Heuristic Cues Research Articles

Audit Partner Signature Disclosure Effects on Non-Professional Investors’ Credibility Assessments and Liability Perceptions

Restoring the credibility of the auditor’s report by disclosing an audit partner’s signature has been the subject of recent auditing standard setting. This study presents an experimental examination of the effect of voluntary audit partner signature disclosure on nonprofessional investor credibility assessments of auditor’s reports and perceived audit partner liability. We find that disclosing the audit partner’s signature enhances auditor’s report credibility unless obtainable information is over-endorsed by the disclosure. However, we could not detect any substantial effect of voluntary audit partner signature disclosure on perceived audit partner liability. We provide evidence consistent with source credibility theory that the audit partner’s signature is used as a heuristic cue in information processing, thereby affecting nonprofessional investor judgments. In light of the increasing interest in and reforms of the auditor’s report, our findings contribute to a decade of auditing standard setting discussions and relativize the perceived liability threats linked to audit partner related disclosures.

A preliminary investigation of dispositional affect, the P300, and sentence processing

We examined whether dispositional affect modulated the relation between sentence processing and the P300 Event Related Potential (ERP) component. We used sentence stimuli from our previous study, where sentences started with subject nouns that were quantified e.g., Every kid… or not, as in The kid…, and continued with a direct object which was either singular, as in a tree, or plural the trees. In this Stroop-like task, participants read sentences presented in 1- and 2-word chunks, and were asked to identify the number of words on the screen at the target word tree(s), which was always presented alone (and never sentence-final). We replicated previous findings of a P300 effect, at the target tree(s), however, actual by-condition effects differed from previous work. Of interest, clear individual differences were apparent. Participants with relatively lower Positive Affect scores (as measured by the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule; PANAS), showed differential P300 responses to the control condition, Every/The kid climbed the tree. Thus, the present ERP findings demonstrate that dispositional affect modulated P300 effects. These findings suggest that, rather than relying on global heuristic cues for sentence meaning interpretation, these participants may be differentially sensitive to local (grammatical) cues which signify task relevance. We discuss our results in terms of theories of positive affect, where less positive individuals are differentially sensitive to local (grammatical) information.

A Bitter Pill to Swallow? The Consequences of Patient Evaluation in Online Health Q&A Platforms

Online Health Q&A platforms (OHQPs), where patients post health-related questions, evaluate advice from multiple doctors and direct a bounty to their most preferred answer, have become a prominent channel for patients to seek and receive medical advice in China. Common characteristics of these platforms include bounty-motivated problem solving, limited search functionality, and lack of peer-assessment. To explore the quality of medical advice promoted on these platforms, we analyzed data on patients’ evaluation of 497k answers to 114k questions on one of the most popular OHQPs, 120ask.com, over a 3-month period. We assembled a panel of independent (offline) physicians and instructed them to professionally evaluate the quality of 13k answers. We found that the quality of medical advice offered on the platform was on average high and that low-quality answers were rare (6%). However, our results also indicate that patients, as laypeople, lacked the ability to discriminate advice based on quality. They were as likely to choose the best answer as the worst. When poor advice was offered, patients chose it over a high-quality alternative as much as 15% of the time. The medical accuracy of patient evaluation was worse in some critical categories (cancer, heart and liver disease) and for vulnerable subpopulations (pediatrics). Given that millions of patients seek medical advice from OHQPs in China annually, the social and economic implications of this finding are troubling. To understand how patients evaluate advice, we leveraged natural language processing techniques to construct a rich set of answer features and estimated a deep learning model to determine how patients responded to features. Importantly, we identified the extent to which patients respond positively or negatively to different heurist cues. While our results indicate that OHQPs perform well, we identified several concerns that should be addressed through platform design and policy changes. Because the Q&A process lacks peer review mechanisms, signals of advice quality are not conveyed to patients, forcing them to rely on heuristic cues which cannot effectively guide them towards the best advice. We also found that the platform reputation metric was not correlated with the quality of advice-giver’s advice, may effectively encourage patients to select lesser quality medical advice, and increased the risk of moral hazard for malicious players to intentionally provide less accurate but more agreeable advice for personal gain. Finally, we found that OHQPs enabled or exacerbated care avoidance. We discuss several potential policy changes to address these shortcomings.

