Estimates Of Others Research Articles

Rapid assessment of wildlife abundance: estimating animal density with track counts using body mass–day range scaling rules

AbstractLimited resources in conservation dictate the need for efficient means of assessing wildlife abundance. Body mass–day range scaling rules and empirical track counts were applied to an established formula to estimate a wide range of wildlife densities. Using the southern Kalahari ecosystem of Botswana as an example, I provide the first comprehensive density estimates for the mammalian wildlife community (>0.2 kg), including densities for several species previously unattainable by other methods. Among a subset of species, empirical day ranges from this area were consistently greater than those predicted using scaling rules modeled with species from diverse ecosystems. I applied a correction factor based on this discrepancy, which generated values congruent with independent density estimates from the area. Although accurate measures of day range are a practical constraint to estimating densities from track counts, the results suggest that modest efforts to obtain location‐specific day range estimates for a subset of species can improve density estimates for others derived from general allometric relationships. Given the strength of track surveys to accumulate unbiased observations quickly, in environments where animal tracks are readily visible, this approach shows potential for the rapid assessment of wildlife abundance.

Evaluations of friends-with-benefits relationship scenarios: Is there evidence of a sexual double standard?

More than half of university students report having had a friends-with-benefits relationship (FWBR), i.e., recurring sexual activity between friends who do not define their relationship as romantic, yet little is known about how people in FWBRs are judged by others. For instance, is there a sexual double standard whereby women are judged more negatively than men? In the present study, 404 university students read one of four randomly assigned scenarios describing an FWBR (scenarios varied on character gender and FWBR experience) and then completed measures of their judgment of the main character, their predictions about the relationship depicted, their beliefs about whether the character should keep the relationship secret, and their perception of how the character would be judged by peers. Two respondent-level variables (respondent gender; respondent FWBR experience) were also examined as predictors. Half of the participants (52.5%) had themselves experienced an FWBR, with a majority evaluating these experiences positively. Male respondents rated scenario characters more positively and made more positive relationship predictions than did female respondents. Respondents who had personal experience of their own FWBR rated characters more positively and made more positive relationship predictions than those who had never experienced an FWBR. There was no evidence of a sexual double standard in character judgments. However, relationship predictions and estimates of others' judgments were more negative when the character was female and there was a greater perceived need for secrecy. Thus, the current research did not support the existence of a sexual double standard for FWBRs, but may have suggested the perception of one.

Seeing storms behind the clouds: Biases in the attribution of anger

Anger-prone individuals are volatile and frequently dangerous. Accordingly, inferring the presence of this personality trait in others was important in ancestral human populations. This inference, made under uncertainty, can result in two types of errors: underestimation or overestimation of trait anger. Averaged over evolutionary time, underestimation will have been the more costly error, as the fitness decrements resulting from physical harm or death due to insufficient vigilance are greater than those resulting from lost social opportunities due to excessive caution. We therefore hypothesized that selection has favored an upwards bias in the estimation of others' trait anger relative to estimations of other traits not characterized by such an error asymmetry. Moreover, we hypothesized that additional attributes that i) make the actor more dangerous, or ii) make the observer more vulnerable increase the error asymmetry with regard to inferring anger-proneness, and should therefore correspondingly increase this overestimation bias. In Study 1 (N=161), a fictitious individual portrayed in a vignette was judged to have higher trait anger than trait disgust, and trait anger ratings were more responsive than trait disgust ratings to behavioral cues of emotionality. In Study 2 (N=335), participants viewed images of angry or fearful faces. The interaction of factors indicating target's formidability (male sex), target's intent to harm (direct gaze), and perceiver's vulnerability (female sex or high belief in a dangerous world) increased ratings of the target's trait anger but not trait fear.

