Everyday Judgments Research Articles

Comparison standards shape everyday judgments of low and high wellbeing in individuals with and without psychopathology: a diary-based investigation.

People can easily rate and express their current levels of wellbeing, but the cognitive foundations for such judgments are poorly understood. We examined whether comparisons to varying standards underlie fluctuating wellbeing judgments within-person (i.e., throughout daily episodes) and between-person (i.e., high vs. low levels of psychopathology). Clinical and non-clinical participants recorded subjective affect for each distinct episode for one week. Participants briefly described current, best, and worst daily episodes, which we coded for presence and type of comparison standard (social, past temporal, criteria-based, counterfactual, prospective temporal, and dimensional). Participants also rated their engagement with these standards and the respective affective impact. During best episodes, participants reported more downward (vs. upward) comparisons that resulted in positive affective impact. In worst episodes, upward (vs. downward) comparisons were more frequent. In best and worst episodes, we most frequently identified past-temporal and criteria-based comparisons, respectively. The clinical group engaged more often with all potential standard types during worst daily episodes and was more negatively affected by comparative thoughts, amid consistently more negative affect levels across all episode types. Our data suggest that judgments of affect and wellbeing may indeed rely on comparative thinking, whereby certain standards may characterize states of negative affect and poor mental health.

Hindsight Bias and its Application in Financial Investment, Legal Decisions, and Medical Diagnosis

This essay seeks to explicate hindsight bias as a pervasive cognitive heuristic and discusses its manifestation in everyday judgment and decision-making, incorporating the representative psychological factors that underlie different conceptual constructs. With the combination of theoretical frameworks with past contextualized experiments, three essential applications of hindsight bias in financial investment, legal decisions, and medical diagnosis, including their significance in society, are introduced respectively by extrapolation. Judgment concerning financial investment and economic outlook necessitate an unprejudiced future-centric perspective but is often susceptible to a biased retrospection that results in unwise decisions. Similarly, in the criminal justice system, hindsight bias may be responsible for numerous impartial decisions made, which would interfere with legal impartiality. In medical settings, people also have a habitual tendency to overestimate their diagnostic abilities, which may have negative implications for future therapeutic treatment. Finally, potential methods to ameliorate the influence of hindsight bias are suggested to guide more sound decisions and enhance societal efficiency.

Moral contamination: Perceptions of good (but not bad) deeds depend on the ethical history of the actor.

In the majority of moral decision-making research, we are asked to consider the action of someone we know little about-an anonymous actor. This is inconsistent with our everyday judgments of the actions of others. Here we test the novel prediction of whether actions are considered as comparably virtuous or malignant when performed by a good person, an immoral person, or the standard anonymous actor. Across four sets of experiments (nine studies in total), we show that the moral status of the actor contaminates peoples' evaluations of the virtue of their actions. Even without ulterior motives, people do not judge good acts consistently across actors. We also discover a dose-response relationship where the more immoral the actor has been in the past-the less credit they are given for a good action in the present. This process does not occur for good people performing bad acts, however. Bad acts are bad regardless of who commits them. These results give new insights into the way people evaluate the behaviors of others.

The Importance of Perceived Procedural Justice Among Defendants With a Non-Western Background Involved in Dutch Criminal Cases.

This study aims to put perceived procedural justice to a critical test in the context of Dutch criminal court hearings. To that end, we surveyed 198 criminal defendants to examine whether their perceptions of procedural fairness were significantly associated with trust in judges and intentions to protest against judicial rulings, among other variables. We also examine the possibility that sometimes unfair procedures may have nice aspects, because they offer opportunities to attribute negative outcomes to external causes. Previous studies conducted in different settings support this line of reasoning by showing that associations between perceived procedural justice and other variables are sometimes attenuated or even reversed, particularly when people feel strongly evaluated. The current study takes these insights into the novel context of Dutch criminal court hearings by focusing on defendants with a non-Western ethnic-cultural background. Some of these defendants may feel negatively evaluated by society, which can manifest as a high level of perceived discrimination. Thus, we examine whether the associations between perceived procedural justice and important other variables may be attenuated or reversed depending on respondents’ perceptions of everyday discrimination and their outcome judgments. Our results revealed significant associations between perceived procedural justice on the one hand and trust in judges and protest intentions on the other hand, which remained intact regardless of perceptions of everyday discrimination and outcome judgments. Hence, even in this real-life courtroom context, procedural justice was a relevant concern. Taken together, our findings support the importance of perceived procedural justice, even when it is put to a critical test.

