Publications

The Importance of Prior Probabilities in Coronavirus Testing

Diagnostic tests are looked to as an essential tool in the fight to contain the coronavirus and guide the reopening of economies. Much is said about problems with gaining access to these tests. Very little is said about their accuracy. These tests are assumed to be highly accurate. However, unless a test is perfect, accuracy can be greatly affected by the prevalence of infection in the population being tested, also known as the base-rate. Other contextual factors such as symptomatology and prior exposure also need to be taken into account along with base rates. One rarely hears anything about the importance of base rates because, unless one is schooled in their importance, they are not understood, not deemed relevant, and are thus neglected. Relying on diagnostic tests without verifying their accuracy and helping people interpret them will compound the crisis already underway and delay recovery.

When compassion fails

Stalin knew that people respond less strongly to mass murder than to individual tragedy. That's why emotion alone won't prevent genocide, says Paul Slovic

Predicting Future Sources of Mass Toxic Tort Litigation

No abstract is provided for this article.

Worldviews and trust of sources for health information on electronic nicotine delivery systems: Effects on risk perceptions and use

Public health agencies, the news media, and the tobacco/vapor industry have issued contradictory statements about the health effects of electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS). We investigated the levels of trust that consumers place in different information sources and how trust is associated with cultural worldviews, risk perceptions, ENDS use, and sociodemographic characteristics using a nationally representative sample of 6051 U.S. adults in 2015. Seventeen percent of adults were uncertain about their trust for one or more potential sources. Among the rest, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), health experts, and the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) elicited the highest levels of trust. In contrast, tobacco and vapor manufacturers, vape shop employees, and, to a lesser extent, the news media were distrusted. Adults who had higher incomes and more education or espoused egalitarian and communitarian worldviews expressed more trust in health sources and the FDA, whereas those identifying as non-Hispanic Black or multiracial reported less trust. Current smokers, those who identified as non-Hispanic Black or other race, had lower incomes, and espoused hierarchy and individualism worldviews expressed less distrust toward the tobacco and vapor industry. Greater trust (or less distrust) toward the tobacco and vapor industry and an individualism worldview were associated with perceptions of lower risk of premature death from daily ENDS use, greater uncertainty about those risks, and greater odds of using ENDS. Public health and the FDA should consider consumer trust and worldviews in the design and regulation of public education campaigns regarding the potential health risks and benefits of ENDS.

The Springs of Action: Affective and Analytical Information Processing in Choice

Affective processes were predicted to play a critical role in choices among complex stimuli. As hypothesized, self-report measures of individual differences in affective information processing were associated with choices in a task designed by Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, and Anderson (1994) to mimic the gains, losses, and uncertainties of real life decisions. The results were stronger when the processing of losses was considered separately from the processing of gains. Greater negative affectivity was associated with more avoidance of high-loss options; greater positive affectivity was associated with more choices from high-gain options. Both measures of affectivity added unique explanatory power to the prediction of choices among the decks over and above conscious knowledge about the decks. Affect appears to play an important role in guiding decisions and judgments.

Mental Imagery, Impact, and Affect: A Mediation Model for Charitable Giving

One of the puzzling phenomena in philanthropy is that people can show strong compassion for identified individual victims but remain unmoved by catastrophes that affect large numbers of victims. Two prominent findings in research on charitable giving reflect this idiosyncrasy: The (1) identified victim and (2) victim number effects. The first of these suggests that identifying victims increases donations and the second refers to the finding that people’s willingness to donate often decreases as the number of victims increases. While these effects have been documented in the literature, their underlying psychological processes need further study. We propose a model in which identified victim and victim number effects operate through different cognitive and affective mechanisms. In two experiments we present empirical evidence for such a model and show that different affective motivations (donor-focused vs. victim-focused feelings) are related to the cognitive processes of impact judgments and mental imagery. Moreover, we argue that different mediation pathways exist for identifiability and victim number effects.

