Pascal Wagner-Egger

Lay perceptions of collectives at the outbreak of the H1N1 epidemic: heroes, villains and victims

Lay perceptions of collectives (e.g., groups, organizations, countries) implicated in the 2009 H1N1 outbreak were studied. Collectives serve symbolic functions to help laypersons make sense of the uncertainty involved in a disease outbreak. We argue that lay representations are dramatized, featuring characters like heroes, villains and victims. In interviews conducted soon after the outbreak, 47 Swiss respondents discussed the risk posed by H1N1, its origins and effects, and protective measures. Countries were the most frequent collectives mentioned. Poor, underdeveloped countries were depicted as victims, albeit ambivalently, as they were viewed as partly responsible for their own plight. Experts (physicians, researchers) and political and health authorities were depicted as heroes. Two villains emerged: the media (viewed as fear mongering or as a puppet serving powerful interests) and private corporations (e.g., the pharmaceutical industry). Laypersons’ framing of disease threat diverges substantially from official perspectives.

Nothing Happens by Accident, or Does It? A Low Prior for Randomness Does Not Explain Belief in Conspiracy Theories

Belief in conspiracy theories has often been associated with a biased perception of randomness, akin to a nothing-happens-by-accident heuristic. Indeed, a low prior for randomness (i.e., believing that randomness is a priori unlikely) could plausibly explain the tendency to believe that a planned deception lies behind many events, as well as the tendency to perceive meaningful information in scattered and irrelevant details; both of these tendencies are traits diagnostic of conspiracist ideation. In three studies, we investigated this hypothesis and failed to find the predicted association between low prior for randomness and conspiracist ideation, even when randomness was explicitly opposed to malevolent human intervention. Conspiracy believers’ and nonbelievers’ perceptions of randomness were not only indistinguishable from each other but also accurate compared with the normative view arising from the algorithmic information framework. Thus, the motto “nothing happens by accident,” taken at face value, does not explain belief in conspiracy theories.

Collective symbolic coping with disease threat and othering: a case study of avian influenza.

Much research studies how individuals cope with disease threat by blaming out-groups and protecting the in-group. The model of collective symbolic coping (CSC) describes four stages by which representations of a threatening event are elaborated in the mass media: awareness, divergence, convergence, and normalization. We used the CSC model to predict when symbolic in-group protection (othering) would occur in the case of the avian influenza (AI) outbreak. Two studies documented CSC stages and showed that othering occurred during the divergence stage, characterized by an uncertain symbolic environment. Study 1 analysed media coverage of AI over time, documenting CSC stages of awareness and divergence. In Study 2, a two-wave repeated cross-sectional survey was conducted just after the divergence stage and a year later. Othering was measured by the number of foreign countries erroneously ticked by participants as having human victims. Individual differences in germ aversion and social dominance orientation interacted to predict othering during the divergence stage but not a year later. Implications for research on CSC and symbolic in-group protection strategies resulting from disease threat are discussed.

Conditional reasoning and the Wason selection task : Biconditional interpretation instead of reasoning bias

Two experiments were conducted to show that the IF … THEN … rules used in the different versions of Wasons (1966) selection task are not psychologically—though they are logically—equivalent. Some of these rules are considered by the participants as strict logical conditionals, whereas others are interpreted as expressing a biconditional relationship. A deductive task was used jointly with the selection task to show that the original abstract rule is quite ambiguous in this respect, contrary to deontic rules: the typical “error” made by most people may indeed be explained by the fact that they consider the abstract rule as a biconditional. Thus, there is no proper error or bias in the selection task as it is still argued, but a differential interpretation of the rule. The need for taking into account a pragmatic component in the process of reasoning is illustrated by the experiments.

Racism in soccer? Perception of challenges of black and white players by white referees, soccer players, and fans.

This experiment investigated challenge evaluations in soccer and their relation to prejudice: more precisely, whether skin colour may influence judgments of soccer tackles. Three groups of participants (soccer players, referees, and soccer fans) were asked to evaluate challenges, featuring Black and White players as aggressors and victims in a mixed-design study. Results showed that participants made some differentiations between Black and White players in a challenge evaluation task. Participants were more likely to consider within-group challenges as fouls and were faster to consider challenges made by Black players as fouls. On the other hand, fouls made by White players were seen as more severe. There were no major differences between the participating groups, suggesting that the observed effects were independent of how good players were or whether the participants were referees or not.

