Cheating and the effect of promises in Indian and German children.

Cheating is harmful to others and society at large. Promises have been shown to increase honesty in children, but their effectiveness has not been compared between different cultural contexts. In a study (2019) with 7- to 12-year-olds (N = 406, 48% female, middle-class), voluntary promises reduced cheating in Indian, but not in German children. Children in both contexts cheated, but cheating rates were lower in Germany than in India. In both contexts, cheating decreased with age in the (no-promise) control condition and was unaffected by age in the promise condition. These findings suggest that there may exist a threshold beyond which cheating cannot be further reduced by promises. This opens new research avenues on how children navigate honesty and promise norms.

Heterogeneity of rules in Bayesian reasoning: A toolbox analysis.

How do people infer the Bayesian posterior probability from stated base rate, hit rate, and false alarm rate? This question is not only of theoretical relevance but also of practical relevance in medical and legal settings. We test two competing theoretical views: single-process theories versus toolbox theories. Single-process theories assume that a single process explains people's inferences and have indeed been observed to fit people's inferences well. Examples are Bayes's rule, the representativeness heuristic, and a weighing-and-adding model. Their assumed process homogeneity implies unimodal response distributions. Toolbox theories, in contrast, assume process heterogeneity, implying multimodal response distributions. After analyzing response distributions in studies with laypeople and professionals, we find little support for the single-process theories tested. Using simulations, we find that a single process, the weighing-and-adding model, nevertheless can best fit the aggregate data and, surprisingly, also achieve the best out-of-sample prediction even though it fails to predict any single respondent's inferences. To identify the potential toolbox of rules, we test how well candidate rules predict a set of over 10,000 inferences (culled from the literature) from 4,188 participants and 106 different Bayesian tasks. A toolbox of five non-Bayesian rules plus Bayes's rule captures 64% of inferences. Finally, we validate the Five-Plus toolbox in three experiments that measure response times, self-reports, and strategy use. The most important conclusion from these analyses is that the fitting of single-process theories to aggregate data risks misidentifying the cognitive process. Antidotes to that risk are careful analyses of process and rule heterogeneity across people.

Promises on the go: A field study on keeping one's word.

Promises are voluntary commitments to perform a future action and are often thought to be powerful levers for behavioral change. Here we studied the effectiveness of promises in two preregistered, incentivized field experiments with German students (N = 406) on the premises of a cafeteria. In Experiment 1, the majority of participants (63%) kept their promise to pay back at least half of a € 4-endowment, even though there was no foreseeable cost of breaking the promise, reputational or otherwise. Significantly fewer participants (22%) paid back money in a control group that faced a simple decision to return money or not. In Experiment 2, the majority of participants (54%) kept their promise to add a provided stamp to a postcard and mail it back (anonymously) within a week. We found similar return rates (52%) for a second group for which the word "promise" was omitted from the commitment. Our findings show that participants kept their word outside the laboratory while pursuing everyday activities even when there were no foreseeable negative consequences for breaking them, demonstrating that promises are effective levers for behavioral change.

Forecasting Postoperative Delirium in Older Adult Patients with Fast-and-Frugal Decision Trees.

Postoperative delirium (POD) is associated with increased complication and mortality rates, particularly among older adult patients. However, guideline recommendations for POD detection and management are poorly implemented. Fast-and-frugal trees (FFTrees), which are simple prediction algorithms, may be useful in this context. We compared the capacity of simple FFTrees with two more complex models-namely, unconstrained classification trees (UDTs) and logistic regression (LogReg)-for the prediction of POD among older surgical patients in the perioperative setting. Models were trained and tested on the European BioCog project clinical dataset. Based on the entire dataset, two different FFTrees were developed for the pre-operative and postoperative settings. Within the pre-operative setting, FFTrees outperformed the more complex UDT algorithm with respect to predictive balanced accuracy, nearing the prediction level of the logistic regression. Within the postoperative setting, FFTrees outperformed both complex models. Applying the best-performing algorithms to the full datasets, we proposed an FFTree using four cues (Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI), site of surgery, physical status and frailty status) for the pre-operative setting and an FFTree containing only three cues (duration of anesthesia, age and CCI) for the postoperative setting. Given that both FFTrees contained considerably fewer criteria, which can be easily memorized and applied by health professionals in daily routine, FFTrees could help identify patients requiring intensified POD screening.