Cue Consistency and Cue Utilization in Judgment

Cue utilization in a numerical prediction task

The importance of variance in gambling decisions

Task Complexity and Older Adults' Decision-Making Competence.

This article reports progress in an ongoing research program examining older adults' decision-making competence (DMC). Using a theoretical framework that emphasizes the person-task fit in assessing DMC, the authors report the results of a study comparing older versus younger adults' decision performance on simple and complex tasks about health, finance, and nutrition. The authors hypothesized and found that increasing age and task complexity were related to greater comprehension errors and inconsistency in decision making. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that a large amount of age-related variance in performance on the decision tasks could be accounted for by exogenous social variables, health measures, basic cognitive skills, and attitudinal measures. The discussion emphasizes several directions for future research, including the need to validate the meaning of performance on these tasks for real-life decision processes.

On the Psychology of Experimental Surprises: Outcome Knowledge and the Journal Review Process

Abstract : To merit publication a study must be informative; the reader must not feel that the results could have been confidently predicted prior to conducting the study. Earlier studies of the psychology of hindsight have shown that people overestimate the predictability of past events. This report examines whether they also overestimate the predictability of experimental results. Three experiments strongly suggest that reviewers may overestimate the degree to which they could have predicted the reported results of experiments. The implications of this bias for the journal review process, and some ways in which it might be alleviated, are discussed.

Knowing with certainty: The appropriateness of extreme confidence

How often are people wrong when they are certain that they know the answer to a question? The studies reported here suggest that the answer is "too often." For a variety of general-knowledge questions (e.g., absinthe is [a] a liqueur or [b] a precious stone), subjects first chose the most likely answer and then indicated their degree of certainty that the answer they had selected was, in fact, correct. Across several different question and response formats, subjects were consistently overconfident. They had sufficient faith in their confidence judgments to be willing to stake money on their validity. The psychological bases for unwarranted certainty are discussed in terms of the inferential processes whereby knowledge is constructed from perceptions and memories.

Numeracy and mood in decision making

Perception of risk and the future of nuclear power

Public support for nuclear power has declined greatly, driven by a number of powerful forces and events. Numerous studies have demonstrated the public`s extreme perceptions of risk and negative attitudes regarding nuclear power. This negativity is remarkable in light of the confidence most technical analysts have regarding the safety of this technology. Public fears and opposition to nuclear power can be seen as a crisis in confidence, a profound breakdown in trust in the scientific, governmental, and industrial managers of nuclear technologies. The problem is not due to public ignorance or irrationality, but is deeply rooted in individual psychology and the adversarial nature of our social, institutional, legal, and political systems of risk management. In the absence of revolutionary changes in the ways that risks are managed in our society, it is unlikely that public trust, confidence, and acceptance of nuclear power can be regained.

Die Ethik des Präferenz-Managements: Risiko, Werte und Entscheidungen

In diesem Kapitel werde ich in wenigen Worten die Psychologie des Risikos und einige ihrer Implikationen beschreiben. Dabei werde ich mit einer Untersuchung der Subjektivität beginnen, sowie den Werten, welche in der Definition und Beurteilung von Risiko...

Expert and Public Evaluations of Technological Risks: Searching for Common Ground

No abstract is provided for this article.

Reader reaction to news of mass suffering: Assessing the influence of story form and emotional response

Drawing from psychological research, the study examines how story form influences reader reaction to news accounts of mass violence in Africa. An online survey with embedded experimental conditions was administered to a US Internet panel (n = 638). Results show that how the story is told affects reader emotional response and, indirectly, charitable giving. Story personification had the strongest influence, followed by stories with photographic images. Use of statistical and mobilizing information had only a small effect on reader response. The straight news story – the predominant form of news reporting – evoked the weakest emotional response. The findings underscore that simply ‘reporting the news’ is often insufficient to arouse audience response. The reader needs empathetic connection, especially when dealing with large-scale distant suffering. Applying psychological principles to practical journalism, the study is intended to guide media practitioners and activists as they seek better ways to bring attention to the world’s most deplorable conditions.