Psychology Commons^™

Types Of Questions Teachers Ask To Engage Students In Making Sense Of A Student Contribution, Nishat B. Alam

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

In the student-centered classroom, a teacher’s interpretation and response to student mathematical contributions plays an important role to shape and direct students’ opportunities for sense-making. This research used a scenario-based survey questionnaire to examine what types of questions middle and high school mathematics teachers indicate they would ask to engage students in making sense of a high-leverage student mathematical contribution and their reasoning about why particular questions are or are not productive. From the results, it could be concluded that teachers asked more productive questions after seeing a set of possible questions. Their beliefs about the productivity of the questions …

Death-Related Anxiety Associated With Riskier Decision-Making Irrespective Of Framing: A Bayesian Model Comparison, Blaine Tomkins

Psychology Faculty Publications

A commonly reported finding is that anxious individuals are less likely to make risky decisions. However, no studies have examined whether this association extends to death-related anxiety. The present study examined how groups low, moderate, and high in death-related anxiety make decisions with varying levels of risk. Participants completed a series of hypothetical bets in which the probability of a win was systematically manipulated. High-anxiety individuals displayed the greatest risk-taking behavior, followed by the moderate-anxiety group, with the low-anxiety group being most risk-averse. Experiment 2 tested this association further by framing outcomes in terms of losses, rather than gains. A …

Are There Individual Differences In The Foreign Language Effect?, Rita Gross

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

AbstractA foreign language effect (FLE) occurs when the language a problem is presented in influences its outcome (Keysar et al., 2012). So far, it has been unclear under which conditions the FLE appears (Driver, 2020; Dylman & Champoux-Larsson, 2020). One hundred and sixty-eight Arabic-English bilinguals from Prince Sultan University were presented with the Trolley Dilemma (a low-conflict, impersonal moral dilemma) and the Footbridge Dilemma (a high-conflict, personal moral dilemma) and responses to these dilemmas were measured on a slider indicating likeliness to take a suggested action. Participants saw Dilemmas either in a gain-frame or a loss-frame condition, and in either …

Representation Of Reward And Risk In The Brain’S Motor System: Studies In Adolescents And Adults, Xingjie Chen

Doctoral Dissertations

In the neuroscience of economic decision making, the brain’s motor system has been ascribed a role in implementing choice actions. However, recent work has revealed canonical motor signals much in advance of choice action, possibly indicating their role in evaluation of decision options. In the current dissertation, we applied multimodal neuroimaging combining EEG and fMRI and used a novel paradigm that temporally separated the evaluation phase from the action phase of a decision-making process to investigate the mechanisms through which the motor control system contributes to decision making. Additionally, we further examined the developmental changes during the two phases of …

The Effect Of Temporal Discounting And Loss Aversion On Mock Plea Bargain Decision-Making, Anisha Patel

Masters Theses, 2020-current

An overwhelming majority of criminal cases in the United States utilize plea bargaining (90-95%). A plea bargain is an agreement between a criminal defendant and a prosecuting attorney where the defendant agrees to plead guilty, or nolo contendre (no contest), to one or more charges to reduce or drop other charges. The decision to accept a plea bargain must be made by the defendant, so a defendant’s ability to make or communicate competent choices regarding a plea bargain is important. However, defendant decision-making in plea bargaining is not sufficiently prevalent in plea bargaining or decision-making literature. While factors such as …

Using Chess As An Intervention To Improve Executive Functioning Among Youth, Anandita Oberoi

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Youth represent a vulnerable segment of the population and may have underdeveloped levels of executive functioning (EF), which is important in both daily life and is shown to have far-reaching effects. This research study aimed to decipher if lessons in the game of chess could be used as an efficacious intervention for accelerating EF development in youth. The three research questions focused on determining whether there was a difference in the chosen indices of EF before and after a 14-session chess intervention. The theoretical framework used for this study was Piaget’s cognitive development theory. This quantitative, single group pretest–posttest design …

Influence Of Increased Options On Performance Generalization Across Two Variations Of The Monty Hall Dilemma, Robert A. Southern

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Monty Hall dilemma (MHD) is a probability puzzle at which humans consistently fail to adopt the optimal winning strategy. The participant chooses between three identical doors, behind one of which is a valuable prize. After the participant makes their initial decision, the host reveals that there is nothing behind one of the two remaining doors, then asks the participant if they would like to stay with their originally selected door or switch to the remaining unopened door. The optimal choice is to switch to the previously unchosen door, which increases the probability of winning from 33% to 67%. Despite …

An Investigation Of “Actual” Versus “Perceived” Substance Use Among College Students, Jordan Ragland