The transmission game: Testing behavioral interventions in a pandemic-like simulation.

During pandemics, effective nonpharmaceutical interventions encourage people to adjust their behavior in fast-changing environments in which exponential dynamics aggravate the conflict between the individual benefits of risk-taking and its social costs. Policy-makers need to know which interventions are most likely to promote socially advantageous behaviors. We designed a tool for initial evaluations of the effectiveness of large-scale interventions, the transmission game framework, which integrates simulations of outbreak dynamics into large-group experiments with monetary stakes. In two studies (n = 700), we found substantial differences in the effectiveness of five behavioral interventions. A simple injunctive-norms message proved most effective, followed by two interventions boosting participants' ability to anticipate the consequences of risky behavior. Interventions featuring descriptive norms or concurrent risk information failed to reduce risk-taking.

Mental health and the wish to have a child: a longitudinal, cross-cultural comparison between Germany and China.

BACKGROUND: The desire to have children has been declining globally, especially in industrialized nations. This study examines the physical health correlates, and positive and negative mental health correlates of the wish to have a child across time and in two countries. METHOD: Questionnaire data were obtained from large-scale university samples of 12,574 participants in Germany and China. RESULTS: The wish to have a child (child wish) is related to positive and negative mental health in China and, to a lesser degree, in Germany. Child wish is positively related to some aspects of mental and somatic health for Chinese women and men, negatively to depression for Chinese and German men and Chinese women, and positively to stress for German men, with generally small effects. Effects hold when controlling for age, partnership status, and family affluence. Most relationships were almost equal between women and men (in both China and Germany), and between countries with the exception of two different paths in each gender group. That is, having a partner is associated with a higher child wish in both Chinese and German female students. In China, older female students are more likely to want to have a child, while older female students in Germany are less likely to want to have a child. Neither partnership nor age predict child wish for the next year. CONCLUSION: In sum, Chinese students reported feeling more positively about having children when they were happy and healthy, with the exception that highly satisfied Chinese males report lower child wish in the next year. More depressed Chinese and German men and Chinese women reported lowered child wish, and stressed German men reported more child wish. Older students reported more (Chinese) or less (German) child wish depending on country.

Age differences in deliberate ignorance.

People sometimes choose to remain ignorant, even when information comes at low marginal costs and promises high utility. To investigate whether older adults enlist deliberate ignorance more than younger adults, potentially as an emotion-regulation tool, we presented a representative sample of 1,910 residents of Germany with 13 scenarios in which knowledge could result in substantial gains or losses. The strongest correlate of deliberate ignorance was indeed age. Openness to experience was negatively correlated with deliberate ignorance; risk preference did not and neuroticism did not consistently predict it. Findings suggest a possible positivity effect in the decision to access new but ambiguous information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Genesis or Evolution of Gender Differences? Worldview-Based Dilemmas in The Processing of Scientific Information.

Some issues that have been settled by the scientific community, such as evolution, the effectiveness of vaccinations, and the role of CO2 emissions in climate change, continue to be rejected by segments of the public. This rejection is typically driven by people's worldviews, and to date most research has found that conservatives are uniformly more likely to reject scientific findings than liberals across a number of domains. We report a large (N > 1,000) preregistered study that addresses two questions: First, can we find science denial on the left? Endorsement of pseudoscientific complementary and alternative medicines (CAM) has been anecdotally cited as being more consonant with liberals than conservatives. Against this claim, we found more support for CAM among conservatives than liberals. Second, we asked how liberals and conservatives resolve dilemmas in which an issue triggers two opposing facets of their worldviews. We probed attitudes on gender equality and the evolution of sex differences-two constructs that may create conflicts for liberals (who endorse evolution but also equality) and conservatives (who endorse gender differences but are sceptical of evolution). We find that many conservatives reject both gender equality and evolution of sex differences, and instead embrace "naturally occurring" gender differences. Many liberals, by contrast, reject evolved gender differences, as well as naturally occurring gender differences, while nonetheless strongly endorsing evolution.

