Time Perception and Retirement Saving: Lessons from Behavioral Decision Research

This chapter provides a behavioral decision perspective on the implications of intertemporal choice research for retirement savings. In particular, we focus on two cognitive mechanisms explaining how and why future monetary outcomes are discounted: (1) changes in the perception of delayed outcomes due to changes in mental representations and perceived slack, and (2) changes in the perception of temporal distance to delayed outcomes. Relevant recent findings are reviewed and the implications for retirement savings are discussed

The Illusion of Multitasking and Its Positive Effect on Performance

Multitasking is pervasive. With technological advancements, the desire, ability, and often necessity to engage in multiple activities concurrently are paramount. Although multitasking refers to the simultaneous execution of multiple tasks, most activities that require active attention cannot actually be done simultaneously. Therefore, whether a certain activity is considered multitasking is often a matter of subjective perception. The current paper demonstrates the malleability of what people perceive as multitasking, showing that the same activity may or may not be construed as multitasking. Importantly, although engaging in multiple tasks may diminish performance, we find that, holding the activity constant, the mere perception of multitasking actually improves performance. Across 23 incentive-compatible studies, totaling 6,768 participants, we find that those who perceived an activity as multitasking were more engaged, and consequently outperformed those who perceived that same activity as single-tasking

It’s Not You, It’s Me: The Joint Impact of Consumer Ethnocentrism & The Country-of-Origin Effect on Purchase Intention

Understanding consumer psychology has become more salient as the world becomes more connected due to globalization. Consumers have a plethora of choices regarding countries from all over the world and are subjugated to psychological phenomena such as Consumer Ethnocentrism and the Country-of-Origin Effect. This study will explore and measure the relationship between country-specific effects and consumer ethnocentrism, as well as, their impact on the likelihood of purchasing goods from the United States (U.S.), Canada, Mexico, Israel, China, and Saudi Arabia. On top of that, this study will explore how consumer demographics can influence the strength of effects. This study will first measure U.S. consumer attitudes and perceptions by conducting an original survey. Then by using the survey data, regressions are run using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) to predict a consumer&rsquo;s purchase intent and explore relationships between consumer ethnocentrism, country-specific quality perceptions, general attitudes, and consumer demographics. In the end, the study found that consumer ethnocentrism, country-specific effects, and consumer political affiliation all influence each other and have varying degrees of consideration in the decision-making process depending on the country. Overall, this study contributes to research concerning Consumer Ethnocentrism, the Country-of-Origin Effect, and the overall impacts of the globalized world. Creating a better understanding of psychological effects that affect the present-day consumer will help international marketers better target their consumers and will allow scholars of International Affairs to better comprehend how international relations and trade is shaped by consumer perceptions.</p

The French Gendarmerie : crossing sociological and historical perspectives

The present comments on Clive Emsley's book are the reflections of a sociologist on the work of a historian concerning their common topic, the Gendarmerie, and more precisely the French Gendarmerie. There is an epistemological problem in this crossing of two perspectives each of which entertains a different relationship with time : should we state straightforwardly that, because a social object has borne the same name from the French Revolution until today, it has not changed ? We have suffic..

Brain Activity in Valuation Regions While Thinking About the Future Predicts Individual Discount Rates

People vary widely in how much they discount delayed rewards, yet little is known about the sources of these differences. Here we demonstrate that neural activity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) and ventral striatum (VS) when human subjects are asked to merely think about the future—specifically, to judge the subjective length of future time intervals—predicts delay discounting. High discounters showed lower activity for longer time delays, while low discounters showed the opposite pattern. Our results demonstrate that the correlation between VMPFC and VS activity and discounting occurs even in the absence of choices about future rewards, and does not depend on a person explicitly evaluating future outcomes or judging their self-relevance. This suggests a link between discounting and basic processes involved in thinking about the future, such as temporal perception. Our results also suggest that reducing impatience requires not suppression of VMPFC and VS activity altogether, but rather modulation of how these regions respond to the present versus the future

Enquêtes de victimation et statistiques de police : les difficultés d’une comparaison

En utilisant une série d’enquêtes nationales de victimation et de statistiques policières françaises pour la période 1985-2002, les auteurs analysent les obstacles à surmonter et les difficultés à résoudre pour comparer ces deux sources, d’abord en ce qui concerne plusieurs sortes d’atteintes aux biens, ensuite différentes catégories de violences

When Happiness Shared Is Happiness Halved: How Taking Photos to Share With Others Affects Experiences and Memories

Though millions of photos are shared every day, no prior work examines how the goal of sharing influences experiences and memories. Three lab and field studies show that taking pictures to share with others, relative to taking pictures for oneself, can reduce enjoyment of experiences, photos themselves, and relived memories

Linking object boundaries at scale: a common mechanism for size and shape judgments

AbstractThe area over which boundary information contributes to the determination of the center of an extended object was inferred from results of a bisection task. The object to be bisected was a rectangle with two long sinusoidally modulated sides, i.e. a wiggly rectangle. The spatial frequency and amplitude of the edge modulation were varied. Two object widths were tested. The modulation of the perceived center approximately equaled that of the edges at very low edge modulation frequencies and decreased in amplitude with increasing edge modulation frequency. The edge modulation had a greater modulating effect on the perceived center for the narrower object than for the wider object. This scaling with object width didn't follow perfect zoom invariance but was precisely matched by the scaling of the bisection threshold with width, strongly supporting the idea that the same mechanism determines both the location of the perceived center for these stimuli and its variance. We propose that this mechanism is the linking of object boundaries at a scale determined by the object width