Color Transferred Convolutional Neural Networks for Image Dehazing

Image dehazing is a crucial image processing step for outdoor vision systems. However, images recovered through conventional image dehazing methods that use either haze-relevant priors or heuristic cues to estimate transmission maps may not lead to sufficiently accurate haze removal from single images. The most commonly observed effects are darkened and brightened artifacts on some areas of the recovered images, which cause considerable loss of fidelity, brightness, and sharpness. This paper develops a variational image dehazing method on the basis of a color-transfer image dehazing model that is superior to conventional image dehazing methods. By creating a color-transfer image dehazing model to remove haze obscuration and acquire information regarding the coefficients of the model by using the devised convolutional neural network-based deep framework as a supervised learning strategy, an image fidelity, brightness, and sharpness can be effectively restored. The experimental results verify through quantitative and qualitative evaluations of either synthesized or real haze images, and the proposed method outperforms existing single image dehazing methods.

A Woman’s Place? An Experimental Study on the Interaction of Gender and List-Position Cues in a System with Gender Quotas

ABSTRACTThis research note focuses on the interaction of gender and list-position cues in preferential-list Proportional Representation (PR) systems in Flanders (Belgium). The list of candidates contains a number of heuristic cues that influence voters’ perceptions of a candidate’s competence. Flanders’s electoral setting, combining a flexible-list PR system with far-reaching quota regulations, provides a good case study for exploring this interaction. The results, based on an innovative survey experiment, highlight that the list position works the same way for women and men. Female head-of-list candidates do not enjoy additional advantages in terms of perceived competence. Since middle-of-list women do not suffer from reduced esteem, these results also contradict the concerns voiced by quota opponents that the use of electoral gender quotas will generate the perception among voters that parties select less-qualified candidates to meet the quota standards.

Moderators for Partition Dependence in Prediction Markets

Every investment decision by organizations is an implicit expression of a prediction on the future state of companies, demand trends, future challenges, or politics. Usually, decision makers can chose between different options to invest and also tend to diversify investments in order to reduce risk. Research on cognitive processing, however, showed that unconscious heuristics triggered by “heuristic cues” influence such decisions in an irrational manner. Partition dependence, the partition of the state space, is such a heuristic cue that leads to an irrational bias in the assessment of probabilities towards a uniform distribution. This work demonstrates that this bias is also persistent in group-based forecasting. We explain and predict the occurrence of the partition dependence bias by applying the Dual-Process Theory of cognitive processing. The results of our three consecutive experiments suggest that besides task complexity, individual expertise, and motivation are moderators for the occurrence of partition dependence. We contribute to the research of biases in forecasting by applying approaches of the Dual-process Theories to explain the occurrence of partition dependence for the first time and shed light on future pathways in this research field.

Psychological Distance Cues in Online Messages

Abstract. Growing evidence reveals that people rely on heuristic cues when processing online information. The current research, by adopting a construal level theory approach, examined whether psychological distance cues within online messages influence message processing. According to construal level theory, spatial and hypothetical distances (i.e., probabilities, likelihoods) share an association based on psychological distance. Construal level literature suggests that people overgeneralize this association and attribute unlikely events to distant places and likely events to close-by places. The current research provides a novel test of this relationship in an online communication setting. In two within-subjects experiments (Studies 1 and 2), we presented participants tweets depicting likely and unlikely events, and measured whether they attribute them to spatially close or far sources. Confirming our predictions, participants utilized the psychological distance cues and attributed the likely tweets to spatially close and the unlikely tweets to spatially far sources. In two follow-up experiments, we tested the same relationship by employing between-subjects designs. In Study 3 where participants saw one spatial distance and both likely and unlikely tweets, participants formed the same association albeit less strongly and attributed the unlikely tweets to spatially distant sources. In Study 4, where participants saw two spatial distances and only one tweet, the expected association was not formed. Findings suggest that comparison of likelihood information is necessary to form an association between source location and tweet likelihood. The implications of psychological distance and a construal level theory approach are discussed in the context of online heuristics and persuasion.

