Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Formalizing The Faustian Bargain Within The Healthcare Domain: An End-Of-Life Approach., Rachel Appel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A Faustian Bargain refers to an individual making a “deal with the devil,” exchanging something moral or sacred for an unattainable earthly good. The Faustian Bargain has been used to describe a ubiquitous social dilemma inherent to human civilization: exchanging individual liberty for public goods (e.g., security) provided by societal leaders and governments (Ostrom, 1980). Research on Faustian Bargains often examines tradeoffs between outcome utility (i.e., value derived from the outcomes of a decision) and procedural utility (i.e., value derived from being involved in the decision process (e.g., Frey et al., 2004). Much of the research on Faustian Bargains has …

Individual Differences In Decision-Making And Emotions: A Study Of Alexithymia Using The Columbia Card Task, Kaycee A. Stewart Ms.

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Making effective decisions requires a balance between rational thinking and emotional processing. Optimal decision-making approaches involve carefully analyzing available information to make informed and advantageous choices. This study investigates how people’s ability to identify, process, and express emotions (alexithymia) relates to their decision-making in different emotional contexts. We used the Hot and Cold versions of the Columbia Card Task (CCT) to evaluate how participants make decisions. By analyzing their decisions as a function of their alexithymia levels and three manipulated game parameters (loss probability, loss amount, and gain amount), we discovered that people with higher levels of alexithymia had reduced …

Cognitive, Ideological, And Goal-Pursuit Barriers To Ethical Decision Making, Jeffrey J. Bailey

Mountain Plains Journal of Business and Technology

This paper brings together diverse research findings to suggest that there are several cognitive, ideological, and goal-pursuit barriers that often get in the way of ethical decision-making. The barriers lead managers to give little or no conscious attention to the ethical implications of their actions. The barriers that I categorize and describe are overconfidence, cognitively “filling-in” of missing information, social norm beliefs, ethical fixed mindsets, metaphors in-use, fairness and justice ideology, behavioral scripts, goal-fever (teleopathy), and goal framing. I describe the processes and mechanisms that underlie these barriers to increase awareness of them so that the willing manager may be …

Unbounding Rationality: Observing And Mitigating K-12 Public Education Administrators’ Cognitive Bias, Julie K. Mesaros

West Chester University Doctoral Projects

Humans tend to simplify complex decisions by employing cognitive bias(es). Cognitively biased decision-making by public administrators can be adversely consequential for public organizations, public employees, and the public interest. Given the historical scope of experimental research on cognitive bias in the social and physical sciences, public administration scholars should continue to advance such research across various public sectors. This dissertation study responded to the long-ago call of Herbert Simon for empirical research situated in specific public or political contexts. This qual-QUAN mixed-method study had two main aims: (1) explore decisions that K-12 public education administrators make in personnel management and …

Cognitive Effort Avoidance In Veterans With Suicide Attempt Histories, James M. Bjork, Chelsea S. Rooney, Lisa K. Straub, David M. N. Garavito, Andrew Westbrook

Articles

Suicide attempts (SA) are increasing in the United States, especially in veterans. Discovering individual cognitive features of the subset of suicide ideators who attempt suicide is critical. Cognitive theories attribute SA to facile schema-based negative interpretations of environmental events. Over-general autobiographical memory and facile solutions in problem solving tasks in SA survivors suggest that aversion to expending cognitive effort may be a neurobehavioral marker of SA risk. In veterans receiving care for mood disorder, we compared cognitive effort discounting and evidence-gathering in a beads task between veterans with (SAHx+; n = 26) versus without (SAHx-; n = 22) a history …

Changing Criteria: What Decision Processes Reveal About Confidence In Memory, Johanny N. Castillo

Masters Theses

Source memory is our ability to relate central information (the “item”) to the context (the “source”) in which it was learned or experienced. People are often highly confident in their source judgements even when this information is incorrectly recalled. Past work has aimed to explain why source errors made with high confidence occur with a framework called the Converging Criteria (CC) account. The CC account posits that item memory can interact with source memory by altering decision criteria as item confidence increases, increasing the probability of a high confidence source judgement. This prediction differs from alternate models, like the Fixed …

Sound Judgment: Review Of Noise: A Flaw In Human Judgment (2021) By Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, And Cass R. Sunstein, Anne Kelly

Numeracy

In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (2021), Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein convincingly demonstrate the pervasiveness and harmfulness of unwanted internal variability or noise. Using examples from both public and private sectors to demonstrate the quality and limits of the judgments we make, they argue that, despite objections based on possible cost, difficulty, and dehumanization, the reduction of noise is imperative for the fairness and equitability of systems upon which we depend.

