Daniel M. Oppenheimer

The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking

Taking notes on laptops rather than in longhand is increasingly common. Many researchers have suggested that laptop note taking is less effective than longhand note taking for learning. Prior studies have primarily focused on students’ capacity for multitasking and distraction when using laptops. The present research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing. In three studies, we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. We show that whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.

Show Me the Numbers Precision as a Cue to Others’ Confidence

Perceptions of other people’s confidence have serious implications. For example, although the link between eyewitness confidence and accuracy is tenuous, jurors rely on the perceived confidence of witnesses to determine a testimony’s factuality (e.g., Fox & Walters, 1986). This has led researchers to examine which cues reliably signal confidence and whether observers are sensitive to these cues. Observers use cues such as speech rate (Street, Brady, & Lee, 1984) and eye gaze (Ridgeway, Berger, & Smith, 1985), as well as posture and use of nervous gestures (Wells, Ferguson, & Lindsay, 1981), to determine the confidence of speakers. One signal of confidence recently identified by Welsh, Navarro, and Begg (2011) is the use of precision. Participants were tested on almanac-style facts and indicated their confidence in their answers. On average, confident participants used more significant digits (i.e., numbers with final digits other than 0) than nonconfident participants did (e.g., 3,962 vs. 4,000, respectively). Precision is potentially a highly useful confidence cue because, unlike many other cues that require the observer to be in the judge’s presence (e.g., posture, eye contact, or prosody; Ridgeway et al., 1985), precision can be observed merely by knowing the judge’s estimate. Recent research demonstrates that precise opening bids in negotiations can signal informed offers (Mason, Lee, Wiley, & Ames, 2013), thus reducing the likelihood and magnitude of counteroffers. Other studies show that precise anchors lead to precise judgments and are particularly influential when the anchor is construed as relevant to the judgment at hand and when it comes from an intentional agent (i.e., a human as opposed to a computer; Zhang & Schwarz, 2013). Although those studies show that precision affects the extent to which advice is adopted into judgment, they did not examine whether observers interpret precision as confidence signals, nor how precision affects from whom estimators seek advice. In the two studies reported here, we investigated both of these previously unexplored questions.

Information Processing as a Paradigm for Decision Making

For decades, the dominant paradigm for studying decision making--the expected utility framework--has been burdened by an increasing number of empirical findings that question its validity as a model of human cognition and behavior. However, as Kuhn (1962) argued in his seminal discussion of paradigm shifts, an old paradigm cannot be abandoned until a new paradigm emerges to replace it. In this article, we argue that the recent shift in researcher attention toward basic cognitive processes that give rise to decision phenomena constitutes the beginning of that replacement paradigm. Models grounded in basic perceptual, attentional, memory, and aggregation processes have begun to proliferate. The development of this new approach closely aligns with Kuhns notion of paradigm shift, suggesting that this is a particularly generative and revolutionary time to be studying decision science.

The Effect of Relative Encoding on Memory-Based Judgments

Several models of judgment propose that people struggle with absolute judgments and instead represent options on the basis of their relative standing. This leads to a conundrum when people make judgments from memory: They may encode an option’s ordinal rank relative to the surrounding options but later observe a different distribution of options. Do people update their representations when making judgments from memory, or do they maintain their representations based on the initial encoding? In three studies, we found that people making memory-based judgments rely on a stimulus’s relative standing in the distribution at the time of encoding rather than attending to absolute quality or updating the stimulus’s ordinal ranking in light of the distribution at the time of the later judgment.

Increasing Donations and Improving Donor Experiences Lessons From Decision Science

Giving to charity not only helps fund programs that are beneficial to society but also reliably increases the well-being of donors. However, not all donations are equally effective at improving donor happiness. This article reviews the research from psychology and behavioral economics and identifies several key factors for optimizing donor experiences. These lessons can be used to design charitable appeals that are highly effective and that create conditions that make charitable giving more rewarding to donors, which increases the likelihood that they will donate again.