Heuristic Cues for Meta-Reasoning Judgments

Metacognitive research aims to explain how people regulate their effort when performing cognitive tasks, to expose conditions that support reliable monitoring of chance for success, and to provide a basis for developing improvement guidelines. The essence of the domain is that monitoring drives control: people continually self-assess their chance for success before, during, and after performing a cognitive task, and use these judgments to guide their effort-allocation decisions (e.g., whether to reconsider an answer option, change strategy, seek help, or give up). Thus, factors that underlie metacognitive judgments affect the efficiency with which people perform cognitive tasks. This paper focuses on meta-reasoning – the monitoring and control processes that apply to reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making tasks. So far, relatively little is known about heuristic cues used for inferring meta-reasoning judgments. This paper reviews the known heuristic cues and offers methodological guidelines for a critical reading of existing research and for designing high-quality studies that will advance this important domain.

Does high on the ballot means highly competent? Explaining the ballot position effect in list-PR systems

Previous research provides solid evidence for the existence of a ballot position effect. The cognitive mechanisms behind this effect are, however, undertheorized and understudied. We develop and test here ‘voter perception effects’ as a possible explanation. Following this reasoning, the list position in a list-PR system functions as a heuristic cue for the competence of candidates: candidates selected for a high list position are perceived as more competent by voters, even when controlling for other candidate characteristics. Our results, based on an experimental design, show that head of lists are indeed perceived as more competent than middle of list candidates. This is related to both advantages for the first position and to disadvantages related to a middle of list position.

Fake images: The effects of source, intermediary, and digital media literacy on contextual assessment of image credibility online

Fake or manipulated images propagated through the Web and social media have the capacity to deceive, emotionally distress, and influence public opinions and actions. Yet few studies have examined how individuals evaluate the authenticity of images that accompany online stories. This article details a 6-batch large-scale online experiment using Amazon Mechanical Turk that probes how people evaluate image credibility across online platforms. In each batch, participants were randomly assigned to 1 of 28 news-source mockups featuring a forged image, and they evaluated the credibility of the images based on several features. We found that participants’ Internet skills, photo-editing experience, and social media use were significant predictors of image credibility evaluation, while most social and heuristic cues of online credibility (e.g. source trustworthiness, bandwagon, intermediary trustworthiness) had no significant impact. Viewers’ attitude toward a depicted issue also positively influenced their credibility evaluation.

The asymmetric effect of review valence on numerical rating

PurposeThe basic assumption is that there is a symmetric relationship between review valence and rating, but what if review valence and rating were linked asymmetrically? There are few studies which have investigated the situations in which positive and negative online reviews exert different influences on ratings. This study considers brand strength as having an important moderating role because the average rating of existing reviews for a particular product is a heuristic cue for decision makers. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to argue that an asymmetric relationship between review content valence and numerical rating will depend on brand strength.Design/methodology/approachThe authors have conducted a sentiment analysis via text mining, using self-developed computer programs to retrieve a data set from the TripAdvisor website.FindingsThis study finds there is an asymmetric relationship between review valence (verbal) and numerical rating. The authors further find brand strength to have an important moderating role. For a stronger brand, negative review content will have a greater impact on numerical ratings than positive review content, while for a weaker brand, positive review content will have a greater impact on numerical ratings than negative review content.Practical implicationsMarketers could adopt sentiment analysis via text mining of online reviews as a valid measure or predictor of consumer satisfaction or numerical ratings. Strong brands should direct more attention to negative reviews, because in such reviews the negative impact transcends the positive. In contrast, weak brands should aim to exploit as many positive reviews as possible to minimize the impact of any negative reviews.Originality/valueThis study finds there is an asymmetric relationship between review valence (verbal) and numerical rating and considers brand strength to play an important moderating role. The authors have used real data from the TripAdvisor website, which allow people to express themselves in an unsolicited manner, and linked these with the results from the sentiment analysis.

