David Leiser

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev | bgu · Department of Psychology

This is the first book to explain why people usually misunderstand economic phenomena (as opposed to economic misbehavior). It explains the mismatch between the limits of our cognitive endowment and the specific way economics analyzes economic phenomena (both micro and macro). It documents numerous examples of misunderstanding and bias, and present...

Do folk economic beliefs have an ultimate cause? We argue that in many cases, the answer is negative. Cognition is constrained in both scope (via LTM) and depth (via WM). Consequently, laypeople are challenged by concepts essential for understanding complex systems, economics included: aggregation, indirect causation, and equilibrium. We discuss se...

Buying a retirement saving plan in Israel involves meeting with an agent whose interests may differ from those of his or her customers. The aim of the present study was to explore the effect of the advice given by the agent, along with that of two further factors: a fair disclosure statement regarding the agent's conflict of interest, and the custo...

In spite of extensive research on theory of mind, lay theories about the unconscious have scarcely been investigated. Three questionnaire studies totaling 689 participants, examined to what extent they thought that a range of psychological processes could be unconscious. It was found that people are less willing to countenance unconscious processes...

We report findings from a survey regarding the lay perception of the causes of the worldwide economic and financial crisis. Respondents (N = 2245) from a variety of countries were included: China (Hong Kong), Turkey, Russia, Israel, Germany, USA, and France. We have previously documented a range of factors that affects lay understanding of the cris...

Climate change is a most serious challenge. Committing the needed resources requires that a clear majority of citizens approves the appropriate policies, since committing resources necessarily involve a trade-off with other expenses. However, there are distinct groups of people who remain in denial about the realities of climatic change. This chapt...

Findings concerning the circumstances in which financial literacy training is effective seem inconsistent. This chapter aims at bringing order to this vexing situation. Its central thesis is that people’s aptitude to deploy their financial literacy relies on their ability to use cognitive and mental resources. This depends on various factors, some...

Much of the communication around the current pandemic stresses the exponential growth in the number of infections. We observe that this approach may backfire: it becomes difficult to convince people to obey strict constraints when what will be achieved is merely a short delay in that growth. Based on a method we successfully used in a context of pe...

Findings concerning the circumstances when financial literacy training is effective seem inconsistent. This chapter aims to bring order to this vexing situation. Its central thesis is that people's aptitude to deploy their financial literacy relies on their ability to use cognitive and mental resources. This depends on various factors, some endogen...

Conspiracy theories are often addressing often address political events and issues. However, the question of how conspiracy beliefs affect people's political attitudes and behavior was not satisfyingly answered so far. We argue that the link between conspiracy beliefs and political action depends upon the kind of political action involved. In four...

"From perceived control to self-control, the importance of cognitive and emotional resources". Peer commentary on “The behavioural constellation of deprivation: causes and consequences,” by Pepper, G. V., & Nettle, D. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Forthcoming

This chapter describes the main cognitive challenges presented by economic theory, and discusses the Good-Begets-Good (GBG) heuristic and how it enables non-economists to interpret the economy. It also describes the contribution of metaphors and the dangers of using them to understand economic issues. The chapter then discusses lay knowledge regard...

This study investigates patterns of lay perception of economics, and in particular the place of conspiratorial thinking regarding the economic domain. We devised four types of accounts in the economic domain, over a range of questions regarding different aspects of the economy: the classical neo-liberal economic view (which we labeled Econ101), and...

During recent decades, the ideologically self-secluded ultra-Orthodox society in Israel has become increasingly open to ideas and practices of the general Israeli society. The present study examines socially constructed knowledge about psychology and psychopathology among Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jews. It aims to study conceptions regarding psycholog...

In line with the rational expectations' approach, economists emphasize transparency as a key factor for Central Banks' credibility. In this paper, a psychological approach yields different results: trust in the Banks' policy is associated with the professionalism and independence of the Bank and not with its transparency. It is a subtle difference:...

Choosing a retirement plan is one of the most important economic decisions people make in their lifetime. Under Israel’s pension marketing policy, a pension plan is generally chosen at a meeting with an insurance agent, who may be subject to a conflict of interests. In this study, 263 participants were asked to choose a savings plan after meeting w...

Previous studies have suggested that when reading texts, lower achievers are more sensitive than their stronger counterparts to surface-level cues, such as graphic illustrations, and that even when uninformative, such concrete supplements tend to raise the text's subjective comprehensibility. We examined how being led astray by uninformative concre...

