Jessica M. Choplin - US grants

This research uses Comparison-Induced Distortion theory to explain the role of verbal comparisons in decision making and evaluation processes with implications for public health, consumer choice, and many other fields. Previous research found that verbal comparisons bias evaluations. For example, saying or thinking to oneself that one portion of chocolate is larger than another or that one price is more expensive than another affects judgments of portion size and price. The research includes three separate projects designed to investigate the role of verbal comparisons in the creation of judgment biases that are known to affect everyday decision making.

The first project will investigate the effects of verbally comparing values to a reference point (i.e., comparing a portion to the amount that people typically eat, a price to what people typically pay, and so forth). Usually, people overestimate small differences from these reference points and underestimate large differences. But if verbal comparisons create these biases, then boundary conditions on this pattern of bias ought to be observed. A different pattern of bias would be expected in the range where virtually everyone describes values as "approximately the same" as the reference point, for example; and the words used to describe comparisons also ought to affect evaluations and decisions. The second project will investigate the role of verbal comparisons in the evaluations of values drawn from different types of distributions (i.e., bell-shaped distributions, skewed distributions, and so forth). The effects of verbal comparisons ought to differ across different types of distributions, because values are verbally compared to nearby values and where the nearby values are different across different types of distributions. A 600-calorie hamburger would be judged smaller if it were drawn from a distribution wherein there are many larger hamburgers and only a few smaller hamburgers than if it were drawn from a distribution wherein there are many smaller hamburgers and only a few larger hamburgers. People might then eat more or less depending upon their size evaluation. The third project will investigate the role of verbal comparisons in situations where decoys (nominally irrelevant options) affect decisions. Verbal comparisons between options and decoys might bias evaluations and thereby affect decisions.

The federal government has primarily relied upon mandatory disclosures of specified loan terms and costs to protect consumers from predatory lending. This research investigates the effects of intermediaries (such as mortgage brokers and lenders) leading consumers through disclosure forms on whether consumers read them, which sections they read, and how they process, evaluate, and remember the disclosed information.

With the use of a series of experiments, this research focuses on five cognitive psychological phenomena that might prevent consumers from gleaning the information from disclosure forms that Congress intended and interfere with intervention strategies intended to address these phenomena. First, under confirmation biases, consumers might skim forms looking for information that confirms, rather than disconfirms, their prior beliefs about the loan, causing them to miss important provisions. Second, consumers might also be more likely to miss important provisions if they look over forms investigating whether they were told the truth than if they look them over investigating whether they were lied to. Third, in conversation people assume that their conversational partners are cooperating with them in exchanging information and telling them about the most important things. This mistaken assumption might cause consumers to be misled if intermediaries emphasize unimportant provisions and thereby suggest that important provisions are less important or not worth looking at. Memory difficulties might also reduce the effectiveness of disclosure forms. Under list-strength memory effects, spending more time on some items reduces people's ability to remember other items, so discussing unimportant or innocuous features on the disclosure form could reduce people's abilities to remember important and potentially risky features. Under part-set cuing memory effects, sophisticated consumers who know that they ought to look for certain provisions might forget to look for them if they are reminded of some of the features they knew to look for, but not others.

Understanding how consumers process and use information directed at protecting them from predatory lending practices is important in two regards. It provides insight into how existing practices may have contributed to the current mortgage crisis. And, it can inform the development of new policies and revision of existing policies to better achieve congressional objectives.

With the support from the National Science Foundation's Major Research Instrumentation Program, Dr. Joseph A. Mikels and his four co-investigators will purchase an integrated electroencephalography/event related potential (EEG/ERP) acquisition system with eye tracking and physiology measurement capabilities. With these technologies, the research team will explore the neural and physiological underpinnings of several affective, social, and cognitive phenomena across the adult life span. This equipment will strengthen the teaching, training, and research infrastructure necessary to better serve DePaul University undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty. This teaching and research laboratory will serve the needs of both the faculty and students in several departments, and will represent a centerpiece program that will enable DePaul to become a competitive institution in the health and life sciences.

The research team includes active researchers in the field of emotion, cognition, social psychology, and neuroscience. Five collaborative research projects are proposed. Project 1 focuses on how changes in emotion and cognition across the adult life span influence decision making. The PI will measure EEG/ERP alongside physiological measures of emotional arousal to understand the underpinnings of age-related changes in decision making. Tasks will be administered in which older adults demonstrate biased and non-optimal choices in different contexts of information presentation, for instance the framing effect and ratio bias phenomenon. Project 2 will explore the causal mechanism underlying motivational shifts that occur in reaction to the finitude of life and life experiences. The project will utilize ERP methods to understand how mortality salience and emotional factors influence brain activation and information processing in older and younger adults. This work will also extend the evaluation of similarities between two pitted theories - Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST) and Terror Management Theory (TMT) - to the domain of art appreciation. Project 3 will use ERP and eye-tracking methods to examine the neural mechanisms of age differences in the processing of emotionally valenced information (i.e., the positivity effect) in the context of naturalistic evaluations. In addition this project will examine how the relationship between these judgment phenomena potentially affects age-related differences in home-loan choices. Extending SST and the positivity effect to this domain promises to shed light upon how to better protect seniors from fraud. Project 4 explores how working memory capacity affects cerebral localizations of various inference generations during reading. In addition, researchers will examine the time course under which inferences occur in younger as well as older adults while reading narrative text. Project 5 will use ERP methods to better elucidate the precise time course of lexical processing above and beyond traditional reaction time (RT) measures across the adult life span. Interestingly, older adults tend to be slower in lexical decision tasks, but they extract the lexical information as efficiently as younger adults. Using ERP methods, the current project will shed light on the relationship between features in RT distributions and ERP components in a lexical processing task and how they change as a function of aging.

This project draws its intellectual merit from the goal of extending the research capabilities at DePaul University to include neuroscience and physiology methods. These methods will allow the faculty and students to explore questions of a deeper nature, as described above.
The core of the research concerns changes in human cognitive function over time and this is an issue of importance given the aging population of the United States and the increasing numbers of older individuals in the workforce. The broader impact of this research also stems from its applicability across several domains of inquiry from cognition to social psychology and decision sciences from a life-span perspective.