Thomas Gilovich - US grants

This research seeks to better understand how social judgments are systematically affected by certain tendencies to revise, immediately or retrospectively, our interpretations and evaluations of events. The first set of studies examines the ongoing and immediate revision of outcome information in various gambling activities that is seen as an important determinant of people's unfortunate persistence in numerous gambling endeavors. This work expands on past research demonstrating that gamblers do not evaluate outcomes evenhandely; instead, successes tend to be readily accepted at face value, whereas failures are explained away and discounted. The present research further examines this biased evaluation process by varying the nature and availability of different types of outcome information and examining their effects on subjects' confidence and willingness to continue betting. Ultimately, it is anticipated that this research will lead to the development of procedures that will reduce people's persistence in patterns of dysfunctional behavior. The second set of studies explores the systematic revision of attributional judgments produced by increases in "psychological distance". In particular, this work examines the increase in psychological distance due to the passage of time and the secondhand knowledge of events. The focus of this work involves comparing attributional judgments made immediately or after a delay and comparing attributions made by subjects who witness some event firsthand with those made by subjects who only hear about that event from someone else. It is expected that with increased psychological distance subjects will see their own and other people's behavior as more consistent and more a function of personal dispositions. The third set of studies attempts to explicate a pervasive tendency to favorably revise our assessments of past decisions and courses of action. This "retrospective optimism" will be examined through a comparision of before and after opinion polls concerning the public's assessment of the wisdom of various government policy decisions.

This proposal requests support for research designed to examine the causes and consequences of questionable and erroneous beliefs. Some of the proposed studies continue earlier work on the misperception of random sequences and the biased selection and evaluation of information. However, the core of this proposal consists of research that examines how people's erroneous beliefs are bolstered by a tendency for people to have an inflated sense of the extent to which others think and act the way that they do. More specifically, this research seeks to explore a heretofore neglected mechanism that may underlie this "false consensus" effect, or the tendency for people to believe that their own beliefs, actions, and opinions are relatively common. This mechanism centers on the inherent ambiguity of most targets of belief. For example, when trying to assess the extent to which other people share one's belief in holistic health, one must first determine exactly what the term "holistic health" means. Such terms can be interpreted quite differently by different people, and it should be clear that the precise way that we construe such terms will not only determine our own reactions, but will exert a parallel influence on our estimates of the reactions of others. Because people fail to appreciate the extent to which others may "construe" the same object quite differently, their consensus estimates fail to take full account of an important source of potential divergence. A series of laboratory experiments will examine how such construal processes lead people to form exaggerated estimates of the commonness of their own beliefs, opinions, and behaviors, and how such distorted perceptions of consensus serve to bolster erroneous beliefs. Ultimately, this research should lead to a better understanding of the causes of, and cures for, distorted judgments, misguided decisions, and erroneous beliefs.

9319558 GILOVICH ABSTRACT Previous research indicates that people experience more regret over negative outcomes that stem from actions taken than over identical outcomes that stem from actions foregone. For example, someone who loses money by selling stocks to buy another one is believed to regret the loss more than someone who thinks about switching but hangs onto his or her current stock. As compelling as this might seem, it conflicts with an observation from everyday life: when people describe what they regret most, their regrets often center around things they failed to do. The purpose of this research is to further our understanding of regret by reconciling everyday observation with the results of previous research. The research has three objectives. The first is to verify everyday observation. Do omissions in fact predominate in the biggest regrets of people's lives? A series of structured interviews will ascertain the most common regrets in people's lives. The second objective follows from the first. If people's biggest regrets involve things they failed to do in their lives, how can we account for previous research that demonstrates the opposite result? This research will explore whether there is a systematic time course to the experience of regret: people regret their unfortunate actions more in the short term (as current research suggests), but their unfortunate inactions more in the long run (as everyday experience suggests). An experimental test of this proposed temporal pattern will be conducted. The third objective is to understand why this temporal pattern might exist. In particular, a series of laboratory experiments will examine: 1) why regret over action tends to diminish with time, 2) why regret over inaction tends to intensify with time, and 3) why our regrettable inactions remain more cognitively available to us in the long run. By furthering our understanding of the regret, this research promises to improv e everyday judgement and decision making. In addition, the examination of underlying mechanisms should expand our knowledge of basic social psychological phenomena such as post-decision dissonance reduction, subjective confidence, and counterfactual thinking.

This project examines the psychological processes that govern how people think they are viewed by others. In particular, the research examines two egocentric biases that result from the difficulty of getting beyond one's own experience or perspective. The `spotlight effect` refers to a hypothesized tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which others attend to them. Thus, people tend to believe (often erroneously) that `all eyes are upon them.` The `illusion of transparency` refers to a hypothesized tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which their internal states are detectable by others. Thus, people tend to believe (again, often erroneously) that others can `see right through them.` The proposed research has three objectives: 1) to examine the pervasiveness of these two biases in everyday social life; 2) to test whether these biases stem primarily from a common `anchoring-and-adjustment` heuristic, or from the difficulty people have in adjusting sufficiently from the anchor of their own experience; 3) to examine the significance of these biases in a variety of applied contexts. A better understanding of the spotlight effect and illusion of transparency should shed light on such diverse phenomena as social phobia, destructive `face saving` gestures and reactions to `losing face,` adolescent anxiety and conformity, non-optimal bargaining and negotiation, and marital harmony and discord.

What is the likely price of the Dow next year? How long can the
patient expect to live? How many lives are likely to be lost in a
looming military campaign? Questions such as these confront decision
makers every day. The proposed research seeks to understand, and
ultimately improve, the precise psychological processes by which such
judgments are made. Often such judgments are made by adjusting from
some initial starting point. The Dow is at 10,500 right now, so one
might estimate it will be at 11,000 next year. The last patient with
the same symptoms lived for 6 months, so one might estimate a
survival time of one year. Psychologists, economists, and marketing
scholars have investigated such "anchoring and adjustment" processes
during the past twenty-five years and have found that a person's
ultimate judgment tends to be too close to the initial value-i.e.,
the initial value serves as an "anchor" that biases the ultimate
judgment.

