Several studies have suggested that people might be less likely to engage in proenvironmental behavior subsequent to their prior engagement in proenvironmental behavior. We have conducted a ...preregistered replication of one such recent study of within-domain licensing in the area of environmental protection. Our replication was extended with an analysis of self-perception as a potential mediator of licensing and environmental attitude as its moderator. The results of our web-based experiment (N = 1,765) show that recollection of past proenvironmental behavior does not diminish subsequent support of a proenvironmental energy policy or proenvironmental intention, and that environmental attitude does not moderate licensing. We only found some evidence of an indirect effect of recollection on subsequent policy support and proenvironmental intention, mediated by self-perception; the pattern of mediation is, however, inconsistent with the licensing theory. We have not replicated the licensing effect observed in the original study.
Disfluent, But Fast Bahník, Štěpán
Experimental psychology,
09/2019, Letnik:
66, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Processing fluency, a metacognitive feeling of ease of
cognitive processing, serves as a cue in various types of judgments. Processing
fluency is sometimes evaluated by response times, with shorter ...response times
indicating higher fluency. The present study examined existence of the opposite
association; that is, it tested whether disfluency may lead to faster decision
times when it serves as a strong cue in judgment. Retrieval fluency was
manipulated in an experiment using previous presentation and phonological
fluency by varying pronounceability of pseudowords. Participants liked
easy-to-pronounce and previously presented words more. Importantly, their
decisions were faster for hard-to-pronounce and easy-to-pronounce pseudowords
than for pseudowords moderate in pronounceability. The results thus showed an
inverted-U shaped relationship between fluency and decision times. The findings
suggest that disfluency can lead to faster decision times and thus demonstrate
the importance of separating different processes comprising judgment when
response times are used as a measure of processing fluency.
While the interpretability of machine learning models is often equated with their mere syntactic comprehensibility, we think that interpretability goes beyond that, and that human interpretability ...should also be investigated from the point of view of cognitive science. The goal of this paper is to discuss to what extent cognitive biases may affect human understanding of interpretable machine learning models, in particular of logical rules discovered from data. Twenty cognitive biases are covered, as are possible debiasing techniques that can be adopted by designers of machine learning algorithms and software. Our review transfers results obtained in cognitive psychology to the domain of machine learning, aiming to bridge the current gap between these two areas. It needs to be followed by empirical studies specifically focused on the machine learning domain.
Several studies have shown that moral licensing by observers makes observers more lenient in their judgment of subsequent immoral behaviors committed by a person. Environmental behavior is generally ...perceived as moral behavior, but it is not known whether it can trigger moral licensing by observers. In two pre-registered experimental laboratory studies (N1 = 198, N2 = 501), we have tested whether prior engagement in pro-environmental behavior triggers licensing by observers and thus makes observers judge more positively actors’ subsequent immoral behavior (Study 1) and their subsequent anti- and pro-environmental behaviors (Study 2). We found that people engaging in pro-environmental behavior were subsequently rated as more pro-environmental and moral, and their subsequent pro- and anti-environmental behaviors (but not outright immoral behavior) were rated as more moral by observers. As these effects also concern subsequent pro-environmental behaviors, they are broader than what licensing theory suggests.
A recent study (Mazar & Zhong, 2010) argued that green consumption triggers cross-domain moral licensing, which makes people engage in dishonest behavior. In two conceptual and one close replication ...of this study (total N = 1,274), we manipulated participants’ level of green consumption. Three different validated tasks, which allowed participants to cheat for monetary profit, were used to measure dishonesty in the three experiments. We found no licensing effect of green consumption on subsequent dishonesty. Thus, policies which make people engage in pro-environmental behavior are less likely to trigger cross-domain licensing than previously thought.
•We have conducted three replications of a moral licensing experiment.•We have found no effect of green consumption on subsequent honesty.•Environmental attitude did not moderate moral licensing.•Environmental attitude did not have a consistent effect on honesty.
