bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The nonsense math effect
Authors: Eriksson Kimmo 
Published: January 2023

AbstractMathematics is a fundamental tool of research. Although potentially applicable in every discipline, the amount of training in mathematics that students typically receive varies greatly between different disciplines. In those disciplines where most researchers do not master mathematics, the use of mathematics may be held in too much awe. To demonstrate this I conducted an online experiment with 200 participants, all of which had experience of reading research reports and a postgraduate degree (in any subject). Participants were presented with the abstracts from two published papers (one in evolutionary anthropology and one in sociology). Based on these abstracts, participants were asked to judge the quality of the research. Either one or the other of the two abstracts was manipulated through the inclusion of an extra sentence taken from a completely unrelated paper and presenting an equation that made no sense in the context. The abstract that included the meaningless mathematics tended to be judged of higher quality. However, this “nonsense math effect” was not found among participants with degrees in mathematics, science, technology or medicine.
The impact of near-miss events on betting behavior: An examination of casino rapid roulette play
Authors: Sundali James A. , Safford Amanda H. , Croson Rachel 
Published: January 2023

AbstractWe examine how almost winning in roulette affects subsequent betting behavior. Our main finding is heterogeneity in gambler behavior with some gamblers less likely to bet on numbers that were near misses on the prior spin and other gamblers more likely to bet on near miss numbers. Using a unique data set from the game rapid roulette, we model the likelihood of a gambler betting on a near miss number while controlling for the favorite number bias and the likelihood of a number being a near miss. We also find no evidence that near misses in roulette leads to gamblers extending the time spent gambling or to the placing of more bets.
Maximize when valuable: The domain specificity of maximizing decision-making style
Authors: Zhu Minfan , Wang Jun , Xie Xiaofei 
Published: January 2023

AbstractThe maximizing decision-making style describes the style of one who pursues maximum utility in decision-making, in contrast to the satisficing style, which describes the style of one who is satisfied with good enough options. The current research concentrates on the within-person variation in the maximizing decision-making style and provides an explanation through three studies. Study 1 (N = 530) developed a domain-specific maximizing scale and found that individuals had different maximizing tendencies across different domains. Studies 2 (N = 162) and 3 (N = 106) further explored this mechanism from the perspective of subjective task value through questionnaires and experiments. It was found that the within-person variation of maximization in different domains is driven by the difference in the individuals’ subjective task value in the corresponding domains. People tend to maximize more in the domains they value more. Our research contributes to a comprehensive understanding of maximization and provides a new perspective for the study of the maximizing decision-making style.
Belief in the unstructured interview: The persistence of an illusion
Authors: Dana Jason , Dawes Robyn , Peterson Nathanial 
Published: January 2023

AbstractUnstructured interviews are a ubiquitous tool for making screening decisions despite a vast literature suggesting that they have little validity. We sought to establish reasons why people might persist in the illusion that unstructured interviews are valid and what features about them actually lead to poor predictive accuracy. In three studies, we investigated the propensity for “sensemaking” - the ability for interviewers to make sense of virtually anything the interviewee says—and “dilution”—the tendency for available but non-diagnostic information to weaken the predictive value of quality information. In Study 1, participants predicted two fellow students’ semester GPAs from valid background information like prior GPA and, for one of them, an unstructured interview. In one condition, the interview was essentially nonsense in that the interviewee was actually answering questions using a random response system. Consistent with sensemaking, participants formed interview impressions just as confidently after getting random responses as they did after real responses. Consistent with dilution, interviews actually led participants to make worse predictions. Study 2 showed that watching a random interview, rather than personally conducting it, did little to mitigate sensemaking. Study 3 showed that participants believe unstructured interviews will help accuracy, so much so that they would rather have random interviews than no interview. People form confident impressions even interviews are defined to be invalid, like our random interview, and these impressions can interfere with the use of valid information. Our simple recommendation for those making screening decisions is not to use them.
Choice blindness in financial decision making
Authors: McLaughlin Owen , Somerville Jason 
Published: January 2023

