Kellen Mrkva

Baylor University | BU

The growing prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI) in our lives has brought the impact of AI-based decisions on human judgments to the forefront of academic scholarship and public debate. Despite growth in research on people's receptivity towards AI, little is known about how interacting with AI shapes subsequent interactions among people. We e...

In psychological science, replicability—repeating a study with a new sample achieving consistent results (Parsons et al., 2022)—is critical for affirming the validity of scientific findings. Despite its importance, replication efforts are few and far between in psychological science with many attempts failing to corroborate past findings. This scar...

The growing prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI) in our lives has brought the impact of AI-based decisions on human judgments to the forefront of academic scholarship and public debate. Despite a massive growth in research related to receptivity towards AI, little is known about how interactions between humans and AI shape subsequent interact...

In psychological science, replicability—repeating a study with a new sampleachieving consistent results (Parsons et al., 2022)—is critical for affirming the validity of scientific findings. Despite its importance, replication efforts are few and far between in psychological science with many attempts failing to corroborate past findings. This scarc...

In the months before the 2020 U.S. election, several political campaign websites added prechecked boxes (defaults), automatically making all donations into recurring weekly contributions unless donors unchecked them. Since these changes occurred at different times for different campaigns, we use a staggered difference-in-differences design to measu...

Individual-level research in behavioral science can have massive impact and create system-level changes, as several recent mandates and other policy actions have shown. Although not every nudge creates long-term behavior change, defaults and other forms of choice architecture can not only change individual behavior but also reduce inequities and le...

How can firms encourage consumers to adopt smartphone apps? The authors show that several inexpensive choice architecture techniques can make users more likely to enable important app features and complete app onboarding. Across six pre-registered experiments (n=5,968) and a field experiment (n=594,997), choice architecture interventions manipulati...

Choice architecture tools, commonly known as nudges, can powerfully impact decisions and improve welfare. Yet it is unclear who is most impacted by nudges. If nudge effects are moderated by socioeconomic status (SES), nudges could increase or decrease disparities across consumers. Using several pre-registered studies as well as self-reports of real...

This paper examines consumers’ attention traces (e.g., sequences of eye fixations and saccades) during choice. Due to reduced equipment cost and increased ease of analysis, attention traces can reflect a more fine-grained representation of decision-making activities (e.g., formation of a consideration set, alternative evaluation, and decision strat...

The authors suggest that mere attention increases the perceived severity of environmental risks because attention increases the fear and distinctiveness of attended risks. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were exposed to images of multiple environmental risks, with attention repeatedly oriented to a subset of these risks. Participants subsequen...

Loss aversion, the principle that losses impact decision making more than equivalent gains, is a fundamental idea in consumer behavior and decision making, though its existence has recently been called into question. Across five unique samples (Ntotal = 17,720), we tested predictions about what moderates loss aversion, which were derived from a pre...

Gilead et al. present a rich account of abstraction. Though the account describes several elements which influence mental representation, it is worth also delineating how feelings, such as fluency and emotion, influence mental simulation. Additionally, though past experience can sometimes make simulations more accurate and worthwhile (as Gilead et...

Attention is integral to mental simulation. Imagining how an event will be, was, or could have been requires attention to the event and its alternatives. How does mere attention influence people’s perception and experience of events? How does attention influence people’s emotions, judgments, and decisions? And do these attentional influences explai...

We propose and support a salience explanation of exposure effects. We suggest that repeated exposure to stimuli influences evaluations by increasing salience, the relative quality of standing out from other competing stimuli. In Experiments 1 and 2, we manipulated exposure, presenting some stimuli 9 times and other stimuli 3 times, 1 time, or 0 tim...

Attention and emotion are fundamental psychological systems. It is well established that emotion intensifies attention. Three experiments (N = 235) demonstrate the reversed casual direction: voluntary visual attention intensifies perceived emotion. In Experiment 1, participants repeatedly directed attention toward a target object during sequential...

Why do some events feel “like yesterday” whereas others feel “ages away”? Past research has identified cues that influence people’s estimates of distance in units like how many meters, miles, or days away events are from the self. But what makes events feel psychologically close or distant? We examine the hypothesis that increased simulational flue...

Are people intuitively generous or stingy? Does reflection make people more willing to give generous amounts to charity? Findings across the literature are mixed, with many studies finding no clear relationship between reflection and charitable giving (e.g., Hauge, Brekke, & Johansson, 2016; Tinghög et al., 2016), while others find that reflection...

Too often, people fail to prioritize the most important activities, life domains, and budget categories. One reason for misplaced priorities, we argue, is that activities and categories people have recently attended to seem higher priority than other activities and categories. In Experiment 1, participants were cued to direct voluntary spatial atte...

Creativity has been defined as the ability to generate ideas that are original and unexpected, but are considered useful or important (Sternberg, 1999). Moral imagination involves not only the ability to generate useful ideas, but also the abilities to form ideas about what is good and right, and to put the best ideas into action for the service of...