This research demonstrates how promoting the environment can negatively affect adoption of energy efficiency in the United States because of the political polarization surrounding environmental ...issues. Study 1 demonstrated that more politically conservative individuals were less in favor of investment in energy-efficient technology than were those who were more politically liberal. This finding was driven primarily by the lessened psychological value that more conservative individuals placed on reducing carbon emissions. Study 2 showed that this difference has consequences: In a real-choice context, more conservative individuals were less likely to purchase a more expensive energy-efficient light bulb when it was labeled with an environmental message than when it was unlabeled. These results highlight the importance of taking into account psychological value-based considerations in the individual adoption of energy-efficient technology in the United States and beyond.
The Wisdom of Select Crowds Mannes, Albert E.; Soll, Jack B.; Larrick, Richard P.
Journal of personality and social psychology,
08/2014, Volume:
107, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Social psychologists have long recognized the power of statisticized groups. When individual judgments about some fact (e.g., the unemployment rate for next quarter) are averaged together, the ...average opinion is typically more accurate than most of the individual estimates, a pattern often referred to as the wisdom of crowds. The accuracy of averaging also often exceeds that of the individual perceived as most knowledgeable in the group. However, neither averaging nor relying on a single judge is a robust strategy; each performs well in some settings and poorly in others. As an alternative, we introduce the select-crowd strategy, which ranks judges based on a cue to ability (e.g., the accuracy of several recent judgments) and averages the opinions of the top judges, such as the top 5. Through both simulation and an analysis of 90 archival data sets, we show that select crowds of 5 knowledgeable judges yield very accurate judgments across a wide range of possible settings-the strategy is both accurate and robust. Following this, we examine how people prefer to use information from a crowd. Previous research suggests that people are distrustful of crowds and of mechanical processes such as averaging. We show in 3 experiments that, as expected, people are drawn to experts and dislike crowd averages-but, critically, they view the select-crowd strategy favorably and are willing to use it. The select-crowd strategy is thus accurate, robust, and appealing as a mechanism for helping individuals tap collective wisdom.
We examine the impact of the subjective experience of power on leadership dynamics and team performance and find that the psychological effect of power on formal leaders spills over to affect team ...performance. We argue that a formal leader's experience of heightened power produces verbal dominance, which reduces team communication and consequently diminishes performance. Importantly, because these dynamics rely on the acquiescence of other team members to the leader's dominant behavior, the effects only emerge when the leader holds a formal leadership position. Three studies offer consistent support for this argument. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.
► Power leads to the discounting of both expert and novice advice. ► This effect is mediated by feelings of competitiveness and confidence. ► Feelings of cooperation mitigate this tendency.
Four ...experiments test the prediction that feelings of power lead individuals to discount advice received from both experts and novices. Experiment 1 documents a negative relationship between subjective feelings of power and use of advice. Experiments 2 and 3 further show that individuals experiencing neutral and low levels of power weigh advice from experts and experienced advisors more heavily than advice from novices, but individuals experiencing high levels of power discount both novice and expert advice. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrate that this tendency of individuals experiencing high levels of power to discount advice from experts and novices equally is mediated by feelings of competitiveness (Experiment 3) and confidence (Experiments 3 and 4). Finally, Experiment 4 shows that inducing high power individuals to feel cooperative with their advisors can mitigate this tendency, leading them to weigh expert advice more heavily than advice from novices. Theoretical and practical contributions are discussed.
Strategies for Revising Judgment Soll, Jack B; Larrick, Richard P
Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition,
05/2009, Volume:
35, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
A basic issue in social influence is how best to change one's judgment in response to learning the opinions of others. This article examines the strategies that people use to revise their ...quantitative estimates on the basis of the estimates of another person. The authors note that people tend to use 2 basic strategies when revising estimates: choosing between the 2 estimates and averaging them. The authors developed the probability, accuracy, redundancy (PAR) model to examine the relative effectiveness of these two strategies across judgment environments. A surprising result was that averaging was the more effective strategy across a wide range of commonly encountered environments. The authors observed that despite this finding, people tend to favor the choosing strategy. Most participants in these studies would have achieved greater accuracy had they always averaged. The identification of intuitive strategies, along with a formal analysis of when they are accurate, provides a basis for examining how effectively people use the judgments of others. Although a portfolio of strategies that includes averaging and choosing can be highly effective, the authors argue that people are not generally well adapted to the environment in terms of strategy selection.