Methodological worries on recent experimental philosophy of music

ABSTRACT This paper discusses methodological issues of two recent experiments conducted by Christopher Bartel, and Elzė S. Mikalonytė and Vilius Dranseika, respectively, about the repeatability and individuation of musical works. I argue, first, that the reliability of their results about people’s intuitions in our everyday musical practices can be questioned due to the use of descriptions instead of musical stimuli of the works and performances involved in the cases tested. This procedure is prone to place participants in an epistemic situation in which their mental capacities for their everyday judgments are not deployed and makes their judgments more vulnerable to the problem of “filling in”. I provide empirical data of an experiment that implements musical stimuli, obtaining large effect sizes regarding the results obtained by Bartel, Mikalonytė and Dranseika. In addition, I argue that the results of three scenarios of the experiment conducted by Mikalonytė and Dranseika are suspicious of being influenced by presentation effects that favor the contextualist intuition that the composer is a relevant parameter in work-individuation. Formal and superficial aspects of the description of their cases would cause these effects. I supply empirical data of an experiment that neutralizes those effects, obtaining moderate and large effect sizes regarding the results of Mikalonytė and Dranseika.

Time and the embodied other in education: A dimension of teachers’ everyday judgements of student learning

The article explores ethical conceptualisations of time that take the existence of the embodied Other in education into consideration. Kristeva’s time/memory paradox is discussed with regard to teachers’ everyday judgements in relation to student learning. In conclusion, learning as an unruptured endeavour is impossible when the time of the embodied Other is taken into account. In this sense, teachers need to be aware of: 1) the time gap between people, 2) the time gap between the conscious and subconscious (time/timelessness), 3) the fact that teachers’ and students’ meaning-making is always tainted by past memory, 4) the ways in which the timelessness of the subconscious crashes into conscious meaning-making in the present and creates ruptures that affect the content of learning and the life conditions of Others, 5) how frozen time (shadow of time) can be used as a way of learning from ruptures, and 6) that processing time(s) is just as important as ‘progressing in it’.

Real and ideal rationality

Formal epistemologists often claim that our credences should be representable by a probability function. Complete probabilistic coherence, however, is only possible for ideal agents, raising the question of how this requirement relates to our everyday judgments concerning rationality. One possible answer is that being rational is a contextual matter, that the standards for rationality change along with the situation. Just like who counts as tall changes depending on whether we are considering toddlers or basketball players, perhaps what counts as rational shifts according to whether we are considering ideal agents or creatures more like ourselves. Even though a number of formal epistemologists have endorsed this type of solution, I will argue that there is no way to spell out this contextual account that can make sense of our everyday judgments about rationality. Those who defend probabilistic coherence requirements will need an alternative account of the relationship between real and ideal rationality.

Development and psychometric evaluation of the Test of Practical Judgment alternate form (Form B)

The Test of Practical Judgment (TOP-J) is increasingly used by neuropsychologists to measure everyday judgment ability in older adulthood. In the present study, we developed an alternate TOP-J Form B, which may be used to reduce practice effects for repeat assessment situations or in place of the original Form A. In developing the measure, special attention was given to limiting cultural bias and making items similar in content and difficulty to Form A. The TOP-J Form B was piloted in a clinical geriatric sample (N = 77) in the Midwestern U.S. Subsequently, older adults (N = 130) were recruited from several boroughs of New York City and surrounding areas (mean age = 77; mean years of education = 16; 69% female; 28% Black/African-American, 11% Hispanic). In this validation sample, both the 9-item and 15-item versions of the TOP-J Form B showed strong psychometric properties, including good unidimensional model fit in confirmatory factor analysis, preliminary convergent/divergent and criterion validity evidence, and strong inter-rater reliability, ICC (2, 1) = .93. The means and standard deviations for the TOP-J Form A and Form B were highly similar, particularly for the 9-item forms in which there was less than a one-point mean difference. Preliminary normative data for cognitively intact participants (n = 73) were established. We present means and standard deviations that will allow for the calculation of z scores as Form B scores were normally distributed. The newly developed TOP-J Form B should be useful in diverse clinical and research settings.