The Influence Of Clutter On Target Prevalence And Decision Making During Visual Search, Brandon Eich

LSU Master's Theses

Participants are sensitive to target prevalence effects in visual search. Low prevalence of targets leads to increased miss rates and shorter response times, and high prevalence of targets leads to increased false alarm rates and longer response times. These effects have been explained using the Multiple-Decision Model (MDM), in which two decisions impact performance during serial visual search. The first decision is whether an inspected item is a target. The second decision is whether the search should be ended with a target-absent response. Target prevalence influences these decisions, evidenced by changes in miss rate, false alarm rate, and response time. …

Lessons From Psychology For Law Practice Management, Peter G. Glenn

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

No abstract provided.

The Influence Of Prosecutorial Overcharging On Defendant And Defense Attorney Plea Decision Making: Documenting And Debiasing The Anchoring Effect, Stephanie Aurora Cardenas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Strategic overcharging, a practice that some prosecutors readily employ to threaten defendants with excessively severe sentences, undermines the Sixth Amendment right to trial by coercing defendants to plead guilty rather than face penalties disproportionate to their alleged misconduct. Legal scholars and psychologists have long suggested that strategic overcharging may elicit powerful anchoring effects that bias defendants’, but not attorneys’ evaluations, of the plea offer. The current research sought to examine (a) the extent to which mock defendants and legal professionals were susceptible to the anchoring bias, (b) elucidate the mechanism underlying susceptibility to the anchoring effect in plea contexts, and …

Exercise, Cognition, And Cannabis Use In Adolescents, Ileana Pacheco-Colón

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Heavy and/or chronic cannabis use has been associated with neurocognitive impairment and decline, often in domains such as memory and executive functioning. On the other hand, exercise has been linked to positive effects on brain and cognitive health across the lifespan, as well as to better substance use outcomes. Despite this, little is known about the ways in which exercise could help prevent or ameliorate adverse cannabis-related outcomes among adolescents.

Through three separate studies, the current dissertation examines interrelations among exercise, cognition, and cannabis use in children and adolescents in an effort to determine whether exercise can prevent or ameliorate …

Undermining Witnesses' Perceptions Of Police Belief Improves Eyewitness Identification Accuracy In Showup Procedures, Alexis T. Mook

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Showups—an identification procedure in which a single suspect is presented to an eyewitness—are considered to be highly suggestive by the U.S. Supreme Court and eyewitness researchers. Despite the suggestive nature of the procedure, showups are often utilized by law enforcement as a fast and easy means of either quickly arresting a suspect (if the witness makes an identification) or setting a suspect free (if the witness does not make an identification). Researchers have therefore begun examining procedural safeguards that might mitigate the suggestiveness of showups. To date, only the additional-opportunities instruction (AOI) has been developed as an easily implemented safeguard …

Review Of Innumeracy In The Wild: Misunderstanding And Misusing Numbers By Ellen Peters, Gizem Karaali

Numeracy

Ellen Peters’s new book Innumeracy in the Wild: Misunderstanding and Misusing Numbers (Oxford University Press, 2020) is a whirlwind tour of psychological research on numeracy and its interactions with decision-making. The book is packed full of convincing arguments about the impact of numeracy and innumeracy on people's decisions and life outcomes, piles of supporting evidence and relevant references, and detailed expositions of multitudes of research results. Thus, it can serve the motivated reader well as a comprehensive literature review of psychologically oriented research on numeracy and decision-making.

