Torsten Reimer

Purdue University | Purdue · Brian Lamb School of Communication

Solar panels promise to provide clean energy with much fewer environmental impacts than traditional energy sources. The adoption of solar panels may be practiced on an individual level, a community level, or even at a national level through corporate or government actions. While extant literature has observed that perceptions of monetary value, hou...

Terrorist threats and attacks provide major risks and sources of public crises in the 21st century. New probabilistic computing technologies possess the capability of increasing the success of identifying terrorist threats and solving cybersecurity and encryption problems more efficiently. However, to identify terrorist threats, these technologies...

An increasing number of residential homes are equipped with smart assistants such as Cortana, Alexa, and Siri. Adoption rates and the frequency of the usage of smart assistants vary across users and residential homes. Building on the theory of uses and gratifications (UGT) and the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology 2 (UTAUT2), the o...

Drawing from research on the halo effect and protected values, consumers’ adoption intentions and willingness to pay a premium for renewable energy were explored. Two theoretical models that involve moderated medi- ation were tested through two-instance repeated-measures linear regressions and non-parametric tests in a behavioral experiment with an...

In this paper, we present a first-time cloud-based eco-feedback and gaming platform that aims to promote energy conserving thermostat-adjustment behaviors in multi-unit residential buildings. To achieve this goal, we introduce a new modeling approach for personalized eco-feedback design integrated with a collaborative social game to assist resident...

Advancements in big data analytics offer new avenues for the analysis and deciphering of suspicious activities on the internet. One promising new technology to increase the identification of terrorism threats is based on probabilistic computing. The technology promises to provide more efficient problem solutions in encryption and cybersecurity. Pro...

Widespread efforts are being made to mitigate environmental degradation driven by human activities. From a supply chain management perspective, companies aim at improving their environmental and organizational performance along their supply chain simultaneously. Since consumers are the sources of manufacturing companies’ profitability, companies ar...

Research on metaphors has shown that individuals form associations between the verticality, brightness, and distance of stimuli and their valence. Building on the literature on conceptual metaphor theory, the pitch-valence hypothesis predicts an association between the pitch of spoken words and their valence. A study was conducted recording partici...

A proposal in favor of a meta-theoretical approach to the study of group communication is advanced, that has not received much attention in group communication scholarship: The study of the bounded rationality of groups and teams. The notion of bounded rationality comes with an invitation to analyze group communication from the vantage point of an...

The use of cellphones in conversations is ubiquitous. Although the overarching view of the social effects of cellphones in conversations appears to be negative, some research has also reported positive outcomes. The Cellphone Relevance Hypothesis predicts that effects of cellphone use on conversational satisfaction depend on the function of cellpho...

The notion of bounded rationality offers new conceptual and methodological perspectives on the study of groups that hold the promise of providing alternative interpretations of at least some of the process losses that have been described in the literature. We introduce a prominent task in group research, the hidden-profile task, that is often cited...

What affects people’s behavior when they dispose items? Our project takes a psychological perspective and aims to understand how people are making recycling decisions in front of bins, especially when they are under time pressure. This project focuses on two main factors: The distance of appropriate bins and the signage surrounding the bins. We are...

Persuasion research involves identifying speaker, message, and receiver factors that influence persuasiveness. Based on Probabilistic Persuasion Theory (PPT), two experiments tested whether attribute degree centrality and attribute tie strength affect persuasion in decision making contexts. A semantic network learning task was used to experimentall...

Purpose: Effective enrollment and treatment of patients in cancer clinical trials require definition and coordination of roles and responsibilities among clinic and research personnel. Materials and methods: We developed a survey that incorporated modified components of the Survey of Physician Attitudes Regarding the Care of Cancer Survivors. Su...

Bringing together probabilistic persuasion theory and semantic network models, past research introduced the number and strength of direct connections in a semantic network as a theory-based criterion of argument quality. In two experiments, the present research provides evidence that this argument quality criterion also increases persuasion in deci...

