The Role of Surprise in Hindsight Bias – A Metacognitive Model of Reduced and Reversed Hindsight Bias

Hindsight bias is the well researched phenomenon that people falsely believe that they would have correctly predicted the outcome of an event once it is known. In recent years, several authors have doubted the ubiquity of the effect and have reported a reversal under certain conditions. This article presents an integrative model on the role of surprise as one factor explaining the malleability of the hindsight bias. Three ways in which surprise influences the reconstruction of pre-outcome predictions are assumed: (1) Surprise is used as direct metacognitive heuristic to estimate the distance between outcome and prediction. (2) Surprise triggers a deliberate sense-making process, and (3) also biases this process by enhancing the retrieval of surprise-congruent information and expectancy-based hypothesis testing.

The role of surprise in hindsight bias : a metacognitive model of reduced and reversed hindsight bias

Hindsight bias is the well researched phenomenon that people falsely believe that they would have correctly predicted the outcome of an event once it is known. In recent years, several authors have doubted the ubiquity of the effect and have reported a reversal under certain conditions. This article presents an integrative model on the role of surprise as one factor explaining the malleability of the hindsight bias. Three ways in which surprise influences the reconstruction of pre-outcome predictions are assumed: (1) Surprise is used as direct metacognitive heuristic to estimate the distance between outcome and prediction. (2) Surprise triggers a deliberate sense-making process, and (3) also biases this process by enhancing the retrieval of surprise-congruent information and expectancy-based hypothesis testing

Applicants reactions to selection procedures : prediction uncertainty as a moderator of the relationship between procedural fairness and organizational attractiveness

Prozedurale Fairnessbewertungen beeinflussen in starkem Maße Einstellungen und das Verhalten von Personen gegenüber Organisationen. Dies gilt auch für die Bewertung von Personalauswahlverfahren. Personen, die ein Auswahlverfahren als fair einschätzen, bewerten die betreffende Organisation auch als attraktiveren Arbeitgeber. Die vorliegende Studie untersuchte, in wieweit dispositionale Vorhersageunsicherheit auf Seiten der Bewerbenden diesen Zusammenhang verstärkt. Die Ergebnisse der Studie demonstrieren in Abhängigkeit von der Auswahlentscheidung unterschiedliche moderierende Einflüsse von Vorhersageunsicherheit auf den Zusammenhang zwischen prozeduraler Fairnessbewertung und organisationaler Attraktivität. Implikationen für die Forschung zum Einfluss von Fairnessbewertungen sowie für die Anwendung im organisationalen Kontext werden diskutiert

Applicants’ reactions to selection procedures – Prediction uncertainty as a moderator of the relationship between procedural fairness and organizational attractiveness

Procedural fairness judgments strongly influence peoples’ attitudes and behaviors towards organizations. This is also true for the evaluation of selection systems. People who perceive a selection procedure as fairer judge the respective organization as a more attractive employer. The present study examined whether this relationship is strengthened by applicants’ prediction uncertainty. Results demonstrate a differential moderating effect of prediction uncertainty on the relationship between procedural fairness judgments and organizational attractiveness, depending on the outcome of the application. Implications for research on fairness judgments as well as applications in organizational settings are discussed.

Beyond procedure's content – Cognitive subjective experiences in procedural justice judgments

