
Jane Elizabeth MillerVanderbilt University | Vander Bilt · Law School
Jane Elizabeth Miller
Doctor of Philosophy
About
18
Publications
1,376
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
79
Citations
Publications
Publications (18)
People sometimes modify their behavior based on whether they believe they do more or less of that behavior than others. But are people's perceptions of their social-comparative status for behaviors generally accurate? The current research assessed accuracy and bias in perceived social-comparative status for a number of health-related behaviors. In...
The current study tested relative strengths of different comparison beliefs for predicting people’s self-assessments of whether they should increase their health-relevant behaviors (exercise, sleep, and fruit and vegetable consumption). Comparison beliefs relevant to three standards (perceived global, local, expert standards) were evaluated. Data w...
People often use tools for tasks, and sometimes there is uncertainty about whether a given task can be completed with a given tool. This project explored whether, when, and how people's optimism about successfully completing a task with a given tool is affected by the contextual salience of a better or worse tool. In six studies, participants were...
Past work has suggested that people prescribe optimism—believing it is better to be optimistic, instead of accurate or pessimistic, about uncertain future events. Here, we identified and addressed an important ambiguity about whether those findings reflect an endorsement of biased beliefs—i.e., whether people prescribe likelihood estimates that ref...
Rapidly growing research on parental mind-mindedness, a tendency to treat one’s young child as a psychological agent and an individual with a mind, internal mental states, and emotions, has demonstrated significant links among parents’ mind-mindedness, their parenting, and multiple aspects of children’s development. This prospective longitudinal st...
Background
To assess the impact of risk perceptions on prevention efforts or behavior change, best practices involve conditional risk measures, which ask people to estimate their risk contingent on a course of action (e.g., “if not vaccinated”).
Purpose
To determine whether the use of conditional wording—and its drawing of attention to one specifi...
During a global crisis, does the desire for good news also mean an endorsement of an optimistic bias? Five pre‐registered studies, conducted at the start of the COVID pandemic, examined people's lay prescriptions for thinking about uncertainty—specifically whether they thought forecasters should be optimistic, realistic, or pessimistic in how they...
During a global crisis, does the desire for good news also mean an endorsement of an optimistic bias? Five pre-registered studies, conducted at the start of the COVID pandemic, examined people’s lay prescriptions for thinking about uncertainty—specifically whether they thought forecasters should be optimistic, realistic, or pessimistic in how they...
The desirability bias (or wishful thinking effect) refers to when a person's desire regarding an event's occurrence has an unwarranted, optimistic influence on expectations about that event. Past experimental tests of this effect have been dominated by paradigms in which uncertainty about the target event is purely stochastic—i.e., involving only a...
The desirability bias refers to when people’s expectations about an uncertain event are biased by outcome preferences. Prior work has provided limited evidence that the magnitude of this motivated bias depends on (is moderated by) how expectations are solicited—as discrete outcome predictions or as likelihood judgments expressed on more continuous...
The desirability bias refers to when people’s expectations about an uncertain event are biased by outcome preferences. Prior work has provided limited evidence that the magnitude of this motivated bias depends on (is moderated by) how expectations are solicited—as discrete outcome predictions or as likelihood judgments expressed on more continuous...
Past work has suggested that people prescribe optimism-believing it is better to be optimistic, instead of accurate or pessimistic, about uncertain future events. Here, we identified and addressed an important ambiguity about whether those findings reflect an endorsement of biased beliefs-that is, whether people prescribe likelihood estimates that...
The phenomenon of ambiguity aversion suggests that people prefer options that offer precisely rather than imprecisely known chances of success. However, past work on people's responses to ambiguity in health treatment contexts found ambiguity seeking rather than aversion. The present work addressed whether such findings reflected a broad tendency f...
The current study tested relative strengths of different comparison beliefs for predicting people’s self-assessments of whether they should increase their health-relevant behaviors (exercise, sleep, and fruit and vegetable consumption). Comparison beliefs relevant to three standards (perceived global, local, expert standards) were evaluated. Data w...
People sometimes modify their behavior based on whether they believe they do more or less of that behavior than others. But are people’s perceptions of their social-comparative status for behaviors generally accurate? The current research assessed accuracy and bias in perceived social-comparative status for a number of health-related behaviors. In...