Denis Hilton

Université Toulouse II - Jean Jaurès | UTM · Cognition, Langues, Langage, Ergonomie (CLLE-ERSS)

The increase in global temperatures requires substantial reductions in the greenhouse emissions from consumer choices. We use an experimental incentive-compatible online supermarket to analyse the effect of a carbon-based choice architecture, which presents commodities to customers in high, medium and low carbon footprint groups, in reducing the ca...

The moral roles assigned to nations that took part in the Second World War cast a shadow over contemporary international politics. To understand contemporary moral beliefs about the war, we took 11 mostly student samples from 9 nations that took part in the European theatre of war (total N = 1,427). We asked respondents, in free and scaled listings...

The potential of psychological and fiscal framing interventions in motivating environmentally responsible behavior is explored in a context of long distance leisure travel. A series of discrete choice experiments is conducted with 789 participants. Framing conditions like information on CO2 emissions, an injunctive and a descriptive norm, fiscal in...

In this chapter, the authors review and discuss the drivers that affect sustainable consumption by focusing on behavioural interventions employed in public policies by private organizations and governments. They differentiate interventions that may promote intrinsic (pro-environmental or prosocial) motivation from those that consider extrinsic fact...

We discuss what makes a “good” environmental nudge from the policy maker’s point of view. We first delineate what is paternalistic about environmental nudges. We then discuss the effectiveness of nudges, including their paradoxical effects on the targeted behaviour, as well as possible collateral effects on the decision-maker’s wellbeing. We also d...

The present study examines current social representations associated with the origins of the Great War, a major event that has profoundly affected Europe. A survey conducted in 20 European countries (N = 1906 students in social sciences) shows a high consensus: The outbreak of the war is attributed to the warring nations' leaders while the responsi...

The present study examines current social representations associated with the origins of the Great War, a major event that has profoundly affected Europe. A survey conducted in 20 European countries (N = 1906 students in social sciences) shows a high consensus: The outbreak of the war is attributed to the warring nations’ leaders while the responsi...

In this article we use a social representational perspective on a large sample of European students to consider the interplay between pacifist attitudes and representations of World War I (WWI). WWI gave rise to pacifist movements across the globe. Across 10 European countries (N = 1,347 undergraduate students), we invited participants to report th...

This study uses an incentive-compatible experimental online supermarket to assess whether prior environmentally-friendly behaviour outside the store and carbon taxes motivate sustainable consumption. Previous research suggests that past decisions may influence current decisions because consumers compensate morally desirable and undesirable acts ove...

We summarize our perspective on social representations of history first presented by Liu and Hilton and extended in later publications. We situate our functional approach in the context of contemporary social psychological approaches to intergroup relations, particularly realistic conflict theory, social identity theory, and the literature on socia...

Studies show equal impact of sexual harassment (SH) on men and women, whereas lay perceptions are that women suffer more. We identify the phenomenon of minimization of male suffering (MMS), which occurs when people assume that SH has less effect on men’s well-being and which results in the perpetrators of SH on men being evaluated less harshly. To...

The present study addresses antecedents and consequences of collective victimhood in the context of World War I (WWI) across 15 European nations (N = 2423 social science students). Using multilevel analysis, we find evidence that collective victimhood is still present a hundred years after the onset of the war and can be predicted by WWI-related ob...

Entering the twenty-first century, economics increasingly looked to psychology and neuroscience in order to revise its assumptions about how people process information and make choices. New sub-disciplines of economics sprang up such as behavioural economics, psychological economics, cognitive economics, and neuro-economics which drew extensively o...

The present study addresses antecedents and consequences of collective victimhood in the context of World War I (WWI) across 15 European nations (N = 2423 social science students). Using multilevel analysis, we find evidence that collective victimhood is still present a hundred years after the onset of the war and can be predicted by WWI-related ob...

According to difference-based (e.g. counterfactual/covariational) models of causal judgement, the epistemic state of the agent should not affect judgements of cause. Four experiments examined opportunity chains in which a physical event (distal cause) enabled a subsequent proximal cause to produce an outcome. All four experiments showed that when t...

The aim of this research is to examine whether socio-demographics, implicit and explicit attitudes towards the environment predict sustainable consumer behaviour, measured using supermarket loyalty card data. The article uses an Implicit Association Test (IAT) and Likert scales to gauge implicit and explicit attitudes towards sustainable consumptio...