Conflict of Interest Disclosure as an Expertise Cue: Automatic versus Deliberative Processing

Disclosure–informing advice recipients of the potential bias of an advisor–is frequently used to remedy the effects of conflicts of interest. However, conflict-of-interest disclosures usually compete with a host of other information that is important, relevant or interesting to the advisee. Across five experiments and one field study, we examine the effect of conflict-of-interest disclosures in a realistic and context-rich setting (online blogs) in which the disclosure is short, clear and conspicuous (as desired by many regulatory bodies) but embedded in the context of other competing information. Our findings show that, in contrast to prior research on conflict of interest disclosures, recipients who read a blog post containing a conflict of interest disclosure report increased trust in the blogger and evaluate the blogger, the blogger’s recommendation, and the sponsoring organization more favorably than recipients who read a post with no disclosure. The effect is driven by disclosure acting as a heuristic cue to infer greater trust in the blogger’s expertise and consequently greater persuasion. The inference of greater expertise and its effect on persuasion are mitigated when recipients are encouraged to deliberate on the disclosure. We discuss implications of these findings for organizations, advisors, consumers and policy makers.

Identity on Social Networks as a Cue: Identity, Retweets, and Credibility

The current study investigates how social media affordances influence individuals’ source credibility perceptions in the presence of risk information, specifically examining how bandwagon heuristics interact with different identity heuristics at the individual level. The MAIN model and warranting theory serve as the theoretical framework to examine the effects of bandwagon cues and identity cues embedded in retweets and users’ profile pages for health and risk online information processing. A posttest-only experiment with a self-report questionnaire was administered to participants. Results indicate that different online heuristic cues impact the judgments of competence, goodwill, and trustworthiness. Authority cues strongly influenced source credibility perceptions. A reverse-bandwagon effect was observed in influencing source credibility judgments.

소셜커머스 호텔 객실상품 구매에 영향을 주는 메시지 정보 탐색과 호텔성급에 따른 차이 연구

This paper tried to investigate what kind of information influences consumers who purchase hotel rooms through social commerce. Whether this information varies depending on the hotel star-rating was also investigated through the application of the heuristic-systematic model to the information that appeared on the social commerce purchase webpage. Specifically, the quantity limitation and the time limit were set for the heuristic cue. The geographical distance and the social commerce offering price were set in the systematic cue. As a result of the study, it was found that the quantity limitation and geographical distance had a significant effect on purchase increase. Differences in information according to hotel star-rating showed a significant difference between the time limit and the social commerce offering price. Based on the results of the research, academic and practical implications for social commerce companies and hotels are discussed. This study contributes to the theoretical expansion of HSM by applying it to social commerce product information and carrying out empirical analysis. In addition, by using web data for analysis, we expanded a research area that was insufficient regarding social commerce and hotels.

Conflict of interest disclosure as an expertise cue: Differential effects due to automatic versus deliberative processing

Disclosure—informing advice recipients of the potential bias of an advisor—is a popular tool to manage conflicts of interest. However, conflict of interest disclosures usually compete with a host of other information that is important, relevant or interesting to the advisee. Across one field study and five experiments, we examine the effect of conflict of interest disclosures in a realistic and context-rich setting (online blogs) in which the disclosure is short, clear and conspicuous (as desired by many regulatory bodies) but embedded in the context of other competing information. Our findings show that, in contrast to much of the prior research on conflict of interest disclosures, recipients who read a blog post containing a conflict of interest disclosure report increased trust in the blogger and evaluate the blogger, the blogger’s recommendation, and the sponsoring organization more favorably than recipients who read a post with no disclosure. The effect is driven by disclosure acting as a heuristic cue to infer greater trust in the blogger’s expertise and consequently greater persuasion. The inference of greater expertise and its effect on persuasion are mitigated when recipients deliberate on the disclosure. We discuss implications of these findings for organizations, advisors, consumers and policy makers.

The role of emotions and conflicting online reviews on consumers' purchase intentions

Drawing on dual-process theories, this paper explains how the systematic and heuristic information processing of online reviews with conflicting information can influence consumers' purchase decision making. The study adopts major assumptions of complexity and configuration theory in employing fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis on 680 TripAdvisor users to test the complex interrelationships between emotions and the systematic and heuristic cues used in processing reviews. The results show that the systematic and heuristic processing of online reviews can produce independent impacts on consumer decision making. Both processing routes can interact with each other to affect the domination of one route over the other. In the case of a positive–negative sequence, consumers mainly follow a heuristic processing route. In the reverse sequence, consumers' concerns about the credibility of the reviews leads them to think more deeply (systematic processing) and actively evaluate both the argumentation quality and the helpfulness of the online reviews.