Putting your money where your self is: Connecting dimensions of closeness and theories of personal identity.

Studying personal identity, the continuity and sameness of persons across lifetimes, is notoriously difficult and competing conceptualizations exist within philosophy and psychology. Personal reidentification, linking persons between points in time is a fundamental step in allocating merit and blame and assigning rights and privileges. Based on Nozick's (1981) closest continuer theory we develop a theoretical framework that explicitly invites a meaningful empirical approach and offers a constructive, integrative solution to current disputes about appropriate experiments. Following Nozick, reidentification involves judging continuers on a metric of continuity and choosing the continuer with the highest acceptable value on this metric. We explore both the metric and its implications for personal identity. Since James (1890), academic theories have variously attributed personal identity to the continuity of memories, psychology, bodies, social networks, and possessions. In our experiments, we measure how participants (N = 1, 525) weighted the relative contributions of these five dimensions in hypothetical fission accidents, in which a person was split into two continuers. Participants allocated compensation money (Study 1) or adjudicated inheritance claims (Study 2) and reidentified the original person. Most decided based on the continuity of memory, personality, and psychology, with some consideration given to the body and social relations. Importantly, many participants identified the original with both continuers simultaneously, violating the transitivity of identity relations. We discuss the findings and their relevance for philosophy and psychology and place our approach within the current theoretical and empirical landscape.

Upon Repeated Reflection: Consequences of Frequent Exposure to the Cognitive Reflection Test for Mechanical Turk Participants.

Participants from public participant panels, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, are shared across many labs and participate in many studies during their panel tenure. Here, I demonstrate direct and indirect downstream consequences of frequent exposure in three studies (N 1-3 = 3, 660), focusing on the cognitive reflection test (CRT), one of the most frequently used cognitive measures in online research. Study 1 explored several variants of the signature bat-and-ball item in samples recruited from Mechanical Turk. Panel tenure was shown to impact responses to both the original and merely similar items. Solution rates were not found to be higher than in a commercial online panel with less exposure to the CRT (Qualtrics panels, n = 1, 238). In Study 2, an alternative test with transformed numeric values showed higher correlations with validation measures than the original test. Finally, Study 3 investigated sources of item familiarity and measured performance on novel lure items.

Most People Keep Their Word Rather Than Their Money.

Promises are crucial for human cooperation because they allow people to enter into voluntary commitments about future behavior. Here we present a novel, fully incentivized paradigm to measure voluntary and costly promise-keeping in the absence of external sanctions. We found across three studies (N = 4,453) that the majority of participants (61%-98%) kept their promises to pay back a specified amount of a monetary endowment, and most justified their decisions by referring to obligations and norms. Varying promise elicitation methods (Study 1a) and manipulating stake sizes (Study 2a) had negligible effects. Simultaneously, when others estimated promise-keeping rates (using two different estimation methods), they systematically underestimated promise-keeping by up to 40% (Studies 1b and 2b). Additional robustness checks to reduce potential reputational concerns and possible demand effects revealed that the majority of people still kept their word (Study 3). Promises have a strong normative power and binding effect on behavior. Nevertheless, people appear to pessimistically underestimate the power of others' promises. This behavior-estimation gap may prevent efficient coordination and cooperation.

Social contact patterns can buffer costs of forgetting in the evolution of cooperation.

