Efficiency neglect: Why people are pessimistic about the effects of increasing population.

In six studies, we find evidence of efficiency neglect: when thinking about the effects of population growth, people intuitively focus on increased demand while neglecting the changes in production efficiency that occur alongside, and often in response to, increased demand. In other words, people tend to think of others solely as consumers, rather than as consumers as well as producers. Efficiency neglect leads to beliefs that the real costs of some consumer goods are rising when they are actually decreasing and may contribute to antiimmigration sentiments because of the fear that increasing local population creates competition for fixed resources. We demonstrate that economic pessimism and antiimmigration sentiments are reduced when people are prompted to consider their own beliefs about increased productivity over time, but are unchanged when they consider their beliefs about increases in demand. Together, these findings shed light on people's lay economic theories and suggest promising interventions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Better Accuracy for Better Science . . . Through Random Conclusions.

Conducting research with human subjects can be difficult because of limited sample sizes and small empirical effects. We demonstrate that this problem can yield patterns of results that are practically indistinguishable from flipping a coin to determine the direction of treatment effects. We use this idea of random conclusions to establish a baseline for interpreting effect-size estimates, in turn producing more stringent thresholds for hypothesis testing and for statistical-power calculations. An examination of recent meta-analyses in psychology, neuroscience, and medicine confirms that, even if all considered effects are real, results involving small effects are indeed indistinguishable from random conclusions.

Nudges, regulations, and behavioral public choice.

Chater & Loewenstein have done a service to the field by raising the fundamental issue of how the political process distorts well-intentioned efforts at behavioral public policy. We connect this argument to broader research on government failure, particularly public choice theory in economics. We further suggest ways that behavioral research can help identify and mitigate such failures.

Individuals with ventromedial frontal damage display unstable but transitive preferences during decision making.

The ventromedial frontal lobe (VMF) is important for decision-making, but the precise causal role of the VMF in the decision process has not been fully established. Previous studies have suggested that individuals with VMF damage violate transitivity, a hallmark axiom of rational decisions. However, these prior studies cannot properly distinguish whether individuals with VMF damage are truly prone to choosing irrationally from whether their preferences are simply more variable. We had individuals with focal VMF damage, individuals with other frontal damage, and healthy controls make repeated choices across three categories-artworks, chocolate bar brands, and gambles. Using proper tests of transitivity, we find that, in our study, individuals with VMF damage make rational decisions consistent with transitive preferences, even though they exhibit greater variability in their preferences. That is, the VMF is necessary for having strong and reliable preferences, but not for being a rational decision maker. VMF damage affects the variability with which value is assessed, but not the consistency with which value is sought.

Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change.

SignificancePeople change when they think others are changing, but people misperceive others' changes. These misperceptions may bedevil people's efforts to understand and change their social worlds, distort the democratic process, and turn imaginary trends into real ones. For example, participants believed that Americans increasingly want to limit immigration, which they said justifies tighter borders. However, participants also said that limiting immigration would not be right if attitudes had shifted against it--which is what actually occurred. Our findings suggest that the national discourse around contentious social issues, policies resulting from that discourse, and perhaps the opinions that drive discourse in the first place would be very different if people better understood how attitudes have and have not changed.

Development and implementation of the Ebola Exposure Window Calculator: A tool for Ebola virus disease outbreak field investigations.

During an Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak, calculating the exposure window of a confirmed case can assist field investigators in identifying the source of infection and establishing chains of transmission. However, field investigators often have difficulty calculating this window. We developed a bilingual (English/French), smartphone-based field application to assist field investigators in determining the exposure window of an EVD case. The calculator only requires the reported date of symptoms onset and the type of symptoms present at onset or the date of death. Prior to the release of this application, there was no similar electronic capability to enable consistent calculation of EVD exposure windows for field investigators. The Democratic Republic of the Congo Ministry of Health endorsed the application and incorporated it into trainings for field staff. Available for Apple and Android devices, the calculator continues to be downloaded even as the eastern DRC outbreak resolved. We rapidly developed and implemented a smartphone application to estimate the exposure window for EVD cases in an outbreak setting.

Correction: Estimation accuracy in the psychological sciences.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0207239.].