This volume contributes to a current debate within the psychology of thought that has wide implications for our ideas about creativity, decision making, and economic behavior. The essays focus on the role of implicit, unconscious thinking in creativity and problem solving, the interaction of intuition and analytic thinking, and the relationship bet...

Understanding the causes of human behavior is essential for advancing one’s interests and for coordinating social relations. The scientific study of how people arrive at such understandings or explanations has unfolded in four distinguishable epochs in psychology, each characterized by a different metaphor that researchers have used to represent ho...

As a well-known source of nutrition and pleasure, meat plays an important role in most people's diet. However, awareness of the "meat paradox"-the association of liking to eat meat but not wanting to kill animals-often implies the experience of cognitive dissonance. In two studies, focusing on meat production and meat consumption respectively, we e...

We address the way verb-based and rule-content knowledge are combined in understanding institutional deontics. Study 1 showed that the institutional regulations used in our studies were readily categorised into one of two content groups: rights or duties. Participants perceived rights as benefiting the addressees identified by the rule, whereas the...

Our research examined effective ways of presenting true descriptive norm information about sustainable consumption in a realistic online shopping environment, even when the current norms for purchasing green products are low. In Experiment 1, participants presented with both “strong” and “weak” formulations of descriptive norms purchased more eco-l...

Objects are evaluated more extremely if they are rare. As minority positions represent low consensus (i.e., only few others agree), they are associated with high gains if correct, but also with high losses if wrong. This renders the minority position a risky option. Study 1 showed that participants judged making a minority decision as more risky th...

Emergent properties of global political culture were examined using data from the World History Survey (WHS) involving 6,902 university students in 37 countries evaluating 40 figures from world history. Multidimensional scaling and factor analysis techniques found only limited forms of universality in evaluations across Western, Catholic/Orthodox,...

The potential of psychological and fiscal incentives in motivating environmentally responsible behavior in a context of long distance leisure travel is explored thanks to a series of controlled experiments on 900 participants. Framing effects like information on CO 2 emissions, injunctive and descriptive norms, in combination with fiscal incentives...

Is it worth to follow press or TV financial advice? Is it a good bargain for an investor to spend money to gain access to these recommendations? In other words, can an investor make a profit following analysts’ recommendations published in press or broadcast? We address the question by examining whether the release day or a few days after, media co...

Bonus-malus taxes appear to have been successful in encouraging people to change to less polluting travel options in France (e.g. the tax on large and small engined cars). We hypothesize that they have three possible effects on consumer behaviour. The positive effects are: 1) a price effect (the less polluting option is subsidized and the polluting...

Many studies have demonstrated that judgments in a variety of domains are reliably influenced by judgmental anchors. Defined as the assimilation of judgments under uncertainty towards a numerical standard, we show that the occurrence of this bias in sentencing decisions depends on a magistrate’s experience of the normally accepted range of sentence...

This paper investigates a cognitive consistency model of the directionality of conditional instructions and advice that use probability expressions to express uncertainty about the antecedent p. The proposed model combines world knowledge (conveyed by causal direction) with linguistic information (conveyed by polarity and negation), and predicts wh...

The study investigates intergroup forgiveness and its antecedents in the context of post World War II in Asia and Europe. An integrative social psychological and social representation of history and identity theoretical framework was used in which it is proposed that the societal context influences intergroup forgiveness of formerly victimized soci...

This chapter begins by reviewing some of the logical and linguistic properties of conversational inference with particular reference to the question of rationality in research on judgment and reasoning. It is shown how these logic-linguistic properties may be moderated by inferences about the social context of communication, and particularly the he...

Objectives: Two studies (one qualitative, one quantitative) introduce new conceptual and methodological angles on national identity. Design and Methods: The qualitative study used a focus group approach in order to examine how nationality operates as an individual as well as collective experience. British, German and French volunteers talked about...

The universality versus culture specificity of quantitative evaluations (negative-positive) of 40 events in world history was addressed using World History Survey data collected from 5,800 university students in 30 countries/societies. Multidimensional scaling using generalized procrustean analysis indicated poor fit of data from the 30 countries t...

An inductive logic model of the process of causal attribution is outlined and contrasted with existing formulations of the covariational model of the attribution process. It is shown how the definition of causality employed in the inductive logic model can be extended to the explanation of non-occurrences. Using an elaborated methodology, it is sho...

This paper reports the results of the first experiment in the United States designed to distinguish between two sources of ambiguity: imprecise ambiguity (expert groups agree on a range of probability, but not on any point estimate) versus conflict ambiguity (each expert group provides a precise probability estimate which differs from one group to...

