The role of episodic memory sampling in evaluation.

Many models of choice assume that people retrieve memories of past experiences and use them to guide evaluation and choice. In this paper, we examine whether samples of recalled past experiences do indeed underpin our evaluations of options. We showed participants sequences of numerical values and asked them to recall as many of those values as possible and also to state how much they would be willing to pay for another draw from the sequence. Using Bayesian mixed effects modeling, we predicted participants' evaluation of the sequences at the group level from either the average of the values they recalled or the average of the values they saw. Contrary to the predictions of recall-based models, people's evaluations appear to be sensitive to information beyond what was actually recalled. Moreover, we did not find consistent evidence that memory for specific items is sufficient to predict evaluation of sequences. We discuss the implications for sampling models of memory and decision-making and alternative explanations.

Incomparability and Incommensurability in Choice: No Common Currency of Value?

Models of decision-making typically assume the existence of some common currency of value, such as utility, happiness, or inclusive fitness. This common currency is taken to allow comparison of options and to underpin everyday choice. Here we suggest instead that there is no universal value scale, that incommensurable values pervade everyday choice, and hence that most existing models of decision-making in both economics and psychology are fundamentally limited. We propose that choice objects can be compared only with reference to specific but nonuniversal "covering values." These covering values may reflect decision-makers' goals, motivations, or current states. A complete model of choice must accommodate the range of possible covering values. We show that abandoning the common-currency assumption in models of judgment and decision-making necessitates rank-based and "simple heuristics" models that contrast radically with conventional utility-based approaches. We note that if there is no universal value scale, then Arrow's impossibility theorem places severe bounds on the rationality of individual decision-making and hence that there is a deep link between the incommensurability of value, inconsistencies in human decision-making, and rank-based coding of value. More generally, incommensurability raises the question of whether it will ever be possible to develop single-quantity-maximizing models of decision-making.

Political Attitudes and Disease Threat: Regional Pathogen Stress Is Associated With Conservative Ideology Only for Older Individuals.

What environmental factors are associated with individual differences in political ideology, and do such associations change over time? We examine whether reductions in pathogen prevalence in U.S. states over the past 60 years are associated with reduced associations between parasite stress and conservatism. We report a positive association between infection levels and conservative ideology in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. However, this correlation reduces from the 1980s onwards. These results suggest that the ecological influence of infectious diseases may be larger for older people who grew up (or whose parents grew up) during earlier time periods. We test this hypothesis by analyzing the political affiliation of 45,000 Facebook users, and find a positive association between self-reported political affiliation and regional pathogen stress for older (>40 years) but not younger individuals. It is concluded that the influence of environmental pathogen stress on ideology may have reduced over time.

Do Misconceptions About Health-Related Quality of Life Affect General Population Valuations of Health States?

OBJECTIVES: Healthcare resource allocation decisions are often informed by the expected gains in patients' quality-adjusted life-years. Misconceptions about ill-health's consequences for quality of life (QOL) may however affect evaluations of health states by the general population and hence affect resource allocation decisions informed by quality-adjusted life-years. We examine whether people selectively misestimate the QOL consequences of moderate anxiety or depression compared with other dimensions of health, and we test whether informing people of actual changes in QOL associated with health states changes appraisals of their relative undesirability. METHODS: UK general population participants (N = 1259; in 2017) expressed preferences over moderate problems: anxiety or depression, self-care, and pain or discomfort. A randomized control trial design was used whereby a control group was given a functional description of each health state, and 2 intervention groups were additionally given information on the actual differences in either life satisfaction (LS) or day affect (DA) associated with experiencing each health state. RESULTS: The LS (DA) group reported a higher preference for avoiding living with moderate anxiety or depression, being 13.4% (13.9%) more likely to choose it as most undesirable. CONCLUSION: Informing people of the change in LS or DA associated with health states before they appraise them is a feasible way to obtain informed preferences.

Rank-based alternatives to mean-based ensemble models of satisfaction with earnings: Comment on Putnam-Farr and Morewedge (2020).