AbstractChoice Blindness is an experimental paradigm that examines the interplay between individuals’ preferences, decisions, and expectations by manipulating the relationship between intention and choice. This paper expands upon the existing Choice Blindness framework by investigating the presence of the effect in an economically significant decision context, specifically that of pension choice. In addition, it investigates a number of secondary factors hypothesized to modulate Choice Blindness, including reaction time, risk preference, and decision complexity, as well as analysing the verbal reports of non-detecting participants. The experiment was administered to 100 participants of mixed age and educational attainment. The principal finding was that no more than 37.2% of manipulated trials were detected over all conditions, a result consistent with previous Choice Blindness research. Analysis of secondary factors found that reaction time, financial sophistication and decision complexity were significant predictors of Choice Blindness detection, while content analysis of non-detecting participant responses found that 20% implied significant preference changes and 62% adhered to initial preferences. Implications of the Choice Blindness effect in the context of behavioural economics are discussed, and an agenda for further investigation of the paradigm in this context is outlined.
Posthumous events affect rated quality and happiness of lives
Authors: Rozin Paul , Stellar Jennifer 
Published: January 2023

AbstractDiener and colleagues (2001) illustrated that individuals rely heavily on endings to evaluate the quality of a life. Two studies investigated the potential for posthumous events to affect rated life quality, calling into question the intuitive “ending” of a life at death. Undergraduates read a series of short life narratives to assess the consequences of posthumous reversals of fortune on judgments of the goodness and happiness of the life. In a 2x2 within-subjects design, lives positive and negative in valence were displayed twice: once from birth to death and once each life was followed by a posthumous event of opposite valence. Results demonstrated that posthumous reversals of fortune shift judgments of the goodness and happiness of the life in the direction of the valence of the posthumous event. These effects were not related to an individual’s religiosity or the degree to which the life made an engaging story. We suggest that the posthumous happy effect may be a case of a more general process, which we call retroactive re-evaluation.
Selective information sampling: Cognitive coherence in evaluation of a novel item
Authors: Fraser-Mackenzie Peter A. F. , Dror Itiel E. 
Published: January 2023

AbstractThis study investigates the amount and valence of information selected during single item evaluation. One hundred and thirty-five participants evaluated a cell phone by reading hypothetical customers reports. Some participants were first asked to provide a preliminary rating based on a picture of the phone and some technical specifications. The participants who were given the customer reports only after they made a preliminary rating exhibited valence bias in their selection of customers reports. In contrast, the participants that did not make an initial rating sought subsequent information in a more balanced, albeit still selective, manner. The preliminary raters used the least amount of information in their final decision, resulting in faster decision times. The study appears to support the notion that selective exposure is utilized in order to develop cognitive coherence.
Biases in choices about fairness: Psychology and economic inequality
Authors: Michaelson Zachary 
Published: January 2023

AbstractThis paper investigates choices about “distributional fairness” (sometimes called “distributive justice”), i.e., selection of the proper way for resources to be distributed in group. The study finds evidence that several of the same biases of risky decision making also apply to choices about distributional fairness, in particular focusing on the key biases that lead to prospect theory. This finding is achieved by introducing a novel thought experiment regarding the fairness of resource distributions, then manipulating the percentage of individuals who gain or lose in these distributions, and changing the sizes of gains and losses. Shared biases may mean similar heuristics are being employed. The mechanism behind this result leaves room for future exploration, as do the implications of the finding for related applications in inequality research.
Are complex decisions better left to the unconscious? Further failed replications of the deliberation-without-attention effect
Authors: Calvillo Dustin P. , Penaloza Alan 
Published: January 2023

AbstractThe deliberation-without-attention effect occurs when better decisions are made when people experience a period of distraction before a decision than when they make decisions immediately or when they spend time reflecting on the alternatives. This effect has been explained (e.g., Dijksterhuis, 2004) by the claim that people engage in unconscious deliberation when distracted and that unconscious thought is better suited for complex decisions than conscious thought. Experiments 1, 2A, and 2B in this study included a dominant alternative and failed to find evidence for this effect. Experiment 3 removed the dominant alternative and manipulated mode of thought within-subjects to eliminate alternative explanations for the failed replication. In all experiments participants did not make better decisions after unconscious thought; decisions were consistently better than chance when made immediately after the encoding of information. Encouraging people not to think about complex decisions appears to be unwarranted.
New designs for research in delay discounting
Authors: Doyle John R. , Chen Catherine H. , Savani Krishna 
Published: January 2023

