Egocentric Bias Research Articles

Spontaneous mentalizing in neurotypicals scoring high versus low on symptomatology of autism spectrum disorder

Spontaneous mentalizing ability has been linked to symptoms severity in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Here we investigated whether in neurotypicals, higher levels of ASD symptomatology could also be linked to lower levels of spontaneous mentalizing, by comparing neurotypicals scoring high with those scoring low on the short Autism Spectrum Quotient. Participants watched movies during which they, and another agent, formed beliefs about the location of an object. These beliefs could influence reaction times (RT) to that object in the outcome phase. We expected participants with more ASD symptoms to show less spontaneous mentalizing, as reflected by a smaller effect of the other agent's beliefs on RT patterns (the ToM index). In contrast, the effect of own beliefs on RTs, reflecting an egocentric bias, was expected to be larger in the high-scoring group. Results showed that groups differed in the effect of the agent's beliefs; the ToM index was highly significant in the low-scoring group, while being absent in the high-scoring group. No difference in egocentric bias was observed. These findings suggest that the relationship between levels of ASD symptomatology and spontaneous mentalizing is not only present in individuals with ASD, but also in the neurotypical population.

What’s in It for Me? Perspective Taking as an Intervention for Improving Attitudes Toward Diversity Management

Hospitality organizations are increasingly investing in diversity management to address the reality of a diverse hospitality workforce. The effectiveness of diversity management highly depends on employee supportive attitudes; however, extant research shows that not all employees have positive attitudes toward diversity management. Using experimental methods, the current study examines situational perspective taking of discrimination—imagining being the target of workplace discrimination—as an intervention to influence the perceived utility and importance of diversity management using frontline hotel managers (Study 1) and hospitality students seeking careers in hospitality (Study 2) with two different methods of collecting data. Both studies showed that situational perspective taking of discrimination increases the perceived utility and importance of diversity management. Mediation analyses showed that it is through inducing negative affect that situational perspective taking leads to more positive attitudes toward diversity management. The results provide insight for hospitality organizations that use corporate websites and other recruitment activities to promote support for diversity management. Specifically, organizations should prime egocentric biases by emphasizing that diversity management protects all employees, regardless of different demographic characteristics, from workplace discrimination.

Perspective-taking and frugal strategies: Evidence from sarcasm detection

Prior research suggests an egocentric bias in the ability to adopt a third-person perspective in sarcastic statements. However, it remains unclear whether (1) this bias is genuinely due to egocentric anchoring or to the cost of the activation of the sarcastic interpretation; (2) context-based, allocentric processing of sarcasm can be by-passed by cheaper strategies, such as prosody processing. To settle the first question, two sarcastic conditions were compared: one, ‘egocentric’, where the favored interpretation was sarcastic only from the participant's perspective, and another, ‘allocentric’, where the sarcastic interpretation was salient from both the addressee's and the participant's perspectives. To address the second question, performance in the egocentric and allocentric conditions were compared when salient prosodic cues were added. To show direct evidence for serial adjustment and to minimize the possibility of parallel processing of prosodic and contextual cues, we compare two experiments: In the first experiment, French-speaking participants had no time limit to respond, while time pressure was added in the second experiment. Results confirm that perspective-shifting is egocentrically anchored (i.e. slower reaction times and poorer accuracy for egocentric condition than allocentric one); furthermore, this egocentric bias is already evident in early stages of processing (within 3s). We also show that perspectival assessment of contextual cues is not triggered in the presence of salient prosodic cues. Since perspective-taking is time consuming, using the non-contextual, prosodic cue is an efficient strategy to make an accurate judgment with the least processing effort.

Visual feedback explains why propointing is better than antipointing in spatial neglect