How much satisfaction do we derive from a new salary or from receiving a bonus payment in an experiment? People do not judge monetary amounts in isolation but compare them to other amounts-judgments are context sensitive. A key question is, however, how context affects judgment. Across eight experiments, Putnam-Farr and Morewedge (2020) showed that people's self-reported satisfaction with a sum of money is predicted by the difference between that amount and the highest or lowest amount received by others. The authors found no evidence that people's judgments are sensitive to the ranked position of a monetary amount among other rewards. Putnam-Farr and Morewedge explained their results with reference to the ensemble representation literature, which shows that people can accurately estimate summary statistics, such as the maximum or mean, of stimulus distributions. In this commentary, we argue that their proposed interpretation is inconsistent with extensive theoretical and empirical research showing that judgments of stimuli reflect the relative ranked position of those stimuli within a comparison context. Building on this research, we show that the experimental results reported by Putnam-Farr and Morewedge can be explained on the assumption that people use contextual information to infer a distribution of monetary amounts and judge individual amounts by their relative ranked position within that inferred distribution. This inferred distribution theory accounts for empirical results reported in the original study while remaining consistent with the general and well-established principle of rank-based judgment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Social sampling and expressed attitudes: Authenticity preference and social extremeness aversion lead to social norm effects and polarization.

A cognitive model of social influence (Social Sampling Theory [SST]) is developed and applied to several social network phenomena including polarization and contagion effects. Social norms and individuals' private attitudes are represented as distributions rather than the single points used in most models. SST is explored using agent-based modeling to link individual-level and network-level effects. People are assumed to observe the behavior of their social network neighbors and thereby infer the social distribution of particular attitudes and behaviors. It is assumed that (a) people dislike behaving in ways that are extreme within their neighborhood social norm (social extremeness aversion assumption), and hence tend to conform and (b) people prefer to behave consistently with their own underlying attitudes (authenticity preference assumption) hence minimizing dissonance. Expressed attitudes and behavior reflect a utility-maximizing compromise between these opposing principles. SST is applied to a number of social phenomena including (a) homophily and the development of segregated neighborhoods, (b) polarization, (c) effects of norm homogeneity on social conformity, (d) pluralistic ignorance and false consensus effects, (e) backfire effects, (f) interactions between world view and social norm effects, and (g) the opposing effects on subjective well-being of authentic behavior and high levels of social comparison. More generally, it is argued that explanations of social comparison require the variance, not just the central tendency, of both attitudes and beliefs about social norms to be accommodated. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Of tinfoil hats and thinking caps: Reasoning is more strongly related to implausible than plausible conspiracy beliefs.

People who strongly endorse conspiracy theories typically exhibit biases in domain-general reasoning. We describe an overfitting hypothesis, according to which (a) such theories overfit conspiracy-related data at the expense of wider generalisability, and (b) reasoning biases reflect, at least in part, the need to reduce the resulting dissonance between the conspiracy theory and wider data. This hypothesis implies that reasoning biases should be more closely associated with belief in implausible conspiracy theories (e.g., the moon landing was faked) than with more plausible ones (e.g., the Russian Federation orchestrated the attack on Sergei Skripal). In two pre-registered studies, we found that endorsement of implausible conspiracy theories, but not plausible ones, was associated with reduced information sampling in an information-foraging task and with less reflective reasoning. Thus, the relationship between belief in conspiracy theories and reasoning is not homogeneous, and reasoning is not linked specifically to the "conspiracy" aspect of conspiracy theories. Instead, it may reflect an adaptive response to the tension between implausible theories and other beliefs and data.

The Endowment Effect and Beliefs About the Market.

The endowment effect occurs when people assign a higher value to an item they own than to the same item when they do not own it, and this effect is often taken to reflect an ownership-induced change in the intrinsic value people assign to the object. However recent evidence shows that valuations made by buyers and sellers are influenced by market prices provided for the individual products, suggesting a role for beliefs about the markets. Here we elicit individuals' beliefs about whole distributions of market prices, enabling us to quantify whether or not a given transaction constitutes a "good deal" and to demonstrate how an endowment effect may reflect such considerations. In a meta-analysis and three laboratory experiments, we show for the first time that ownership has no effect on beliefs about either: (a) the quality of the item or (b) the appropriate market price for the item. Instead, we show that sellers demand a price for the item that matches their beliefs about the item's relative quality and the distribution of market prices in the market. Buyers, in contrast, offer less than what they believe the appropriate market price is. Thus, we argue that the endowment effect may largely reflect "adaptively rational" behavior on the part of both buyers and sellers (given their beliefs about relevant markets) rather than any ownership-induced bias or change in intrinsic preferences.

Inequality and Social Rank: Income Increases Buy More Life Satisfaction in More Equal Countries.

