Silvio Aldrovandi

Sentencing, severity, and social norms: A rank-based model of contextual influence on judgments of crimes and punishments

Context effects have been shown to bias lay peoples evaluations of the severity of crimes and punishments. To investigate the cognitive mechanisms behind these effects, we develop and apply a rank-based social norms approach to judgments of perceived crime seriousness and sentence appropriateness. In Study 1, we find that (a) people believe on average that 84% of people illegally download software more than they do themselves and (b) their judged severity of, and concern about, their own illegal software downloading is predicted not by its amount but by how this amount is believed (typically inaccurately) to rank within a social comparison distribution. Studies 2 and 3 find that the judged appropriateness of a given sentence length is highly dependent on the length of other sentences available in the decision-making context: The same objective sentence was judged as approximately four times stricter when it was the second longest sentence being considered than when it was the fifth longest. It is concluded that the same mechanisms that are used to judge the magnitude of psychophysical stimuli bias judgments about legal matters.

Preference stability and memory: two unlikely companions

Do people have stable risk preferences? This important question has engaged normative (von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1947 ) and both computational (e.g., Kahneman and Tversky, 1979, 1992; Tversky and Koehler, 1994; Birnbaum, 2008 ) and non-computa-tional descriptive theories of judgment and decision-making (e.g., Brandstatter et al., 2006). The above theories differ, among other aspects, in how they conceptualize decision-making in general and risk pref-erences in particular. For instance, decision-making under uncertainty has been thought of as either a rational process through which an agent maximize “utility” (the perceived goodness of an option) or a process that translates objective, external utility into stable internal, subjective value. The sta-bility (or instability) of risk preferences emerges as a by-product of such processes and conceptualization.Here we would like to take a step back and consider the question from a differ-ent angle. A discussion about preference stability raises the question: where does the stability come from? If we start with the assumption that people have stable risk preferences, which cognitive processes underlie stable risk preferences? One obvi-ous candidate for the origin of preference stability is memory. We need to remember – to some level or other – that we like some -thing (e.g., wine) so to be able to prefer it to something that we like less (e.g., cider). In order to be able to make a choice between two options we at least need to be able to keep both options in short-term memory (STM) for long enough to make the deci-sion. From a more long-term perspective the choices we have made – and tend to make – need to be remembered in order to reduce or avoid cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957) and develop a sense of self. LeDoux (1996, 2002) argues that the self is a representational structure emerg-ing from integrative memory processes. We are one because our memory holds the pieces together, and it lets us integrate in the myriad of experiences we have, the things we see and the aspirations we have. Memory influences decision-making even when judgments are made “on-line” (i.e., while experiencing the to-be-assessed experience) and relying on memory becomes a relatively costly cognitive process (Aldrovandi et al., 2009, 2011; for a review, see Hastie and Park, 1986). Accessibility – the influence of the most easily retrievable information on judgment (e.g., Kahneman and Tversky, 1979) – is so ubiquitous in its influence on judgments and decision tasks, that it is gen-erally considered as a truism (cf. Schwarz and Vaughn, 2002). Most approaches and models therefore include memory processes amongst the cognitive precursors of judg-ment biases (e.g., Dougherty et al., 1999; Stewart et al., 2006; Weber and Johnson, 2006).Thus, if we accept the claim that mem-ory has a strong influence on judgments and decision-making, the question is then whether memory processes sustain the stability of our preferences across situa-tions, contexts, and stimuli? We feel that the answer to this question is a resounding “no.” In a nutshell, our memories are not stable, they are influenced by motivational and situational factors and they are highly malleable and changeable. Memory forma-tion, encoding, and retrieval are susceptible to bias and it is increasingly accepted that affective states are highly reconstructive (e.g., Kemp et al., 2008). In this opinion letter, we will make three observations on why memory cannot sustain stability for risk preferences. First, we will discuss how memory biases how we summarize the quality of recent experiences – hence influencing our choices and leading to preference instability. Second, memories for our preferences are highly distorted and highly reconstructed – do we really remem-ber what we prefer or do we prefer what we chose? Third, we will reflect on how long-term memory (LTM; what we know) influences STM (short-term memory; what we remember from a recent experience) – “filling in the gaps” and hence potentially decreasing the correspondence between experience and choice.Let’s start with the discrepancy between experienced and remembered utility. How we summarize the quality of an experience can be very different from what we actu-ally experienced. The work by Kahneman and colleagues suggests that how people summarize experiences in hindsight drives the choices they will make in the future; for instance, retrospective evaluations appear to be an important input into decisions to repeat (or not repeat) past experiences (e.g., Kahneman etal., 1993; Kahneman, 2000; Kahneman and Thaler, 2006). In medi-cal settings, this influence of our memory can lead people to take bad choices and increase risk-taking. For instance, a large proportion of women who do not attend routine mammogram screening mention the remembered pain of previous screen-ings as the reason for their decision ( Baines et al., 1990; Elwood et al., 1998 ). More strik-ingly, about 40% of patients who survived a cardiac arrest decide not to undergo future revival procedures – and again this choice was largely due to the remembered discom-fort of the treatment (Bedell etal., 1983). However, would people always take these risks? Evidence suggests that the same category of unpleasant and/or painful medical procedures can be remembered very differ -ently, and that decisions about these can largely differ as a consequence. In an oft-cited clinical study, Redelmeier et al. (2003)showed that adding an extra period of pain can actually improve the evaluation of a painful medical procedure. Patients under -going colonoscopy were randomly assigned to either a control group, who underwent the standard procedure, or an experimental group. In the latter condition, the procedure was extended by leaving the apparatus in place for an average 2min after the clinic examination was completed. This added experience was mildly uncomfortable – but