Effect Of Short-Storage Hrgcs On Driver Decision Behavior And Safety Concerns: Real-World Analysis And Experimental Evidence, Anne Linja

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Vehicle-train collisions at highway-rail grade crossings (HRGCs) continue to be a safety concern, and despite improvements in warnings, many of these incidents are attributed to human error. In some cases, distractions other than railroad traffic, such as HRGCs with limited space between the railroad tracks and the highway intersection, may create additional cognitive burdens for drivers. We investigated the effect of HRGC type (short-storage vs. non-short storage) on driver attention and decision-making in two studies. In Study 1, we systematically analyzed 996 incidents from 2017-2019 from the Federal Railroad Administration’s Safety database. Driver decision making and outcomes were different depending …

Humor Improves Women’S But Impairs Men’S Iowa Gambling Task Performance, Jorge Flores‑Torres, Lydia Gómez‑Pérez, Kateri Mcrae, Vladimir López, Ivan Rubio, Eugenio Rodriguez

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is a popular method for examining real-life decision-making. Research has shown gender related differences in performance, in that men consistently outperform women. It has been suggested that these performance differences are related to decreased emotional control in women compared to men. Given the likely role of emotion in these gender differences, in the present study, we examine the effect of a humor induction on IGT performance and whether the effect of humor is moderated by gender. IGT performance and parameters from the Expectancy Valence Model (EVM) were measured in 68 university students (34 men; mean …

Competitive Frontoparietal Interactions Mediate Implicit Inferences, Martijn E. Wokke, Tony Ro

Publications and Research

Frequent experience with regularities in our environment allows us to use predictive information to guide our decision process. However, contingencies in our environment are not always explicitly present and sometimes need to be inferred. Heretofore, it remained unknown how predictive information guides decision-making when explicit knowledge is absent and how the brain shapes such implicit inferences. In the present experiment, 17 human participants (9 females) performed a discrimination task in which a target stimulus was preceded by a predictive cue. Critically, participants had no explicit knowledge that some of the cues signaled an upcoming target, allowing us to investigate how …

Where There's A Will, There's A Way: Implementing Motivational Strategies To Combat Decision Fatigue, David Huang

CMC Senior Theses

Recent research suggests we have a limited supply of willpower, termed the “ego”, which becomes depleted by undergoing cognitively demanding tasks. Any acts of volition, including decision-making, self-control, and taking responsibility, reduce this supply of “ego” (Baumeister, 1998), which impedes our ability to further perform these tasks. Decision fatigue, a specific form of ego depletion, is prevalent everywhere from judicial court cases (Danzinger, Levav, & Avnaim-Pesso, 2010) to our daily lives. There is now significant mainstream media exposure and literature on decision fatigue and the activities to which it applies. However, it remains contested how to best handle its negative …

Individual Differences In Discounting Delayed Gains, Delayed Losses, And Probabilistic Losses, Yu-Hua Yeh

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many decisions in one’s daily life involve the discounting of delayed or probabilistic losses: Should we pay off our credit-card balance in full or incur interest; should we buy more collision and liability insurance or risk having to pay more in case of an accident? Despite its importance, however, discounting of losses is understudied, and few studies have focused on individual differences. The current study recruited 407 on-line participants through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk who completed three discounting questionnaires: delayed losses, probabilistic losses, and delayed gains. Magnitude effects were observed with delayed gains (i.e., larger delayed gains were discounted less steeply …

Supporting Dynamic And Distributed Decision Making In Acute Care Environments: Insights From A Cognitive Ethnography, Anthony Naimi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The way that medical decisions are carried out in hospital environments has undergone radical changes in recent years, in part as a result of the changing landscape of care. To make decisions, physicians are expected to keep abreast of a growing and changing body of medical and patient knowledge, collaborate more with clinical colleagues, and utilize more technologies to inform care than ever before. This dissertation reports on a five month cognitive ethnography in an ICU in Ontario Canada, and utilizes distributed cognition to understand the challenges that physicians face in making decision in modern acute care environments. It also …