בחירת קרן פנסיה מהווה את אחת ההחלטות הכלכליות החשובות שאדם מקבל במהלך חייו. במדיניות השיווק הפנסיונית בישראל אדם לרוב בוחר תכנית פנסיונית בעת פגישה עם סוכן ביטוח שעשוי להיות נתון בניגוד אינטרסים. במחקר הנוכחי התבקשו 263 נבדקים לבחור תכנית חיסכון לאחר שנחשפו לסוכן ביטוח המסביר להם אודות שתי תכניות שונות ומסיים בהמלצה באיזו תכנית לבחור. המחקר בחן האם...

This study examined whether when lay people reason about everyday domains, ‎they do so in a slow, serial, deliberate process or using an automatic, effortless, ‎associative process, and whether there are differences in this respect between ‎content domains. The cognitive resources used by lay persons in reasoning about ‎everyday domains were invest...

In Israel's people usually select a pension savings plan during a meeting with an insurance agent who may ‎experience a conflict of interest between his fees and the best interest of the client. In the current study ‎‎263 respondents choose a savings plan after being exposed to the insurance agent explainations about ‎two different programs and rec...

Firm moral judgment deems dishonest acts as categorically wrong, and considers any self-serving justification for them as further dishonesty. People, however, commonly use self-serving justifications in order to feel honest even as they behave dishonestly, indicating reduced moral firmness. We test variation in moral firmness by comparing a sample...

Previous studies in the domain of metacomprehension judgments have primarily used expository texts. When these texts include illustrations, even uninformative ones, people were found to judge that they understand their content better. The present study aimed to delineate the metacognitive processes involved in understanding problem solutions - a te...

McCullough et al. suggest that revenge and forgiveness rest upon risk computation. Risk computation is implemented by emotions that evolved for additional functions, giving rise to phenomena such as betrayal aversion and taboo-tradeoffs, and specific patterns of forgiveness we have documented. A complete account of revenge and reconciliation should...

In configuration problems, such as the construction of a weekly study schedule, decision makers must assemble a combination of parts under a set of constraints. Interactions may be present between the parts, and more than a single objective function may exist, such as minimizing the number of days on campus and maximizing the interest level of the...

This study investigates the emotional responses to betrayal in two domains - social norms and personal acquaintances. The study relies on a newly developed Betrayal-Domain Questionnaire and the Portrait Value Questionnaire (Schwartz et al., 2001). Study 1 confirmed the existence of two distinct betrayal-domains differing in the pattern of emotional...

Social cognition refers to how people conceive, perceive, and draw inferences about mental and emotional states of others in the social world. Previous studies suggest that the concept of social cognition involves several abilities, including those related to affect and cognition. The present study analyses the deficits of individuals with schizoph...

Rules requiring the disclosure of conflicts of interest are often established to reduce information asymmetries and so protect consumers from biased information. We report on an experimental study assessing the effect of disclosure by an insurance agent of his differential earnings for two savings plans -- a pension plan and an "executive insurance...

Models of spatial behavior implicitly assume a direct connection between the individual's utility function and his actual behavior. In reality, this link is mediated by the extent and quality of his spatial knowledge. Without sufficient knowledge, the chosen behavior will be selected from a small number of known alternatives. Using a route choice s...

We examined lay perceptions of the recent financial and economic crisis through 1707 questionnaires, administered via internet, to a varied group of volunteers in a range of countries: France, the US, Russia, Germany, Israel, and sub-Saharan Africa. Respondents graded the contribution of a large number of possible factors to the crisis, and answere...

Corruption in the public sector erodes tax compliance and leads to higher tax evasion. Moreover, corrupt public officials abuse their public power to extort bribes from the private agents. In both types of interaction with the public sector, the private agents are bound to face uncertainty with respect to their disposable incomes. To analyse effect...

The functioning of the economic system is complex and technical. For its part, the public is constantly presented with information on economic causality. It is important for its members to assimilate this information, whether to further their personal goals or to engage advisedly in the democratic process. We presented economically untrained and tr...

Previous studies in the domain of metacomprehension judgments have primarily used expository texts. When these texts include illustrations, even uninformative ones, people were found to judge that they understand their content better. The present study aimed to delineate the metacognitive processes involved in understanding problem solutions — a te...

According to construal level theory (CLT) [Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2003). Temporal construal. Physical Review, 110, 403–421], psychological representation of information depends on “psychological distance”, that is, on whether the relevant information refers to the near or distant psychological space. While CLT was originally developed to accoun...

Professional judges in traffic courts sentence many hundreds of offenders per year. Using 639 case files from archives, we compared the Matching Heuristic (MH) to compensatory, weighing algorithms (WM). We modeled and cross validated the models on different subsets of the data, and took several other methodological precautions such as allowing each...

