Laypeople's Views on Decision Making in the Health Professions

Although actuarial judgment (AJ) is often superior to clinical judgment (CJ), it is underused in the health fields for decision making. One potential reason is that people would not like to be treated as statistics. This study investigates laypeople’s views about the use of AJ versus CJ. Manipulations include domain – a medical context or a psychological context – and perceived difficulty of a diagnosis on laypersons’ preference for either method. It is hypothesized that laypeople are biased against AJ in general. However there are many potential effects of varying context and difficulty. Therefore several possibilities are discussed. 82 Research Experience Program students participating for credit were randomly assigned to two groups in which all materials were presented in a medical or psychological context. Participants read unbiased definitions of AJ and CJ, then read scenarios where easy or difficult diagnoses were made by physicians or psychologists. After each scenario, participants indicated how appropriate it was for the professional to use CJ and AJ. Final questions further explored participants’ comfort levels with each method, and their views of health professionals and actuarial tool development. Results indicated significant interactions between style and difficulty on the rated appropriateness of AJ and CJ. After reading the easy scenario, participants were more in favor of CJ, but after the difficult scenario they rated AJ as more appropriate. Significant interactions between style and domain revealed that CJ was perceived as more appropriate in a psychological context, but appropriateness inverted in the medical context. In general, participants were more comfortable with CJ in both the medical and psychological groups. Finally, people perceived physicians as more knowledgeable than psychologists, and their decision making to be more rational. Possible factors influencing these views are discussed in the paper.No embarg

The Measure of a Man: A Critical Methodology for Investigating Essentialist Beliefs about Sexual Orientation Categories in Japan and the United States

Methods for studying laypeople’s beliefs about sexual orientation categories have evolved in step with larger theoretical and epistemological shifts in the interdisciplinary study of sexuality. The dominant approach to measuring laypeople’s sexual orientation beliefs over the past decade was made possible through an epistemological shift from a nature vs. nurture paradigm to a social constructionist theoretical model of psychological essentialism (Medin, 1989; Medin & Ortony, 1989; Rothbart & Taylor, 1992). Despite this shift, I argue that the forced-response scale-based survey methodologies typically used to operationally define essentialist beliefs about sexual orientation at best only partially realize the social constructionist potential of this underlying theory. By critically reconstructing this theory of psychological essentialism from an epistemological stance rooted in discourse, I developed a methodology reliant not on investigators’ but rather laypeople’s own mobilization of culturally shared discourses of sexuality. In testing this methodology, I focus on one theoretical dimension of psychological essentialism—inductive potential, or the extent to which shared knowledge about category membership allows for inference of a wealth of associated information about specific category members. I explored this critical methodology through a mixed-method empirical investigation of laypeople’s beliefs in the inductive potential of sexual orientation categories in relation to two components of sexuality: sexual desire and romantic love. I sought to answer two research questions: To what extent, and in what ways, do laypeople discursively mobilize inductive potential beliefs about homosexual or heterosexual men’s sexual desire and romantic love? To what extent, and in what ways, is laypeople’s discursive mobilization of those inductive potential beliefs explained by their gendered and/or cultural contexts? In Study 1, I primed cultural discourses of sexual orientation categories prior to an impression formation task. Students from four-year public universities in the Tokyo (N = 197; ages 18-23) and New York City (N = 208; ages 18-25) metropolitan areas read a series of fictional diary entries featuring a male college student (the target) describing his attraction to either a female or male classmate. Each participant then manually drew a Euler diagram comprised of circles representing their impressions of the relative importance (circle size) and interrelationships between (circle overlap) six identities associated with the target. To the extent participants engaged in inductive potential beliefs, I predicted that: (H1) participants would perceive sexual desire as more centrally defining of a same-sex attracted male target relative to an other-sex attracted male target; and (H2) participants would perceive romantic love as less centrally defining of a same-sex attracted male target relative to an other-sex attracted male target. Fitting multiple circle size and overlap outcomes to separate generalized linear models, I found a consistent pattern of support for both predictions. Cultural and gendered differences added additional nuance to these experimental patterns: Japanese participants associated men with greater sexual desire and less romantic love relative to their US peers, regardless of perceived sexual orientation. Additionally, US and Japanese men, compared to women, appeared to associate these two components of sexuality more frequently with men’s social roles. As such, while these results strongly suggested the presence of participants’ inductive potential beliefs about sexual orientation categories, they also pointed to important variation across culture and gender. In an effort to discursively unpack the inductively rich meanings associated with these additional gendered and cultural patterns, as well as establish the cultural credibility of my interpretations of the results of this experimental manipulation, in a second study I engaged separate peer focus groups in New York City (N = 20; ages 19-25) and Tokyo (N = 21; ages 20- 24) in discursively interpreting the Euler diagrams produced in Study 1. Using thematic analysis, I identified three themes concerning the ways several distinct sexual orientation discourses were culturally understood in the US and Japan; the ways those discourses were imbricated with other distinct discourses of cultural identity; and the ways laypeople voiced resistance to these sexual orientation discourses. I concluded that the experimental pattern from Study 1 could be explained in part through US participants’ rejection of an essentialist discourse of binary sexual orientation in favor of a focus on sexual practices; Japanese participants’ responses marked instead a troubling of essentialist discourses of binary gender. Taken together, these findings from Study 1 and 2 implicate sexual orientation as an inductively potent discourse in laypeople’s construction of beliefs about male sexuality across cultural contexts and genders, albeit in cultural distinct ways. These results thus add to past research on essentialist beliefs while also highlighting a need for critical methodologies sensitive to the ways culturally embedded and multiply imbricated transnational discourses of sexuality inform beliefs about men