For the past 40 years, entrepreneurs and researchers have assumed that entrepreneur networks are important for startup ventures. This study takes this notion further by testing whether these benefits translate into tangible financial outcomes for a startup. For this purpose, the study integrates two extensive databases that have not been studied to...

Research on metaphors has established a relationship between the verticality, brightness, and distance of stimuli and affect. This project expands the literature on metaphors by exploring the connection between pitch and valence. Specifically, the pitch-valence hypothesis assumed that receivers of spoken messages associate higher pitches with posit...

Inconsistency is often considered an indication of deceit. The conceptualization of consistency used in deception research, however, has not made a clear distinction between two concepts long differentiated by philosophers: coherence and correspondence. The existing literature suggests that coherence is not generally useful for deception detection....

Recycling provides an important economic factor in the 21st century (Schultz, 2015). Even though opportunities to recycle as well as the public awareness of the importance of recycling has increased over the last decades, diversion rates are far from being optimal (see Binder et al., 2017). The literature on environmental behavior has identified se...

Communication researchers have deplored the absence of theory-driven criteria of argument quality in persuasion. Probabilistic Persuasion Theory (PPT) aims to offer theoretical criteria which define the quality of arguments, a priori. Past experimental research tested the validity and distinctiveness of cues as argument quality criteria. Drawing on...

Purpose: Conduct of cancer clinical trials requires coordination and cooperation among research and clinic teams. Diffusion of and confusion about responsibility may occur if team members' perceptions of roles and objectives do not align. These factors are critical to the success of cancer centers but are poorly studied. Methods: We developed a...

e18215 Background: As evidenced by the NCI-ASCO Teams in Cancer Care Delivery initiative, there is growing interest in applying an emerging science of teams to oncology clinical care. Treatment of patients on cancer clinical trials requires coordination and cooperation among research and clinic teams. However, little empirical research has examined...

Groups and teams are the central building blocks of organizations. Many organizational tasks and functions are performed by teams, and organizational communication is often organized in meetings and other interactions that involve teams and groups. An input–process–output framework is used to describe, classify, and connect key findings regarding t...

This article describes the care processes for a 64-year-old man with newly diagnosed advanced non-small-cell lung cancer who was enrolled in a first-line clinical trial of a new immunotherapy regimen. The case highlights the concept of multiteam systems in cancer clinical research and clinical care. Because clinical research represents a highly dyn...

Research on communication in workplace teams involves the communication processes amongst team members and how communication impacts team outcomes. Communication is important for a team's concertive effort to act effectively as a unit. Workplace teams often face complex tasks that require teams to share task-relevant information to coordinate actio...

In this comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of risk communication, the field’s leading experts summarize theory, current research, and practice in a range of disciplines and describe effective communication approaches for risk situations in diverse contexts, such as health, environment, science, technology, and crisis. Offering practical insig...

Applying the framework of ecological rationality, the authors studied the adaptivity of group decision making. In detail, they investigated whether groups apply decision strategies conditional on their composition in terms of task-relevant features. The authors focused on the recognition heuristic, so the task-relevant features were the validity of...

If each member of a group makes less accurate decisions than those of another group, can the former actually make more accurate decisions collectively than the latter? Through four simulation studies, the chapter shows conditions under which such "less-ismore" effect may occur. In each study, a group member adopted either the take-thebest or the mi...

In today's world of business and politics, collaboration is a common and valued practice. A group's potential to outperform individual decision makers is especially apparent if the knowledge of the members of a team or committee is distributed such that each member typically favors an inferior option at the outset. This biased information distribut...

The Brunswikian lens model has been widely used to describe how individuals integrate information when making a decision (Brunswik, 1943; Dhami, Hertwig, & Hoffrage, 2004). The chapter applies and extends the lens model to a persuasion context. Specifically, the chapter introduces the probabilistic persuasion theory (PPT) as a framework within whic...

Purpose ‐ The purpose of this paper is to present a review of the deception detection literature that arrives at a different conclusion from the one presented by King and Dunn. Specifically, the authors' review shows that people can detect deception at significantly above chance accuracy in policing environments. A new paradigm for deception detect...