How do income and income inequality combine to influence subjective well-being? We examined the relation between income and life satisfaction in different societies, and found large effects of income inequality within a society on the relationship between individuals' incomes and their life satisfaction. The income-satisfaction gradient is steeper in countries with more equal income distributions, such that the positive effect of a 10% increase in income on life satisfaction is more than twice as large in a country with low income inequality as it is in a country with high income inequality. These findings are predicted by an income rank hypothesis according to which life satisfaction is derived from social rank. A fixed increment in income confers a greater increment in social position in a more equal society. Income inequality may influence people's preferences, such that in unequal countries people's life satisfaction is determined more strongly by their income.

Comparing indices of relative deprivation using behavioural evidence.

What measure of relative deprivation best predicts health? While numerous indices of relative deprivation exist, few studies have compared how well different measures account for empirical data. Hounkpatin et al. (2016) demonstrated that the relative ranked position of an individual i's income within a comparison group (their relative rank) was a better predictor of i's health than i's relative deprivation as assessed by the widely-used Yitzhaki index. In their commentary, Stark and Jakubek (2020) argue that both relative rank and relative deprivation may matter, and they develop a composite index. Here we identify some issues with their composite index, develop an alternative based on behavioural evidence, and test the various indices against data. Although almost all existing indices assume that the significance of an income yj to an individual with income yi (yj>yi) will be some increasing function of the difference between yj and yi, we find that the influence of j's income on i's health is actually a reducing function of (yj-yi). This finding - that less significance is assigned to distant higher incomes than to near higher incomes - is consistent with the well-established idea that we compare ourselves primarily to similar others.

Individual-Level Analyses of the Impact of Parasite Stress on Personality: Reduced Openness Only for Older Individuals.

The parasite stress hypothesis predicts that individuals living in regions with higher infectious disease rates will show lower openness, agreeableness, and extraversion, but higher conscientiousness. This article, using data from more than 250,000 U.S. Facebook users, reports tests of these predictions at the level of both U.S. states and individuals and evaluates criticisms of previous findings. State-level results for agreeableness and conscientiousness are consistent with previously reported cross-national findings, but others (a significant positive correlation with extraversion and no correlation with openness) are not. However, effects of parasite stress on conscientiousness and agreeableness are not found when analyses account for the data's hierarchical structure and include controls. We find that only openness is robustly related to parasite stress in these analyses, and we also find a significant interaction with age: Older, but not younger, inhabitants of areas of high parasite stress show lower openness. Interpretations of the findings are discussed.

Benchmarks for models of short-term and working memory.

Any mature field of research in psychology-such as short-term/working memory-is characterized by a wealth of empirical findings. It is currently unrealistic to expect a theory to explain them all; theorists must satisfice with explaining a subset of findings. The aim of the present article is to make the choice of that subset less arbitrary and idiosyncratic than is current practice. We propose criteria for identifying benchmark findings that every theory in a field should be able to explain: Benchmarks should be reproducible, generalize across materials and methodological variations, and be theoretically informative. We propose a set of benchmarks for theories and computational models of short-term and working memory. The benchmarks are described in as theory-neutral a way as possible, so that they can serve as empirical common ground for competing theoretical approaches. Benchmarks are rated on three levels according to their priority for explanation. Selection and ratings of the benchmarks is based on consensus among the authors, who jointly represent a broad range of theoretical perspectives on working memory, and they are supported by a survey among other experts on working memory. The article is accompanied by a web page providing an open forum for discussion and for submitting proposals for new benchmarks; and a repository for reference data sets for each benchmark. (PsycINFO Database Record

Benchmarks provide common ground for model development: Reply to Logie (2018) and Vandierendonck (2018).

We respond to the comments of Logie and Vandierendonck to our article proposing benchmark findings for evaluating theories and models of short-term and working memory. The response focuses on the two main points of criticism: (a) Logie and Vandierendonck argue that the scope of the set of benchmarks is too narrow. We explain why findings on how working memory is used in complex cognition, findings on executive functions, and findings from neuropsychological case studies are currently not included in the benchmarks, and why findings with visual and spatial materials are less prevalent among them. (b) The critics question the usefulness of the benchmarks and their ratings for advancing theory development. We explain why selecting and rating benchmarks is important and justifiable, and acknowledge that the present selection and rating decisions are in need of continuous updating. The usefulness of the benchmarks of all ratings is also enhanced by our concomitant online posting of data for many of these benchmarks. (PsycINFO Database Record

Income Inequality, Income, and Internet Searches for Status Goods: A Cross-National Study of the Association Between Inequality and Well-Being.