Rossit et al. (2011) showed that neglect patients perform normally in a propointing task but not in an antipointing task which requires pointing towards the mirrored position of a target. It is assumed that antipointing relies on information from the perceptual pathway of our visual brain. Therefore, this finding supports the notion that neglect is a disorder that primarily affects perceptual spatial representations within the brain leaving spatial maps used for visuomotor guidance intact. Alternatively, performance of patients might be compromised in both tasks, but only obviously so in tasks in which online corrections are made more difficult. It can be argued that online-corrections via visual feedback are less effective in antipointing because a direct comparison between hand and target is not possible in this condition. Secondly, it is also known that neglect patients have a pronounced egocentric bias which is assumed to be associated with a deviation of the perceived body midline. Since the midline is used to compute the end-position in the antipointing task this could also explain why patients are worse in antipointing. We investigated the influence of visual feedback on pro- and antipointing and the effect of providing a visual reference line for the antipointing task in right-brain damaged patients with neglect (n = 20), right-brain damaged patients without neglect (n = 23) and in a group of healthy participants (n = 22). The withdrawal of visual feedback had a stronger effect on propointing compared to antipointing. This effect was stronger in neglect patients than in patients without neglect or healthy controls. The introduction of a reference line reduced errors in antipointing performance, particularly in neglect patients with a strong egocentric bias. The results support our alternative account and challenge the hypothesis that the spatial disorder in neglect affects primarily perceptual maps within the visual system.

Behavioral Insights into International Arbitration: An Analysis of How to De-Bias Arbitrators

Empirical evidence indicates that national court judges fall prey to cognitive biases and heuristics. The same may be assumed for international arbitrators. Improving third-party adjudication through behavior-ally informed rules on procedure thus seems to be an avenue of research worth being pursued. In applying behavioral law and economics to international commercial arbitration, the present analysis shows (1) that behavioral economics can help to understand arbitrators’ behavior and (2) suggests how the law may mitigate their cognitive biases and heuristics in order to design more effective, efficient, and fair arbitral proceedings under the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules. The analysis focuses on (i) the representativeness heuristic, (ii) anchoring, (iii) the hindsight bias, (iv) framing effects, and (v) the egocentric bias. Building on their underlying dynamics and recent research on context-dependent decision-making, corresponding debiasing mechanisms may be implemented into arbitral proceedings through either behaviorally informed (model) arbitration clauses or by complementing existing frameworks such as the UNCITRAL Notes on Organizing Arbitral Proceedings in a behaviorally informed manner. Hence, in applying insights from economics and psychology to international arbitration, the present analysis adopts a prescriptive approach, examining how to actively mitigate arbitrators’ cognitive shortcomings as much as possible. Ac-curacy in fact determination – or the search for the truth – is perceived as the central motivation of this approach. As prescriptive insights from behavioral economics are able to allow for more accurate judgment, behaviorally informed rules on procedure not only benefit disputing parties by enhancing the idea of due process, but in doing so, they also empower international arbitration as a legal institution when con-fronted with national legal systems.

Knowledge likely held by others affects speakers’ choices of referential expressions at different stages of discourse

ABSTRACTEffective communication requires adjusting one’s discourse to be understood by the addressee. While some suggest that choices of referring expressions are dependent on the addressee’s accessibility to the referent, there is also evidence for an egocentric bias in speech production. This study relied on two new experimental tasks designed to assess whether speakers adapt their choices of referential expressions when introducing movie characters that are either likely known or likely unknown by their addressee, and when maintaining or reintroducing these characters at a later point in the discourse. Results revealed an adjustment to the addressee in the use of character’s names (increased for likely known characters) and definite expressions (increased for likely unknown characters) observed at all the discourse stages. Use of indefinite expressions and names was affected by the participant’s own knowledge specifically when introducing the characters. These results indicate that speakers take their addressee’s likely knowledge into account at multiple discourse stages.

Naive realism in the unmarried cohabitation controversy in the United States

We explored the role of “naïve realism” in perceptions of attitudinal differences between proponents and opponents of unmarried cohabitation (UC) in the United States. Participants were presented with UC vignettes, asked to describe their own impressions of the couple in each scenario, and then to speculate about the impressions of the typical UC proponent and opponent. A comparison of these impressions yielded a pattern of false polarization in their perceptions, such that partisans’ self-reported sympathy was reliably more similar than the degree of sympathy either side attributed to the other. Partisans also exhibited egocentric bias regarding the basis for each side’s stances on UC. The relevance of this misperception and faulty assumptions toward the resolution of the debate over unmarried cohabitation is discussed.

Reprint of: Equal egocentric bias in school-aged children with and without autism spectrum disorders

Egocentric bias is a core feature of autism. This phenomenon has been studied using the false belief task. However, typically developing children who pass categorical (pass or fail) false belief tasks may still show subtle egocentric bias. We examined 7- to 13-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n=76) or typical development (n=113) using tasks with a continuous response scale: a modified false belief task and a visual hindsight bias task. All children showed robust egocentric bias on both tasks, but no group effects were found. Our large sample size, coupled with our sensitive tasks and resoundingly null group effects, indicate that children with and without ASD possess more similar egocentric tendencies than previously reported.

