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The intentional mind and the hot hand: Perceiving intentions makes streaks seem likely to continue
Abstract
People can appear inconsistent in their intuitions about sequences of repeated events. Sometimes people believe such sequences will continue (the "hot hand"), and sometimes people believe they will reverse (the "gambler's fallacy"). These contradictory intuitions can be partly explained by considering the perceived intentionality of the agent generating the streak. The intuition that streaks will continue (reverse) should emerge in contexts involving agents that are perceived to be intentional (unintentional), and should be most common among those who are most inclined to attribute intentions to other agents. Four studies support these predictions, identifying both situational and dispositional determinants of the perceived continuity of streaks. Discussion focuses on the foundational nature of intentionality for perceptions of interdependence between events, the relationship between these findings and existing theoretical accounts, and the inverse possibility that people use perceptions of streakiness as a cue for an agent's intentionality.
... We define an unintentional discovery as a discovery which was not a product of an actor's planning or intention (Cameron et al., 2017;Caruso et al., 2010;Mele & Moser, 1994). We propose that a resource which is unintentionally discovered will be preferred to an otherwise identical resource which is intentionally discovered. ...
... Prior work suggests that an intentionally discovered resource would be preferred because intentionality has been shown to enhance value. Specifically, perceptions of intentionality have been found to increase perceptions of effort (Caruso et al., 2010;Malle, 2010;Malle & Knobe, 1997), and multiple lines of research have shown that objects that were believed to have taken more effort to create were valued more (Cho & Schwarz, 2008;Kruger et al., 2004;Morales, 2005). For example, Kruger et al. (2004) demonstrate that poems and paintings were valued more when people perceived their creation as involving more effort. ...
... Specifically, benevolently intended electric shocks (benevolent in that they were believed to heighten the chance that the recipient would receive a $50 reward) caused the recipient less pain, benevolently intended massages felt more pleasurable, and benevolently intended candy tasted better than otherwise identical unintended experiences that were randomly assigned to occur (Gray, 2012). Additionally, people believe that agents hold more skill if their actions are intentional (Caruso et al., 2010;Malle, 2010;Malle & Knobe, 1997). These findings imply that intentionally discovered resources would be preferred to unintentionally discovered resources as the skill and effort implicitly perceived in intentional discovery and appreciation of intentional actions may spillover into a preference for the resource. ...
An archeologist discovers a 1,500-year-old Viking sword at the bottom of a lake. Would people be more drawn to the sword if they knew that the discovery was intentional, or unintentional? The current research examines this previously unexplored type of biographical narrative-the biography of the discovery of historical and natural resources. We propose that unintentionality in the discovery of a resource can shape choice and preference. We focus our investigation on resources because the event of discovery is an inherent component in the biography of all known historical and natural resources, and because these resources are either themselves already objects (like historical artifacts) or are the building blocks of virtually all objects. Eight laboratory studies and one field experiment indicate that the unintentional discovery of resources heightens the choice of and preference for the resources. We find that the unintentional discovery of a resource triggers counterfactual thoughts about how the discovery might not have occurred, increasing perceptions that the discovery was fated, consequently driving choice of and preference for the resource. Further, we identify the level of expertise of the discoverer as a theoretically relevant moderator of this effect, finding that the effect is eliminated in the case of novice discoverers. It arises for resources discovered by experts with the rationale that unintentional discovery by an expert is unexpected, and therefore prompts heightened counterfactual thoughts. However, resources discovered by novices for which discovery is unexpected whether it is intentional or unintentional are preferred at equally high rates. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
... This finding is surprising, as works by Clotfelter and Cook (1993) and Terrell (1994) have previously documented the presence of an opposite effect-the "gambler's fallacy"-in the U.S. lottery market. The current literature also suggests that the gambler's fallacy prevails when random numbers are generated by mechanical devices, such as in lottery games (Ayton and Fisher 2004, Burns and Corpus 2004, Caruso et al. 2010. We use two sets of naturally occurring data to show that both the gambler's fallacy and the hot-hand fallacy can exist in different types of lottery games. ...
... In the other line of research, observations that the gambler's fallacy is more prevalent in lottery games, and the hot-hand fallacy more prevalent in games that require skill, are often attributed to the source of the random number generator. That is, we tend to observe the gambler's fallacy if the random generator is a mechanical device and the hot-hand fallacy if it is a human being (e.g., Ayton and Fisher 2004, Burns and Corpus 2004, Caruso et al. 2010. ...
... Specifically, if the random process is believed to be generated by a mechanical device, people expect negative recency; if a human being generates the sequences, however, people expect positive recency. For example, the experimental study by Caruso et al. (2010) demonstrated that human subjects tend to predict the continuation of a streak of outcomes when the agents that generate it are perceived to be intentional. In contrast, when generated by a mechanical device (as in lottery games), people believe the streak will end; that is, the gambler's fallacy dominates. ...