Senior Theses and Projects

Alcohol and illicit substance use is recognized as a widespread public health concern across college campuses in the United States (Shepard Meteyer, Bruzios, Pol, & Charpentier 2017). Perceived norms are among the strongest predictors of college student alcohol use and related problems (Ecker, Cohen, & Buckner 2017). Prior research has shown that normative perceptions relate to one’s own drinking behavior (Lewis, Litt, Blayney, Lostutter, Granato, Kilmer, & Lee 2011). This data has shown that college students typically overestimate the amount other students or peers drink. Based on previous literature this can be applied to drug, marijuana, and nicotine use. The …

Conditions For Maximizing Expected Value In Repeated Choices From Experience, Andrea Y. Ranieri

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

It is largely expected that people can learn from past experiences and use this knowledge to make better decisions in the future. However, there are aspects inherent in experiential learning which may affect the extent to which people can extract and use information from experiential feedback to make advantageous decisions. Three aspects inherent in experiential learning were identified: (1) it is reliant on memory, (2) information is gathered exclusively through outcome feedback, and (3) outcome feedback is inherently dynamic. The current investigation explored how each of these aspects may help shape experiential decision making, and examined how the presence of …

Decision Making, Julia Nolte, David M. N. Garavito, Valerie F. Reyna

Chapters in Books

Choice is ubiquitous, from small decisions such as whether to bring an umbrella to life-changing choices such as whether to get married. Making good decisions is a lifelong challenge. Psychologists have long been fascinated by the mechanisms that underlie human decision making. Why do different people make different decisions when offered the same choices? What are common decision making errors? Which choice option is the “best” and why? These questions are addressed in this chapter.

We first outline models and theories of decision making, defining key concepts and terms. We then describe the psychological processes of decision makers and how …

The Effects Of Reward And Risk Level Associated With Speeded Actions: Evidence From Behavior And Electroencephalography, Xingjie Chen

Masters Theses

Choosing a course of action in our daily lives requires an accurate assessment of the associated risks as well as the potential rewards. The present two studies investigated the mechanism of how reward and risk level influence the motor decisions of speeded actions (Chapter 2) and its neural dynamics (Chapter 3) by focusing on the beta band (15-30 Hz) oscillation patterns reflected in the EEG signals. Participants performed a modified version of the Go-NoGo task, in which they earned reward points based on the speed and accuracy of response. On each trial, the reward points at stake (120 vs. 6) …

Effectiveness Of Hazardous Attitudes Mitigation In Pilot Training, Matthew D. Furedy Ed.D.

National Training Aircraft Symposium (NTAS)

One of the minimum levels of flight training required to fly within the US includes obtaining the necessary skills to acquire a Private Pilot Certificate. Further training requirements are needed depending on whether one desires to operate under Visual Flight Rules (VFR) or Instrument Flight Rules (IFR). It has been stated by the FAA that Aeronautical Decision Making (ADM) training for pilots has been effective in reducing in-flight errors by up to 50 percent. Hazardous attitudes and their associated antidotes are currently discussed as part of the FAA’s ADM training for pilots. The purpose of this study is to add …

The Effects Of Repeated Lineups And Delay On Eyewitness Identification, Wenbo Lin

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Prior eyewitness research has examined the effects of repeated identification procedures and delays on eyewitness identification, but these studies have either confounded these two factors or studied them in isolation. Experiment 1 attempted to disentangle these factors through systematic manipulations of the number of repeated lineups and the length of delay between the original event and the first lineup. Experiment 2 examined whether the length of delay between two lineups (Lineups 1 and 2) affects the subsequent lineup identification decisions. We found that people were more inclined to choose when a lineup was repeated. A longer delay between the crime …

Alternative Measures Of Noncognitive Skills And Their Effect On Retirement Preparation And Financial Capability, Gema Zamarro

Education Reform Faculty and Graduate Students Publications

Social science, more than ever, is drawing upon the insights of personality psychology. Though researchers now know that noncognitive skills and personality traits, such as conscientiousness, grit, self-control, or a growth mindset could be important for life outcomes, they struggle to find reliable measures of these skills. Self-reports are often used for analysis, but these measures have been found to be affected by important biases. We study the validity of innovative, more robust measures of noncognitive skills based on performance tasks. Our first proposed measure is an adaptation, for the adult population, of the Academic Diligence Task (ADT) developed and …