We address the question as to whether judgmental overconfidence, as assessed by probability miscalibration, is related to positive illusions about the self. We first demonstrate that judgmental overconfidence measured with interval production procedures can be considered a trait, due to correlations observed in miscalibration scores in two sets of...

Gilovich, Medvec, and Kahneman (1998) have shown that real-life regrets for actions and inactions correspond to different emotional states. When people regret something they have done they experience painful “hot” emotions such as disgust or guilt, whereas when the regret is about a failure to act they rather experience wistful emotions. In four qu...

In this chapter, I will review some of the potential barriers to scientific cooperation between Britain and France, drawing on my own experience as a British social psychologist who has worked in both countries, as well as in America and Germany. It is the ‘bottom-up’ view of a researcher currently working in the French university system, but who h...

The acquisition of a negative evaluation of a fictitious minority social group in spite of the absence of any objective correlation between group membership and negative behaviours was described by Hamilton and Gifford (1976) as an instance of an illusory correlation. We studied the acquisition and attenuation through time of this correlation learn...

We investigate whether people prefer voluntary causes to physical causes in unfolding causal chains and whether statistical (covariation, sufficiency) principles can predict how people select explanations. Experiment 1 shows that while people tend to prefer a proximal (more recent) cause in chains of unfolding physical events, causality is traced t...

Testing whether risk professionals (here insurers) behave differently under risk and ambiguity when they cover catastrophic risks (floods and earthquakes) and non-catastrophic risks (fires), this paper reports the results of the first field experiment in the United States designed to distinguish two sources of ambiguity: imprecise ambiguity (outsid...

The psychological underpinnings of the door-in-the-face (DITF) effect are examined in 2 experiments. The research contrasts the traditional reciprocal concessions interpretation of the effect with arguments based on social identity and perceptual contrast. Study 1 replicated the DITF effect in contemporary France and clarified earlier methodologica...

This chapter explicates the use of the concept of social representations of history, and shows how it can function with respect to group identity construction and agenda setting. These representations include charters that serve a normative function of warranting group attitudes and actions by explaining them in terms of key events in the group's h...

In this paper I explore how the evolution of emotional expression and co-operative planning in humans may inform the way they communicate about risks, and what implication this may have for models of rationality in risk communication. In particular, I focus on aspects of human language that enable successful co-ordination around shared tasks that i...

The statement: "An agent harms a victim," depicts a situation that triggers moral emotions. Depending on whether the agent and the victim are the self or someone else, it can lead to four different moral emotions: self-anger ("I harm myself"), guilt ("I harm someone"), other-anger ("someone harms me"), and compassion ("someone harms someone"). In o...

A New Look at Rationality: The Logic of ConversationAn Attributional Model of Conversational Inference: Rationality in Interpretation and ReasoningConversational Processes and Causal ExplanationClosing the Circle: Thinking as Inner SpeechConclusions

Four experiments investigated judgments about voluntary human actions and physical causes that were embedded in causal chains ending in negative outcomes (e.g., a forest fire). Causes were judged for their explanatory quality, their effect on the probability of the outcome, and the extent to which they could be socially controlled. Results supporte...

We argue that logical expressions in human language enable speakers to perform particular acts as well as stating propositions which may be true or false. We present a conversational action planning model of coordinated reasoning, which we use to predict choice of logical expressions in situations in which two people cooperate in the face of risk a...

Miscalibration of judgement can be viewed as distinct from other positive illusions identified by Taylor and Brown (1988). Accordingly, miscalibration needs to be distinguished from other positive illusions in models of how stable tendencies in judgemental biases might affect behaviour (e.g. Odean, 1998). It is certainly possible that miscalibratio...

This paper aims to check whether the company analysts' recommendations made in German media on firms quoted on the DAX30 stock exchange have an impact on the prices of stock, and whether the degree of this impact varies according to the type of media: daily newspapers, daily financial press, and daily TV programs. Our intention is to study the econ...

The aim of this paper is to illustrate the contribution that taking a psychological perspective can bring to the study of decision-making in economics. The article pursues the idea that it can be useful to combine a psychological analysis of judgment and decision-making with an economic analysis of choice (traditionally focused on outcomes). Indeed...

Socially shared representations of history have been important in creating, maintaining and changing a people's identity. Their management and negotiation are central to interethnic and international relations. We present a narrative framework to represent how collectively significant events become (selectively) incorporated in social representatio...