Altered Psychophysiological Responses to the View of Others' Pain and Anger Faces in Fibromyalgia Patients

Facial expression provides information for an accurate estimation of others' pain. Nevertheless, little is known about psychophysiological responses to pain faces in chronic pain. Event-related potentials and brain oscillations, corrugator activity, and heart rate were recorded in 20 fibromyalgia patients and 20 pain-free controls when viewing pain, anger, happy, and neutral faces. Pain and anger faces elicited greater unpleasantness and arousal than happy and neutral faces, and pain faces evoked greater corrugator response than the rest of faces in all participants. Fibromyalgia patients displayed greater cardiac deceleration to all facial expressions than pain-free controls, and enhanced N100 amplitudes to pain and anger faces in comparison with neutral faces. Pain-free controls were characterized by enhanced N100 amplitudes to happy faces as compared to patients, and by more positive event-related potential amplitudes to happy than to other faces in the time window of 200 to 300 ms. Fibromyalgia patients showed greater theta power in response to pain and anger faces, as well as more reduced alpha power than pain-free controls to all faces. These findings suggest that information processing in fibromyalgia might be characterized by enhanced defensive reactions and increased mobilization of attention resources to pain and anger faces, and by reduced allocation of attention to happy faces. PerspectiveOur findings suggest that brain and cardiac activity elicited by viewing facial expressions of pain and anger in others is altered in fibromyalgia patients. This cognitive bias toward negative emotions could be used in clinical settings as a psychobiological marker during the assessment and treatment of fibromyalgia.

Measuring Beliefs in Centimeters: Private Knowledge Biases Preschoolers' and Adults' Representation of Others' Beliefs

A novel task, using a continuous spatial layout, was created to investigate the degree to which (in centimeters) 3-year-old children's (N = 63), 5-year-old children's (N = 60), and adults' (N = 60) own privileged knowledge of the location of an object biased their representation of a protagonist's false belief about the object's location. At all ages, participants' knowledge of the object's actual location biased their search estimates, independent of the attentional or memory demands of the task. Children's degree of bias correlated with their performance on a classic change-of-location false belief task, controlling for age. This task is a novel tool for providing a quantitative measurement of the degree to which self-knowledge can bias estimates of others' beliefs.

A graphical tool for locating inconsistency in network meta-analyses

BackgroundIn network meta-analyses, several treatments can be compared by connecting evidence from clinical trials that have investigated two or more treatments. The resulting trial network allows estimating the relative effects of all pairs of treatments taking indirect evidence into account. For a valid analysis of the network, consistent information from different pathways is assumed. Consistency can be checked by contrasting effect estimates from direct comparisons with the evidence of the remaining network. Unfortunately, one deviating direct comparison may have side effects on the network estimates of others, thus producing hot spots of inconsistency.MethodsWe provide a tool, the net heat plot, to render transparent which direct comparisons drive each network estimate and to display hot spots of inconsistency: this permits singling out which of the suspicious direct comparisons are sufficient to explain the presence of inconsistency. We base our methods on fixed-effects models. For disclosure of potential drivers, the plot comprises the contribution of each direct estimate to network estimates resulting from regression diagnostics. In combination, we show heat colors corresponding to the change in agreement between direct and indirect estimate when relaxing the assumption of consistency for one direct comparison. A clustering procedure is applied to the heat matrix in order to find hot spots of inconsistency.ResultsThe method is shown to work with several examples, which are constructed by perturbing the effect of single study designs, and with two published network meta-analyses. Once the possible sources of inconsistencies are identified, our method also reveals which network estimates they affect.ConclusionOur proposal is seen to be useful for identifying sources of inconsistencies in the network together with the interrelatedness of effect estimates. It opens the way for a further analysis based on subject matter considerations.

Diminishing adult egocentrism when estimating what others know.

People often use what they know as a basis to estimate what others know. This egocentrism can bias their estimates of others' knowledge. In 2 experiments, we examined whether people can diminish egocentrism when predicting for others. Participants answered general knowledge questions and then estimated how many of their peers would know the answers. Egocentrism was revealed in the relationship between participants' own accuracy and their estimates of peer accuracy for questions that were new to the experiment. However, when participants encountered the answer to a question asked earlier in the experiment, they showed reduced egocentrism for these old relative to new questions (Experiment 1). Participants were aware that recent experience with answers spoiled their knowledge as a basis for estimating what others know. Consequently, they relied on more objective bases for prediction, which enhanced their ability to discriminate between questions that are easy versus difficult for others (i.e., relative accuracy). In Experiment 2, the relative accuracy of estimates of others' knowledge was also enhanced when experience-based cues were blocked by presenting the answer with the question. Results are discussed in terms of a dual process theory of the bases (e.g., experience vs. theory) people use for predictions for others. Further, we discuss the effects of egocentrism in educational contexts, such as a professor estimating what students know. In sum, our findings show that people can shift away from their own knowledge to diminish egocentrism and to more accurately estimate what others know.