Problem Solving, Decision Making, And Kirton Adaption-Innovation Theory In High-Performance Organizations, Miriam Grace Michael

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Research on high-performing nonprofit boards has indicated a positive relationship between a board's strength and an organization's effectiveness; however, how boards achieve success remains relatively unknown. The Kirton adaption-innovation (KAI) theory was used to examine board members' cognitive styles in relationship to facilitating problem solving and decision making. This nonexperimental, quantitative study included archived nonprofit board data from 2 American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) studies that had addressed the high performance of boards and factors associated with organizational success. A total of 102 randomly selected, high-performing nonprofit board members completed the KAI Inventory, which was used to measure cognitive …

Learning To Think Slower: Review Of Thinking, Fast And Slow By Daniel Kahneman (2011), Samuel L. Tunstall, Patrick N. Beymer

Numeracy

Daniel Kahneman. Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 499 pp. ISBN 978-0374275631.

As an expansive review of Kahneman and others' work over the past half-century in understanding human decision-making, Thinking, Fast and Slow provides Numeracy readers much to consider for both pedagogy and research. In this review, we outline Kahneman's core argument—that humans use both rash (emotional) System 1 thinking and slow (logical) System 2 thinking—then discuss how such systems might be addressed in a quantitative literacy classroom.

Think Twice: Review Of Thinking, Fast And Slow By Daniel Kahneman (2011), Anne Kelly

Numeracy

Daniel Kahneman. Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 499 pp. ISBN 978-0374275631.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman significantly sharpens our understanding of human decision-making and the systems of thinking that underlie it. He offers a compelling critique of the rational-agent model, arguing that, while we can and do use reason, we often fall back on a type of thinking that operates quickly and requires less cognitive effort but is vulnerable to faulty belief.

Harnessing The Power Of Emotion For Social Change: Review Of Numbers And Nerves: Information, Emotion, And Meaning In A World Of Data By Scott Slovic And Paul Slovic (2015), Anne M. W. Kelly

Numeracy

Scott Slovic and Paul Slovic (Eds.). Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of Data (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2015). 272 pp. ISBN 978-0-87071-776-5.

Literature and environment professor Scott Slovic, and his father, psychologist Paul Slovic, editors of this collection of essays and interviews, describe and demonstrate the psychological effects which hamper our ability to comprehend and respond appropriately to large numerical data. The collection then offers a brief survey of art works which, by first appealing to viewers’ emotions, can potentially move the viewer to a better understanding of numbers.

Cross Cultural Regularities In The Cognitive Architecture Of Pride, Daniel Sznycer, Laith Al-Shawaf, Yoella Bereby-Meyer, Oliver Scott Curry, Delphine De Smet, Elsa Ermer, Sangin Kim, Sunhwa Kim, Norman P. Li, Maria Florencia Lopez Seal, Jennifer Mcclung, Jiaqing O, Yohsuke Ohtsubo, Tadeg Quillien, Max Schaub, Aaron Sell, Florian Van Leeuwen, Leda Cosmide, John Tooby

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Pride occurs in every known culture, appears early in development, is reliably triggered by achievements and formidability, and causes a characteristic display that is recognized everywhere. Here, we evaluatethe theory that pride evolved to guide decisions relevant to pursuing actions that enhance valuation and respect for a person in the minds of others. By hypothesis, pride is a neurocomputational program tailored by selection to orchestrate cognition and behavior in the service of: (i) motivating the costeffective pursuit of courses of action that would increase others’ valuations and respect of the individual, (ii) motivating the advertisement of acts or characteristics whose …

The Regret Elements Scale: Distinguishing The Emotional And Cognitive Components Of Regret, Joshua Buchanan, Amy Summerville, Jennifer Lehmann, Jochen Reb

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Regret is one of the most common emotions, but researchers generally measure it in an ad-hoc, unvalidated fashion. Three studies outline the construction and validation of the Regret Elements Scale (RES), which distinguishes between an affective component of regret, associated with maladaptive affective outcomes, and a cognitive component of regret, associated with functional preparatory outcomes. The present research demonstrates the RES’s relationship with distress (Study 1), appraisals of emotions (Study 2), and existing measures of regret (Study 3). We further demonstrate the RES’s ability to differentiate regret from other negative emotions (Study 2) and related traits (Study 3). The scale …