Judgment errors in naturalistic numerical estimation

People estimate numerical quantities (such as the calories of foods) on a day-to-day basis. Although these estimates influence behavior and determine wellbeing, they are prone to two important types of errors. Scaling errors occur when people make mistakes reporting their beliefs about a particular numerical quantity (e.g. by inflating small numbers). Belief errors occur when people make mistakes using their knowledge of the judgment target to form their beliefs about the numerical quantity (e.g. by overweighting certain cues). In this paper, we quantitatively model numerical estimates, and in turn, scaling and belief errors, in everyday judgment tasks. Our approach is unique in using insights from semantic memory research to specify knowledge for naturalistic judgment targets, allowing our models to formally describe nuanced errors in belief not considered in prior research. In Studies 1 and 2, we find that belief error models predict participant estimates and errors with very high out-of-sample accuracy rates, significantly outperforming the predictions of scaling error models. In fact, the best-fitting belief error models can closely mimic the inverse-S shaped patterns captured by scaling error models, suggesting that the types of responses previously attributed to scaling errors can be seen as errors of belief. In Studies 3 to 8, we find that belief error models are also able to predict people's responses in semantic judgment, free association, and verbal protocol tasks related to numerical judgment, and thus provide a good account of the cognitive underpinnings of judgment.

Cognitive reflection correlates with behavior on Twitter

We investigate the relationship between individual differences in cognitive reflection and behavior on the social media platform Twitter, using a convenience sample of N = 1,901 individuals from Prolific. We find that people who score higher on the Cognitive Reflection Test—a widely used measure of reflective thinking—were more discerning in their social media use, as evidenced by the types and number of accounts followed, and by the reliability of the news sources they shared. Furthermore, a network analysis indicates that the phenomenon of echo chambers, in which discourse is more likely with like-minded others, is not limited to politics: people who scored lower in cognitive reflection tended to follow a set of accounts which are avoided by people who scored higher in cognitive reflection. Our results help to illuminate the drivers of behavior on social media platforms and challenge intuitionist notions that reflective thinking is unimportant for everyday judgment and decision-making.

The Effect of Letter versus Number Cues on Distance Perception

People experience the world through distance perceptions, such as perceiving distance when moving through store aisles, locating movie theater seats, spotting parking spaces, or navigating airport gates. The distance can be perceived using qualitative (e.g., letter) or quantitative (e.g., number) cues. In this research, we focus on how the type of cues can influence consumers’ distance perceptions and affect their everyday judgments. Specifically, we suggest that in pretask estimates (referred to as the preaction stage), letter cues lead to lesser distance perceptions. However, in posttask estimates (referred to as the postaction stage), letter cues lead to greater distance perceptions. We explain the result pattern in the preaction stage using naive beliefs about the ease of computation and magnitude judgments (i.e., computational fluency). In the postaction stage, we propose that expectation–disconfirmation causes such a reversal in distance perceptions. We test the proposed patterns of results and theoretical accounts across two laboratory studies and two field studies.

