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Dive into the research topics where Thomas Schultze is active.

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Featured researches published by Thomas Schultze.


Journal of Experimental Child Psychology | 2015

Young children heed advice selectively

Hannes Rakoczy; Christoph Ehrling; Paul L. Harris; Thomas Schultze

A rational strategy to update and revise ones uncertain beliefs is to take advice by other agents who are better informed. Adults routinely engage in such advice taking in systematic and selective ways depending on relevant characteristics such as reliability of advisors. The current study merged research in social and developmental psychology to examine whether children also adjust their initial judgment to varying degrees depending on the characteristics of their advisors. Participants aged 3 to 6 years played a game in which they made initial judgments, received advice, and subsequently made final judgments. They systematically revised their judgments in light of the advice, and they did so selectively as a function of advisor expertise. They made greater adjustments to their initial judgment when advised by an apparently knowledgeable informant. This suggests that the pattern of advice taking studied in social psychology has its roots in early development.


Journal of Personality and Social Psychology | 2017

Predictive Validity and Adjustment of Ideal Partner Preferences Across the Transition Into Romantic Relationships.

Tanja M. Gerlach; Ruben C. Arslan; Thomas Schultze; Selina K. Reinhard; Lars Penke

Although empirical research has investigated what we ideally seek in a romantic partner for decades, the crucial question of whether ideal partner preferences actually guide our mating decisions in real life has remained largely unanswered. One reason for this is the lack of designs that assess individuals’ ideal partner preferences before entering a relationship and then follow up on them over an extended period. In the Göttingen Mate Choice Study (GMCS), a preregistered, large-scale online study, we used such a naturalistic prospective design. We investigated partner preferences across 4 preference domains in a large sample of predominantly heterosexual singles (N = 763, aged 18–40 years) and tracked these individuals across a period of 5 months upon a possible transition into romantic relationships. Attesting to their predictive validity, partner preferences prospectively predicted the characteristics of later partners. This was equally true for both sexes, except for vitality-attractiveness where men’s preferences were more predictive of their later partners’ standing on this dimension than women’s. Self-perceived mate value did not moderate the preference-partner characteristics relations. Preferences proved to be relatively stable across the 5 months interval, yet were less stable for those who entered a relationship. Subgroup analyses using a newly developed indicator of preference adjustment toward (vs. away from) partner characteristics revealed that participants adjusted their preferences downward when partners fell short of initial preferences, but showed no consistent adjustment when partners exceeded them. Results and implications are discussed against the background of ongoing controversies in mate choice and romantic relationship research.


bioRxiv | 2018

Emergence and suppression of cooperation by action visibility in transparent games

Anton M. Unakafov; Thomas Schultze; Igor Kagan; Sebastian Moeller; Stephan Eule; Fred Wolf

Real-world agents, humans as well as animals, observe each other during interactions and choose their own actions taking the partners’ ongoing behaviour into account. Yet, classical game theory assumes that players act either strictly sequentially or strictly simultaneously without knowing each other’s current choices. To account for action visibility and provide a more realistic model of interactions under time constraints, we introduce a new game-theoretic setting called transparent game, where each player has a certain probability of observing the partner’s choice before deciding on its own action. By means of evolutionary simulations, we demonstrate that even a small probability of seeing the partner’s choice before one’s own decision substantially changes evolutionary successful strategies. Action visibility enhances cooperation in an iterated coordination game, but disrupts cooperation in a more competitive iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. In both games, “Win–stay, lose–shift” and “Tit-for-tat” strategies are predominant for moderate transparency, while “Leader-Follower” strategy emerges for high transparency. Our results have implications for studies of human and animal social behaviour, especially for the analysis of dyadic and group interactions. Author summary Humans and animals constantly make social decisions. Should an animal during group foraging or a human at the buffet try to obtain an attractive food item but risk a confrontation with a dominant conspecific, or is it better to opt for a less attractive but non-confrontational choice, especially when considering that the situation will repeat in future? To model decision-making in such situations game theory is widely used. However, classic game theory assumes that agents act either at the same time, without knowing each other’s choices, or one after another. In contrast, humans and animals usually try to take the behaviour of their opponents and partners into account, to instantaneously adjust their own actions if possible. To provide a more realistic model of decision making in a social setting, we here introduce the concept of transparent games. It integrates the probability of observing the partner’s instantaneous actions into the game-theoretic framework of knowing previous choice outcomes. We find that such “transparency” has a direct influence on the emergence of cooperative behaviours in classic iterated games. The transparent games contribute to a deeper understanding of the social behaviour and decision-making of humans and animals.


Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition | 2017

Disentangling the Effects of Advisor Consensus and Advice Proximity.

Stella Wanzel; Thomas Schultze; Stefan Schulz-Hardt

When advice comes from interdependent sources (e.g., from advisors who use the same database), less information should be gained as compared to independent advice. On the other hand, since individuals strive for consistency, they should be more confident in consistent compared to conflicting advice, and interdependent advice should be more consistent than independent advice. In a study investigating the differential effects of interdependent versus independent advice on a judge’s accuracy and confidence (Yaniv, Choshen-Hillel, & Milyavsky, 2009), advice interdependence was confounded with another variable, namely closeness of the advice to the judge’s estimate. Interdependent advice was not only more consistent than independent advice but also closer to the judge’s first estimate. The present study aimed at disentangling the effects of consensus and closeness of the advice by adding a third experimental condition in which interdependent (and, hence, consistent) advice was far from the judge’s own estimate. We found that, as suggested by Yaniv et al., accuracy gains were indeed a consequence of advisor interdependence. However, in contrast to Yaniv et al.’s conclusions, confidence in the correctness of one’s estimates was mostly a function of the advice’s proximity to the participants’ initial estimations, thereby indicating a social validation effect.


Experimental Psychology | 2017

On the Inability to Ignore Useless Advice

Thomas Schultze; Andreas Mojzisch; Stefan Schulz-Hardt

Research in the judge-advisor-paradigm suggests that advice is generally utilized less than it should be according to its quality. In a series of four experiments, we challenge this widely held assumption. We hypothesize that when advice quality is low, the opposite phenomenon, namely overutilization of advice, occurs. We further assume that this overutilization effect is the result of anchoring: advice serves as an anchor, thus causing an adjustment toward even useless advice. The data of our four experiments support these hypotheses. Judges systematically adjusted their estimates toward advice that we introduced to them as being useless, and this effect was stable after controlling for intentional utilization of this advice. Furthermore, we demonstrate that anchoring-based adjustment toward advice is independent of advice quality. Our findings enhance our understanding of the processes involved in advice taking and identify a potential threat to judgment accuracy arising from an inability to discount useless advice.


Cognitive Therapy and Research | 2017

Are Depressed People More or Less Susceptible to Informational Social Influence

Christine Hofheinz; Markus Germar; Thomas Schultze; Johannes Michalak; Andreas Mojzisch

When making judgments and decisions, people suffering from depression are often faced with opinions and advice from others (e.g., from their therapists) but it is unclear how their psychopathology alters the utilization of such information. This study is the first to examine whether depressed people are more or less susceptible to informational social influence. To this end, we employed the Judge–Advisor-System, which allows for a pure test of how people utilize information from others. We found that depressed participants had significantly higher advice taking values than non-depressed participants, which was mediated by self-esteem. A fine-grained analysis of these group differences revealed that depressed participants were more likely to revise their initial estimates after receiving advice than non-depressed people. Yet, once having decided to revise their estimates, depressed people did not weight advice more heavily. Theoretical implications concerning two qualitatively independent effects of depression on advice taking are discussed.


Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes | 2012

Why groups perform better than individuals at quantitative judgment tasks: Group-to-individual transfer as an alternative to differential weighting

Thomas Schultze; Andreas Mojzisch; Stefan Schulz-Hardt


Journal of Experimental Social Psychology | 2016

Reconceptualizing replication as a sequence of different studies: A replication typology

Joachim Hüffmeier; Jens Mazei; Thomas Schultze


Journal of Applied Psychology | 2012

Biased information processing in the escalation paradigm: information search and information evaluation as potential mediators of escalating commitment.

Thomas Schultze; Felix Pfeiffer; Stefan Schulz-Hardt


Judgment and Decision Making | 2015

Effects of distance between initial estimates and advice on advice utilization

Thomas Schultze; Anne-Fernandine Rakotoarisoa; Stefan Schulz-Hardt

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Lars Penke

University of Göttingen

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Anne Tomaschek

Dresden University of Technology

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