Barnabas Szaszi

Commentary: Oxytocin-gaze positive loop and the coevolution of human–dog bonds

It has been proposed that evolution of dogs have led to a set of changes, which made them functionally similar to humans in some cognitive, behavioral, and social aspects (Topal et al., 2005; MacLean and Hare, 2015). Searching for these similarities, Nagasawa et al. (2015) hypothesize an oxytocin-mediated positive loop, which developed through the coevolution of human–dog bonding. To test this hypothesis, they conducted a highly original experiment, examining the effects of a 30-min human–dog interaction on oxytocin-secretion in both owners and dogs, and investigating which characteristics of the interaction modulated the oxytocin change (experiment 1). A unique feature of the study is that the same experiment was repeated with hand-reared wolves and their owners to evaluate whether the proposed oxytocin loop was specific to the human–dog interaction. In a following experiment (experiment 2), they administered oxytocin to dogs, and recoded changes in social behavior, and effects of the behavioral change on the owners urinary oxytocin levels.

The Cognitive Reflection Test Revisited: Exploring the Ways Individuals Solve the Test

ABSTRACT Individuals’ propensity not to override the first answer that comes to mind is thought to be a crucial cause behind many failures in reasoning. In the present study, we aimed to explore the strategies used and the abilities employed when individuals solve the cognitive reflection test (CRT), the most widely used measure of this tendency. Alongside individual differences measures, protocol analysis was employed to unfold the steps of the reasoning process in solving the CRT. This exploration revealed that there are several ways people solve or fail the test. Importantly, 77% of the cases in which reasoners gave the correct final answer in our protocol analysis, they started their response with the correct answer or with a line of thought which led to the correct answer. We also found that 39% of the incorrect responders reflected on their first response. The findings indicate that the suppression of the first answer may not be the only crucial feature of reflectivity in the CRT and that the lack of relevant knowledge is a prominent cause of the reasoning errors. Additionally, we confirmed that the CRT is a multi-faceted construct: both numeracy and reflectivity account for performance. The results can help to better apprehend the “whys and whens” of the decision errors in heuristics and biases tasks and to further refine existing explanatory models.

Estimating the Evidential Value of Significant Results in Psychological Science

Quantifying evidence is an inherent aim of empirical science, yet the customary statistical methods in psychology do not communicate the degree to which the collected data serve as evidence for the tested hypothesis. In order to estimate the distribution of the strength of evidence that individual significant results offer in psychology, we calculated Bayes factors (BF) for 287,424 findings of 35,515 articles published in 293 psychological journals between 1985 and 2016. Overall, 55% of all analyzed results were found to provide BF > 10 (often labeled as strong evidence) for the alternative hypothesis, while more than half of the remaining results do not pass the level of BF = 3 (labeled as anecdotal evidence). The results estimate that at least 82% of all published psychological articles contain one or more significant results that do not provide BF > 10 for the hypothesis. We conclude that due to the threshold of acceptance having been set too low for psychological findings, a substantial proportion of the published results have weak evidential support.

Quantifying Support for the Null Hypothesis in Psychology: An Empirical Investigation

In the traditional statistical framework, nonsignificant results leave researchers in a state of suspended disbelief. In this study, we examined, empirically, the treatment and evidential impact of nonsignificant results. Our specific goals were twofold: to explore how psychologists interpret and communicate nonsignificant results and to assess how much these results constitute evidence in favor of the null hypothesis. First, we examined all nonsignificant findings mentioned in the abstracts of the 2015 volumes of Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and Psychological Science (N = 137). In 72% of these cases, nonsignificant results were misinterpreted, in that the authors inferred that the effect was absent. Second, a Bayes factor reanalysis revealed that fewer than 5% of the nonsignificant findings provided strong evidence (i.e., BF01 > 10) in favor of the null hypothesis over the alternative hypothesis. We recommend that researchers expand their statistical tool kit in order to correctly interpret nonsignificant results and to be able to evaluate the evidence for and against the null hypothesis.

Is Action Execution Part of the Decision-Making Process? An Investigation of the Embodied Choice Hypothesis.

In this study, we aimed to explore whether action execution is an inherent part of the decision-making process. According to the hypothesis of embodied choice, the decision-making process is bidirectional as action dynamics exert their backward influence on decision processes through changing the cost and value of the potential options. This influence takes place as moving toward one option increases the commitment to and, therefore, the likelihood of choosing that option. This commitment effect can be the result of either (a) the continuous act of getting closer to this option or (b) the increased movement cost associated with changing the movement direction to select a different option. To disentangle the potential influence of these two factors, we developed the Guided Movement Task, a choice task designed to bias participant’s computer-mouse movements by constraining the allowed movement space by a corridor. Using this task, we created different conditions in which the participants’ mouse cursor, after being guided toward one of the options, either had equal or unequal distances to the choice options. By this manipulation, we could test whether the continuous act of getting closer to an option in itself is sufficient to influence people’s decisions—a claim of “strong embodiment.” In two experiments, we found that the likelihood of choosing an option only increased when the distances between the two options were unequal after the initial movement but not when they were equal. These results disagree with the hypothesis that action execution is an inherent part of the decision-making process.

Exploring the determinants of confidence in the bat-and-ball problem

People often fail to solve deceptively simple mathematical problems, a tendency popularly demonstrated by the bat-and-ball problem. The most prominent explanation of this finding is that, to spare cognitive effort, people substitute the difficult task with an easier one, without being aware of the substitution. Despite this latter assumption, recent studies have found decreased levels of post-decision confidence ratings when people gave the answer of an easier calculation, suggesting that people are sensitive to their errors. In the current study, we investigated a mechanism that might be responsible for such a decrease in peoples confidence ratings when they make errors: their attempts to make certain that their answer is correct (verification) and the perceived level of task difficulty (verifiability). We found that these two factors predicted peoples confidence, suggesting that peoples self-assessment of the perceived task difficulty and of their attempt to verify their response might determine their confidence. Implication for current models of post-decision confidence on reasoning problems is discussed.