Confidence judgments in syllogistic reasoning: the role of consistency and response cardinality

ABSTRACTIn two experiments, we examined the resolution of confidence judgments in syllogistic reasoning and their heuristic bases. Based on the assumptions of Koriat's Self-Consistency Model of confidence, we expected the confidence judgments to be related to conclusion consensuality, reflecting the role of consistency as a heuristic cue to confidence. In Experiment 1, the participants evaluated 24 syllogisms with conclusions that varied with respect to validity and consensuality. In Experiment 2, the participants produced conclusions to 64 pairs of premises. The correlation between confidence and reasoning accuracy was low. In both experiments confidence was related to the consensuality of the responses. For consensually correct items, correlation between confidence and accuracy was positive; however, for consensually incorrect items it was negative. In Experiment 2, confidence was lower for syllogisms with higher response cardinality, or syllogisms that elicited a greater variety of conclusions.

Good to Be Novel? Understanding How Idea Feasibility Affects Idea Adoption Decision Making in Crowdsourcing

Soliciting novel ideas from the crowd is a paradigm shift for innovation that gains increasing attention from researchers and practitioners. However, studies examining the relationship between the novelty of crowdsourced ideas and firms' idea adoption decisions are surprisingly rare. This research adopts the path-of-least-resistance (POLR) theory as a new theoretical angle to examine the role of idea feasibility as a key heuristic cue mediating the effect of idea novelty on adoption decisions. We further explore factors that may amplify or mitigate this mediation. Using data collected from a laboratory experiment and a firm-sponsored crowdsourcing community, we reveal that firms tend to follow the POLR by using idea feasibility as meta-information to evaluate novel ideas in their idea adoption decisions. However, this tendency depends on external stimuli and constraints, such that the mediation of idea feasibility exists only when idea favorability from the crowd is low or when an ideator's prior ideation participation is high. Our supplementary study further offers preliminary insights on the extension of our proposed effects to the ultimate success of adopted ideas. These findings illuminate a better understanding of firms' idea adoption decisions and suggest ways to manage idea crowdsourcing effectively for new product/service development and improvements.

Staying Alive: TV News Facebook Posts, Perceived Credibility, and Engagement Intent

Facebook drives more traffic to news websites than any other site and is the most used social platform in the journalistic process, elevating the importance of what organizations post there. Central to consumer’s decision to engage is their assessment of credibility. This study examines how characteristics of Facebook posts promoting news trigger heuristic cues previously shown to help online consumers’ make such decisions. A 2 (likes, shares, and comments: low vs. high) × 2 (sponsorship: liked brand vs. suggested post) × 3 (post source: peer vs. brand vs. journalist) online experiment was conducted. Participants were U.S. adults (mean age = 35.7) who use Facebook. Results indicate that actions do not always match the assumed actions that traditional heuristic cues would predict. Results can be used by scholars studying credibility and by news brands and journalists to increase credibility and engage audiences on Facebook.

Fake Images: The Effects of Source, Intermediary, and Digital Media Literacy on Contextual Assessment of Image Credibility Online

Fake or manipulated images propagated through the Web and social media have the capacity to deceive, emotionally distress, and influence public opinions and actions. Yet few studies have examined how individuals evaluate the authenticity of images that accompany online stories. This paper details a 6-batch large-scale online experiment using Amazon Mechanical Turk that probes how people evaluate image credibility across online platforms. In each batch, participants were randomly assigned to one of 28 news-source mockups featuring a forged image, and they evaluated the credibility of the images based on several features. We found that participants’ internet skills, photo-editing experience, and social media use were significant predictors of image credibility evaluation, while most social and heuristic cues of online credibility (e.g., source trustworthiness, bandwagon, intermediary trustworthiness) had no significant impact. Viewers’ attitude towards a depicted issue also positively influenced their credibility evaluation.