Abstract
According to the Selective Accessibility Model of anchoring, the comparison question in the standard anchoring paradigm activates information that is congruent with an anchor. As a ...consequence, this information will be more likely to become the basis for the absolute judgment which will therefore be assimilated toward the anchor. However, if the activated information overlaps with information that is elicited by the absolute judgment itself, the preceding comparative judgment should not exert an incremental effect and should fail to result in an anchoring effect. The present studies find this result when the comparative judgment refers to a general category and the absolute judgment refers to a subset of the general category that was activated by the anchor value. For example, participants comparing the average annual temperature in New York City to a high 102 °F judged the average winter, but not summer temperature to be higher than participants making no comparison. On the other hand, participants comparing the annual temperature to a low –4 °F judged the average summer, but not winter temperature to be lower than control participants. This pattern of results was shown also in another content domain. It is consistent with the Selective Accessibility Model but difficult to reconcile with other main explanations of the anchoring effect.
Processing fluency is used as a basis for various types of judgment. For example, previous research has shown that people judge food additives with names that are more difficult to pronounce (i.e., ...that are disfluent) to be more harmful. We explored the possibility that the association between disfluency and perceived harmfulness might be in the opposite direction for some categories of stimuli. Although we found some support for this hypothesis, an improved analysis and further studies indicated that the effect was strongly dependent on the stimuli used. We then used stimulus sampling and showed that the original association between fluency and perceived safety was not replicable with the newly constructed stimuli. We found the association between fluency and perceived safety using the newly constructed stimuli in a final study, but only when pronounceability was confounded with word length. The results cast doubt on generalizability of the association between pronounceability and perceived safety and underscore the importance of treating stimulus as a random factor.
•How the probability of harming others affects dishonest behavior is not known.•We vary the probability of harm while keeping its expected value constant.•The likelihood of misconduct increases with ...financial incentives.•The probability of causing harm does not alter the likelihood of misconduct.•Uncertainty of harm does not seem to be used for justification of dishonesty.
Dishonest actions, while beneficial to perpetrators, can have significant negative effects on financial markets and organizations. The caused harm is, however, often unclear and unpredictable, possibly making dishonesty easier to justify. We conducted an experiment where participants could break a rule for increased rewards, potentially harming a third party. By manipulating the probability of harm while maintaining the size of expected harm constant, we explore how the probability of harm influences dishonesty. Contrary to expectations, our results suggest that the manipulation does not impact the dishonest behavior. These findings underscore the complexity of dishonest behavior in contexts relevant to finance.
•We explored the depiction of characters in the English-language fiction.•Men were described in more positive terms than women.•Men were described in similarly masculine adjectives as women.•Relative ...to girls, boys were depicted increasingly more positively.•Boys were described in more masculine terms than girls.
Gender associations may be partly learned from print media, including literature. Using Google Books Ngram corpus, we explored the depiction of male and female characters in the twentieth-century English-language fiction. By analyzing adjective-noun bigrams, we examined adjectives used in association with “man”, “woman”, “boy”, and “girl”. Men were described in more positive terms than women. Girls were depicted more positively than boys at the beginning of the twentieth century, but the tendency reversed in the middle of the century. Boys were described in more masculine terms than girls; however, men were described in similarly masculine adjectives as women. Despite limitations of interpretability of the results, the study presents a possible approach of exploring past characterization of the two genders.
The areas of machine learning and knowledge discovery in databases have considerably matured in recent years. In this article, we briefly review recent developments as well as classical algorithms ...that stood the test of time. Our goal is to provide a general introduction into different tasks such as learning from tabular data, behavioral data, or textual data, with a particular focus on actual and potential applications in behavioral sciences. The supplemental appendix to the article also provides practical guidance for using the methods by pointing the reader to proven software implementations. The focus is on R, but we also cover some libraries in other programming languages as well as systems with easy-to-use graphical interfaces.
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