Lukasz Walasek

How to make loss aversion disappear and reverse: Tests of the decision by sampling origin of loss aversion.

One of the most robust empirical findings in the behavioral sciences is loss aversion—the finding that losses loom larger than gains. We offer a new psychological explanation of the origins of loss aversion in which loss aversion emerges from differences in the distribution of gains and losses people experience. In 4 experiments, we tested this proposition by manipulating the range of gains and losses that individuals saw during the process of eliciting their loss aversion. We were able to find loss aversion, loss neutrality, and even the reverse of loss aversion.

Income Inequality and Status Seeking Searching for Positional Goods in Unequal U.S. States

It is well established that income inequality is associated with lower societal well-being, but the psychosocial causes of this relationship are poorly understood. A social-rank hypothesis predicts that members of unequal societies are likely to devote more of their resources to status-seeking behaviors such as acquiring positional goods. We used Google Correlate to find search terms that correlated with our measure of income inequality, and we controlled for income and other socioeconomic factors. We found that of the 40 search terms used more frequently in states with greater income inequality, more than 70% were classified as referring to status goods (e.g., designer brands, expensive jewelry, and luxury clothing). In contrast, 0% of the 40 search terms used more frequently in states with less income inequality were classified as referring to status goods. Finally, we showed how residual-based analysis offers a new methodology for using Google Correlate to provide insights into societal attitudes and motivations while avoiding confounds and high risks of spurious correlations.

Personality, Parasites, Political Attitudes, and Cooperation: A Model of How Infection Prevalence Influences Openness and Social Group Formation

Abstract What is the origin of individual differences in ideology and personality? According to the parasite stress hypothesis, the structure of a society and the values of individuals within it are both influenced by the prevalence of infectious disease within the societys geographical region. High levels of infection threat are associated with more ethnocentric and collectivist social structures and greater adherence to social norms, as well as with socially conservative political ideology and less open but more conscientious personalities. Here we use an agent‐based model to explore a specific opportunities‐parasites trade‐off (OPTO) hypothesis, according to which utility‐maximizing agents place themselves at an optimal point on a trade‐off between (a) the gains that may be achieved through accessing the resources of geographically or socially distant out‐group members through openness to out‐group interaction, and (b) the losses arising due to consequently increased risks of exotic infection to which immunity has not been developed. We examine the evolution of cooperation and the formation of social groups within social networks, and we show that the groups that spontaneously form exhibit greater local rather than global cooperative networks when levels of infection are high. It is suggested that the OPTO model offers a first step toward understanding the specific mechanisms through which environmental conditions may influence cognition, ideology, personality, and social organization.

Income Inequality, Income, and Internet Searches for Status Goods: A Cross-National Study of the Association Between Inequality and Well-Being

Is there a positive association between a nation’s income inequality and concerns with status competition within that nation? Here we use Google Correlate and Google Trends to examine frequency of internet search terms and find that people in countries in which income inequality is high search relatively more frequently for positional brand names such as Prada, Louis Vuitton, or Chanel. This tendency is stronger among well-developed countries. We find no evidence that income alone is associated with searches for positional goods. We also present evidence that the concern with positional goods does not reflect non-linear effects of income on consumer spending, either across nations or (extending previous findings that people who live in unequal US States search more for positional goods) within the USA. It is concluded that income inequality is associated with greater concerns with positional goods, and that this concern is reflected in internet searching behaviour.

Endowment effect despite the odds

ABSTRACT Can ownership status influence probability judgements under condition of uncertainty? In three experiments, we presented our participants with a recording of a real horse race. We endowed half of our sample with a wager on a single horse to win the race, and the other half with money to spend to acquire the same wager. Across three large studies (N = 750), we found the endowment effect – owners demanded significantly more for the wager than buyers were willing to pay to acquire it. However, we also found that probability estimates of each horse winning the race did not differ between owners and non-owners of the betting slip. Our results demonstrate that distorted perception of probability is unlikely to be a mechanism explaining the endowment effect.