The present research seeks to build on existing knowledge of
anchoring and adjustment processes by pointing out (with empirical
justification) an important misunderstanding in the current
literature. The proposed experiments are designed to show that the
psychological processes invoked by real-world problems like those
above are quite different from those invoked in the standard
paradigms used to investigate anchoring and adjustment. Real-world
problems like those above involve explicit adjustment from the
initial value; the standard anchoring paradigm involves simple
priming of anchor-consistent information. By directing the field to
the true source of anchoring effects in real-world contexts, the
proposed research promises to point the way to strategies that can be
used to improve the accuracy of important real-world forecasts.

People's judgments are often inordinately influenced by the first information that comes to mind. Judgments of others' perceptions are unduly tied to one's own (Gilovich & Savitsky, 1999; Savitsky, Epley, & Gilovich, 2001; Keysar & Barr, 2002), impressions of others' personalities overly influenced by initial dispositional inferences (Gilbert, 2002) and answers to general knowledge questions anchored on irrelevant information considered early in the processing stream (Chapman & Johnson, 2002; Wilson, Brekke, & Centerbar, 2002). These effects, and many like them, have traditionally been explained as insufficient adjustment from an initial anchor or starting point, using what Tversky and Kahneman (1974) called the "anchoring and adjustment" heuristic. In short, people make judgments under uncertainty of all kinds by starting with (or anchoring on) information that is presented to their attention or that comes quickly and automatically to mind, and then serially adjusting their initial impression until an acceptable judgment is reached. Although originally used to explain numerical estimates, anchoring and adjustment has figured prominently in numerous theories of social judgment.

Recent evidence has cast doubt on the "anchoring and adjustment" heuristic. In particular, it has come to light that the experimental paradigm long used to investigate anchoring and adjustment does not, in fact, involve adjustment at all. These results, accompanied by failures to find conclusive evidence for a process of adjustment outside this paradigm, have led some researchers to reject the anchoring and adjustment heuristic altogether (Chapman & Johnson, 2002).

Research conducted with funding from a current NSF grant indicates that this conclusion is premature: The anchoring and adjustment heuristic is alive and well when one looks in the right places (Epley & Gilovich, 2001). This research indicates that people adjust in a serial fashion from anchors they automatically generate themselves as a value known to be close to the right answer but in need of tinkering. It appears, furthermore, that the processing of such "self-generated" anchors is common and pervasive in everyday life, making an accurate understanding of them critical to a broader understanding of social judgment.

The studies proposed here are designed to expand the work begun on the existing grant by: a) developing new methodologies for tracking the operation of true anchoring and adjustment; b) more clearly identifying the exact nature of anchors that stimulate adjustment and those that do not; c) expanding the scope of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic beyond questions of general knowledge and into social judgment more generally; and d) developing techniques for overcoming insufficient adjustment.

There is a fine line between productive intuition and misleading superstition. The proposed research seeks to explore this fine line by examining how the same intuitive processes that give rise to celebrated instances of creative insight also give rise to common superstition. The focus of this research is on the widespread belief, even on the part of highly educated people, that one ought not to "tempt fate" because to do so would be to increase the chances of a bad outcome coming to pass.

The proposed research is designed to test a theoretical model of such beliefs that draws upon previous research indicating that the act of imagination involves many of the same processes and brain structures as perception, and so the mere act of imagining an event gives it an aura of reality that increases its subjective likelihood of occurrence. Because negative outcomes often command more attention than positive outcomes, actions that put one at risk of such outcomes are likely to induce mental processes that make those outcomes seem particularly vivid, fluent, and familiar, and hence enhance their subjective likelihood. The proposed research, then, seeks to understand a common category of superstition-based negative thinking that stands in marked contrast to the excessive optimism documented in most psychological research on the general population. The proposed research will also examine the extent to which this theoretical model can help explain: (1) why people tend to be more optimistic about predicting events that have yet to be determined (e.g., a football game about to be played) than comparable events that have already been determined but whose outcome is not yet known (e.g., a videotaped football game), and (2) why people are reluctant to pursue "sudden death" strategies in which payoffs-good or bad-are resolved in one swift stroke rather than drawn out over time.

Abstract

"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
(Public Law 111-5)."


It is widely acknowledged that making decisions often involves the consideration of both "rational" and "intuitive" inputs. This program of research will examine how people decide the amount of weight to assign rational considerations and intuitive impulses when making decisions. The work will focus particularly closely on those situations in which people experience a conflict between intuition and reason and must choose whether to follow their "head" or their "gut." Much of the work will examine whether people pursue a "matching" procedure in deciding whether to follow one or the other. That is, it is hypothesized that people compare the features of a given choice problem (Can the outcome be evaluated quantitatively? Will the outcome unfold in a series of discrete steps?) with the features they associate with reason (precise, sequential) and with intuition (fuzzy, wholistic), and then choose to decide intuitively or rationally according to which input provides the closest match. The proposed research will also examine how the bodily associations people have to intuition (gut) and reason (head) influence their evaluations of intuitive and rational arguments, and, ultimately, the decisions they make.

By understanding the processes that govern how people utilize rational and intuitive inputs in making decisions, this research promises to further our understanding of (1) what constitutes intuition and reason, (2) why and when intuitive arguments can trump rational considerations, (3) how decision environments can be structured to increase the impact of either rational or intuitive inputs, and (3) how people can be aided in making more rewarding choices.