Conditional Projection: How Own Evaluations Influence Beliefs about Others Whose Choices Are Known

The authors study how a person's evaluation of choice options influences his or her estimates of other people's evaluations when their choices are known. The study shows that people rely on the relationship between their own evaluations and their final decision to make sense of others, projecting their evaluations of the corresponding options. A person's liking of the option he or she chose between two alternatives influences the person's estimates of others' liking of the option they chose, regardless of whether it matches his or her own choice. Likewise, a person's evaluation of the rejected option affects his or her estimate of others' evaluations of the option they rejected. Across four studies, the authors provide evidence of conditional projection in political and consumer decisions, using across-people differences in ratings of choice options, within-person changes in ratings, and manipulated differences in participants' ratings. The authors also demonstrate that existing accounts of projection do not directly predict these findings and rule out other alternative explanations.

Dorsomedial prefrontal cortex activity predicts the accuracy in estimating others' preferences

The ability to accurately estimate another person's preferences is crucial for a successful social life. In daily interactions, we often do this on the basis of minimal information. The aims of the present study were (a) to examine whether people can accurately judge others based only on a brief exposure to their appearances, and (b) to reveal the underlying neural mechanisms with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants were asked to make guesses about unfamiliar target individuals' preferences for various items after looking at their faces for 3 s. The behavioral results showed that participants estimated others' preferences above chance level. The fMRI data revealed that higher accuracy in preference estimation was associated with greater activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) when participants were guessing the targets' preferences relative to thinking about their own preferences. These findings suggest that accurate estimations of others' preferences may require increased activity in the DMPFC. A functional connectivity analysis revealed that higher accuracy in preference estimation was related to increased functional connectivity between the DMPFC and the brain regions that are known to be involved in theory of mind processing, such as the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC)/precuneus, during correct vs. incorrect guessing trials. On the contrary, the tendency to refer to self-preferences when estimating others' preference was related to greater activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. These findings imply that the DMPFC may be a core region in estimating the preferences of others and that higher accuracy may require stronger communication between the DMPFC and the TPJ and PCC/precuneus, part of a neural network known to be engaged in mentalizing.

The powerful size others down: The link between power and estimates of others' size

The current research examines the extent to which visual perception is distorted by one's experience of power. Specifically, does power distort impressions of another person's physical size? Two experiments found that participants induced to feel powerful through episodic primes (Study 1) and legitimate leadership role manipulations (Study 2) systematically underestimated the size of a target, and participants induced to feel powerless systematically overestimated the size of the target. These results emerged whether the target person was in a photograph or face-to-face. These findings suggest that the experience of powerfulness and powerlessness leads people to misperceive complementary power cues in others, and in doing so, distorts what they actually see. We discuss how these findings elucidate the interplay between how psychological states influence perception, and through this, facilitate social coordination.

An unlucky feeling: Overconfidence and noisy feedback

How do individuals’ beliefs respond to ego-relevant information? After receiving noisy, but unbiased performance feedback, participants in an experiment overestimate their own scores on a quiz and believe their feedback to be ‘unlucky’, estimating that it under-represents their score by 13%. However, they exhibit no such overconfidence in non-ego-relevant beliefs—in this case, estimates of others’ scores. Comparing subjects’ belief-updating to the Bayesian benchmark, we find that this ‘unlucky feeling’ is largely due to overconfident priors, with biased updating driving overconfidence only among the participants with the worst-calibrated beliefs. This suggests that social comparisons contribute to the biased response to feedback on relative performance observed in other studies. While feedback improves performance estimates, this learning does not translate into improved estimates of subsequent performances. This suggests that beliefs about ability are updated differently than beliefs about a particular performance, contributing to the persistence of overconfidence.

