Sara D. Hodges

Introspecting about Reasons can Reduce Post-Choice Satisfaction

This study tested the prediction that introspecting about the reasons for ones preferences would reduce satisfaction with a consumer choice. Subjects evaluated two types of posters and then chose one to take home. Those instructed to think about their reasons chose a different type of poster than control subjects and, when contacted 3 weeks later, were less satisfied with their choice. When people think about reasons, they appear to focus on attributes of the stimulus that are easy to verbalize and seem like plausible reasons but may not be important causes of their initial evaluations. When these attributes imply a new evaluation of the stimulus, people change their attitudes and base their choices on these new attitudes. Over time, however, peoples initial evaluation of the stimulus seems to return, and they come to regret choices based on the new attitudes.

Gender Differences, Motivation, and Empathic Accuracy: When it Pays to Understand:

Two studies of college students investigated the conditions under which women perform better than men on an empathic accuracy task (inferring the thoughts and feelings of a target person). The first study demonstrated that women’s advantage held only when women were given a task assessing their feelings of sympathy toward the target prior to performing the empathic accuracy task. The second study demonstrated that payments in exchange for accuracy improved the performance of both men and women and wiped out any difference between men’s and women’s performances. Together, the results suggest that gender differences in empathic accuracy performance are the result of motivational differences and are not due to simple differences of ability between men and women.

Effects of introspecting about reasons: inferring attitudes from accessible thoughts

Previous research has shown that analyzing reasons can change peoples attitudes, but the exact mechanisms of this effect have not been entirely clear. It was hypothesized that introspecting about reasons focuses peoples attention on thoughts that are accessible in memory and increases the extent to which people view their accessible thoughts as applicable to their current attitudes. In Study 1, college students formed initial impressions of a target person, and then positive or negative thoughts about the target person were made memorable. After a delay, half of the participants analyzed reasons for their attitude and half recalled the target persons behaviors. As predicted, people who analyzed reasons reported attitudes toward the target person that were based more on what they could recall about her. Study 2 showed that this effect occurs regardless of whether people initially form an online impression. Implications for the effects of analyzing reasons and for attitude formation are discussed.

Regulating the costs of empathy: the price of being human

It’s not easy being empathic. However, unlike snowboarding or yodeling or decoupage, most people manage to pick up empathy skills naturally without the aid of special lessons or designated practice sessions. Knowing what someone else is thinking and feeling allows people to coordinate their activities, something that is useful and necessary in interpersonal interactions. Like any skill, empathy differs from person to person. We can probably all easily think of individuals in our life who anchor the extreme points on a scale of empathy: the cherished person who consistently seems to have our interest at heart at one end, and the insensitive lout at the other end. However, people who never show empathy or are unable to do so are rare and striking in their inability to fit into normal social interactions. At the same time, people who are extremely empathic are rare also, for good reason: Being constantly sensitive to the thoughts and feelings of others would interfere with the ability to act on one’s own thoughts and feelings. How do people generate and maintain a desirable level of empathy? In this paper, we start with the premise that normal people have some capacity for being empathic and define how that capacity is demonstrated. We then explain why empathy is something that needs to be regulated: Despite the obvious advantages of penetrating another person’s thoughts, empathy does not come without its costs. Next, we address two means of regulating empathy: by regulating exposure to stimuli that produce empathy and by regulating the effort expended in attending to another person’s experience.

When Trying Hard Isn’t Natural Women’s Belonging With and Motivation for Male-Dominated STEM Fields As a Function of Effort Expenditure Concerns

Feeling like one exerts more effort than others may influence women’s feelings of belonging with science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and impede their motivation. In Study 1, women STEM graduate students perceived they exerted more effort than peers to succeed. For women, but not men, this effort expenditure perception predicted a decreased sense of belonging, which in turn decreased motivation. Study 2 tested whether the male-dominated status of a field triggers such effort expectations. We created a fictional “eco-psychology” graduate program, which when depicted as male-dominated resulted in women expecting to exert relatively more effort and decreased their interest in pursuing the field. Study 3 found emphasizing effort as expected (and normal) to achieve success elevated women’s feelings of belonging and future motivation. Results suggest effort expenditure perceptions are an indicator women use to assess their fit in STEM. Implications for enhancing women’s participation in STEM are discussed.