Extending previous work on the formation of justice judgments, it is argued in this thesis that procedural justice judgments are based not only on the information about the procedure accessible at the time of judgment formation, but also on accessibility experiences that accompany the retrieval of content about the procedure. In line with this hypothesis, five experiments tested whether individuals may judge procedures in accordance with the ease or difficulty with which unfair aspects of the procedure come to mind. Experiment 1 examined the role of the accessibility experience in the formation of a procedural justice judgment about a university application procedure. Results show that accessibility experiences associated with the retrieval of unfair aspects of the procedure had an influence on the formation of the procedural justice judgment as well as on the acceptance of the organization’s authority. Experiment 2 tested the processing hypothesis that personal uncertainty should reduce the reliance on the accessibility experiences as heuristic information. In line with this hypothesis, results show that participants with dispositionally high self-uncertainty rely less on the accessibility experience in their procedural justice judgments and their assessment of the organization’s attractiveness. Experiment 3 replicated this finding with an experimental manipulation of uncertainty salience. Experiments 4 and 5 tested whether such a reliance on accessibility experiences also occurs in situations where the procedure has not started yet. Both experiments demonstrate that in negotiation situations participants’ justice expectations and their subsequent behavior are influenced by accessibility experiences and that this influence is moderated by personal uncertainty. The presented research extends current conceptions of the formation of justice judgments in numerous ways and introduces personal uncertainty as a new moderator of the reliance on the accessibility experiences in judgment formation. Implications for future research on the formation of justice judgments and possible applications of the current findings for conflict management and personnel marketing are discussed

Helping to overcome intervention inertia in Bystander’s dilemmas: behavioral disinhibition can improve the greater good

Conventional wisdom holds that behavioral disinhibition has negative effects on what humans do. Behavioral disinhibition may indeed frequently have negative effects, but in the present paper we reveal some positive consequences as well: The disinhibition hypothesis proposed here states that people may feel inhibited to intervene in situations in which non-intervening bystanders are present and that, therefore, behavioral disinhibition may help to overcome the bystander effect. Findings presented here provide evidence supporting this prediction both inside and outside the psychology laboratory: In both real-life and controlled bystander situations, people were more likely and faster to provide help when (unrelated to the bystander situations) they had (vs. had not) been reminded about having acted with no inhibitions. These findings suggest that, in contrast with what various theories and worldviews dictate, behavioral disinhibition may have positive effects on helping behavior and hence can be conducive for the greater good

Shaping Cooperation Behavior: The Role of Accessibility Experiences

The present research investigates the influence on cooperative behavior of accessibility experiences associated with the retrieval of fairness-relevant information from memory. We argue that the decision whether to cooperate in negotiations depends not only on information about the appropriateness of the negotiation procedure, but also on the experience of how difficult or easy it is to come up with this information. Supporting this hypothesis, it is shown that in the context of a bargaining experiment, participants' experiences of ease or difficulty in retrieving unfair aspects of the respective negotiation procedure strongly influence their cooperation behavior. In addition, we hypothesize and empirically substantiate that the influence of accessibility experiences on cooperation behavior occurs particularly in situations of certainty salience. Implications for future research on cooperation and on accessibility experiences are discussed

A Case Study of Small Scale Structure Formation in 3D Supernova Simulations

It is suggested in observations of supernova remnants that a number of large- and small-scale structures form at various points in the explosion. Multidimensional modeling of core-collapse supernovae has been undertaken since SN1987A, and both simulations and observations suggest/show that Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities during the explosion is a main driver for the formation of structure in the remnants. We present a case study of structure formation in 3D in a \msol{15} supernova for different parameters. We investigate the effect of moderate asymmetries and different resolutions of the formation and morphology of the RT unstable region, and take first steps at determining typical physical quantities (size, composition) of arising clumps. We find that in this progenitor the major RT unstable region develops at the He/OC interface for all cases considered. The RT instabilities result in clumps that are overdense by 1-2 orders of magnitude with respect to the ambient gas, have size scales on the level of a few % of the remnant diameter, and are not diffused after the first $\sim30$ yrs of the remnant evolution, in the absence of a surrounding medium.Comment: 59 pages, 34 figure

Increase of the mean inner Coulomb potential in Au clusters induced by surface tension and its implication for electron scattering

Electron holography in a transmission electron microscope was applied to measure the phase shift induced by Au clusters as a function of the cluster size. Large phase shifts Df observed for small Au clusters cannot be described by the well-known equation Df=C_E V_0 t (C_E: interaction constant, V_0: mean inner Coulomb potential (MIP) of bulk gold, t: cluster thickness). The rapid increase of the Au MIP with decreasing cluster size derived from Df, can be explained by the compressive strain of surface atoms in the cluster