PAPEL DO PRINCÍPIO DE COOPERAÇÃO NA COCONSTRUÇÃO DA INTERAÇÃO DOCENTE-DISCENTE EM TEMPOS DE ISOLAMENTO SOCIAL

O objetivo precípuo deste trabalho é produzir entendimentos sobre os efeitos pragmático-interacionais do (des) cumprimento do princípio de cooperação na avaliação discente de vídeo-aulas produzidas no contexto da pandemia de COVID-19. Para tanto, assento-me em um arcabouço teórico de viés pragmático, que articula a reflexão griceana acerca do princípio da cooperação no estabelecimento da comunicação à uma discussão sobre as especificidades da abordagem pragmática e as particularidades do gênero vídeo-aula. Com base em tal diálogo, empreendo uma análise acerca de comentários produzidos acerca de uma aula de inglês publicada na plataforma do YouTube ® azo de um projeto de ensino a distância em circunstâncias de isolamento social. As análises evidenciaram a presença das máximas de Grice nos construtos avaliativos dos alunos, corroborando a ideia de que, ainda que nem sempre conhecidas em sua forma teórica, tais imperativos permeiam os julgamentos cotidianos dos indivíduos acerca da qualidade comunicativa das intervenções discursivas. Os entendimentos gerados ao longo da pesquisa emergem como suprimentos importantes para o desenvolvimento de uma discussão acerca do processo de construção das práticas docente-discentes durante o período de suspensão sanitária das aulas presenciais e, em um esforço de elucubração, acerca da construção de uma prática pedagógica pós-pandemia.

Кто заплатит за водопровод: социальный контекст восприятия дистрибутивной справедливости

Статья посвящена исследованию влияния социального контекста распределения издержек на обыденные нормативные суждения о дистрибутивной справедливости, выносящиеся с точки зрения арбитра. С помощью метода факторного опроса оценивалось влияние контекстуальной информации о родстве реципиентов издержек, формы предоставления информации об их текущем финансовом положении, а также величины совокупных издержек на восприятие дистрибутивной справедливости. Участники были более склонны распределять издержки, компенсируя положение тех, кто находится в наихудшем положении, за счет тех, кто находится в наилучшем положении, если реципиенты издержек являются родственниками, предоставляется информация о доходах, а не о долгах реципиентов, и величина совокупных издержек относительно невелика. Также был выявлен эффект взаимодействия между величиной совокупных издержек и двумя остальными факторами: увеличение суммы совокупных издержек снижает силу эффектов родства и формы предоставления информации о финансовом положении реципиентов и сильнее склоняет участников к восприятию эгалитарного распределения издержек в качестве справедливого. Результаты подтверждают предположение о контекстуальной природе дистрибутивной справедливости и углубляют понимание ее проявления в обыденных нормативных суждениях при распределении издержек, направленных на поддержание общественного блага.

The limits of definition: Gadamer’s critique of Aristotle’s ethics

ABSTRACTThere is a recent scholarly trend drawing similarities between Aristotle’s conceptions of ethics and demonstrative science. One such similarity has become widely and rightly recognized: for Aristotle both ethics and demonstrative science seek essential definitions of phenomena. The task of the paper is to show that German philosopher and classicist Hans-Georg Gadamer not only prefigured this interpretative trend, he also identified a problematic feature of Aristotle’s method so construed. The problematic feature is semantic. For Aristotle essential definitions must consist of univocal terms, but such univocity cannot be maintained if the definienda and definientes are concepts to be usefully employed in everyday ethical judgements. Gadamer therefore points out a problematic tension in Aristotle’s ethics. On the one hand, ethical inquiry should have practical application, but, on the other hand, the semantic assumptions underlying inquiry imply that it cannot.

Biological and Technical Complications of Splinted or Nonsplinted Dental Implants: A Decision Tree for Selection.

To present an in-depth review on splinting versus nonsplinting the restorations of adjacent dental implants, in addition to discussing biological and technical complications associated with either choice; and to provide the clinician with a decision tree that serves in everyday judgments when it comes to addressing this issue. A comprehensive literature review was performed for articles comparing success of splinted versus nonsplinted dental implants. There is no evidence to suggest that implementing either prosthetic design results in higher implant survival. Both designs tend to have their own set of complications, but there is compelling evidence to suggest that splinted restorations generally have less technical complications. Either splinting or nonsplinting are valid options for restoring adjacent implants, but each tend to face different biological and technical complications. Knowing which patients are more likely to face particular complications is strategic to provide patients with successful restorations.