Giving Birth to Empathy: The Effects of Similar Experience on Empathic Accuracy, Empathic Concern, and Perceived Empathy

This study examined how having had a similar experience to a target person’s experience affected three facets of empathy: empathic concern, empathic accuracy, and perceived empathy. Women who had never been mothers, who were pregnant with their first child, or who had just given birth to their first child (20 in each group) served as perceivers, watching videotapes of new-mother targets (N = 20) and providing measures of emotional and cognitive empathy. When perceivers had experienced the same life events as the targets, they expressed greater empathic concern and reported greater understanding of targets. However, experience had a much smaller effect on empathic accuracy, limited to comparisons between new-mother and never-pregnant perceivers and only for accuracy at guessing stereotypic attitudes, not individual thoughts. Perceived empathy, in contrast, appeared to be influenced by targets’ knowledge of whether perceivers had experienced similar events.

The Illusion of Independent Agency: Do Adult Fiction Writers Experience Their Characters as Having Minds of Their Own?

The illusion of independent agency (IIA) occurs when a fictional character is experienced by the person who created it as having independent thoughts, words, and/or actions. Children often report this sort of independence in their descriptions of imaginary companions. This study investigated the extent that adult writers experience IIA with the characters they create for their works of fiction. Fifty fiction writers were interviewed about the development of their characters and their memories for childhood imaginary companions. Ninety-two percent of the writers reported at least some experience of IIA. The writers who had published their work had more frequent and detailed reports of IIA, suggesting that the illusion could be related to expertise. As a group, the writers scored higher than population norms in empathy, dissociation, and memories for childhood imaginary companions.

Parallel Constraint Satisfaction in Memory-Based Decisions

Three studies sought to investigate decision strategies in memory-based decisions and to test the predictions of the parallel constraint satisfaction (PCS) model for decision making (Glockner & Betsch, 2008). Time pressure was manipulated and the model was compared against simple heuristics (take the best and equal weight) and a weighted additive strategy. From PCS we predicted that fast intuitive decision making is based on compensatory information integration and that decision time increases and confidence decreases with increasing inconsistency in the decision task. In line with these predictions we observed a predominant usage of compensatory strategies under all time-pressure conditions and even with decision times as short as 1.7 s. For a substantial number of participants, choices and decision times were best explained by PCS, but there was also evidence for use of simple heuristics. The time-pressure manipulation did not significantly affect decision strategies. Overall, the results highlight intuitive, automatic processes in decision making and support the idea that human information-processing capabilities are less severely bounded than often assumed.

Empathy in frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease

Using naturalistic stimuli, we assessed the ability to infer what other people are feeling in three groups of participants: healthy elderly adults, patients suffering from the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (FTD-b), and patients suffering from Alzheimers disease (AD). After watching videotaped interviews of everyday people (nonactors) discussing an emotionally relevant event in their lives, participants answered questions regarding the interviewees feelings. Both patient groups inferred emotions as accurately as the healthy elderly, provided the emotions were displayed unambiguously and consistently across the interview. However, when the displayed emotions became more variable and ambiguous, performance in both patient groups became impaired relative to healthy elderly participants. The similar profile across the two clinical groups despite their differences in social skills suggests that nonsocial cognitive processes affected in dementia may be an important factor in drawing inferences about other peoples feelings.

Better Living Through Perspective Taking

People behave better – more acceptably, more admirably, more prosocially – after perspective taking. First, perspective taking has been consistently found to increase compassionate emotions (commonly called empathy, but the precise label in this case is “empathic concern”) toward the person whose perspective has been taken. Second, perspective taking leads people to view and treat other people more like the self, viewing them as possessing more traits in common with the self, and symbolically having “merged,” at least partially, with the self in terms of cognitive representations and descriptions of personality and explanations of behavior.