Confidence in the future and hopelessness: Experiences in daily occupations of immigrants with late effects of polio

Sweden today may be described as multicultural. Those who are immigrants and have a disability are described as doubly vulnerable. Aims:To explore and describe how immigrants with late effects of polio experience their daily occupations. Method:The experiences were explored by interviews with 12 immigrants with late effects of polio, from Eastern Africa. Data analysis was carried out according to grounded theory. Results:Experiences in daily occupations affected the participants' view of the future, which in turn was influenced by the participants' conception of occupational self. This was dependent on their participation in daily occupations. Five categories influenced their experiences: rootedness in society, estimation of others, treatment by others, belonging to social networks, and the process of change in life. The social environment played an important role in determining how the participants experienced their daily occupations. Conclusions:The participants' experiences could not be seen in isolation; consequences of their disability and migration interact. The study showed that the complexity of daily life among immigrants with disability requires individual treatment and points to a need for consideration of differences in cultural background, including the therapist's own cultural lens.

Conditional Projection: How Own Evaluations Impact Beliefs about Others Whose Choices Are Known

We study how a person’s evaluation of choice options influences her estimates of other people’s evaluations when their choices are known. People rely on the relation between their own evaluations and their final decision to make sense of others, projecting their evaluations of the corresponding options. A person’s liking of the option she chose between two alternatives influences her estimates of others’ liking of the option they chose, regardless of whether it matches her own choice. Likewise, her evaluation of the option she rejected affects her estimate of others’ evaluations of the option they rejected. Across four studies, we provide evidence of conditional projection in political and consumer decisions, using across-people differences in ratings of choice options, within-person changes in ratings, as well as manipulated differences in participants’ ratings. We demonstrate that existing accounts of projection would not directly predict our findings, and rule out other alternative explanations.

Interdependency Between Risk Assessments for Self and Other in the Field of Comparative Optimism: The Contribution of Response Times

By introducing a response-time measure in the field of comparative optimism, this study was designed to explore how people estimate risk to self and others depending on the evaluation order (self/other or other/self). Our results show the interdependency between self and other answers. Indeed, while response time for risk assessment for the self does not vary depending on the evaluation order, assessment for an average other takes longer in the other/self than in the self/other order. Thus, prior self-estimate appears to facilitate the construction of subsequent risk estimates for others. Our data indicate that the two evaluation orders do not correspond to strictly equivalent procedures; the other/self order requires extra cognitive effort and leads to greater comparative optimism levels. These findings should alert researchers that the measurement procedures, classically considered as interchangeable in the area of comparative optimism, actually generate different ways to construct the answers. Our results are discussed in terms of anchoring and asymmetry effects.

Gender differences in factors associated with alcohol drinking: Delay discounting and perception of others’ drinking

BackgroundExcessive alcohol consumption in college students is associated with impulsivity and with overestimating levels of others’ drinking; however, females’ and males’ drinking may be differently impacted by their overestimations. We examined whether moderate drinkers discount alcohol rewards differently from money rewards and whether their estimate of others’ drinking is more closely associated with own-drinking for males than females. MethodCollege students completed two delay discounting tasks in which they chose between money rewards and between alcohol rewards, varying in amount and delay to receipt. Participants also completed questionnaires about their own and others’ drinking. ResultsArea under the curve (AUC) relating delay to subjective value was smaller for alcohol than money rewards, implying steeper discounting of alcohol rewards. Regression analyses showed that females’ number of drinks per sitting was related only to AUC for money, while males’ drinks per sitting was related to their estimates of others’ drinks. ConclusionThe relationship between alcohol consumption and discounting was replicated. This study also indicated that social norms play a larger role in determining males’ drinking than females’.