AbstractThe two most influential models in delay discounting research have been the exponential (E) and hyperbolic (H) models. We develop a new methodology to design binary choice questions such that exponential and hyperbolic discount rates can be purposefully manipulated to make their rate parameters orthogonal (Pearson’s R = 0), negatively correlated (R = –1), positively correlated (R = +1), or to hold one rate constant while allowing the other to vary. Then we extend the method to similarly contrast different versions of the hyperboloid model. The arithmetic discounting model (A), which is based on differences between present and future rewards rather than their ratios, may easily be made orthogonal to any other pair of models. Our procedure makes it possible to design choice stimuli that precisely vary the relationship between different discount rates. However, the additional control over the correlation between different discount rate parameters may require the researcher to either restrict the range that those rate parameters can take, or to expand the range of times the participant must wait for future rewards.
Measuring Social Value Orientation
Authors: Murphy Ryan O. , Ackermann Kurt A. , Handgraaf Michel J. J. 
Published: January 2023

AbstractNarrow self-interest is often used as a simplifying assumption when studying people making decisions in social contexts. Nonetheless, people exhibit a wide range of different motivations when choosing unilaterally among interdependent outcomes. Measuring the magnitude of the concern people have for others, sometimes called Social Value Orientation (SVO), has been an interest of many social scientists for decades and several different measurement methods have been developed so far. Here we introduce a new measure of SVO that has several advantages over existent methods. A detailed description of the new measurement method is presented, along with norming data that provide evidence of its solid psychometric properties. We conclude with a brief discussion of the research streams that would benefit from a more sensitive and higher resolution measure of SVO, and extend an invitation to others to use this new measure which is freely available.
The endowment effect in the genes: An exploratory study
Authors: Hou Xingrong , Zeng Jianmin , Chen Hong , Su Li 
Published: January 2023

AbstractThe endowment effect is a well-documented decision phenomenon, referring to a tendency that people price a commodity higher when selling it than when buying it. This phenomenon can be interpreted as a sort of inertia, an unwillingness to make a change, or in other words an attachment to the status-quo. People with autism dislike social interaction, and are thus probably less willing to buy and sell items and more attached to the status quo. Previous research revealed that T-carriers of a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) of the dopamine beta-hydroxylase (DBH) gene, rs1611115 (C-1021T), are associated with autism and difficulty in social interaction. Therefore, rs1611115 may modulate the endowment effect. In the current study, the subjects sold and bought lotteries with various probabilities of winning money and provided saliva for genotyping. We found that T-carriers (people of CT genotype in this study) exhibited greater endowment effects compared to people of CC genotype. We discuss another two possible explanations of our results: empathy and loss aversion. This is the first attempt to research the endowment effect from the perspective of genes. The result indicates that an SNP of genes (an innate factor) can exert an observable effect on human market activities.
The power of moral words: Loaded language generates framing effects in the extreme dictator game
Authors: Capraro Valerio , Vanzo Andrea 
Published: January 2023

AbstractUnderstanding whether preferences are sensitive to the frame has been a major topic of debate in the last decades. For example, several works have explored whether the dictator game in the give frame gives rise to a different rate of pro-sociality than the same game in the take frame, leading to mixed results. Here we contribute to this debate with two experiments. In Study 1 (N=567) we implement an extreme dictator game in which the dictator either gets $0.50 and the recipient gets nothing, or the opposite (i.e., the recipient gets $0.50 and the dictator gets nothing). We experimentally manipulate the words describing the available actions using six terms, from very negative (e.g., stealing) to very positive (e.g., donating) connotations. We find that the rate of pro-sociality is affected by the words used to describe the available actions. In Study 2 (N=221) we ask brand new participants to rate each of the words used in Study 1 from “extremely wrong” to “extremely right”. We find that these moral judgments can explain the framing effect in Study 1. In sum, our studies provide evidence that framing effects in an extreme Dictator game can be generated using morally loaded language.
How well can adolescents really judge risk? Simple, self reported risk factors out-predict teens’ self estimates of personal risk
Authors: Persoskie Alexander 
Published: January 2023

AbstractRecent investigations of adolescents’ beliefs about risk have led to surprisingly optimistic conclusions: Teens’ self estimates of their likelihood of experiencing various life events not only correlate sensibly with relevant risk factors (Fischhoff et al., 2000), but they also significantly predict later experiencing the events (Bruine de Bruin et al., 2007). Using the same dataset examined in previous investigations, the present study extended these analyses by comparing the predictive value of self estimates of risk to that of traditional risk factors for each outcome. The analyses focused on the prediction of pregnancy, criminal arrest, and school enrollment. Three findings emerged. First, traditional risk factor information tended to out-predict self assessments of risk, even when the risk factors included crude, potentially unreliable measures (e.g., a simple tally of self-reported criminal history) and when the risk factors were aggregated in a nonoptimal way (i.e., unit weighting). Second, despite the previously reported correlations between self estimates and outcomes, perceived invulnerability was a problem among the youth: Over half of the teens who became pregnant, half of those who were not enrolled in school, and nearly a third of those who were arrested had, one year earlier, indicated a 0% chance of experiencing these outcomes. Finally, adding self estimates of risk to the other risk factor information produced only small gains in predictive accuracy. These analyses point to the need for greater education about the situations and behaviors that lead to negative outcomes.
Downside financial risk is misunderstood
Authors: Newall Philip W. S. 
Published: January 2023