Conditional directives are used by speakers to instruct hearers which actions are to be taken should certain events occur. The authors demonstrate that conditional directives are distinct from indicative conditionals in which speakers predict what is likely to be observed should certain events occur. The 1st set of experiments shows that goal struc...

We argue that logical expressions in human language enable speakers to perform particular acts as well as stating propositions which may be true or false. We present a conversational action planning model of co-ordinated reasoning, which we use to predict choice of logical expressions in situations in which two people co-operate in the face of risk...

Social representations of world history were assessed using the open-ended questions, “What are the most important events in world history?” and “Who are the most influential persons in world history in the last 1,000 years?”Data from six Asian and six Western samples showed cross-cultural consensus. Historical representations were (a) focused on t...

We measure the degree of overconfidence in judgement (in the form of miscalibration, i.e. the tendency to overestimate the precision of one's information) and self-monitoring (a form of attentiveness to social cues) of 245 participants and also observe their behaviour in an experimental financial market under asymmetric information. Miscalibrated t...

Ce texte est un rapport de fin de recherche issu de l'ACI cognitique.

Processes that govern the interpretation of conditional statements by lay reasoners are considered a key-issue by nearly all reasoning psychologists. An argumentative approach to interpretation is outlined, based on the idea that one has to retrieve the intention of the speaker to interpret a statement, and an argumentative based typology of condit...

Consequential conditionals are defined as "if P then Q" statements, where P is an action, and Q a predicted outcome of this action, which is either desirable or undesirable to the agent. Experiment 1 shows that desirable (viz. undesirable) outcomes invite an inference to the truth (viz. falsity) of their antecedent. Experiment 2 shows that the more...

We present a domain-specific analysis of control motivation, which distinguishes between three types of control needs: desire for mastery of one's physical and non-social environment, desire for power in one's interpersonal environment, and desire for autonomy. A new version of the Bains Control Motivation (CM) Scale is developed and validated for...

Daniel Kahneman and risky decision The work of Kahneman, Tversky and other psychologists has called the classical model of homo œconomicus into question. Many studies conducted in psychology and economics have shown that classical economic expected utility theory does not satisfactorily describe human behaviour under risk. We suggest that Kahneman...

This paper deals with bounded rationality as a way to describe behavior and focuses on the question of how to build such boundedly rational models. The first part is a discussion of the reasons why such models are needed and on the situations in which they can be regarded as more particularly useful. The second part examines three strategies of res...

We present a procedure for subconscious priming of risk attitudes. In Experiment 1, we were reliably able to induce risk-seeking or risk-averse preferences across a range of decision scenarios using this priming procedure. In Experiment 2, we showed that these priming effects can be reversed by drawing participants' attention to the priming event....

The Cognitive Basis of Science concerns the question 'What makes science possible?' Specifically, what features of the human mind and of human culture and cognitive development permit and facilitate the conduct of science? The essays in this volume address these questions, which are inherently interdisciplinary, requiring co-operation between philo...

In this Paper we measure psychological traits and show that they significantly affect behaviour and performance in a financial context. Based on the answers of 184 subjects to a psychological questionnaire we measured their degree of overconfidence, ie. the extent to which they overestimate the precision of their information, and self-monitoring, w...

The suppression of the Modus Ponens inference is described as a loss of confidence in the conclusion C of an argument ''If A1 then C; If A2 then C; A1'' where A2 is a requirement for C to happen. It is hypothesised that this loss of confidence is due to the derivation of the conversational implicature ''there is a chance that A2 might not be satisf...

Processes that govern the interpretation of conditional statements by lay reasoners are considered a key -issue by nearly all reasoning psychologists. An argumentative approach to interpretation is outlined, based on the idea that one has to retrieve the intention of the speaker to interpret a statement, and an argumentative based typology of condi...

The suppression of Modus Ponens by the introduction of a second conditional is introduced as a result relevant both to psychologists and to AI researchers interested in default reasoning. Some psychological considerations on the explanation of this effect, together with (a) their tentative formalisation within the framework of default logic, and (b...

Recent research shows that the framing of causal questions influences the choice of goals and preconditions as explanations of actions. However, research has not examined participants’ judgments as to which causal questions are most relevant to explain actions. Study 1 examined which question (“why” or “how”) participants would use to gain informat...

I suggest that contemporary economics shares many of the characteristics of methodological behaviourism in psychology, with its emphasis on the influence of motivation, learning, and situational incentives on behaviour, and minimal interest in the details of the cognitive processes that transform input (information) into output (behaviour). The emp...