Is there a positive association between a nation's income inequality and concerns with status competition within that nation? Here we use Google Correlate and Google Trends to examine frequency of internet search terms and find that people in countries in which income inequality is high search relatively more frequently for positional brand names such as Prada, Louis Vuitton, or Chanel. This tendency is stronger among well-developed countries. We find no evidence that income alone is associated with searches for positional goods. We also present evidence that the concern with positional goods does not reflect non-linear effects of income on consumer spending, either across nations or (extending previous findings that people who live in unequal US States search more for positional goods) within the USA. It is concluded that income inequality is associated with greater concerns with positional goods, and that this concern is reflected in internet searching behaviour.

A rank based social norms model of how people judge their levels of drunkenness whilst intoxicated.

BACKGROUND: A rank based social norms model predicts that drinkers' judgements about their drinking will be based on the rank of their breath alcohol level amongst that of others in the immediate environment, rather than their actual breath alcohol level, with lower relative rank associated with greater feelings of safety. This study tested this hypothesis and examined how people judge their levels of drunkenness and the health consequences of their drinking whilst they are intoxicated in social drinking environments. METHODS: Breath alcohol testing of 1,862 people (mean age = 26.96 years; 61.86 % male) in drinking environments. A subset (N = 400) also answered four questions asking about their perceptions of their drunkenness and the health consequences of their drinking (plus background measures). RESULTS: Perceptions of drunkenness and the health consequences of drinking were regressed on: (a) breath alcohol level, (b) the rank of the breath alcohol level amongst that of others in the same environment, and (c) covariates. Only rank of breath alcohol level predicted perceptions: How drunk they felt (b 3.78, 95 % CI 1.69 5.87), how extreme they regarded their drinking that night (b 3.7, 95 % CI 1.3 6.20), how at risk their long-term health was due to their current level of drinking (b 4.1, 95 % CI 0.2 8.0) and how likely they felt they would experience liver cirrhosis (b 4.8. 95 % CI 0.7 8.8). People were more influenced by more sober others than by more drunk others. CONCLUSION: Whilst intoxicated and in drinking environments, people base judgements regarding their drinking on how their level of intoxication ranks relative to that of others of the same gender around them, not on their actual levels of intoxication. Thus, when in the company of others who are intoxicated, drinkers were found to be more likely to underestimate their own level of drinking, drunkenness and associated risks. The implications of these results, for example that increasing the numbers of sober people in night time environments could improve subjective assessments of drunkenness, are discussed.

Being paid relatively well most of the time: Negatively skewed payments are more satisfying.

How does the structure of a series of payments influence its recipient's satisfaction? A common hypothesis is that each payment will be compared with a single "standard" or "reference" payment (e.g., the average payment). Cognitive models of judgment such as range frequency theory predict in contrast that the entire payment distribution will influence evaluation of each individual payment. Two experiments examined satisfaction with a series of payments. In both experiments, most payments were either relatively high in the experienced distribution (the distribution was negatively skewed) or relatively low (positively skewed). The total and average payment was held constant. Experiment 1 found that average satisfaction with individual payments was higher when the payments were negatively skewed, consistent with range frequency theory, and earlier findings were extended by comparing range frequency theory with a range-based model, a rank-based model, and a reference point model at the individual level. Experiment 2 examined satisfaction with whole sequences of payments and found that receiving a negatively skewed sequence was more satisfying overall than receiving a positively skewed sequence. It is concluded that negatively skewed payment distributions are more satisfying, as predicted by cognitive models of judgment.

Personality, Parasites, Political Attitudes, and Cooperation: A Model of How Infection Prevalence Influences Openness and Social Group Formation.

What is the origin of individual differences in ideology and personality? According to the parasite stress hypothesis, the structure of a society and the values of individuals within it are both influenced by the prevalence of infectious disease within the society's geographical region. High levels of infection threat are associated with more ethnocentric and collectivist social structures and greater adherence to social norms, as well as with socially conservative political ideology and less open but more conscientious personalities. Here we use an agent-based model to explore a specific opportunities-parasites trade-off (OPTO) hypothesis, according to which utility-maximizing agents place themselves at an optimal point on a trade-off between (a) the gains that may be achieved through accessing the resources of geographically or socially distant out-group members through openness to out-group interaction, and (b) the losses arising due to consequently increased risks of exotic infection to which immunity has not been developed. We examine the evolution of cooperation and the formation of social groups within social networks, and we show that the groups that spontaneously form exhibit greater local rather than global cooperative networks when levels of infection are high. It is suggested that the OPTO model offers a first step toward understanding the specific mechanisms through which environmental conditions may influence cognition, ideology, personality, and social organization.