The ability to represent mental states of self and others to account for behavior is called theory of mind (ToM). This study examined whether ToM deficit in schizophrenia patients is a specific deficit in the cognitive component of interpersonal skills or a more global deficit, involving impaired information processing skills. Schizophrenia inpatie...

This study investigated children’s understanding of the effect of changes in supply and demand on the exchange value of everyday goods and services. Sixty-four children (aged 6, 8, 10 and 12) were told short stories and asked to predict whether certain circumstances would affect price or exchange rate. Explanations for their answers were also elici...

The present study investigated the extent to which the economic beliefs of participants from eight nations (Austria, France, Greece, Israel, New Zealand, Singapore, Slovenia, and Turkey) co-varied with national differences in economic development and modernisation. We predicted and found that greater human capital is associated with more economic s...

A multi-faceted questionnaire was presented to four groups of people occupying different positions in the economic world: students in psychology, technical high school students, grocers, and school teachers, in an effort to identify commonalties and differences in their concept of inflation. The questionnaire included concepts associations, closed...

This study explores the relations between psychosocial variables and lay economic thought. A number of studies have described cultural variations of individual differences variables, such as locus of control (LOC) and belief in a just world. The aim of this project is to test the strength of the relationships between these variables and economic be...

This study investigated patterns of beliefs concerning CAM (complementary/alternative medicine) in 403 subjects in Israel. Multidimensional scaling and generalised linear model analyses of their answers to a questionnaire evidenced two sources of organising factors: (1). commitment to CAM approaches and techniques is dependent on the specific appro...

Schizophrenics exhibit a deficit in theory of mind (ToM), but an intact theory of biology (ToB). One explanation is that ToM relies on an independent module that is selectively damaged. Phillips & Silverstein's analyses suggest an alternative: ToM requires the type of coordination that is impaired in schizophrenia, whereas ToB is spared because thi...

The authors investigated the development of children's understanding of birthdays using structured interviews of 102 Israeli children aged 4 to 9 years. To fully comprehend the concept of birthday, children must grasp the relationship between the social occasion (the birthday party), irreversible biological growth, and the cyclical nature of the ca...

The present experiments investigate point-to-point mapping of perspective transformations of 2D outline figures under diverse viewing conditions: binocular free viewing, monocular perspective with 2D cues masked by an optic tunnel, and stereoptic viewing through an optic tunnel. The first experiment involved upright figures, and served to determine...

Examines European children’s and young people’s conceptualization of political institutions and concepts. Political understanding empowers individuals to cope with the demands and opportunities afforded by citizenship. We need to learn more about how children and young people understand personal, national and international political phenomena, and...

This paper constitutes an attempt to derive the epistemological consequences of what is known in cognitive, developmental, and social psychology on the nature of naive theories. The process of cognitive development and knowledge acquisition is such that uncoordinated knowledge must result. There is no process active in long-term memory to harmonize...

This paper constitutes an attempt to derive the epistemological consequences of what is known in cognitive, developmental, and social psychology on the nature of naive theories. The process of cognitive development and knowledge acquisition is such that uncoordinated knowledge must result. There is no process active in long-term memory to harmonize...

This paper represents an attempt to summarize what is known in cognitive, developmental and social psychology on the nature of human naive theories, The parallel human mind / www is drawn, and it is shown how the challenges addressed in Data Mining and Knowledge Acquisition are present in the mind of the individual as well. The process of cognitive...

The present study investigates the distortions in the perception of artificial stereoscopic displays seen from an inappropriate distance and/or orientation. Stereoscopic displays represent 3-D information correctly, provided they are seen from the correct station point. The viewing point may differ from the correct station point in its distance or...

The present study investigates the distortions in the perception of artificial stereoscopic displays seen from an inappropriate distance and/or orientation. Stereoscopic displays represent 3-D information correctly, provided they are seen from the correct station point. The viewing point may differ from the correct station point in its distance or...

Two experiments assessed the relative efficiency of line graphs, bar graphs, and tables, applying a multiple-factors approach to study the effects of the type of the required information, the complexity of the data, and the user's familiarity with the display. information extraction tasks included reading exact values, comparing values, identifying...

comment on Clark and Thornton

-Mothers' intuitive models concerning the causes of fever in their children and their beliefs about the effects of different treatments were compared to modern, folk and ancient models of the subject. A questionnaire was devised, presenting statements that were generated from the responses in a preliminary study, and from ancient, folk and modem vi...

