Across consequential attributions of attitudes, ability, emotions, and morality, people make correspondent inferences. People infer stable personality characteristics from others’ behavior, even when that behavior is caused by situational factors. We examined the structure of correspondent inferences and report the development and validation of an instrument measuring individual differences in this correspondence bias (a Neglect of External Demands scale, or “NED”). The NED is internally consistent and distinct from scales and measures of intelligence, cognitive ability, cognitive reflection, general decision-making ability, preference for control, and attributional style. Individual differences in correspondence bias predict blaming people for harmful accidents, believing coerced confessions, correcting for job and task difficulty when making performance evaluations and incentive-compatible personnel selections, and separating market and fund performance when making incentive-compatible investments. Fortunately, the tendency to commit correspondence bias can be reduced. Making situational information easier to process debiases those most prone to correspondence bias. Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2668 . This paper was accepted by Yuval Rottenstreich, judgment and decision making.

We report new evidence on the emotional, demographic, and situational correlates of boredom from a rich experience sample capturing 1.1 million emotional and time-use reports from 3,867 U.S. adults. Subjects report boredom in 2.8% of the 30-min sampling periods, and 63% of participants report experiencing boredom at least once across the 10-day sampling period. We find that boredom is more likely to co-occur with negative, rather than positive, emotions, and is particularly predictive of loneliness, anger, sadness, and worry. Boredom is more prevalent among men, youths, the unmarried, and those of lower income. We find that differences in how such demographic groups spend their time account for up to one third of the observed differences in overall boredom. The importance of situations in predicting boredom is additionally underscored by the high prevalence of boredom in specific situations involving monotonous or difficult tasks (e.g., working, studying) or contexts where one’s autonomy might be constrained (e.g., time with coworkers, afternoons, at school). Overall, our findings are consistent with cognitive accounts that cast boredom as emerging from situations in which engagement is difficult, and are less consistent with accounts that exclusively associate boredom with low arousal or with situations lacking in meaning.

In the current study, a serious game was developed to address a training challenge: teaching players to recognize and mitigate their cognitive biases. Cognitive biases, which are human tendencies to commit systematic errors in thinking that lead to irrational judgments, are deeply ingrained and difficult to alter. This paper describes the theory-based approach we employed to create a game for the mitigation of cognitive biases – a challenging and abstract training topic. A cognitive bias framework that relates the target cognitive biases, their causes, and effective bias mitigation techniques was developed and incorporated into the game design. The resultant serious game, titled Missing: The Final Secret (hereinafter: Missing ), pairs the most promising mitigation strategies with the primary causes of the targeted cognitive biases and incorporates them into game-play. Further, we present preliminary results from a game efficacy evaluation suggesting that Missing is an effective tool for training cognitive bias recognition and mitigation.

Across consequential attributions of attitudes, ability, emotions, and morality, people make correspondent inferences-infer stable personality characteristics from others' behavior, even when their behavior was caused by situational factors. We examined their structure and report the development and validation of an instrument measuring individual differences in the propensity to make correspondent inferences (the Neglect of External Demands-NED -scale). The instrument is internally consistent and distinct from measures of intelligence, cognitive ability, cognitive reflection, general decision making ability, preference for control, and attributional style. It predicted attributions of blame for accidental harm, the weight attributed to confessions obtained under coercion, the consideration of job difficulty in performance evaluations, and the ability to separate market and fund performance when making incentive-compatible investments. We found that making situational information accessible debiased the judgments of people most prone to make correspondent inferences.

In this article, we report on a serious game development approach, characterized by combining theory-based design with an iterative development strategy guided by experimental test and evaluation. We describe two serious games that teach the mitigation of cognitive biases (human tendencies to commit systematic errors in thinking that lead to irrational judgments). Cognitive biases tend to be deeply ingrained and early attempts to reduce biases with training have met with little success. We address this training challenge using bias mitigation theory derived from the literature and an instructional framework to establish the educational content of each game. The mitigation effects of the games were measured through multiple experiment cycles, and multiple play-testing campaigns were conducted to inform instructional model and game design revisions. The final game versions achieved a medium-to-large training effect following a single play session.

We measure individual differences in the tendency to make correspondent inference, i.e., to infer stable dispositions from the behavior of others, and show their impact on blame and guilt attributions, performance evaluations, and investment decisions. Higher accessibility of situational information helps debiasing correspondent inferences.

From failures of intelligence analysis to misguided beliefs about vaccinations, biased judgment and decision making contributes to problems in policy, business, medicine, law, education, and private life. Early attempts to reduce decision biases with training met with little success, leading scientists and policy makers to focus on debiasing by using incentives and changes in the presentation and elicitation of decisions. We report the results of two longitudinal experiments that found medium to large effects of one-shot debiasing training interventions. Participants received a single training intervention, played a computer game or watched an instructional video, which addressed biases critical to intelligence analysis (in Experiment 1: bias blind spot, confirmation bias, and fundamental attribution error; in Experiment 2: anchoring, representativeness, and social projection). Both kinds of interventions produced medium to large debiasing effects immediately (games ≥ −31.94% and videos ≥ −18.60%) that persisted at least 2 months later (games ≥ −23.57% and videos ≥ −19.20%). Games that provided personalized feedback and practice produced larger effects than did videos. Debiasing effects were domain general: bias reduction occurred across problems in different contexts, and problem formats that were taught and not taught in the interventions. The results suggest that a single training intervention can improve decision making. We suggest its use alongside improved incentives, information presentation, and nudges to reduce costly errors associated with biased judgments and decisions.

