neck fractures are associated with high rates of revision surgery after management with internal fixation. Using data from the Fixation using Alternative Implants for the Treatment of Hip fractures (FAITH) trial evaluating methods of internal fixation in patients with femoral neck fractures, we investigated associations between baseline and surgical factors and the need for revision surgery to promote healing, relieve pain, treat infection or improve function over 24 months postsurgery. Additionally, we investigated factors associated with (1) hardware removal and (2) implant exchange from cancellous screws (CS) or sliding hip screw (SHS) to total hip arthroplasty, hemiarthroplasty, or another internal fixation device. Methods: We identified 15 potential factors a priori that may be associated with revision surgery, 7 with hardware removal, and 14 with implant exchange. We used multivariable Cox proportional hazards analyses in our investigation. Results: Factors associated with increased risk of revision surgery included: female sex, [hazard ratio (HR) 1.79, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.25-2.50; P = 0.001], higher body mass index (fo

Measurements of photo-nuclear jet production in Pb plus Pb collisions with ATLAS

Ultra-peripheral heavy ion collisions provide a unique opportunity to study the parton distributions in the colliding nuclei via the measurement of photo-nuclear jet production. An analysis of jet production in ultra-peripheral Pb+Pb collisions at √sNN = 5.02 TeV performed using data collected with the ATLAS detector in 2015 is described. The data set corresponds to a total Pb+Pb integrated luminosity of 0.38 nb−1. The ultra-peripheral collisions are selected using a combination of forward neutron and rapidity gap requirements. The cross-sections, not unfolded for detector response, are compared to results from Pythia Monte Carlo simulations re-weighted to match a photon spectrum obtained from the STARlight model. Qualitative agreement between data and these simulations is observed over a broad kinematic range suggesting that using these collisions to measure nuclear parton distributions is experimentally realisable

Differential cross-section measurements of the production of four charged leptons in association with two jets using the ATLAS detector

Differential cross-sections are measured for the production of four charged leptons in association with two jets. These measurements are sensitive to final states in which the jets are produced via the strong interaction as well as to the purely-electroweak vector boson scattering process. The analysis is performed using proton-proton collision data collected by ATLAS at √s = 13 TeV and with an integrated luminosity of 140 fb−1. The data are corrected for the effects of detector inefficiency and resolution and are compared to state-of-the-art Monte Carlo event generator predictions. The differential cross-sections are used to search for anomalous weak-boson self-interactions that are induced by dimension-six and dimension-eight operators in Standard Model effective field theory

When Do People Talk About and Why?

People talk about the past, present, and future. When across these ranges do people talk about more and why? Examining over 5,000 social media posts as well as a corpus of offline conversations provides insight into this question and the drivers of interpersonal communication more broadly