A psycholinguistic investigation of football players’mental representations of game situations: Does expertise count?

In order to progress through a competitive sporting event, athletes need to form mental representations of the situations they encounter. In this paper, we present three experiments exploring the mental representations of football players when presented with written material describing football game situations. Experiment 1 assessed off-line processing by having players of different levels generate written football scripts. The results predominantly showed that players of lower expertise were less “other-oriented” and included more emotional elements in their mental representations. Experiments 2a and 2b further explored these differences. Using an on-line measure, a reading-time paradigm, we showed that First Division players’ mental representations more easily included “others” and less readily included emotions, as opposed to both National League and Fifth Division players. Although Fifth Division and National League were similar, different cognitive processes may underlie the construction of the playe...

Diana Was Not Involved in the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks!

In this research, we investigated the social influence of newspaper headlines on beliefs on various social, political, and economic issues, including belief in conspiracy theories. Building on the seminal study by Gruenfeld and Wyer (1992), we examined how denials and affirmations printed in a credible source (e.g., a newspaper considered to be serious) versus a less credible source (e.g., a free newspaper) affected readers’ beliefs. In this computer-based study, participants were asked to rate the plausibility of 24 newspaper statements (eight of which were related to conspiracy theories), first without any mention of a newspaper and then with the newspapers mentioned as sources. The results showed the general effects associated with the degree of informativeness of the statements. We discuss these effects in terms of the boomerang effect (i.e., opinion change in the direction opposite to that of the opinion given in the headline). We also found that the participants judged the official versions of various events to be more plausible than the conspiracy theory versions of the same events.

The Conspiratorial Style in Lay Economic Thinking

This study investigates patterns of lay perception of economics, and in particular the place of conspiratorial thinking regarding the economic domain. We devised four types of accounts in the economic domain, over a range of questions regarding different aspects of the economy: the classical neo-liberal economic view (which we labeled Econ101), and the Conspiracy view (the destructive outcomes of economy are due to small and powerful groups who are manipulating the markets), to which we added the Government malfunction view (failures in the economy are due to the authorities), and the Bad Invisible Hand view (the invisible hand may go wrong, and the equilibrium reached by its doings may be undesirable). The last two views are the ones most strongly endorsed by our respondents, in the US, Israel and Switzerland. The pattern of inter-correlations between the four accounts, and that between each and the psycho-social variables we examined, exhibits two clusters, Econ101 vs. the other three views of economy. This corresponds to a general opposition between people who trust the neoliberal economic system, and those opposed to it. What sets economic conspiratorial thinking apart are its links with other conspirational beliefs and with paranormal beliefs.

Les canons de la rationalité: essai de classification des points de vue dans le débat sur les biais cognitifs et la rationalité humaine

EnglishThis paper attempts to classify the different points of view regarding the question of cognitive biases and human rationality. Various epistemological positions are distinguished, from a dogmatic to a relativist stance on the normative theories used to judge inferences, with some more balanced opinions lying in-between these two extremes. The case of the famous Wason selection task (Wason, 1966) is taken to illustrate these epistemological positions. Finally, some possible consequences are drawn from the classification, either regarding the labelling of �bias� or �error� that may be applied to cognitive processes, or the diverse forms of human rationality. francaisCet article propose une classification des points de vue dans le debat recurrent en psychologie cognitive a propos des biais de raisonnement et de la rationalite humaine. Differentes positions epistemologiques sur cette question sont distinguees, allant d�un point de vue dogmatique a une conception relativiste des theories normatives utilisees afin de juger les inferences, avec a l�entre-deux differents points de vue plus nuances. L�exemple des travaux sur la tâche de selection de Wason (1966) permet d�illustrer ces positions epistemologiques. Dans la discussion qui suit, des consequences possibles de cette classification sont tirees, a la fois concernant la caracterisation de « biais », ou d� « erreur » ou que l�on peut apposer ou non a certains processus cognitifs, et en ce qui concerne les formes possibles de rationalite humaine.