Patrice Rusconi

You want to give a good impression? Be honest! Moral traits dominate group impression formation

Research has shown that warmth and competence are core dimensions on which perceivers judge others and that warmth has a primary role at various phases of impression formation. Three studies explored whether the two components of warmth (i.e., sociability and morality) have distinct roles in predicting the global impression of social groups. In Study 1 (N= 105) and Study 2 (N= 112), participants read an immigration scenario depicting an unfamiliar social group in terms of high (vs. low) morality, sociability, and competence. In both studies, participants were asked to report their global impression of the group. Results showed that global evaluations were better predicted by morality than by sociability or competence-trait ascriptions. Study 3 (N= 86) further showed that the effect of moral traits on group global evaluations was mediated by the perception of threat. The importance of these findings for the impression-formation process is discussed.

Response demands and the recruitment of heuristic strategies in syllogistic reasoning

Two experiments investigated whether dealing with a homogeneous subset of syllogisms with time-constrained responses encouraged participants to develop and use heuristics for abstract (Experiment 1) and thematic (Experiment 2) syllogisms. An atmosphere-based heuristic accounted for most responses with both abstract and thematic syllogisms. With thematic syllogisms, a weaker effect of a belief heuristic was also observed, mainly where the correct response was inconsistent with the atmosphere of the premises. Analytic processes appear to have played little role in the time-constrained condition, whereas their involvement increased in a self-paced, unconstrained condition. From a dual-process perspective, the results further specify how task demands affect the recruitment of heuristic and analytic systems of reasoning. Because the syllogisms and experimental procedure were the same as those used in a previous neuroimaging study by Goel, Buchel, Frith, and Dolan (2000), the result also deepen our understanding of the cognitive processes investigated by that study.

Preferences for different questions when testing hypotheses in an abstract task: Positivity does play a role, asymmetry does not

Previous studies on hypothesis-testing behaviour have reported systematic preferences for posing positive questions (i.e., inquiries about features that are consistent with the truth of the hypothesis) and different types of asymmetric questions (i.e., questions where the hypothesis confirming and the hypothesis disconfirming responses have different evidential strength). Both tendencies can contribute - in some circumstances - to confirmation biases (i.e., the improper acceptance or maintenance of an incorrect hypothesis). The empirical support for asymmetric testing is, however, scarce and partly contradictory, and the relative strength of positive testing and asymmetric testing has not been empirically compared. In four studies where subjects were asked to select (Experiment 1) or evaluate (Experiments 2-4) questions for controlling an abstract hypothesis, we orthogonally balanced the positivity/negativity of questions by their symmetry/asymmetry (Experiments 1-3), or by the type of asymmetry (confirmatory vs disconfirmatory; Experiment 4). In all Experiments participants strongly preferred positive to negative questions. Their choices were on the other hand mostly unaffected by symmetry and asymmetry in general, or - more specifically - by different types of asymmetry. Other results indicated that participants were sensitive to the diagnosticity of the questions (Experiments 1-3), and that they preferred testing features with a high probability under the focal hypothesis (Experiment 4). In the discussion we argue that recourse to asymmetric testing - observed in some previous studies using more contextualized problems - probably depends on context-related motivations and prior knowledge. In abstract tasks, where that knowledge is not available, more simple strategies - such as positive testing - are prevalent.

New knowledge for old credences: Asymmetric information search about in‐group and out‐group members

Three experiments examined how people gather information on in-group and out-group members. Previous studies have revealed that category-based expectancies bias the hypothesis-testing process towards confirmation through the use of asymmetric-confirming questions (which are queries where the replies supporting the prior expectancies are more informative than those falsifying them). However, to date there is no empirical investigation of the use of such a question-asking strategy in an intergroup context. In the present studies, participants were asked to produce (Study 1) or to choose (Studies 2 and 3) questions in order to investigate the presence of various traits in an in-group or an out-group member. Traits were manipulated by valence and typicality. The results revealed that category-based expectancies do not always lead to asymmetric-confirming testing: whereas participants tended to ask questions that confirmed positive in-group and negative out-group stereotypical attributes, they used a more symmetric strategy when testing for the presence of negative in-group or positive out-group traits. Moreover, Study 3 also revealed a moderation effect of in-group identification. The findings point to the role played by motivational factors associated with preserving a positive social identity. Possible consequences of these hypothesis-testing processes in preserving a positive social identity for intergroup relations are discussed.

Taking into account the observers’ uncertainty: a graduated approach to the credibility of the patient’s pain evaluation

This article presents two experiments aiming to investigate the adoption of a graduated measure to describe credibility attribution by observers who evaluate patients’ pain accounts. A total of 160 medical students were required to express a credibility judgment on the pain intensity level of hypothetical patients. We used 16 vignettes based on a factorial mixed-design. Within-participants factors were the reported pain, the presence of a physical sign, the patient’s facial expression and the patient’s gender, and between-groups factors were the patient’s age and the geographical distribution of the patient’s name. Results confirm the well-established tendency not to believe patients’ self-reports and provide information regarding the evaluators’ uncertainty. The findings suggest that a graduated measure is useful for assessing the degree of uncertainty of the observers and subtle effects of different factors upon the judgment of patient’s pain.