It is often unclear which factor plays a more critical role in determining a group's performance: the diversity among members of the group or their individual abilities. In this study, we addressed this "diversity vs. ability" issue in a decision-making task. We conducted three simulation studies in which we manipulated agents' individual ability (...

Diversity Results. The results are shown in three sheets in the Excel file, corresponding to the results in Study 1, 2, and 3, respectively. (XLS)

p>Goldstein and Gigerenzer (2002) [Models of ecological rationality: The recognition heuristic. Psychological Review, 109 (1), 75-90] found evidence for the use of the recognition heuristic. For example, if an individual recognizes only one of two cities, they tend to infer that the recognized city has a larger population. A prediction that follows...

Research involving hidden-profile tasks suggests that groups typically fail to detect hidden profiles. In previous studies, group members always considered the alternatives in the choice tasks prior to joining the group and, thus, entered discussions with preformed preferences (predecided groups). We set up a new condition, in which group members r...

Groups often focus their discussions on information that all members know at the outset. To test how robust the sampling advantage for shared information is, a meta-analysis was conducted. The analysis integrated findings from 20 publications (45 independent effects), in which information sharedness was manipulated. Groups discussed more shared tha...

People often seek quantitative risk information, but, at the same time, many have problems understanding risk messages that contain statistics and numbers. Common hurdles with comprehending such messages can be related to the risk message itself, the message sender, and the message receiver. In this chapter, we review literature indicating that som...

Boundedly rational heuristics for inference can be surprisingly accurate and frugal for several reasons. They can exploit environmental structures, co-opt complex capacities, and elude effortful search by exploiting information that automatically arrives on the mental stage. The fluency heuristic is a prime example of a heuristic that makes the mos...

The concept of heuristic decision making is adapted to dynamic influence processes in social networks. We report results of a set of simulations, in which we systematically varied: a) the agents\' strategies for contacting fellow group members and integrating collected information, and (b) features of their social environment—the distribution of me...

Definition Fast and frugal heuristics refer to simple, task-specific de-cision strategies that are part of a decision maker's reper-toire of cognitive strategies for solving judgment and deci-sion tasks (Gigerenzer, Todd, & the ABC Research Group, 1999). Fast and frugal heuristics are simple to execute be-cause they limit information search and do...

Es wird ein Forschungsansatz vorgestellt, der zwei Forschungstraditionen miteinander verknüpft: Den kognitionspsychologischen Ansatz der "Simple Heuristics" und die sozialpsychologische Forschung zur Informationsverarbeitung in Gruppen. Die sozial-psychologische Gruppenforschung hat sich intensiv mit der Frage beschäftigt, wie die Informations- und...

Research on the Information Sampling Model (ISM) revealed that information items that are known to all group members at the outset (shared information) are more likely to be mentioned during discussion than information items that are only known to individual members (unshared information) (Stasser & Titus, 1985; Wittenbaum, Hollingshead, & Botero,...

Findings show that both positive and negative mood may hinder or promote information processing. In two experiments, we show that negative mood impairs transfer effects and learning. In the first experiment, N = 54 participants drawn from a training course for the Swiss Corps of Fortification Guards first learned to solve the three- and four-disk T...

The notion of ecological rationality implies that the accuracy of a decision strategy depends on features of the information environment in which it is tested. We demonstrate that the performance of a group may be strongly affected by the decision strategies used by its individual members and specify how this effect is moderated by environmental fe...

From a groups‐as‐information‐processors perspective, the notion of shared cognition is crucial to the understanding of team performance. This approach is used to comprehend the effectiveness of sports teams. Typically, sports teams are placed in a dynamic environment in which tasks are highly interdependent. Individual actions have to be coordinate...

From a practical perspective, (arguably) most consumer decisions are not made in isolation of the households in which consumers are inserted, yet we commonly treat them econometrically as if they were. The purpose of this workshop was to take some initial steps in defining needed research in household decision making that structurally accounts for...

