Irene Scopelliti

Debiasing Decisions Improved Decision Making With a Single Training Intervention

From failures of intelligence analysis to misguided beliefs about vaccinations, biased judgment and decision making contributes to problems in policy, business, medicine, law, education, and private life. Early attempts to reduce decision biases with training met with little success, leading scientists and policy makers to focus on debiasing by using incentives and changes in the presentation and elicitation of decisions. We report the results of two longitudinal experiments that found medium to large effects of one-shot debiasing training interventions. Participants received a single training intervention, played a computer game or watched an instructional video, which addressed biases critical to intelligence analysis (in Experiment 1: bias blind spot, confirmation bias, and fundamental attribution error; in Experiment 2: anchoring, representativeness, and social projection). Both kinds of interventions produced medium to large debiasing effects immediately (games ≥ −31.94% and videos ≥ −18.60%) that persisted at least 2 months later (games ≥ −23.57% and videos ≥ −19.20%). Games that provided personalized feedback and practice produced larger effects than did videos. Debiasing effects were domain general: bias reduction occurred across problems in different contexts, and problem formats that were taught and not taught in the interventions. The results suggest that a single training intervention can improve decision making. We suggest its use alongside improved incentives, information presentation, and nudges to reduce costly errors associated with biased judgments and decisions.

You Call It “Self-Exuberance”; I Call It “Bragging” Miscalibrated Predictions of Emotional Responses to Self-Promotion

People engage in self-promotional behavior because they want others to hold favorable images of them. Self-promotion, however, entails a trade-off between conveying one’s positive attributes and being seen as bragging. We propose that people get this trade-off wrong because they erroneously project their own feelings onto their interaction partners. As a consequence, people overestimate the extent to which recipients of their self-promotion will feel proud of and happy for them, and underestimate the extent to which recipients will feel annoyed (Experiments 1 and 2). Because people tend to promote themselves excessively when trying to make a favorable impression on others, such efforts often backfire, causing targets of self-promotion to view self-promoters as less likeable and as braggarts (Experiment 3).

Bias Blind Spot: Structure, Measurement, and Consequences

People exhibit a bias blind spot: they are less likely to detect bias in themselves than in others. We report the development and validation of an instrument to measure individual differences in the propensity to exhibit the bias blind spot that is unidimensional, internally consistent, has high test-retest reliability, and is discriminated from measures of intelligence, decision-making ability, and personality traits related to self-esteem, self-enhancement, and self-presentation. The scale is predictive of the extent to which people judge their abilities to be better than average for easy tasks and worse than average for difficult tasks, ignore the advice of others, and are responsive to an intervention designed to mitigate a different judgmental bias. These results suggest that the bias blind spot is a distinct metabias resulting from naive realism rather than other forms of egocentric cognition, and has unique effects on judgment and behavior. This paper was accepted by Yuval Rottenstreich, judgment and decision making.

Registered Replication Report on Mazar, Amir, and Ariely (2008)

The self-concept maintenance theory holds that many people will cheat in order to maximize self-profit, but only to the extent that they can do so while maintaining a positive self-concept. Mazar, Amir, and Ariely (2008, Experiment 1) gave participants an opportunity and incentive to cheat on a problem-solving task. Prior to that task, participants either recalled the Ten Commandments (a moral reminder) or recalled 10 books they had read in high school (a neutral task). Results were consistent with the self-concept maintenance theory. When given the opportunity to cheat, participants given the moral-reminder priming task reported solving 1.45 fewer matrices than did those given a neutral prime (Cohen’s d = 0.48); moral reminders reduced cheating. Mazar et al.’s article is among the most cited in deception research, but their Experiment 1 has not been replicated directly. This Registered Replication Report describes the aggregated result of 25 direct replications (total N = 5,786), all of which followed the same preregistered protocol. In the primary meta-analysis (19 replications, total n = 4,674), participants who were given an opportunity to cheat reported solving 0.11 more matrices if they were given a moral reminder than if they were given a neutral reminder (95% confidence interval = [−0.09, 0.31]). This small effect was numerically in the opposite direction of the effect observed in the original study (Cohen’s d = −0.04).