Hindsight Bias In Clinical Decision Making, Amanda Beltrani

Student Theses

The tendency for an individual to believe that a specific event, in hindsight, was more predictable than it was in foresight is known as hindsight bias. This phenomenon has been demonstrated in the psychological literature across a variety of samples, methodologies, and predictions for decades. The current study used a sample of 95 mental health professionals to explore the impact of advanced outcome knowledge on the decision making process. Participants reviewed a hypothetical risk assessment in the form of a hospital chart and then responded to a series of questions, using only their clinical judgment. Analyses revealed that evaluators who …

The Influence Of Discrete Emotional States On Preferential Choice, Andrea M. Cataldo

Masters Theses

Past research has shown that emotion affects preferential choice outcomes. The goal of the present study was to further research on emotion and preferential choice by using mathematical modeling to investigate the effects of specific dimensions of emotion on the underlying mechanisms of preferential choice. Specifically, we aimed to determine whether the concurrent effects of positive-negative valence and situational certainty on attention and information accumulation threshold, respectively, would influence the magnitude of the similarity effect, a robust phenomenon in preferential choice. Participants first underwent either an Anger (negative and certain), Fear (negative and uncertain), or no (Control) emotion manipulation. All …

Creativity In Organizations: Antecedents And Outcomes Of Individual Creativity, Goran Calic

Open Access Dissertations

In this dissertation I set out to expand our collective understanding of creativity in organizations. I accomplish this through three related studies, each organized into independent chapters of this dissertation.

The first study explores how demands of organizations, particularly strategic contradictions faced by decision makers, affect creative processes and products. In this chapter I develop the theory of paradoxical creativity, which posits that creative discovery is a function of how strategic contradictions are perceived by decision-makers. The key insight of the theory of paradoxical creativity is that strategic contradictions have independent effects on the two stages of creative discovery (generation …

Acute Stress Exposure And Expression Of Instrumentally Conditioned Financial Preferences: An Fmri Study, William Travis Mccuddy

Master's Theses (2009 -)

Recent research suggests acute stress exposure is associated with increased habit-based over goal-oriented decision making (e.g., Schwabe & Wolf, 2011). The current study examined whether acute stress promotes the expression of simple financial preferences “overtrained” to the point of habit in the face of a changing environment where said preferences were later rendered non-optimal. Over three days participants (N = 28) learned to discriminate between visual stimuli probabilistically associated with monetary gains or losses and made decisions between stimuli with real financial outcomes. On the fourth day after exposure to either an acute stressor or control procedure participants performed the …

Enhancing Travel Experience With The Combination Of Information Visualization, Situation Awareness, And Distributed Cognition, Weiran Lei

Open Access Theses

With the new forms of travel introduced by new technologies of transportation and communication, a satisfied travel experience could be affected by various factors before and during a trip. Especially for road trips, traveling by car provides freedom on time control while leading to more possibilities of rescheduling initial plans made under time constraints. When overwhelmed with the need for changed travel context to avoid unexpected events that will require a serious change of initial plans, travelers need to find and access helpful contextual information quickly. This is a context-related decision making process that requires amplifying human situation awareness and …

Nashbots: How Political Scientists Have Underestimated Human Rationality, And How To Fix It, Daniel Enemark, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner

Faculty Scholarship

Political scientists use experiments to test the predictions of game-theoretic models. In a typical experiment, each subject makes choices that determine her own earnings and the earnings of other subjects, with payments corresponding to the utility payoffs of a theoretical game. But social preferences distort the correspondence between a subject’s cash earnings and her subjective utility, and since social preferences vary, anonymously matched subjects cannot know their opponents’ preferences between outcomes, turning many laboratory tasks into games of incomplete information. We reduce the distortion of social preferences by pitting subjects against algorithmic agents (“Nashbots”). Across 11 experimental tasks, subjects facing …

Cognitive Phenotypes And The Evolution Of Animal Decisions, Tamra C. Mendelson, Courtney L. Fitzpatrick, Mark E. Hauber, Charles H. Pence, Rafael L. Rodriguez, Rebecca J. Safran, Caitlin A. Stern, Jeffrey R. Stevens

Jeffrey Stevens Publications

Despite the clear fitness consequences of animal decisions, the science of animal decision making in evolutionary biology is underdeveloped compared with decision science in human psychology. Specifically, the field lacks a conceptual framework that defines and describes the relevant components of a decision, leading to imprecise language and concepts. The ‘judgment and decision-making’ (JDM) framework in human psychology is a powerful tool for framing and understanding human decisions, and we apply it here to components of animal decisions, which we refer to as ‘cognitive phenotypes’. We distinguish multiple cognitive phenotypes in the context of a JDM framework and highlight empirical …

It Must Have Been Him: Coherence Effects Within The Legal System, Jonathan N. Carbone

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The present series of studies examine how jurors and public defenders evaluate different pieces of evidence and integrate them into a coherent conclusion within the context of a criminal case. Previous research has shown that in situations where both sides of the case are compelling, decision-makers nevertheless come to highly confident and polarized decisions, called coherence shifts (Simon, 2004). The present research sought to expand on coherence effects, improve upon the methodology of previous studies, and explore potential moderators of coherence. In Study 1, mock jurors (n = 306) read about a criminal case and evaluated multiple pieces of …

The Bounded Log-Odds Model Of Frequency And Probability Distortion, Hang Zhang, Laurence T. Maloney

MODVIS Workshop

No abstract provided.