A revolution in the science of emotion has emerged in recent decades, with the potential to create a paradigm shift in decision theories. The research reveals that emotions constitute potent, pervasive, predictable, sometimes harmful and sometimes beneficial drivers of decision making. Across different domains, important regularities appear in the mechanisms through which emotions influence judgments and choices. We organize and analyze what has been learned from the past 35 years of work on emotion and decision making. In so doing, we propose the emotion-imbued choice model, which accounts for inputs from traditional rational choice theory and from newer emotion research, synthesizing scientific models.

People exhibit a bias blind spot: they are less likely to detect bias in themselves than in others. We report the development and validation of an instrument to measure individual differences in the propensity to exhibit the bias blind spot that is unidimensional, internally consistent, has high test-retest reliability, and is discriminated from measures of intelligence, decision-making ability, and personality traits related to self-esteem, self-enhancement, and self-presentation. The scale is predictive of the extent to which people judge their abilities to be better than average for easy tasks and worse than average for difficult tasks, ignore the advice of others, and are responsive to an intervention designed to mitigate a different judgmental bias. These results suggest that the bias blind spot is a distinct metabias resulting from naïve realism rather than other forms of egocentric cognition, and has unique effects on judgment and behavior. This paper was accepted by Yuval Rottenstreich, judgment and decision making.

Overview. The field of emotion research is still in its infancy. In terms of Thomas Kuhn’s ( 1962) approach to scientific revolutions, it has yet to become a “normal science” with established paradigms. It instead features sparring theories, each trying to best represent the true nature of emotion. Even the question posed in the title of William James’( 1884) essay “What is an Emotion?” still sparks debate today (see Keltner & Lerner 2010, Russell & Barrett 1999). It is not surprising, then, that within the JDM literature, specifically, researchers have labeled a wide variety of mental states as “emotional”: from fleeting, momentary reactions (eg, Todorov et al 2007) to protracted, durable moods that last a lifetime (eg, Lerner & Keltner 2001); from states characterized solely by subjective feelings to those characterized by complex coordination of physiological, hormonal, and expressive activity (eg, Bechara et al 1997, Chapman et al 2009, Kassam et al 2009); and from evaluations that involve simple positive and negative associations to those that involve more complex affective relationships (for review, see Loewenstein & Lerner 2003). Although a full understanding of these relationships is not needed to study the impact of emotion on JDM, it is nonetheless useful to mention two theoretical questions that can contextualize this review within the current state of emotion research: 1) How are emotion and cognition related? 2) What is the consensual model for the universe of emotions (discrete versus dimensional)?

Whereas parents typically believe that their children increase their happiness (e.g., Eibach & Mock 2011), decades of research have found little support for this contention (Dolan et al. 2008). In a recent paper, Nelson et al. (2013) address the issue with analyses of the World Values Survey (WVS; 2006) and an experience-sampling dataset (Carstensten et al. 2010). Though the authors carefully avoid making causal claims, they nevertheless conclude that the results provide (page 8) “...strong evidence challenging the widely held perception that children are a source of reduced well-being.”

The current study was designed to address the following research question: Can a computer game provide an effective mechanism for training adults to identify and mitigate their cognitive biases? Human decision making relies on a variety of simple heuristic decision rules that can be quick and effective mental shortcuts when making judgments. However, these heuristics can also lead to irrational thinking and problem-solving in ways that produce errors or illogicality, known as cognitive biases. Though knowledge of cognitive biases and bias mitigation strategies can help to reduce the potential impact of cognitive biases on human reasoning, such deeply ingrained cognitive strategies are difficult to alter. The current study was designed to leverage the virtual learning environment of a serious game to take on this training challenge. To that end, a training game – Missing: The Pursuit of Terry Hughes (Missing) – was developed. Missing was created for an audience of educated adults, and the described instructional design is based on current research on effective andragogical learning theory. The Missing game design immerses the user into bias-invoking situations which provide direct experience with cognitive bias identification and mitigation strategies. In this paper, details of the game instructional design are presented, including a cognitive framework based on dual-process systems of reasoning which relates multiple biases, their causes, and mitigation techniques. An external test campaign was conducted to determine whether the game had a positive transfer of ingame experiential learning about biases to real world skills and behavior change. Results are presented that suggest this novel serious game both engages and trains players, resulting in measurable reductions in cognitive biases.