Research on the hidden-profile effect (Stasser, 1992) has revealed that groups often fail to detect the choice alternative with the highest sum score if the individual group members' information points to another alternative. We conducted a simulation study in which we randomly generated distributions of information such that they did or did not co...

Konstantinos Katsikopoulos (katsikop@mpib-berlin.mpg.de) Abstract Dual-process models of persuasion (e.g., Heuristic Systematic Model) contrast the use of heuristics with systematic information processing. However, a great deal of attention is increasingly being devoted to the interplay between the two types of processing. We propose a multistage v...

Goldstein and Gigerenzer (2002) [Models of ecological rationality: The recognition heuristic. Psychological Review, 109 (1), 75–90] found evidence for the use of the recognition heuristic. For example, if an individual recognizes only one of two cities, they tend to infer that the recognized city has a larger population. A prediction that follows i...

Dual-process models of persuasion contrast the expertise heuristic "experts' statements can be trusted" with systematic processing of message content. Studies in which source expertise and argument quality were simultaneously manipulated revealed that the expertise manipulation affects attitudes when receivers are not highly motivated to scrutinize...

In a complex and uncertain world, humans draw inferences and make decisions under the constraints of limited knowledge, resources, and time. Herbert Simon, with his call for models of bounded rationality, can be seen as one of the fathers of the recently initiated research program on "simple heuristics that make us smart" (Gigerenzer/Todd/the ABC R...

We investigated if metacognitive thinking and knowledge acquisition in dyads improve individual problem solving performance and transfer to new problems. In the learning phase, participants solved several Tower of Hanoi problems and half of them were stimulated to metacognitive thinking. A second variable studied was if the learning tasks were solv...

Zusammenfassung: In der Persuasionsforschung (z.B. Petty, Cacioppo & Goldman, 1981) werden haufig die Angaben zur Expertise eines Kommunikators und die Qualitat der Argumente variiert. Gewohnlich gelingt es dabei jedoch nicht, diese beiden Faktoren unabhangig voneinander zu manipulieren, wodurch die interne Validitat der Experimente eingeschrankt w...

A new framework is introduced that models group decision making by using simple group heuristics (SIGH). We report results of a set of simulations that systematically varied (a) the group members' strategies (compensatory unit weight model, UWM, and a noncompensatory lexicographic heuristic, LEX), (b) the distribution of cue validities (J-shaped vs...

Routines may help groups to effectively reduce coordination requirements when solving interdependent tasks. However, routine problem solving always involves the risk of a negative transfer, which appears if a routine is applied to novel problems even though it is inappropriate. In this experiment, negative transfer was produced by first teaching in...

On the basis of an interdependent task, contradictory predictions on group achievement were tested by comparing group performance with a single person condition. The distractor hypothesis claims that group members distract each other from solving a task and that this distraction causes process losses if cognitive load is high (worse performance in...

Several studies on group problem solving have shown that perspective-taking may affect group performance. In this paper, a model is outlined in which the effect of performance attributions on group achievement is assumed to be mediated by the quality of group members' partner spaces (i.e. by their ability to recognize their partners' perspective on...

Abstract A recent trend in application software design is to extend online help systems in order to support exploratory and self-paced learning. Two different information formats, lists of action steps that have to be taken to achieve a goal (operative help) and explanations about how a function works (function-oriented help), were evaluated to ass...

This study examined the reliability of a German version of the Sexual Experiences Survey (SES) using a retest design. A total of 114 respondents were asked to complete the SES twice within a period of 3 to 4 weeks. Overall percentages of consistent responses at the two data points were high, with a mean score of 95% across all items. Separate analy...

In der sozialpsychologischen Problemlöseforschung wird häufig angenommen, daß Gruppen gegenüber Einzelpersonen einen Leisümgsvorteil haben, da eine Gruppe als Ganze in der Regel über mehr problemrelevante Informationen verfügt als jedes einzehie Gruppenmitglied (Winquist & Larson, 1998; Wittenbaum, 1998). Die aktive Verteilung von Informationen unt...