AbstractThe mathematics of downside financial risk can be difficult to understand: For example a 50% loss requires a subsequent 100% gain to break-even. A given percentage loss always requires a greater percentage gain to break-even. Instead, many non-expert investors may assume for example that a 50% gain is sufficient to offset a 50% loss. Over 3,498 participants and five experiments, the widespread illusion that a sequence of equal percentage gains and losses produces a zero overall return was demonstrated. Participants continued to err frequently, even with percentage returns of +/-100%, or when financially incentivized. Financial literacy, numeracy, and deliberation were all shown to independently contribute to accurate performance. These results have implications for promoting the understanding of downside financial risk.
Risks deter but pleasures allure: Is pleasure more important?
Authors: Chao Li-Wei , Szrek Helena , Leite Rui , Peltzer Karl , Ramlagan Shandir 
Published: January 2023

AbstractThe pursuit of unhealthy behaviors, such as smoking or binge drinking, not only carries various downside risks, but also provides pleasure. A parsimonious model, used in the literature to explain the decision to pursue an unhealthy activity, represents that decision as a tradeoff between risks and benefits. We build on this literature by surveying a rural population in South Africa to elicit the perceived riskiness and the perceived pleasure for various risky activities and to examine how these perceptions relate to the pursuit of four specific unhealthy behaviors: frequent smoking, problem drinking, seatbelt nonuse, and risky sex. We show that perceived pleasure is a significant predictor for three of the behaviors and that perceived riskiness is a significant predictor for two of them. We also show that the correlation between the riskiness rating and behavior is significantly different from the correlation between the pleasure rating and behavior for three of the four behaviors. Finally, we show that the effect of pleasure is significantly greater than the effect of riskiness in determining drinking and risky sex, while the effects of pleasure and riskiness are not different from each other in determining smoking and seatbelt nonuse. We discuss how our findings can be used to inform the design of health promotion strategies.
Contamination without contact: An examination of intention-based contagion
Authors: Stavrova Olga , Newman George E. , Kulemann Anna , Fetchenhauer Detlef 
Published: January 2023

AbstractContagion refers to the belief that individuals or objects can acquire the essence of a particular source, such as a disgusting product or an immoral person, through physical contact. This paper documents beliefs in a "contact-free" form of contagion whereby an object is thought to inherit the essence of a person when it was designed, but never actually physically touched, by the individual. We refer to this phenomenon as contagion through creative intent or “intention-based contagion” and distinguish it from more traditional forms of contact-based contagion (Studies 1 and 2), as well as alternative mechanisms such as mere association (Studies 2 and 3a). We demonstrate that, like contact-based contagion, intention-based contagion results from beliefs in transferred essence (Study 1) and involves beliefs in transfer of actual properties (Study 4). However, unlike contact-based contagion, intention-based contagion does not appear to be as strongly related to the emotion of disgust (Study 1) and can influence evaluations in auditory as well as visual modalities (Studies 3a–3c).
The role of cognitive reflection in decision making: Evidence from Pakistani managers
Authors: Sajid Muhammad , Li Matthew C. 
Published: January 2023

AbstractAssessing how managers discount and evaluate risks is crucial in designing effective managerial policies. In this work, we examine whether risk preferences (RP; both in the domains of gain and loss) and time preferences (TP) are related to managers’ cognitive reflection (CR). To achieve this, the current study focuses on the responses of 601 corporate decision-makers, such as CEO and CFO, of 200 non-financial firms listed at the Pakistan Stock Exchange. Using the three-item of Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; Frederick, 2005) as a measure of CR, we observe that males perform better on this test than females. Correlation analysis reveals that individuals’ RP in the gain domain are positively associated with their TP, implying that risk-taking individuals are more patient. Our evidence further shows that higher CR is associated with a higher likelihood of increased patience and a lower likelihood of willingness to take risks in the domain of loss. Greater CR is also linked to a higher likelihood of risk-taking in the domain of gain. These findings have important implications regarding the ability of managers to make financial decisions that involve uncertainty and delayed rewards but maximize firm value.