Fashion is an essential part of human experience and an industry worth over $1.7 trillion. Important choices such as hiring or dating someone are often based on the clothing people wear, and yet we understand almost nothing about the objective features that make an outfit fashionable. In this study, we provide an empirical approach to this key aesthetic domain, examining the link between color coordination and fashionableness. Studies reveal a robust quadratic effect, such that that maximum fashionableness is attained when outfits are neither too coordinated nor too different. In other words, fashionable outfits are those that are moderately matched, not those that are ultra-matched ("matchy-matchy") or zero-matched ("clashing"). This balance of extremes supports a broader hypothesis regarding aesthetic preferences-the Goldilocks principle--that seeks to balance simplicity and complexity.

Individuals typically believe that children increase parental happiness (see Hansen, 2012), but decades of research have found little support for this contention (e.g., Dolan, Peasgood, & White, 2008). In a recent article, Nelson, Kushlev, English, Dunn, and Lyubomirsky (2013) addressed this issue with analyses of data from the World Values Survey (WVS; 2006) and an experience-sampling data set (Carstensen et al., 2011). Though Nelson et al. carefully avoided making causal claims, they nevertheless concluded that the results provide “strong evidence challenging the widely held [academic] perception that children are a source of reduced well-being” (p. 8). In this Commentary, we report a reanalysis of the data, which suggests that it is premature to abandon the idea that children reduce happiness. A reassessment of Studies 1 and 2 in Nelson et al., prompted by econometric and conceptual concerns, failed to support the conclusions of the authors. Parents did report higher levels of wellbeing than nonparents did, but the difference appears to have been entirely driven by omitted factors—such as marital status and parental age—that were highly correlated with both the presence of children and well-being. We found that controlling for such factors, which are available in the data, erases the positive relationship between well-being and parenthood. A reanalysis seems especially critical in light of the importance that Nelson et al. attribute to these findings for “those planning a family” and for “emerging evolutionary perspectives” of parenting (p. 9).

We attempt to determine the discriminability and organization of neural activation corresponding to the experience of specific emotions. Method actors were asked to self-induce nine emotional states (anger, disgust, envy, fear, happiness, lust, pride, sadness, and shame) while in an fMRI scanner. Using a Gaussian Naïve Bayes pooled variance classifier, we demonstrate the ability to identify specific emotions experienced by an individual at well over chance accuracy on the basis of: 1) neural activation of the same individual in other trials, 2) neural activation of other individuals who experienced similar trials, and 3) neural activation of the same individual to a qualitatively different type of emotion induction. Factor analysis identified valence, arousal, sociality, and lust as dimensions underlying the activation patterns. These results suggest a structure for neural representations of emotion and inform theories of emotional processing.

Measurement effects exist throughout the sciences-the act of measuring often changes the properties of the observed. We suggest emotion research is no exception. The awareness and conscious assessment required by self-report of emotion may significantly alter emotional processes. In this study, participants engaged in a difficult math task designed to induce anger or shame while their cardiovascular responses were measured. Half of the participants were asked to report on their emotional states and appraise their feelings throughout the experiment, whereas the other half completed a control questionnaire. Among those in the anger condition, participants assigned to report on their emotions exhibited qualitatively different physiological responses from those who did not report. For participants in the shame condition, there were no significant differences in physiology based on the self-report manipulation. The study demonstrates that the simple act of reporting on an emotional state may have a substantial impact on the body's reaction to an emotional situation.

Salience and satisfaction are important factors in determining the comparisons that people make. We hypothesized that people make salient comparisons first, and then make satisfying comparisons only if salient comparisons leave them unsatisfied. This hypothesis suggests an asymmetry between winning and losing. For winners, comparison with a salient alternative (i.e., losing) brings satisfaction. Therefore, winners should be sensitive only to the relative value of their outcomes. For losers, comparison with a salient alternative (i.e., winning) brings little satisfaction. Therefore, losers should be drawn to compare outcomes with additional standards, which should make them sensitive to both relative and absolute values of their outcomes. In Experiment 1, participants won one of two cash prizes on a scratch-off ticket. Winners were sensitive to the relative value of their prizes, whereas losers were sensitive to both the relative and the absolute values of their prizes. In Experiment 2, losers were sensitive to the absolute value of their prize only when they had sufficient cognitive resources to engage in effortful comparison.

Objects are more easily recognized in their typical context. However, is contextual information activated early enough to facilitate the perception of individual objects, or is contextual facilitation caused by postperceptual mechanisms? To elucidate this issue, we first need to study the temporal dynamics and neural interactions associated with contextual processing. Studies have shown that the contextual network consists of the parahippocampal, retrosplenial, and medial prefrontal cortices. We used functional MRI, magnetoencephalography, and phase synchrony analyses to compare the neural response to stimuli with strong or weak contextual associations. The context network was activated in functional MRI and preferentially synchronized in magnetoencephalography (MEG) for stimuli with strong contextual associations. Phase synchrony increased early (150–250 ms) only when it involved the parahippocampal cortex, whereas retrosplenial–medial prefrontal cortices synchrony was enhanced later (300–400 ms). These results describe the neural dynamics of context processing and suggest that context is activated early during object perception.