Noticing Future Me: Reducing Egocentrism Through Mental Imagery.

People drastically overestimate how often others attend to them or notice their unusual features, a phenomenon termed the spotlight effect Despite the prevalence of this egocentric bias, little is known about how to reduce the tendency to see oneself as the object of others' attention. Here, we tested the hypothesis that a basic property of mental imagery-the visual perspective from which an event is viewed-may alleviate a future-oriented variant of the spotlight effect. The results of three experiments supported this prediction. Experiment 1 revealed a reduction in egocentric spotlighting when participants imagined an event in the far compared with near future. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated reduced spotlighting and feelings of embarrassment when participants viewed an impending event from a third-person (vs. first-person) vantage point. Simple changes in one's visual perspective may be sufficient to diminish the illusion of personal salience.

Egocentric biases in comparative volume judgments of rooms.

The elongation of a figure or object can induce a perceptual bias regarding its area or volume estimation. This bias is notable in Piagetian experiments in which participants tend to consider elongated cylinders to contain more liquid than shorter cylinders of equal volume. We investigated whether similar perceptual biases could be found in volume judgments of surrounding indoor spaces and whether those judgments were viewpoint dependent. Participants compared a variety of computer-generated rectangular rooms with a square room in a psychophysical task. We found that the elongation bias in figures or objects was also present in volume comparison judgments of indoor spaces. Further, the direction of the bias (larger or smaller) depended on the observer's viewpoint. Similar results were obtained from a monoscopic computer display (Experiment 1) and stereoscopic head-mounted display with head tracking (Experiment 2). We used generalized linear mixed-effect models to model participants' volume judgments using a function of room depth and width. A good fit to the data was found when applying weight on the depth relative to the width, suggesting that participants' judgments were biased by egocentric properties of the space. We discuss how biases in comparative volume judgments of rooms might reflect the use of simplified strategies, such as anchoring on one salient dimension of the space.

Empathy in depression: Egocentric and altercentric biases and the role of alexithymia

BackgroundMajor depressive disorder (MDD) has been associated with empathy deficits. The exact nature of these deficits and their relation to concurrent alexithymia remain unknown. Here we tested under which conditions MDD patients with high and low alexithymia show deficient empathy, particularly investigating empathic abilities when inhibition of self-related emotional states is needed and when it is not. MethodsHealthy controls (low: n=28, high: n=14) and currently depressed MDD patients (low: n=11, high: n=18) with low or high alexithymia performed an emotional egocentricity paradigm based on tactile stimulation. This task measures empathic judgements, when emotional states of self and other differ and inhibition of self-related emotional states is needed, and when they do not and thus empathic judgments can be based on simple projection mechanisms. ResultsOnly alexithymia but not depression decreased empathy, in situations when simple projection sufficed. However, when inhibition of self-related emotional states was needed, MDD patients showed an egocentric bias during empathic judgments and an altercentric bias during self emotion judgments, the latter suggesting heightened emotional contagion, both independent of alexithymia. Across the entire sample, alexithymia decreased the size of the egocentric bias. LimitationsThis study was based on a relatively sample size. ConclusionsThese results suggest that MDD patients show intact empathic judgments, when simple projection is required and no concurrent alexithymia is present. In situations when incongruent emotional states of self and other have to be resolved, MDD patients are prone to egocentric and altercentric biases.

Equal egocentric bias in school-aged children with and without autism spectrum disorders

Egocentric bias is a core feature of autism. This phenomenon has been studied using the false belief task. However, typically developing children who pass categorical (pass or fail) false belief tasks may still show subtle egocentric bias. We examined 7- to 13-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n=76) or typical development (n=113) using tasks with a continuous response scale: a modified false belief task and a visual hindsight bias task. All children showed robust egocentric bias on both tasks, but no group effects were found. Our large sample size, coupled with our sensitive tasks and resoundingly null group effects, indicate that children with and without ASD possess more similar egocentric tendencies than previously reported.

Reducing the motor response in haptic parallel matching eliminates the typically observed gender difference.

