Surrogate utility estimation by long-term partners and unfamiliar dyads

To what extent are people able to make predictions about other people's preferences and values?We report two experiments that present a novel method assessing some of the basic processes in surrogate decision-making, namely surrogate-utility estimation. In each experiment participants formed dyads who were asked to assign utilities to health related items and commodity items, and to predict their partner's utility judgments for the same items. In experiment one we showed that older adults in long-term relationships were able to accurately predict their partner's wishes. In experiment two we showed that younger adults who were relatively unfamiliar with one another were also able to predict other people's wishes. Crucially we demonstrated that these judgments were accurate even after partialling out each participant's own preferences indicating that in order to make surrogate utility estimations people engage in perspective-taking rather than simple anchoring and adjustment, suggesting that utility estimation is not the cause of inaccuracy in surrogate decision-making. The data and implications are discussed with respect to theories of surrogate decision-making

Predicting smartphone operating system from personality and individual differences

Android and iPhone devices account for over 90% of all smartphones sold world-wide. Despite being very similar in functionality, current discourse and marketing campaigns suggest that key individual differences exist between users of these two devices; however, this has never been investigated empirically. This is surprising, as smartphones continue to gain momentum across a variety of research disciplines. In this paper we consider if individual differences exist between these two distinct groups. In comparison to Android users, we found that iPhone owners are more likely to be female, younger, and increasingly concerned about their smartphone being viewed as a status object. Key differences in personality were also observed with iPhone users displaying lower levels of honesty-humility and higher levels of emotionality. Following this analysis, we were also able to build and test a model that predicted smartphone ownership at above chance level based on these individual differences. In line with extended self theory, the type of smartphone owned provides some valuable information about its owner. These findings have implications for the increasing use of smartphones within research particularly for those working within Computational Social Science and PsychoInformatics, where data is typically collected from devices and applications running a single smartphone operating system

Toward a Psychology of Surrogate Decision Making

In everyday life, many of the decisions that we make are made on behalf of other people. A growing body of research suggests that we often, but not always, make different decisions on behalf of other people than the other person would choose. This is problematic in the practical case of legally designated surrogate decision makers, who may not meet the substituted judgment standard. Here, we review evidence from studies of surrogate decision making and examine the extent to which surrogate decision making accurately predicts the recipient’s wishes, or if it is an incomplete or distorted application of the surrogate’s own decision-making processes. We find no existing domain-general model of surrogate decision making. We propose a framework by which surrogate decision making can be assessed and a novel domain-general theory as a unifying explanatory concept for surrogate decisions

Quantifying Smartphone “Use”: Choice of Measurement Impacts Relationships Between “Usage” and Health

Problematic smartphone scales and duration estimates of use dominate research that considers the impact of smartphones on people and society. However, issues with conceptualization and subsequent measurement can obscure genuine associations between technology use and health. Here, we consider whether different ways of measuring “smartphone use,” notably through problematic smartphone use (PSU) scales, subjective estimates, or objective logs, lead to contrasting associations between mental and physical health. Across two samples including iPhone (n = 199) and Android (n = 46) users, we observed that measuring smartphone interactions with PSU scales produced larger associations between mental health when compared with subjective estimates or objective logs. Notably, the size of the relationship was fourfold in Study 1, and almost three times as large in Study 2, when relying on a PSU scale that measured smartphone “addiction” instead of objective use. Further, in regression models, only smartphone “addiction” scores predicted mental health outcomes, whereas objective logs or estimates were not significant predictors. We conclude that addressing people’s appraisals including worries about their technology usage is likely to have greater mental health benefits than reducing their overall smartphone use. Reducing general smartphone use should therefore not be a priority for public health interventions at this time

The Technology Integration Model (TIM): predicting the continued use of technology

The human-computer relationship is often convoluted and despite decades of progress, many relation- ships relating to continued use are unclear and poorly defined. This may be due to a lack of interdisci- plinary collaboration, especially from a theoretical standpoint between computer science and psychology. Following a review of existing theories that attempt to explain continued technology use, we developed the Technology Integration Model (TIM). In sum, the main objective of TIM is to outline the processes behind continued technology use in an individual's everyday life. Here we present the model alongside a description of its scope and the relationships between constructs. This can help generate research questions relating to technology use while simultaneously addressing many previous short- comings of existing models. As a unifying theory, TIM can quickly be adopted by researchers and developers when designing and implementing new technologie

We are all mindreaders and fortune tellers: a psychological investigation of the power of imagination

Imagination is not just fun and children's games but underpins many of the key skills we need for navigating our social world. Other people's thoughts and minds are not visible but at some stage in development children take a mental leap to attribute other people with these invisible mental states. This results in the skill to 'get into the heads of others', allowing for meaningful disentanglement of communication, being discrete, tactful, empathic and also understanding and predicting other people's behaviour. Seeing into the future is important when we make decisions, because we have to imagine what the outcome of a decision is going to be and which one will make us happier. But why, if imagination is so powerful, do we often fail to see things from someone else's point of view and get some small and some big decisions quite wrong? The development, the success and the failures can tell us much about the workings of the mechanism itself

The puzzle of social cognition. How can we fit together the pieces?