Retrospective evaluations of sequences: Testing the predictions of a memory-based analysis

Retrospective evaluation (RE) of event sequences is known to be biased in various ways. The present paper presents a series of studies that examined the suggestion that the moments that are the most accessible in memory at the point of RE contribute to these biases. As predicted by this memory-based analysis, Experiment 1 showed that pleasantness ratings of word lists were biased by the presentation position of a negative item and by how easy the negative information was to retrieve. Experiment 2 ruled out the hypothesis that these findings were due to the dual nature of the task called upon. Experiment 3 further manipulated the memorability of the negative items--and corresponding changes in RE were as predicted. Finally, Experiment 4 extended the findings to more complex stimuli involving event narratives. Overall, the results suggest that assessments were adjusted based on the retrieval of the most readily available information.

Reconstructing the recent visual past: Hierarchical knowledge-based effects in visual working memory

This paper presents two experiments that examine the influence of multiple levels of knowledge on visual working memory (VWM). Experiment 1 focused on memory for faces. Faces were selected from continua that were constructed by morphing two face photographs in 100 steps; half of the continua morphed a famous face into an unfamiliar one, while the other half used two unfamiliar faces. Participants studied six sequentially presented faces each from a different continuum, and at test they had to locate one of these within its continuum. Experiment 2 examined immediate memory for object sizes. On each trial, six images were shown; these were either all vegetables or all random shapes. Immediately after each list, one item was presented again, in a new random size, and participants reproduced its studied size. Results suggested that two levels of knowledge influenced VWM. First, there was an overall central-tendency bias whereby items were remembered as being closer to the overall average or central tokens (averaged across items and trials) than they actually were. Second, when object knowledge was available for the to-be-remembered items (i.e., famous face or typical size of a vegetable) a further bias was introduced in responses. The results extend the findings of Hemmer and Steyvers (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16, 80–87, 2009a) from episodic memory to VWM and contribute to the growing literature which illustrates the complexity and flexibility of the representations subtending VWM performance (e.g., Bae, Olkkonen, Allred, & Flombaum, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(4):744–63, 2015).