Trait Associations for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in News Media: A Computational Analysis

We study media representations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In particular, we train models of semantic memory on a large number of news media outlets that published online articles during the course of the election. Based on the structure of word co-occurrence in these media outlets, our models learn semantic representations for the two presidential candidates as well as for widely studied personality traits. We find that models trained on media outlets most read by Clinton voters and media outlets most read by Trump voters differ in the strength of association between the two candidates’ names and trait words pertaining to morality. We observe some differences for trait words pertaining to warmth, but none for trait words pertaining to competence.

Commentary: Effects of Age and Initial Risk Perception on Balloon Analog Risk Task: The Mediating Role of Processing Speed and Need for Cognitive Closure.

A commentary on Effects of Age and Initial Risk Perception on Balloon Analog Risk Task: The Mediating Role of Processing Speed and Need for Cognitive Closure by Koscielniak, M., Rydzewska, K., and Sedek, G. (2016). Front. Psychol. 7:659. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00659 Existing research strongly suggests that age-related changes in the cognitive system influence preferential choice. While the reduction of fluid cognitive ability can lead to sub-optimal decision outcomes (Finucane et al., 2000), experience garnered during ones lifespan can also improve ones decision making (Mata et al., 2007; Bruine de Bruin et al., 2014). How can research on aging and decision making explain such mixed results? A reasonable approach is to adhere to a clear definition of optimality in choice behavior, which must be grounded in principles of cognitive psychology. Indeed, this approach has led many researchers to identify distinct cognitive processes that may be responsible for suboptimal decisions among older adults. Among many, these include memory (Buckner, 2004), perception (Schneider and Pichora-Fuller, 2000), and executive functions (Schiebener and Brand, 2015).

Event construal and temporal distance in natural language

Construal level theory proposes that events that are temporally proximate are represented more concretely than events that are temporally distant. We tested this prediction using two large natural language text corpora. In study 1 we examined posts on Twitter that referenced the future, and found that tweets mentioning temporally proximate dates used more concrete words than those mentioning distant dates. In study 2 we obtained all New York Times articles that referenced U.S. presidential elections between 1987 and 2007. We found that the concreteness of the words in these articles increased with the temporal proximity to their corresponding election. Additionally the reduction in concreteness after the election was much greater than the increase in concreteness leading up to the election, though both changes in concreteness were well described by an exponential function. We replicated this finding with New York Times articles referencing US public holidays. Overall, our results provide strong support for the predictions of construal level theory, and additionally illustrate how large natural language datasets can be used to inform psychological theory.

Association and response accuracy in the wild

We studied contestant accuracy and error in a popular television quiz show, “Jeopardy!” Using vector-based knowledge representations obtained from distributional models of semantic memory, we computed the strength of association between clues and responses in over 5,000 televised games. Such representations have been shown to play a key role in memory and judgment, and consistent with this work, we find that contestants are more likely to provide correct responses when these responses are strongly associated with their clues, and more likely to provide incorrect responses when correct responses are weakly or negatively associated with their clues. This effect is stronger for easier questions with low monetary values, and for questions in which contestants compete to respond quickly. Our results show how distributional models of semantic memory can be used to predict human behavior in naturalistic high-level judgment tasks with skilled participants and significant monetary and social incentives.

Context-dependent sensitivity to losses: Range and skew manipulations.

The assumption that losses loom larger than gains is widely used to explain many behavioral phenomena in judgment and decision-making. It is also generally accepted that loss aversion is a stable, traitlike individual difference characterizing people’s sensitivity to gains and losses. This interpretation was recently challenged by Walasek and Stewart (2015), who showed that by manipulating the range of the gains and losses used in the accept−reject task it is possible to find loss aversion, loss neutrality, and a reversal of loss aversion. Here, we reexamined the claim that these context effects arise as a result of people being sensitive to the rank position of a given gain among other gains and the rank position of a loss among other losses. We used skewed distributions of outcomes to manipulate the rank position of gains and losses while keeping the range of possible outcomes constant. We found a small but robust effect of skew on the propensity to accept mixed gambles. We compared the sizes of skew and range effects and found that they are of similar magnitude but that the range effects are smaller than those reported by Walasek and Stewart. We were able to attenuate loss aversion, but we were not able to replicate Walasek and Stewart’s reversal of loss aversion. We conclude that rank effects are, at least in part, responsible for the loss aversion seen in the accept−reject task.