A quantum theory account of order effects and conjunction fallacies in political judgments.

Are our everyday judgments about the world around us normative? Decades of research in the judgment and decision-making literature suggest the answer is no. If people's judgments do not follow normative rules, then what rules if any do they follow? Quantum probability theory is a promising new approach to modeling human behavior that is at odds with normative, classical rules. One key advantage of using quantum theory is that it explains multiple types of judgment errors using the same basic machinery, unifying what have previously been thought of as disparate phenomena. In this article, we test predictions from quantum theory related to the co-occurrence of two classic judgment phenomena, order effects and conjunction fallacies, using judgments about real-world events (related to the U.S. presidential primaries). We also show that our data obeys two a priori and parameter free constraints derived from quantum theory. Further, we examine two factors that moderate the effects, cognitive thinking style (as measured by the Cognitive Reflection Test) and political ideology.

Actual and Potential Harm is Central to Perceptions of Greed

Despite its centrality to public discourse and everyday ethical judgment and behavior, a robust conceptual understanding of greed has been lacking from the management literature (Wang & Murninghan, 2011). This paper focuses on the factors that shape ordinary perceptions of greedy actions and business practices. Supplementing existing accounts that conceptualize greed as a sin of acquisitiveness or insatiability (always wanting more), we find in five studies that real or potential harm to other parties is an additional important determinant of whether actions are seen as greedy. People are sensitive to both the degree and victims of harm, and use both acquisitiveness and harm to evaluate the amount of greed reflected in real-world business practices. Results are discussed in terms of both theoretical and applied implications.

Intuitive Face Judgments Rely on Holistic Eye Movement Pattern

Non-verbal signals such as facial expressions are of paramount importance for social encounters. Their perception predominantly occurs without conscious awareness and is effortlessly integrated into social interactions. In other words, face perception is intuitive. Contrary to classical intuition tasks, this work investigates intuitive processes in the realm of every-day type social judgments. Two differently instructed groups of participants judged the authenticity of emotional facial expressions, while their eye movements were recorded: an ‘intuitive group,’ instructed to rely on their “gut feeling” for the authenticity judgments, and a ‘deliberative group,’ instructed to make their judgments after careful analysis of the face. Pixel-wise statistical maps of the resulting eye movements revealed a differential viewing pattern, wherein the intuitive judgments relied on fewer, longer and more centrally located fixations. These markers have been associated with a global/holistic viewing strategy. The holistic pattern of intuitive face judgments is in line with evidence showing that intuition is related to processing the “gestalt” of an object, rather than focusing on details. Our work thereby provides further evidence that intuitive processes are characterized by holistic perception, in an understudied and real world domain of intuition research.

Mathematical knowledge is related to understanding stocks and flows: results from two nations

Stocks and flows (SF) are essential to every-day judgments: debt changes with rates of incomes and expenses, and body weight with calories consumed and energy expended. Research suggests that individuals with strong mathematical skills have a poor understanding of SF. However, past research used homogeneous participant samples and the relationship between mathematical knowledge and performance in SF tasks was not tested. In two studies involving different populations from China and the U.S.A, we find that individuals with better general mathematical knowledge tend to be more accurate in SF tasks. We find that most participants who make mistakes follow an erroneous correlation heuristic; however, we also find that the use of this heuristic is not related to mathematical knowledge. Our results open the door to new research questions, including the type of mathematical knowledge needed and the relationship of mathematical knowledge and cognitive processes that people need for solving SF tasks. Copyright © 2015 System Dynamics Society

Embodied Disagreements

In this paper, I suggest that embodied metaphysical experience underlies many of our everyday judgements, which are expressed in our bodily comportments and actions, through which disagreements in our ontological experiences are highlighted. I propose attending to such concrete, situated disagreements as a way of challenging the tradition of metaphysics as an enterprise of objective and universal theory, and as a way of promoting feminist, anti-racist, and queer practices of responsibility.