Estimation accuracy in the psychological sciences.

Sample means comparisons are a fundamental and ubiquitous approach to interpreting experimental psychological data. Yet, we argue that the sample and effect sizes in published psychological research are frequently so small that sample means are insufficiently accurate to determine whether treatment effects have occurred. Generally, an estimator should be more accurate than any benchmark that systematically ignores information about the relations among experimental conditions. We consider two such benchmark estimators: one that randomizes the relations among conditions and another that always assumes no treatment effects. We show conditions under which these benchmark estimators estimate the true parameters more accurately than sample means. This perverse situation can occur even when effects are statistically significant at traditional levels. Our argument motivates the need for regularized estimates, such as those used in lasso, ridge, and hierarchical Bayes techniques.

Not all folk-economic beliefs are best understood through our ancestral past.

We applaud Boyer & Petersen's (B&P's) approach to a fascinating topic. Their arguments against understanding folk-economic beliefs (FEBs) in terms of economic ignorance or specific biases, however, are overly pessimistic. Economic theory is the reason beliefs about such disparate phenomena are labeled "economic" and "folk." More importantly, some FEBs are better understood by examining current rather than ancestral contexts of exchange.

Anti-profit beliefs: How people neglect the societal benefits of profit.

Profit-seeking firms are stereotypically depicted as immoral and harmful to society. At the same time, profit-driven enterprise has contributed immensely to human prosperity. Though scholars agree that profit can incentivize societally beneficial behaviors, people may neglect this possibility. In 7 studies, we show that people see business profit as necessarily in conflict with social good, a view we call anti-profit beliefs. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that U.S. participants hold anti-profit views of real U.S. firms and industries. Study 3 shows that hypothetical organizations are seen as doing more harm when they are labeled "for-profit" rather than "non-profit," while Study 4 shows that increasing harm to society is viewed as a strategy for increasing a hypothetical firm's long-run profitability. Studies 5-7 demonstrate that carefully prompting subjects to consider the long run incentives of profit can attenuate anti-profit beliefs, while prompting short run thinking does nothing relative to a control. Together, these results suggest that the default view of profits is zero-sum. While people readily grasp how profit can incentivize firms to engage in practices that harm others, they neglect how it can incentivize firms to engage in practices that benefit others. Accordingly, people's stereotypes of profit-seeking firms are excessively negative. Even in one of the most market-oriented societies in history, people doubt the contributions of profit-seeking industry to societal progress. (PsycINFO Database Record

Mating motives are neither necessary nor sufficient to create the beauty premium.

Mating motives lead decision makers to favor attractive people, but this favoritism is not sufficient to create a beauty premium in competitive settings. Further, economic approaches to discrimination, when correctly characterized, could neatly accommodate the experimental and field evidence of a beauty premium. Connecting labor economics and evolutionary psychology is laudable, but mating motives do not explain the beauty premium.

Data from a pre-publication independent replication initiative examining ten moral judgement effects.

We present the data from a crowdsourced project seeking to replicate findings in independent laboratories before (rather than after) they are published. In this Pre-Publication Independent Replication (PPIR) initiative, 25 research groups attempted to replicate 10 moral judgment effects from a single laboratory's research pipeline of unpublished findings. The 10 effects were investigated using online/lab surveys containing psychological manipulations (vignettes) followed by questionnaires. Results revealed a mix of reliable, unreliable, and culturally moderated findings. Unlike any previous replication project, this dataset includes the data from not only the replications but also from the original studies, creating a unique corpus that researchers can use to better understand reproducibility and irreproducibility in science.

Comparing physicians personal prevention practices and their recommendations to patients.