Analyses of the evolution of cooperation often rely on two simplifying assumptions: (i) individuals interact equally frequently with all social network members and (ii) they accurately remember each partner's past cooperation or defection. Here, we examine how more realistic, skewed patterns of contact-in which individuals interact primarily with only a subset of their network's members-influence cooperation. In addition, we test whether skewed contact patterns can counteract the decrease in cooperation caused by memory errors (i.e. forgetting). Finally, we compare two types of memory error that vary in whether forgotten interactions are replaced with random actions or with actions from previous encounters. We use evolutionary simulations of repeated prisoner's dilemma games that vary agents' contact patterns, forgetting rates and types of memory error. We find that highly skewed contact patterns foster cooperation and also buffer the detrimental effects of forgetting. The type of memory error used also influences cooperation rates. Our findings reveal previously neglected but important roles of contact pattern, type of memory error and the interaction of contact pattern and memory on cooperation. Although cognitive limitations may constrain the evolution of cooperation, social contact patterns can counteract some of these constraints.

Description and experience: How experimental investors learn about booms and busts affects their financial risk taking.

A few years ago, the world experienced the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression. According to the depression baby hypothesis, people who live through such macroeconomic shocks take less financial risk in their future lives (e.g., lower stock market participation). This hypothesis has previously been tested against survey data. Here, we tested it in a simulated experimental stock market (based on the Spanish stock index, IBEX-35), varying both the length of historical data available to participants (including or excluding a macroeconomic shock) and the mode of learning about macroeconomic events (through sequential experience or symbolic descriptions). Investors who learned about the market from personal experience took less financial risk than did those who learned from graphs, thus echoing the description-experience gap observed in risky choice. In a second experiment, we reversed the market, turning the crisis into a boom. The description-experience gap persisted, with investors who experienced the boom taking more risk than those who did not. The results of a third experiment suggest that the observed gap is not driven by a wealth effect, and modeling suggests that the description-experience gap is explained by the fact that participants who learn from experience are more risk averse after a negative shock. Our findings highlight the crucial role of the mode of learning for financial risk taking and, by extension, in the legally required provision of financial advice.

Correlates of diagnostic accuracy in patients with nonspecific complaints.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate diagnostic accuracy in patient histories involving nonspecific complaints and the extent to which characteristics of physicians and structural properties of patient histories are associated with accuracy. METHODS: Six histories of patients presenting to the emergency department (ED) with nonspecific complaints were provided to 112 physicians: 36 ED physicians, 50 internists, and 26 family practitioners. Physicians listed the 3 most likely diagnoses for each history and indicated which cue(s) they considered crucial. Four weeks later, a subset of 20 physicians diagnosed the same 6 histories again. For each history, experts had previously determined the correct diagnoses and the diagnostic cues. RESULTS: Accuracy ranged from 14% to 64% correct diagnoses (correct diagnosis listed as the most likely) and from 29% to 87% correct differential diagnoses (correct diagnosis listed in the differential). Acute care physicians (ED physicians and internists) included the correct diagnosis in the differential in, on average, 3.4 histories, relative to 2.6 for the family practitioners (P = 0.001, d = .75). Diagnostic performance was fairly reliable (r = .61, P < 0.001). Clinical experience was negatively correlated with diagnostic accuracy (r = -.25, P = 0.008). Two structural properties of patient histories-cue consensus and cue substitutability-were significantly associated with diagnostic accuracy, whereas case difficulty was not. Finally, prevalence of diagnosis also proved significantly correlated with accuracy. CONCLUSIONS: Average diagnostic accuracy in cases with nonspecific complaints far exceeds chance performance, and accuracy varies with medical specialty. Analyzing cue properties in patient histories can help shed light on determinants of diagnostic performance and thus suggest ways to enhance physicians' ability to accurately diagnose cases with nonspecific complaints.

Introducing MASC: a movie for the assessment of social cognition.

In the present study we introduce a sensitive video-based test for the evaluation of subtle mindreading difficulties: the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC). This new mindreading tool involves watching a short film and answering questions referring to the actors' mental states. A group of adults with Asperger syndrome (n = 19) and well-matched control subjects (n = 20) were administered the MASC and three other mindreading tools as part of a broader neuropsychological testing session. Compared to control subjects, Asperger individuals exhibited marked and selective difficulties in social cognition. A Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis for the mindreading tests identified the MASC as discriminating the diagnostic groups most accurately. Issues pertaining to the multidimensionality of the social cognition construct are discussed.