When making two bars haptically parallel to each other, large deviations have been observed, most likely caused by the bias of a hand-centered egocentric reference frame. A consistent finding is that women show significantly larger deviations than men when performing this task. It has been suggested that this difference might be due to the fact that women are more egocentrically oriented than men or are less efficient in overcoming the egocentric bias of the hand. If this is indeed the case, reducing the bias of the egocentric reference frame should eliminate the above-mentioned gender difference. This was investigated in the current study. Sixty participants (30 men, 30 women) were instructed to haptically match (task HP) the orientation of a test bar with the dominant hand to the orientation of a reference bar that was perceived with the non-dominant hand. In a haptic visual task (task HV), in which only the reference bar and exploring hand were out of view, no motor response was required, but participants had to “match” the perceived orientation by verbally naming the parallel orientation that was read out on a test protractor. Both females and males performed better in the HV task than in the HP task. Significant gender effects were only found in the haptic parallelity task (HP), corroborating the idea that women perform at the same level as men when the egocentric bias of the hand is reduced.

Parent–child discrepancies in the assessment of children’s and adolescents’ happiness

In this study, we assessed parent–child agreement in the perception of children’s general happiness or well-being in typically developing children (10- and 11-year-olds, n=172) and adolescents (15- and 16-year-olds, n=185). Despite parent and child reporters providing internally consistent responses in the General Happiness single-item scale and the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire–Short Form, their perceptions about children’s and adolescents’ general happiness did not correlate. Parents of 10- and 11-year-olds significantly overestimated children’s happiness, supporting previous literature on the parents’ positivity bias effect. However, parents of 15- and 16-year-olds showed the reverse pattern by underestimating adolescents’ happiness. Furthermore, parents’ self-reported happiness or well-being (reported 6 months later) significantly correlated with their estimations of children’s and adolescents’ happiness. Therefore, these results suggest a potential parents’ “egocentric bias” when estimating their children’s happiness. These findings are discussed in terms of their theoretical and applied implications for research into child–parent relationships.

Using spotlight effect to curb counterfeit consumption – an experimental investigation

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how counterfeit users estimate the probability of being detected and how this probability affects their counterfeit consumption behaviour. Specifically, it addresses three questions: do perceived social consequences influence counterfeit users’ probability estimate of being detected? What is the psychological mechanism underlying the estimation of this probability? And how does this probability estimate affect counterfeit purchase and usage intentions? Design/methodology/approach – The authors used three scenario-based experimental studies with university students in Hong Kong, a place where counterfeit products are widely available. First study used a factitious brand of jeans as the stimulus and the other two studies used a Ralph Lauren polo shirt. In each study, the authors measured participants’ responses towards counterfeit purchase and the probability of being detected after they read the relevant brand information and had a close-up view of the attributes in the genuine and counterfeit versions. Findings – The authors found that counterfeit users are susceptible to a pessimism bias such that they estimate a higher probability of being detected when they judge the outcome of being detected as more severe and this bias is driven by the spotlight effect in that counterfeit users judging the outcome as more severe tend to perceive that others pay more attention to their counterfeit usage. Moreover, this pessimism bias is mitigated when the target user is another person instead of oneself, thus suggesting the egocentric nature of the bias. Research limitations/implications – The authors used undergraduate students and scenario-based experimental approach in all the studies that may limit the generalisability of the findings. Practical implications – The results suggest that brand managers should emphasise the importance of negative social consequences and highlight the role of outcome severity and egocentric bias in their advertising and communication programmes in order to curb counterfeit consumption. Originality/value – The research contributes to the growing literature on counterfeit consumption by studying the process underlying estimation of the probability of being detected by others, an important but often neglected factor that influences counterfeit purchase decision. The authors also highlight the role of outcome severity and egocentric bias in this process.

"Increases in Status, Perceived Under-Reciprocation, and Social Undermining Among Top Managers"

This paper explores how social and psychological biases may impede the social exchange relations of executives who ascend to high- status corporate leadership positions. We theorize that a combination of self-serving attribution biases among executives who reach high-status positions, and egocentric biases among their prior benefactors, causes a systematic difference in perceptions between the two parties about the relative importance of that help to the high-status beneficiary’s success. This in turn leads to the perception among prior benefactors that the high-status executives have not adequately reciprocated their help. We then extend this theoretical argument, first by suggesting that the perception of under reciprocation is heightened when the high- status executive is a racial minority or a female. Second, we examine how high levels of ingratiation directed toward the high- status executives may contribute to the attribution biases which lead to perceptions of under-reciprocation. The final component of our theoretical framework addresses the significant social consequences of perceived under-reciprocation for the high-status corporate leaders. Specifically, we suggest that the high-status leaders’ ability to access help when needed is reduced, and they are liable to become the target of social undermining that can damage their broader reputation.