Prior research suggests that people assess overall fairness of an event by focusing on the distribution of the final outcome (distributive fairness) and on how they are treated by others during the ...conflict resolution process (interactional fairness). The primary goal of this work is to use a social relationship framework to study differences in consumers' responses to interactional fairness as revealed by their evaluations of a brand. Two types of relationships are examined—exchange relationships in which benefits are given to get something back in return; and communal relationships in which benefits are given to take care of others' needs. Results of two studies suggest that the type of consumers' relationship with the brand moderates the effect of interactional fairness such that consumers who have a communal relationship are more responsive to interactional fairness under conditions of low distributive fairness while those who have an exchange relationship are more responsive under conditions of high distributive fairness.
The Power of Rank Information Chun, Jinseok S.; Larrick, Richard P.
Journal of personality and social psychology,
06/2022, Volume:
122, Issue:
6
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
People, organizations, and products are continuously ranked. The explosion of data has made it easy to rank everything, and, increasingly, outlets for information try to reduce information loads by ...providing rankings. In the present research, we find that rank information exerts a strong effect on decision making over and above the underlying information it summarizes. For example, when multiple options are presented with ratings alone (e.g., "9.7" vs. "9.5") versus with ratings and corresponding ranks (e.g., "9.7" and "1st" vs. "9.5" and "2nd"), the presence of rank information increases preference for the top ranked option. This effect of ranking is found in a variety of contexts, ranging from award decisions in a professional sports league to hiring decisions to consumer choices, and it is independent of other well-known effects (such as the effect of sorting). We find that the influence of ranks is explained by the extent to which decision makers attend to the top ranked option and overlook the other options when they are given rank information. Because they invest a disproportionate amount of attention to the top ranked option when they are given rank information, decision makers tend to learn the strength of the top ranked option, but they fail to process the strengths of the other options. We discuss how rank information may operate as one of the processes by which those at the top of the hierarchy maintain a disproportionate level of popularity in the market.
Seven experiments demonstrate that framing an organizational entity (the target) as an organization ("an organization comprised of its constituent members") versus its members ("constituent members ...comprising an organization") increases attribution of responsibility to the target following a negative outcome, despite identical information conveyed. Specifically, the target in the organization (vs. members) frame was perceived to have more control over a negative outcome, which led to an increased attribution of responsibility (Studies 1-3). This effect surfaced for both for-profits and nonprofits (Study 5). However, when the target in the members frame had explicit control over the outcome (Study 3), or when participants held strong beliefs in individual free will (Study 4), the effect of frame on responsibility attenuated. To the extent that framing increased perceptions of control, punishment for the target also increased (Studies 6a and 6b). By demonstrating how a subtle shift in framing can impact people's perceptions and judgments of organizations, we reveal important knowledge about how people understand organizations and the psychological nature of organizational and group perception.
Averaging estimates is an effective way to improve accuracy when combining expert judgments, integrating group members' judgments, or using advice to modify personal judgments. If the estimates of ...two judges ever fall on different sides of the truth, which we term bracketing, averaging must outperform the average judge for convex loss functions, such as mean absolute deviation (MAD). We hypothesized that people often hold incorrect beliefs about averaging, falsely concluding that the average of two judges' estimates would be no more accurate than the average judge. The experiments confirmed that this misconception was common across a range of tasks that involved reasoning from summary data (Experiment 1), from specific instances (Experiment 2), and conceptually (Experiment 3). However, this misconception decreased as observed or assumed bracketing rate increased (all three studies) and when bracketing was made more transparent (Experiment 2). Experiment 4 showed that flawed inferential rules and poor extensional reasoning abilities contributed to the misconception. We conclude by describing how people may face few opportunities to learn the benefits of averaging and how misappreciating averaging contributes to poor intuitive strategies for combining estimates.
Economics. The MPG illusion Larrick, Richard P; Soll, Jack B
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
2008-Jun-20, 20080620, Volume:
320, Issue:
5883
Journal Article
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