Is It All About Retribution? The Flexibility of Punishment Goals

Current literature suggests that laypeople’s punishment is primarily driven by retributive reasons (i.e., to give offender their just deserts) rather than utilitarian purposes such as special prevention (i.e., to prevent recidivism of the offender) or general prevention (i.e., to prevent the imitation of the crime by others). One explanation for this may be that individuals tend to focus on salient cues while ignoring others when making a decision and critically, generally pay relatively little attention to secondary or long-term effects of their decision-making. This suggests that people’s punishment goals may be subject to the information salient about the crime situation. Specifically, individuals may only pursue utilitarian goals with their punishment, if aspects related to such long-term consequences of punishment are salient (such as information about the offender or the broad circumstances surrounding the crime). To examine this, we manipulated the salience of different aspects in a scenario describing a crime. In two preregistered experiments, participants were asked to choose from (Experiment 1, N = 291) or rate the appropriateness of (Experiment 2, N = 366) different reactions to the crime; these reactions were pretested for the degree to which they served each of the punishment goals: retribution, special prevention, and general prevention. As hypothesized, we found that participants’ punishment goals were associated with the salience of specific aspects of the scenario describing the crime situation. This extends on research suggesting that laypeople’s punishment goals are malleable and may depend on the research design employed by a particular study

Are emotions reliable guides for policy making? An evolutionary perspective

Technology has become all-important in modern society. For each application, it is crucial for society to have a good understanding of the risks and benefits involved. However, experts tend to assess the risks very differently than the public. One of the main reasons is that experts tend to rely on an objective analysis of the facts, whereas laypeople’s judgment is also based on other factors, including emotional responses. The question remains however whether that is a good thing. Some argue that emotions lead to biases and should be treated with great suspicion; others claim that the laypeople’s approach to risk is much richer and should also be taken into consideration. In this paper, I explore how we can answer that important question from an evolutionary perspective. First, I briefly outline the role of emotions in judgment and decision making. Next, I discuss two approaches that have defended the rationality of emotions: Roeser’s concept of emotions as trustworthy indicators of moral risks and Kahan’s cultural evaluator theory. Subsequently, I briefly discuss the evolution of emotions and their impact on risk assessment. I conclude from that account that emotions are not trustworthy guide for policy making

The Differing Views of Laypeople and Economists on Economic Policies

please see chapter 1.

Money, Banks, and Savings: A Comparative Analysis of Turkish Laypeople's Social Representations over Five Periods (1999-2017)

The way and context-specific scope of how money and banks are mirrored in citizens’ minds is an expanding area of research in relation to economic psychology. Through the analysis of data collected from salaried employees, self-employed professionals, and small/medium enterprise [SME] owners, lay people’s social representations for money, saving and banks in Turkey are comparatively investigated and analysed over time. Grounded in a previous study by authors (undisclosed), with respective samples from the years of 1999, 2001, 2007, 2015, a new fifth dataset for 2017 is introduced here. Changing priorities, understanding and cognitive constructs related to money, banks and savings were particularly analysed to be substantially interconnected with the evolving socioeconomic dynamics and conditions of the crisis periods. Negative evocations and lack of trust became prominent as to the findings such that banks are seen as contemporary pawnshops; money is mirrored as a symbol of power, prestige and reputation, and cannot be achieved through hard work