Two experiments assessed the effect of various static and dynamic computer 'wait' message displays on (1) subjective estimates of the duration of intervals during which a subject had to wait for the computer's response, and (2) subjective preferences among the different displays. All the static displays led to identical duration estimates. For dyna...

the impact of pocket money (money allowance) on economic outlook in adolescents

Stereoscopic information is distorted when the observer is not seated at the correct station point. Given a number of people who must watch a stereoscopic display simultaneously, what is the best seating arrangement so that as few people as possible will suffer from distorted perception? This question was analysed mathematically. Regardless of the...

A series of six experiments compared several approaches to displaying 3D point information on a CRT screen. The methods used included perspective, motion, stereo, and numeric information, in various combinations. Measures included error rate and reaction times on three tasks, which all involved deciding whether a given configuration of dots exhibit...

Estimates of mean velocity and total driving time were studied for trips on an urban driving simulator. Routes traveled varied in two respects: the order of the segments, and the proportion of slow and fast segments.Regarding velocity, order effects were found: the first and last segments of a route influence mean velocity disproportionately. Beyon...

This paper summarizes the cross-cultural study of economic socialization detailed in the previous papers in this issue. The sample was drawn from 10 countries: Algeria, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Israel (town and kibbutz), Norway, Poland, West Germany, and Yugoslavia and administred to children age 8, 11 and 14. The topics covered were: (a)...

The effect of different types computer “wait” message displays on the subjective estimates of the duration of intervals in which the subject had to wait for the computer response was studied. The displays were either static (a blank screen, the phrase PLEASE WAIT, or an epigram) or dynamic (a blinking PLEASE WAIT, a round clock-like display, or an...

Skilled performance is often associated with automaticity. Automatic processes are generally thought of as uncontrollable so that automaticity implies the lack of control. The Stroop Color and Word Test is one of the most cited examples of automaticity and uncontrollability of word reading. This task is also employed extensively to investigate the...

This study compared the economic understanding and attitudes of children living in the city with those living in a kibbutz, collective villages where an extreme socialist lifestyle is practised and preached. The differences in the answer patterns of the urban and kibbutz children were not very large, but the pattern was clear, and in keeping with t...

Four main experiments and three control experiments will be presented here. Most of them have been published previously (Gillièron, 1973, 1976, 1977).10 The first two were designed primarily to study the horizontal decalage between length and weight, whereas the last two were used to compare serial ordering and (simple) spatial ordering. Meanwhile,...

In this chapter, we describe a more general algorithm, of which the basic algorithm is a special case. We will then see what are the precise difficulties which prevent some subjects from seeing this underlying and familiar structure in the description of the task, and test these ideas by some additional data from transfers between variants of the b...

Mental simulation is very different from actual execution. In actual execution, a great deal of structure is given “for free,” because any actual execution perforce obeys the laws of logic and natural law. By contrast, simulated execution will only conform to them and be accurate to the extent that the subject has represented these laws in his simu...

Order structures are operational structures possessed by every adult. Adults are adept at ordering objects according to a given dimension, at solving transitivity problems, and the like. To study that structure in the adult, we devised a challenging modification to the classic experimental method. Instead of requesting our subjects to order a set o...

The task of our subjects was to describe the configuration produced by applying an algorithm to a set of elements. This final configuration may be seen as produced by three factors: the properties of the procedure, considered in isolation; those of the execution space, that is, the elements to which the procedure is to be applied; and finally, the...

At the outset, we presented the four levels of description required to analyze how people are able to understand or invent procedures, such as the basic algorithm. These levels are specific formulation, general algorithm, anticipatory schema, and operational structure. Part I was mainly devoted to the outermost two levels. In this second part, we w...

A detailed computational model for learning spatial networks is presented. Information is kept in a distributed, modular format: "condition-actions pairs." Knowledge of individual routes consists in chaining this piecemeal information. The model, called the Traveller, was fully implemented, and some sample runs are discussed. In learning a new netw...

An urban driving simulator is used to generate a data base for calibrating and testing a causal path model for subjective time estimates. The model specifies the determinants of subjective time through a web of direct and indirect interactions confirming a positive relationship between the density of urban environmental stimuli (e.g., traffic light...

In recent years, workers in cognitive science have come to recognize that cognitive structures should not be equated with computational ones. This realization has often been experienced as confusing. It is argued that cognitive science is moving closer to positions defended by genetic epistemologists. The course of development of a cognitive struct...

Israel has known a very high inflation rate and two currency changes in thepast five years. Coin size estimation by 97 subjects reveals a general tendency to underestimate sizes. The specific pattern of results suggests that coin size estimation is influenced by the subject's attitude towards the coin in question, that inflation and actual value of...