Registered Replication Report on Srull and Wyer (1979)

Srull and Wyer (1979) demonstrated that exposing participants to more hostility-related stimuli caused them subsequently to interpret ambiguous behaviors as more hostile. In their Experiment 1, participants descrambled sets of words to form sentences. In one condition, 80% of the descrambled sentences described hostile behaviors, and in another condition, 20% described hostile behaviors. Following the descrambling task, all participants read a vignette about a man named Donald who behaved in an ambiguously hostile manner and then rated him on a set of personality traits. Next, participants rated the hostility of various ambiguously hostile behaviors (all ratings on scales from 0 to 10). Participants who descrambled mostly hostile sentences rated Donald and the ambiguous behaviors as approximately 3 scale points more hostile than did those who descrambled mostly neutral sentences. This Registered Replication Report describes the results of 26 independent replications (N = 7,373 in the total sample; k = 22 labs and N = 5,610 in the primary analyses) of Srull and Wyer’s Experiment 1, each of which followed a preregistered and vetted protocol. A random-effects meta-analysis showed that the protagonist was seen as 0.08 scale points more hostile when participants were primed with 80% hostile sentences than when they were primed with 20% hostile sentences (95% confidence interval, CI = [0.004, 0.16]). The ambiguously hostile behaviors were seen as 0.08 points less hostile when participants were primed with 80% hostile sentences than when they were primed with 20% hostile sentences (95% CI = [−0.18, 0.01]). Although the confidence interval for one outcome excluded zero and the observed effect was in the predicted direction, these results suggest that the currently used methods do not produce an assimilative priming effect that is practically and routinely detectable.

Individual Differences in Correspondence Bias: Measurement, Consequences, and Correction of Biased Interpersonal Attributions

Across consequential attributions of attitudes, ability, emotions, and morality, people make correspondent inferences. People infer stable personality characteristics from others’ behavior, even when that behavior is caused by situational factors. We examined the structure of correspondent inferences and report the development and validation of an instrument measuring individual differences in this correspondence bias (a Neglect of External Demands scale, or “NED”). The NED is internally consistent and distinct from scales and measures of intelligence, cognitive ability, cognitive reflection, general decision-making ability, preference for control, and attributional style. Individual differences in correspondence bias predict blaming people for harmful accidents, believing coerced confessions, correcting for job and task difficulty when making performance evaluations and incentive-compatible personnel selections, and separating market and fund performance when making incentive-compatible investments. Fort...

The Effect of Budget Constraints on Creativity

This article analyzes the effects of financial constraints and of their interaction with individual novelty-seeking traits on the outcome of different types of creative tasks such as product ideation and product repair. Three experimental studies examine the effect of financial constraints on creativity of the outcome of a product ideation task, compare the effect of financial constraints with the effect of another type of constraint (i.e., input restriction) on creativity of products ideated, on the amount of resources invested in the development of the creative solution, and on the type of creative process adopted, and following re¬cent recommendations on the adoption of an interactionist perspective for the study of creativity, analyze the effect of financial constraints in interaction with an individual difference such as novelty-seeking, which embraces more remote determinants of creative performance, on the creativity of the outcomes to a product ideation task. The results suggest that constrained financial resources may be beneficial to creativity. Specifically, results suggest that financial constraints lead to the ideation of more creative products, even though these products make use of fewer inputs and of a lower budget. Furthermore, while yielding outcomes as creative as the ones generated under input constraints, financial constraints induce the use of fewer resources and activate a top down rather than a bottom up processing strategy in the solution of the problem solving task. In addition, the results show that the effect of financial constraints is stronger for individuals with inherent tendencies toward novelty-seeking, because their stock of experiences and perspectives to put them under stress when facing an unconstrained problem space.

Measurement, Consequences, and Debiasing of Correspondent Inference Making

Across consequential attributions of attitudes, ability, emotions, and morality, people make correspondent inferences-infer stable personality characteristics from others’ behavior, even when their behavior was caused by situational factors. We examined their structure and report the development and validation of an instrument measuring individual differences in the propensity to make correspondent inferences (the Neglect of External Demands-NED -scale). The instrument is internally consistent and distinct from measures of intelligence, cognitive ability, cognitive reflection, general decision making ability, preference for control, and attributional style. It predicted attributions of blame for accidental harm, the weight attributed to confessions obtained under coercion, the consideration of job difficulty in performance evaluations, and the ability to separate market and fund performance when making incentive-compatible investments. We found that making situational information accessible debiased the judgments of people most prone to make correspondent inferences.

Breaking through complexity. Gli effetti di complessità visiva e concettuale sulla valutazione dei loghi

La complessita degli stimoli visivi riguarda sia aspetti percettivi che concettuali, il cui effetto congiunto sulle reazioni del consumatore non e ancora chiaro. L’articolo analizza l’interazione tra complessita visiva e concettuale nell’ambito della valutazioni dei loghi. In particolare, sulla base dell’ipotesi di discrepanza-attribuzione, l’articolo propone che le due forme di complessita generino diversi effetti sull’atteggiamento a una esposizione. Inoltre, l’articolo mostra che, con esposizioni multiple, le due forme di complessita influenzano l’atteggiamento seguendo pattern opposti determinati dai meccanismi di fluency e di potenziale di apprendimento. I risultati di due studi supportano le ipotesi e offrono spunti per la teoria sulla complessita del design e la gestione del brand.