Belief States in Criminal Law

Belief-state ascription — determining what someone “knew,” “believed,” was “aware of,” etc. — is central to many areas of law. In criminal law, the distinction between knowledge and recklessness, and the use of broad jury instructions concerning other belief states, presupposes a common and stable understanding of what those belief-state terms mean. But a wealth of empirical work at the intersection of philosophy and psychology — falling under the banner of “Experimental Epistemology” — reveals how laypeople’s understandings of mens rea concepts differ systematically from what scholars, courts, and perhaps legislators, have assumed. As implemented, mens rea concepts are much more context-dependent and normatively evaluative than the conventional wisdom suggests, even assuming that jurors are following jury instructions to the letter. As a result, there is less difference between knowledge and recklessness than is typically assumed; jurors consistently “over”-ascribe knowledge to criminal defendants; and concepts like “belief,” “awareness,” and “conscious disregard” mean different things in different contexts, resulting in mens rea findings systematically responsive to aspects of the case traditionally considered irrelevant to the meaning of those terms. This Article provides the first systematic account of the factors driving jurors’ ascriptions of the specific belief states criminal law invokes. After surveying mens rea jury instructions, introducing the Experimental Epistemology literature to the legal literature on mens rea, and examining the implications of that literature for criminal law, this Article considers ways to begin bridging the surprisingly large gap between mens rea theory and practice

The effect of abstract versus concrete framing on judgments of biological and psychological bases of behavior

Human behavior is frequently described both in abstract, general terms and in concrete, specific terms. We asked whether these two ways of framing equivalent behaviors shift the inferences people make about the biological and psychological bases of those behaviors. In five experiments, we manipulated whether behaviors are presented concretely (i.e. with reference to a specific person, instantiated in the particular context of that person’s life) or abstractly (i.e. with reference to a category of people or behaviors across generalized contexts). People judged concretely framed behaviors to be less biologically based and, on some dimensions, more psychologically based than the same behaviors framed in the abstract. These findings held true for both mental disorders (Experiments 1 and 2) and everyday behaviors (Experiments 4 and 5) and yielded downstream consequences for the perceived efficacy of disorder treatments (Experiment 3). Implications for science educators, students of science, and members of the lay public are discussed

Cross-Cultural Studies of Implicit Theories of Creativity: A Comparative Analysis Between the United States and the Main Ethnic Groups in Singapore

This thesis explored the extent of influence of culture on implicit theories of creativity among laypeople from the United States and Singapore, as well as the ethnic groups in Singapore - the Chinese, the Malays, and the Indians, in regard to adaptive and innovative styles of creativity as well as their own conceptions of creativity. A total of 523 participants were involved in this study. They comprised 139 participants from the United States and 199 participants from Singapore, 84 Chinese, 54 Malays, and 47 Indians. The participants completed the first part of a questionnaire that consisted of a ten-point scale to rate the creativity level for the descriptors of the Adaptor and Innovator derived from Kirton’s explicit theory of creativity called the Adaptor-Innovator Theory. They also completed the second part of the questionnaire where they were asked to give words they believed were associated with creativity. The data were analyzed and compared with each other as national cultures as well as amongst the three ethnic groups in Singapore. The results revealed that the participants had an implicit belief that high creativity was associated with Kirton’s innovative style of creativity. Also, the words they believed were associated with creativity seemed to have an innovator bias. Implications of these findings raise new questions on the extent of influence of culture on laypeople’s perceptions of creativity. Recommendations for future research were also discussed

Belief States in Criminal Law

Belief-state ascription—determining what someone “knew,” “believed,” was “aware of,” etc.—is central to many areas of law. In criminal law, the distinction between knowledge and recklessness, and the use of broad jury instructions concerning other belief states, presupposes a common and stable understanding of what those belief-state terms mean. But a wealth of empirical work at the intersection of philosophy and psychology—falling under the banner of “Experimental Epistemology”—reveals how laypeople’s understandings of mens rea concepts differ systematically from what scholars, courts, and perhaps legislators, have assumed. As implemented, mens rea concepts are much more context-dependent and normatively evaluative than the conventional wisdom suggests, even assuming that jurors are following jury instructions to the letter. As a result, there is less difference between knowledge and recklessness than is typically assumed; jurors consistently “over”-ascribe knowledge to criminal defendants; and concepts like “belief,” “awareness,” and “conscious disregard” mean different things in different contexts, resulting in mens rea findings systematically responsive to aspects of the case traditionally considered irrelevant to the meaning of those terms. This Article provides the first systematic account of the factors driving jurors’ ascriptions of the specific belief states criminal law invokes. After surveying mens rea jury instructions, introducing the Experimental Epistemology literature to the legal literature on mens rea, and examining the implications of that literature for criminal law, this Article considers ways to begin bridging the surprisingly large gap between mens rea theory and practice