Conceiving "personality": Psychologist's challenges and basic fundamentals of the Transdisciplinary Philosophy-of-Science Paradigm for Research on Individuals.

Scientists exploring individuals, as such scientists are individuals themselves and thus not independent from their objects of research, encounter profound challenges; in particular, high risks for anthropo-, ethno- and ego-centric biases and various fallacies in reasoning. The Transdisciplinary Philosophy-of-Science Paradigm for Research on Individuals (TPS-Paradigm) aims to tackle these challenges by exploring and making explicit the philosophical presuppositions that are being made and the metatheories and methodologies that are used in the field. This article introduces basic fundamentals of the TPS-Paradigm including the epistemological principle of complementarity and metatheoretical concepts for exploring individuals as living organisms. Centrally, the TPS-Paradigm considers three metatheoretical properties (spatial location in relation to individuals' bodies, temporal extension, and physicality versus "non-physicality") that can be conceived in different forms for various kinds of phenomena explored in individuals (morphology, physiology, behaviour, the psyche, semiotic representations, artificially modified outer appearances and contexts). These properties, as they determine the phenomena's accessibility in everyday life and research, are used to elaborate philosophy-of-science foundations and to derive general methodological implications for the elementary problem of phenomenon-methodology matching and for scientific quantification of the various kinds of phenomena studied. On the basis of these foundations, the article explores the metatheories and methodologies that are used or needed to empirically study each given kind of phenomenon in individuals in general. Building on these general implications, the article derives special implications for exploring individuals' "personality", which the TPS-Paradigm conceives of as individual-specificity in all of the various kinds of phenomena studied in individuals.

Cultural selection drives the evolution of human communication systems.

Human communication systems evolve culturally, but the evolutionary mechanisms that drive this evolution are not well understood. Against a baseline that communication variants spread in a population following neutral evolutionary dynamics (also known as drift models), we tested the role of two cultural selection models: coordination- and content-biased. We constructed a parametrized mixed probabilistic model of the spread of communicative variants in four 8-person laboratory micro-societies engaged in a simple communication game. We found that selectionist models, working in combination, explain the majority of the empirical data. The best-fitting parameter setting includes an egocentric bias and a content bias, suggesting that participants retained their own previously used communicative variants unless they encountered a superior (content-biased) variant, in which case it was adopted. This novel pattern of results suggests that (i) a theory of the cultural evolution of human communication systems must integrate selectionist models and (ii) human communication systems are functionally adaptive complex systems.

No Strings Attached: When Giving It Away Versus Making Them Pay Reduces Consumer Information Disclosure

We examine egocentric biases in mental accounting that occur when consumers face the prospect of disclosing personal information in exchange for online marketing incentives. We find that consumers keep balanced “mental accounts” of the costs and benefits of such exchanges when they are contingent or temporally integrated. However, when non-contingent exchanges are temporally separated so that benefits precede costs, or when bias correction is impeded in the same non-contingent transaction, consumers keep separate mental accounts in which they egocentrically devalue the marketers' incentives, making them less likely to reciprocate by disclosing. We explore consequences of these findings for online relationships between consumers and marketers.

Egocentric representations of space co-exist with allocentric representations: Evidence from spatial neglect

The brain transforms sensory input to motor coordinates to accommodate for changes of posture and gaze direction. Neurophysiological and neuropsychological evidence supports the existence of multiple representations of space. A debated issue regards whether objects that we see are encoded in egocentric frames only or also maintain an object-centered frame of reference. Previous clinical studies were unable to discriminate between these models as the stimuli used to determine object-based (allocentric) biases are contaminated by body-centered (egocentric) effects. To address this, we used stimuli where allocentric side was elicited by gestalt configuration rather than egocentric location. We then displayed these stimuli at different egocentric positions allowing us to independently measure the effects of allocentric position, egocentric position as well as their interaction. In a group of stroke patients with neglect we demonstrate that allocentric biases are modulated as a function of egocentric position. These findings help adjudicate between the different models of space representation, demonstrating that specific allocentric deficits not only exist but also often co-exist with egocentric biases.