How social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect

Social groups can be remarkably smart and knowledgeable when their averaged judgements are compared with the judgements of individuals. Already Galton [Galton F (1907) Nature 75:7] found evidence that the median estimate of a group can be more accurate than estimates of experts. This wisdom of crowd effect was recently supported by examples from stock markets, political elections, and quiz shows [Surowiecki J (2004) The Wisdom of Crowds]. In contrast, we demonstrate by experimental evidence (N = 144) that even mild social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect in simple estimation tasks. In the experiment, subjects could reconsider their response to factual questions after having received average or full information of the responses of other subjects. We compare subjects' convergence of estimates and improvements in accuracy over five consecutive estimation periods with a control condition, in which no information about others' responses was provided. Although groups are initially "wise," knowledge about estimates of others narrows the diversity of opinions to such an extent that it undermines the wisdom of crowd effect in three different ways. The "social influence effect" diminishes the diversity of the crowd without improvements of its collective error. The "range reduction effect" moves the position of the truth to peripheral regions of the range of estimates so that the crowd becomes less reliable in providing expertise for external observers. The "confidence effect" boosts individuals' confidence after convergence of their estimates despite lack of improved accuracy. Examples of the revealed mechanism range from misled elites to the recent global financial crisis.

Exploring the Influence of Mediated Beauty: Examining Individual and Social Factors in White and Black Adolescent Girls' Appearance Evaluations

This project explored media exposure, self-esteem, and the role that sports participation might play in cultivating perceptions and expectations of ideal beauty and attractiveness in others using a sample of girls who have varying degrees of athletic involvement. The study objective was to assess the factors that were stronger predictors of more favorable appearance estimates of others based on involvement in sports, race, age, media exposure and self-esteem. This study of 117 adolescent Black and White girls measured media use and media preferences, their beliefs about the importance of appearance attributes and self-esteem to determine if these factors shaped the way they viewed attractiveness in others. Findings from this survey yielded interesting but conflicting results with regard to potential correlates of higher or lower appearance evaluations. Type of sport played, time spent viewing thin-ideal media content, and self-esteem were the strongest predictors of higher or lower appearance evaluations of others. Participants' ethnicity was not a significant predictor of higher or lower appearance evaluations; however, differences in athletic participation and self-esteem did vary by ethnicity. These and other findings are discussed.

You Like What I Like, but I Don’t Like What You Like: Uniqueness Motivations in Product Preferences

Consumers often gauge their own and others’ preferences for products through social comparisons. This research examines the role of consumers’ need for uniqueness (CNFU) in two common social comparisons: projection and introjection. Consumers project (i.e., rely on their own preferences to estimate those of others), regardless of their CNFU. However, high-CNFU consumers are less likely than low-CNFU ones to introject (i.e., rely on estimates of others’ preferences to gauge their own). Moreover, alleviating the introjection-induced threat to the high-CNFU consumers’ self-concept by having them deliberate on their differentness from others increases their likelihood of introjection. Together, these findings confirm our basic contention that the process underlying introjection is more motivational in nature than that underlying projection.

Judgmental aggregation strategies depend on whether the self is involved

Abstract We report the results of a novel experiment that addresses two unresolved questions in the judgmental forecasting literature. First, how does combining the estimates of others differ from revising one’s own estimate based on the judgment of another? The experiment found that participants often ignored advice when revising an estimate but averaged estimates when combining. This was true despite receiving identical feedback about the accuracy of past judgments. Second, why do people consistently tend to overweight their own opinions at the expense of profitable advice? We compared two prominent explanations for this, differential access to reasons and egocentric beliefs, and found that neither adequately accounts for the overweighting of the self. Finally, echoing past research, we find that averaging opinions is often advantageous, but that choosing a single judge can perform well in certain predictable situations.

High Levels of Vicarious Exposure Bias Pain Judgments

The present study evaluated the effects of exposure to facial expression of pain, on observers' perceptions of pain expression. Participants were undergraduates shown brief video clips of the facial expressions of shoulder-pain patients displaying no pain or moderate pain. Participants were randomly allocated to either a high preexposure condition in which each clip was preceded by 10 other clips showing strong pain or a no-exposure control. On each test trial, participants indicated whether they thought the person they saw was in pain or not. Data were analyzed using signal detection theory methods. High prior exposure to pain was unrelated to sensitivity to pain expression, but did significantly diminish the likelihood of judging the other to be in pain. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for pain judgments of health-care professionals, adaptation-level theory, and the psychophysical method of selective adaptation. This paper provides an experimental demonstration that, when people have large amounts of exposure to others' expressions of pain, their estimation of others' pain is reduced. The findings offer 1 explanation for the widely observed underestimation bias in pain judgments and may suggest ways of changing it.