The study of mentalising has been dominated for the past two decades by two theories: simulation theory (ST) and theory theory (TT). TT postulates that we understand others’ mental states by applying a series of rules which form a folk psychological theory, whereas ST claims that we use our own mind as a model for understanding the decision processes of others. Whilst these theories are relatively easy to delineate at a theoretical level, it has proved frustratingly inconclusive to test them at the behavioural level. Neuroimaging techniques promised an exciting new avenue for distinguishing between ST or TT processes, but in a provocative critique, Apperly (2008) proposed that ST and TT cannot be distinguished at either the behavioural or neural level and no longer provide a fruitful framework for the study of mental state understanding. In examining Apperly’s argument, I find that ST and TT may not need to be abolished, but need to be sharpened in their formulation, such that they provide a constrainable and, most importantly, testable theory. In a recent hybrid model, we (Mitchell, Currie & Ziegler, 2009) have attempted to put forward such a framework which we hope provides a testable account of mentalising and its development. ST and TT allow us to put together disparate pieces of empirical evidence and provide a deeper understanding of the way our mental world connects with that of others

One small step outside the here and now: what stories can tell us about children’s perspective-taking

The enjoyment of fiction and narrative depends on our ability to step outside our own perspective and take that of another person in a different spatial and temporal reference frame. Readers form rich and vibrant representations of events or scenes described in text, which have many of the same properties as events that are encountered in the real world. Zwaan (1999; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998) in reviewing the literature on adult readers’ mental models presented evidence that situation models share properties with the situation they represent in the dimensions of time, space, causation, intentionality and protagonists. By comparison to the wealth of adult literature, the study of children’s mental models in narrative has been relatively neglected. This seems particularly surprising given the enjoyment children gain from stories and fiction (Harris, 2000), the importance narrative has for their social development (Carpendale & Lewis, 2004) and the opportunity for researchers to use narrative to learn about children’s ability to create situation models that are grounded in the ability to simulate. Indeed, narrative comprehension and social interactions both often depend on the ability to take someone else’s perspective, and narratives therefore offer the opportunity to study children’s perspective-taking in a playful and familiar context. Here I present evidence from a series of studies using different experimental paradigms with children to show that perspective taking in stories and narrative is present even when the protagonist is an inanimate object, but it is not as strong as it is for protagonists who are people. This suggests a dual process of perspective taking that is partly empathic, but also partly driven by pragmatic cues of language. Perspective taking is therefore strongest when the cues of language combine with the opportunity to imaginatively project into the space occupied by the protagonist through an empathic process

The puzzle of social cognition. How can we fit together the pieces?

The study of mentalising has been dominated for the past two decades by two theories: simulation theory (ST) and theory theory (TT). TT postulates that we understand others’ mental states by applying a series of rules which form a folk psychological theory, whereas ST claims that we use our own mind as a model for understanding the decision processes of others. Whilst these theories are relatively easy to delineate at a theoretical level, it has proved frustratingly inconclusive to test them at the behavioural level. Neuroimaging techniques promised an exciting new avenue for distinguishing between ST or TT processes, but in a provocative critique, Apperly (2008) proposed that ST and TT cannot be distinguished at either the behavioural or neural level and no longer provide a fruitful framework for the study of mental state understanding. In examining Apperly’s argument, I find that ST and TT may not need to be abolished, but need to be sharpened in their formulation, such that they provide a constrainable and, most importantly, testable theory. In a recent hybrid model, we (Mitchell, Currie & Ziegler, 2009) have attempted to put forward such a framework which we hope provides a testable account of mentalising and its development. ST and TT allow us to put together disparate pieces of empirical evidence and provide a deeper understanding of the way our mental world connects with that of others.</p

We are all mindreaders and fortune tellers: a psychological investigation of the power of imagination

Imagination is not just fun and children's games but underpins many of the key skills we need for navigating our social world. Other people's thoughts and minds are not visible but at some stage in development children take a mental leap to attribute other people with these invisible mental states. This results in the skill to 'get into the heads of others', allowing for meaningful disentanglement of communication, being discrete, tactful, empathic and also understanding and predicting other people's behaviour.Seeing into the future is important when we make decisions, because we have to imagine what the outcome of a decision is going to be and which one will make us happier. But why, if imagination is so powerful, do we often fail to see things from someone else's point of view and get some small and some big decisions quite wrong? The development, the success and the failures can tell us much about the workings of the mechanism itself.</p