The Regret Elements Scale: Distinguishing The Emotional And Cognitive Components Of Regret, J. Buchanan, A. Summerville, J. Lehmann, Jochen Reb

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Regret is one of the most common emotions, but researchers generally measure it in an ad-hoc, unvalidated fashion. Three\302\240studies outline the construction and validation of the Regret Elements Scale (RES), which distinguishes between an affective\302\240component of regret, associated with maladaptive affective outcomes, and a cognitive component of regret, associated with\302\240functional preparatory outcomes. The present research demonstrates the RES's relationship with distress (Study 1), appraisals\302\240of emotions (Study 2), and existing measures of regret (Study 3). We further demonstrate the RES's ability to differentiate\302\240regret from other negative emotions (Study 2) and related traits (Study 3). The scale provides both a new theoretical …

Humans Integrate Monetary And Liquid Incentives To Motivate Cognitive Task Performance, Debbie Yee

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

It is unequivocal that a wide variety of incentives can motivate behavior. However, few studies have explicitly examined whether and how different incentives are integrated in terms of their motivational influence. The current study examines the combined effects of monetary and liquid incentives on cognitive processing, and whether appetitive and aversive incentives have distinct influences. We introduce a novel task paradigm, in which participants perform cued task-switching for monetary rewards that vary parametrically across trials, with liquid incentives serving as post-trial performance feedback. Critically, the symbolic meaning of the liquid was held constant (indicating successful reward attainment), while liquid valence …

Mathematical Modeling Of Stress Management Via Decisional Control, Matthew J. Shanahan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Engaging the environment through reason, humankind evaluates information, compares it to a standard of desirability, and selects the best option available. Stress is theorized to arise from the perception of survival-related demands on an organism. Cognitive efforts are no mere intellectual exercise when ontologically backed by survival-relevant reward or punishment. This dissertation examines the stressful impact, and countervailing peaceful impact, of environmental demands on cognitive efforts and of successful cognitive efforts on a person’s day-to-day environment, through mathematical modeling of ‘decisional control’. A modeling approach to clinical considerations is introduced in the first paper, “Clinical Mathematical Psychology”. A general exposition …

Blood Alcohol Concentration Is Negatively Associated With Gambling Money Won On The Iowa Gambling Task In Naturalistic Settings After Controlling For Trait Impulsivity And Alcohol Tolerance, Michael Lyvers, Nicole Mathieson, Mark Edwards

Mark Edwards

Introduction: Acute alcohol intoxication has been found to increase perseverative errors on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, a well known neuropsychological index of prefrontal cortical functioning, in both laboratory and naturalistic settings. Method: The present study examined the relationship between levels of alcohol consumption at campus drinking venues and performance of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), another neuropsychological test designed to assess prefrontal cortex dysfunction, after controlling for potential confounding variables including habitual alcohol intake (as a proxy for alcohol tolerance), trait impulsivity, and everyday executive functioning. Results: The 49 participants of both genders aged 18 to 30 years were …

Blood Alcohol Concentration Is Negatively Associated With Gambling Money Won On The Iowa Gambling Task In Naturalistic Settings After Controlling For Trait Impulsivity And Alcohol Tolerance, Michael Lyvers, Nicole Mathieson, Mark Edwards

Mike Lyvers

Introduction: Acute alcohol intoxication has been found to increase perseverative errors on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, a well known neuropsychological index of prefrontal cortical functioning, in both laboratory and naturalistic settings. Method: The present study examined the relationship between levels of alcohol consumption at campus drinking venues and performance of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), another neuropsychological test designed to assess prefrontal cortex dysfunction, after controlling for potential confounding variables including habitual alcohol intake (as a proxy for alcohol tolerance), trait impulsivity, and everyday executive functioning. Results: The 49 participants of both genders aged 18 to 30 years were …