BACKGROUND: Hypothetical choice studies suggest that physicians often take more risk for themselves than on their patient's behalf. OBJECTIVE: To examine if physicians recommend more screening tests than they personally undergo in the real-world context of breast cancer screening. DESIGN: Within-subjects survey. PARTICIPANTS: A national sample of female obstetricians and gynecologists (N = 135, response rate 54%) from the United States. In total, they provided breast care to approximately 2,800 patients per week. MEASURES: Personal usage history and patient recommendations regarding mammography screening and breast self-examination, a measure of defensive medicine practices. RESULTS: Across age groups, female physicians were more likely to recommend mammography screening than to have performed the procedure in the past 5 years (86% vs. 81%, p = .10). In respondents aged 40-49 this difference was significant (91% vs. 82%, p < .05), whereas no differences were detected for younger or older physicians. Among respondents in their 40s, 18% had undergone annual screenings in the past 5 years, compared to 48% of their colleagues above 50. Respondents were as likely to practice breast self-examination (98%) as to recommend it (93%), a pattern that was consistent across age groups. A logistic regression model of personal use of mammography significantly predicted recommending the procedure to patients (OR = 15.29, p = .001). Similarly, number of breast self-examinations performed over the past 2 years positively predicted patient recommendations of the procedure (OR = 1.31, p < .001). CONCLUSIONS: Obstetricians and gynecologists tended to recommend early mammography screening to their patients, though their personal practices indicated later start than their own recommendations and lower frequency of screening than peers in recent studies have recommended.

Comparing the accuracy of experimental estimates to guessing: a new perspective on replication and the "Crisis of Confidence" in psychology.

We develop a general measure of estimation accuracy for fundamental research designs, called v. The v measure compares the estimation accuracy of the ubiquitous ordinary least squares (OLS) estimator, which includes sample means as a special case, with a benchmark estimator that randomizes the direction of treatment effects. For sample and effect sizes common to experimental psychology, v suggests that OLS produces estimates that are insufficiently accurate for the type of hypotheses being tested. We demonstrate how v can be used to determine sample sizes to obtain minimum acceptable estimation accuracy. Software for calculating v is included as online supplemental material (R Core Team, 2012).

Transitivity of preferences.

Transitivity of preferences is a fundamental principle shared by most major contemporary rational, prescriptive, and descriptive models of decision making. To have transitive preferences, a person, group, or society that prefers choice option x to y and y to z must prefer x to z. Any claim of empirical violations of transitivity by individual decision makers requires evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. We discuss why unambiguous evidence is currently lacking and how to clarify the issue. In counterpoint to Tversky's (1969) seminal "Intransitivity of Preferences," we reconsider his data as well as those from more than 20 other studies of intransitive human or animal decision makers. We challenge the standard operationalizations of transitive preferences and discuss pervasive methodological problems in the collection, modeling, and analysis of relevant empirical data. For example, violations of weak stochastic transitivity do not imply violations of transitivity of preference. Building on past multidisciplinary work, we use parsimonious mixture models, where the space of permissible preference states is the family of (transitive) strict linear orders. We show that the data from many of the available studies designed to elicit intransitive choice are consistent with transitive preferences.

Contextual biases in the interpretation of auditory evidence.

Noisy recordings of dialogue often serve as evidence in criminal proceedings. The present article explores the ability of two types of contextual information, currently present in the legal system, to bias subjective interpretations of such evidence. The present experiments demonstrate that the general context of the legal system and the presence of transcripts of the recorded speech are both able to bias interpretations of degraded & benign recordings into interpretable & incriminating. Furthermore we demonstrate a curse of knowledge whereby people become miscalibrated to the true quality of degraded recordings when provided transcripts. Current methods of dealing with auditory evidence are insufficient to mollify the effects of biasing information within the criminal justice system.

Testing transitivity of preferences on two-alternative forced choice data.

As Duncan Luce and other prominent scholars have pointed out on several occasions, testing algebraic models against empirical data raises difficult conceptual, mathematical, and statistical challenges. Empirical data often result from statistical sampling processes, whereas algebraic theories are nonprobabilistic. Many probabilistic specifications lead to statistical boundary problems and are subject to nontrivial order constrained statistical inference. The present paper discusses Luce's challenge for a particularly prominent axiom: Transitivity. The axiom of transitivity is a central component in many algebraic theories of preference and choice. We offer the currently most complete solution to the challenge in the case of transitivity of binary preference on the theory side and two-alternative forced choice on the empirical side, explicitly for up to five, and implicitly for up to seven, choice alternatives. We also discuss the relationship between our proposed solution and weak stochastic transitivity. We recommend to abandon the latter as a model of transitive individual preferences.