The perceptual wink model of non-switching attentional blink tasks

The attentional blink (AB) is a temporary deficit for a second target (T2) when that target appears after a first target (T1). Although sophisticated models have been developed to explain the substantial AB literature in isolation, the current study considers how the AB relates to perceptual dynamics more broadly. We show that the time-course of the AB is closely related to the time course of the transition from positive to negative repetition priming effects in perceptual identification. Many AB tasks involve a switch between a T1 defined in one manner and a T2 defined in a different manner. Other AB tasks are non-switching, with all targets belonging to the same well-known category (e.g., letter targets versus number distractors) or sharing the same perceptual feature. We propose that these non-switching AB tasks reflect perceptual habituation for the target-defining attribute; thus, a ‘perceptual wink’, with perception of one attribute (target identity) undisturbed while perception of another (target detection) is impaired. On this account, the immediate benefit following T1 (lag-1 sparing) reflects positive repetition priming and the subsequent deficit (the blink) reflects negative repetition priming for the realization that a target occurred. In developing the perceptual wink model, we extended the nROUSE model of perceptual priming to explain the results of two new experiments combining the AB and identity repetitions. This establishes important connections between non-switching AB tasks and perceptual dynamics.

Moderators of the feature-positive effect in abstract hypothesis-evaluation tasks.

Three studies using abstract materials tested possible moderators of the feature-positive effect in hypothesis evaluation whereby people use the presence of features more than their absence to judge which of 2 competing hypotheses is more likely. Drawing on a distinction made in visual perception research, we tested whether the feature-positive effect emerges both when using nonsubstitutive features, which can be removed without replacement by other features, and substitutive features, the absence of which implies the presence of other features (e.g., the colour red, the absence of which entails the presence of another colour). Furthermore, we tested whether presenting to participants both the clue occurrence probabilities (which are needed to consider clue presence) and their complements (which are needed to gauge the impact of the absent clues) decreased the feature-positive effect. The results showed that regardless of the type of feature (i.e., nonsubstitutive vs. substitutive), participants provided more responses consistent with an evaluation of the subset of present clues compared to all other kinds of responses. However, the use of substitutive features combined with an explicit presentation format of probabilistic information had a debiasing effect. Furthermore, the use of substitutive features negated participant sensitivity to the rarity of clues, whereby the feature-positive effect decreased when there was one absent clue and two present clues for problems in which the exclusive consideration of the presence of features did not suggest the correct response.

When Eye-Tracking Meets Cognitive Modeling: Applications to Cyber Security Systems

Human cognitive modeling techniques and related software tools have been widely used by researchers and practitioners to evaluate the effectiveness of user interface (UI) designs and related human performance. However, they are rarely used in the cyber security field despite the fact that human factors have been recognized as a key element for cyber security systems. For a cyber security system involving a relatively complicated UI, it could be difficult to build a cognitive model that accurately captures the different cognitive tasks involved in all user interactions. Using a moderately complicated user authentication system as an example system and CogTool as a typical cognitive modeling tool, this paper aims to provide insights into the use of eye-tracking data for facilitating human cognitive modeling of cognitive tasks more effectively and accurately. We used visual scan paths extracted from an eye-tracking user study to facilitate the design of cognitive modeling tasks. This allowed us to reproduce some insecure human behavioral patterns observed in some previous lab-based user studies on the same system, and more importantly, we also found some unexpected new results about human behavior. The comparison between human cognitive models with and without eye-tracking data suggests that eye-tracking data can provide useful information to facilitate the process of human cognitive modeling as well as to achieve a better understanding of security-related human behaviors. In addition, our results demonstrated that cyber security research can benefit from a combination of eye-tracking and cognitive modeling to study human behavior related security problems.

The onset time delaying effect: smokers vs non-smokers place the adverse consequences of smoking further in the future

ABSTRACT Despite all the information about the risks, many people still smoke. Several studies investigated risk perceptions in smokers. The adequate perceptions of the risks from smoking is particularly important and this study investigated the risk perception of young smokers vs non-smokers by a new time-estimation task in which we required participants (smokers and non-smokers) to estimate the onset time of smoking-related conditions in an average young smoker. The findings supported our main hypothesis that smokers, compared to non-smokers, postponed the onset of both mild and severe smoking-related conditions. The results also revealed that the onset time estimates for mild conditions given by both smokers and non-smokers were associated with their self-perceptions of risk and level of fear of developing smoking-related conditions. The findings cast light on smokers’ distorted temporal perception of the health-damaging consequences of smoking. Implications for the adequacy of risk perception in smokers are discussed.

You are fair, but I expect you to also behave unfairly: Positive asymmetry in trait-behavior relations for moderate morality information

Trait inference in person perception is based on observers’ implicit assumptions about the relations between trait adjectives (e.g., fair) and the either consistent or inconsistent behaviors (e.g., having double standards) that an actor can manifest. This article presents new empirical data and theoretical interpretations on people’ behavioral expectations, that is, people’s perceived trait-behavior relations along the morality (versus competence) dimension. We specifically address the issue of the moderate levels of both traits and behaviors almost neglected by prior research by using a measure of the perceived general frequency of behaviors. A preliminary study identifies a set of competence- and morality-related traits and a subset of traits balanced for valence. Studies 1–2 show that moral target persons are associated with greater behavioral flexibility than immoral ones where abstract categories of behaviors are concerned. For example, participants judge it more likely that a fair person would behave unfairly than an unfair person would behave fairly. Study 3 replicates the results of the first 2 studies using concrete categories of behaviors (e.g., telling the truth/omitting some information). Study 4 shows that the positive asymmetry in morality-related trait-behavior relations holds for both North-American and European (i.e., Italian) individuals. A small-scale meta-analysis confirms the existence of a positive asymmetry in trait-behavior relations along both morality and competence dimensions for moderate levels of both traits and behaviors. We discuss these findings in relation to prior models and results on trait-behavior relations and we advance a motivational explanation based on self-protection.