Measuring implicit attitudes: A positive framing bias flaw in the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP).

How can implicit attitudes best be measured? The Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP), unlike the Implicit Association Test (IAT), claims to measure absolute, not just relative, implicit attitudes. In the IRAP, participants make congruent (Fat Person-Active: false; Fat Person-Unhealthy: true) or incongruent (Fat Person-Active: true; Fat Person-Unhealthy: false) responses in different blocks of trials. IRAP experiments have reported positive or neutral implicit attitudes (e.g., neutral attitudes toward fat people) in cases in which negative attitudes are normally found on explicit or other implicit measures. It was hypothesized that these results might reflect a positive framing bias (PFB) that occurs when participants complete the IRAP. Implicit attitudes toward categories with varying prior associations (nonwords, social systems, flowers and insects, thin and fat people) were measured. Three conditions (standard, positive framing, and negative framing) were used to measure whether framing influenced estimates of implicit attitudes. It was found that IRAP scores were influenced by how the task was framed to the participants, that the framing effect was modulated by the strength of prior stimulus associations, and that a default PFB led to an overestimation of positive implicit attitudes when measured by the IRAP. Overall, the findings question the validity of the IRAP as a tool for the measurement of absolute implicit attitudes. A new tool (Simple Implicit Procedure:SIP) for measuring absolute, not just relative, implicit attitudes is proposed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Why does Income Relate to Depressive Symptoms? Testing the Income Rank Hypothesis Longitudinally.

This paper reports a test of the relative income rank hypothesis of depression, according to which it is the rank position of an individual's income amongst a comparison group, rather than the individual's absolute income, that will be associated with depressive symptoms. A new methodology is developed to test between psychosocial and material explanations of why income relates to well-being. This method was used to test the income rank hypothesis as applied to depressive symptoms. We used data from a cohort of 10,317 individuals living in Wisconsin who completed surveys in 1992 and 2003. The utility assumed to arise from income was represented with a constant relative risk aversion function to overcome limitations of previous work in which inadequate specification of the relationship between absolute income and well-being may have inappropriately favoured relative income specifications. We compared models in which current and future depressive symptoms were predicted from: (a) income utility alone, (b) income rank alone, (c) the transformed difference between the individual's income and the mean income of a comparison group and (d) income utility, income rank and distance from the mean jointly. Model comparison overcomes problems involving multi-collinearity amongst the predictors. A rank-only model was consistently supported. Similar results were obtained for the association between depressive symptoms and wealth and rank of wealth in a cohort of 32,900 British individuals who completed surveys in 2002 and 2008. We conclude that it is the rank of a person's income or wealth within a social comparison group, rather than income or wealth themselves or their deviations from the mean within a reference group, that is more strongly associated with depressive symptoms.

Improving social norms interventions: Rank-framing increases excessive alcohol drinkers' information-seeking.

OBJECTIVE: Two types of social norm message frame for encouraging seeking of alcohol-related health information by excessive drinkers were compared: (a) how much the average person actually drinks and (b) how their drinking ranks among others. It was hypothesized, in accordance with recent evidence of how the brain represents value, that Frame (b) would be more effective than Frame (a). This is the first test comparing these frames in any domain of social norms research. METHOD: U.K. university students with excessive alcohol intake (n = 101; 66 female) were sent 4 weekly messages containing 1 of 4 types of information depending upon the experimental condition to which each participant was randomly allocated: (a) official alcohol consumption guidelines, (b) how their alcohol consumption compared with official guidelines, (c) how their consumption compared with the sample mean, or (d) how their consumption ranked among the sample. They then had the opportunity to request up to 3 types of alcohol-related health information. RESULTS: Participants informed of how their consumption ranked were more likely to request information (p < .01, odds ratio = 6.0) and tended to request a greater number of types of information (p < .01, Wald = 7.17) than those in other conditions. CONCLUSIONS: Informing excessive drinkers of how their alcohol consumption ranked was more effective in eliciting their seeking of alcohol-related health information than informing them of how their consumption compared with the mean. Research investigating the effectiveness of this message frame in social norms interventions more generally is needed.