Intuitive Thought And Consumer Decision Making, Morgan M. Moore

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Anytime the human mind makes a decision, intuitive thought has played a hidden role. There is more to consumer decision making than just logical, slow cognition. Exploring the intuitive mind through the works of Johnathan Haidt and Daniel Kahneman helps researchers understand the roles and origins of intuition. Proof of the presence and power of intuitive thought in cognitive processes is offered. A subset of the intuitive mind, termed the righteous mind by Haidt, is shown to be responsible for moral intuition. As the role of intuitive thought in consumer decision making is considered, numerous marketing applications are applied. Whether …

Myside Bias In Probabilistic Ethical Decision Making, Richard E. Hohn

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

This study examined the extent to which myside bias was observed in the context of ethical decision making. In judgment and decision making research the resistance of myside bias is described as a component of rational thinking. Thus, to some effect, this study aimed to examine the extent to which people act rationally when making ethical decisions. Measures of thinking dispositions (actively open-minded thinking and need for cognition) as well as measures of cognitive reflection and probabilistic knowledge were included in the study to examine their associations with myside bias in ethical decisions. Modest myside bias effects were observed between …

Against Game Theory, Gale M. Lucas, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner

Faculty Scholarship

People make choices. Often, the outcome depends on choices other people make. What mental steps do people go through when making such choices? Game theory, the most influential model of choice in economics and the social sciences, offers an answer, one based on games of strategy such as chess and checkers: the chooser considers the choices that others will make and makes a choice that will lead to a better outcome for the chooser, given all those choices by other people. It is universally established in the social sciences that classical game theory (even when heavily modified) is bad at …

Are Individuals Fickle-Minded?, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner

Faculty Scholarship

Game theory has been used to model large-scale social events — such as constitutional law, democratic stability, standard setting, gender roles, social movements, communication, markets, the selection of officials by means of elections, coalition formation, resource allocation, distribution of goods, and war — as the aggregate result of individual choices in interdependent decision-making. Game theory in this way assumes methodological individualism. The widespread observation that game theory predictions do not in general match observation has led to many attempts to repair game theory by creating behavioral game theory, which adds corrective terms to the game theoretic predictions in the hope …

Development And Initial Validation Of The Willingness To Compromise Scale, Serena Wee

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This study introduced an individual difference construct of willingness to compromise and examined its implications for understanding and predicting career-related decisions in work settings. In Study 1 (N = 53), critical incidents of career decisions were analyzed to identify commonalities across different types of career-related compromises. In Study 2 (N = 171), an initial 17-item scale was developed and revised. In Study 3 (N = 201), the convergent and criterion-related validity of the scale was examined in relation to specific personality traits, regret, dealing with uncertainty, career adaptability, and a situational dilemma task. Willingness to compromise was negatively related to …

Using A Prediction And Option Generation Paradigm To Understand Decision Making, Joel Suss

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

In many complex and dynamic domains, the ability to generate and then select the appropriate course of action is based on the decision maker's "reading" of the situation--in other words, their ability to assess the situation and predict how it will evolve over the next few seconds. Current theories regarding option generation during the situation assessment and response phases of decision making offer contrasting views on the cognitive mechanisms that support superior performance. The Recognition-Primed Decision-making model (RPD; Klein, 1989) and Take-The-First heuristic (TTF; Johnson & Raab, 2003) suggest that superior decisions are made by generating few options, and then …

Metaphor And Analogy: The Sun And Moon Of Legal Persuasion, Linda L. Berger

Scholarly Works

Drawing on recent studies of social cognition, decision making, and analogical processing, this article recommends that lawyers turn to novel characterizations and metaphors to solve a particular kind of persuasion problem that is created by the way judges and juries think and decide. According to social cognition researchers, we perceive and interpret new information by following a process of schematic cognition, analogizing the new data we encounter to the knowledge structures embedded in our memories. Decision-making researchers differentiate between intuitive and reflective processes (System 1 and System 2), and they agree that in System 1 decision making, only the most …