We demonstrate that lottery markets can exhibit the “hot-hand” phenomenon, in which past winning numbers tend to have a greater share of the betting proportion in future draws even though past and future events are independent. This is surprising as previous works have instead documented the presence of an opposite effect, the “gambler’s fallacy” in the U.S. lottery market. The current literature also suggests that the gambler’s fallacy prevails when random numbers are generated by mechanical devices, such as in lottery games. We use two sets of naturally occurring data to show that both the gambler’s fallacy and the hot-hand fallacy can exist in different types of lottery games. We then run online experimental studies that mimic lottery games with one, two, or three winning numbers. Our experimental results show that the number of winning prizes impacts behavior. In particular, whereas a single-prize game leads to a strong presence of the gambler’s fallacy, we observe a significant increase in hot-hand behavior in multiple-prize games with two or three winning numbers.
This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, behavioral economics.
... This finding is surprising, as works by Clotfelter and Cook (1993) and Terrell (1994) have previously documented the presence of an opposite effect-the "gambler's fallacy"-in the U.S. lottery market. The current literature also suggests that the gambler's fallacy prevails when random numbers are generated by mechanical devices, such as in lottery games (Ayton and Fisher 2004, Burns and Corpus 2004, Caruso et al. 2010. We use two sets of naturally occurring data to show that both the gambler's fallacy and the hot-hand fallacy can exist in different types of lottery games. ...
... In the other line of research, observations that the gambler's fallacy is more prevalent in lottery games, and the hot-hand fallacy more prevalent in games that require skill, are often attributed to the source of the random number generator. That is, we tend to observe the gambler's fallacy if the random generator is a mechanical device and the hot-hand fallacy if it is a human being (e.g., Ayton and Fisher 2004, Burns and Corpus 2004, Caruso et al. 2010. ...
... Specifically, if the random process is believed to be generated by a mechanical device, people expect negative recency; if a human being generates the sequences, however, people expect positive recency. For example, the experimental study by Caruso et al. (2010) demonstrated that human subjects tend to predict the continuation of a streak of outcomes when the agents that generate it are perceived to be intentional. In contrast, when generated by a mechanical device (as in lottery games), people believe the streak will end; that is, the gambler's fallacy dominates. ...
We demonstrate that lottery markets can exhibit the "hot-hand" phenomenon, in which past winning numbers tend to receive a greater share of the bets in future draws, even though past and future events are independent. This finding is surprising, as works by Clotfelter and Cook (1993) and Terrell (1994) have previously documented the presence of an opposite effect-the "gambler's fallacy"-in the U.S. lottery market. The current literature also suggests that the gambler's fallacy prevails when random numbers are generated by mechanical devices, such as in lottery games (Ayton and Fisher 2004, Burns and Corpus 2004, Caruso et al. 2010). We use two sets of naturally occurring data to show that both the gambler's fallacy and the hot-hand fallacy can exist in different types of lottery games. We then run online experimental studies that mimic lottery games with one, two, or three winning numbers. Our experimental results show that the number of winning prizes impacts behavior. In particular, whereas a single-prize game leads to a strong presence of the gambler's fallacy, we observe a significant increase in hot-hand behavior in multiple-prize games with two or three winning numbers.
... In contexts of intentional human performance, such as athletic performance, people tend to predict streak's continuation, exhibiting the hot-hand effect (Gilovich, Vallone, & Tversky, 1985; see Alter & Oppenheimer, 2006 for a review). Yet, this tendency to predict the continuation of the streak may be driven by the availability heuristic, with predictions reflecting a simple repetition of the most accessible past outcome; or by the representativeness heuristic, because streaky performances have been shown to be representative of intentionally generated outcomes (Caruso, Waytz, & Epley, 2010). Thus, it seems hard to disentangle representativeness from availability in such contexts because both heuristics predict streak's continuation. ...
... In light of the current results, particularly studies 4 and 5, we should also consider their relevance to the hot-hand effect, the prediction of the continuation of a streak in contexts of intentional mechanisms, such as human performance (e.g., Caruso et al., 2010;Gilovich et al., 1985). In studies 4 and 5, participants had a particularly accessible representation of physical performance that expects failure as the athlete gets older. ...
... In fact, previous research has suggested that the hot-hand effect may depend on the representations of the event accessible for the prediction. For instance, streaks are more likely to be continued when the agent performing the streak is represented as behaving intentionally (Caruso et al., 2010). Moreover, people's goals seem to activate different representations of the event in order to guide self-serving predictions regarding an unfolding streak (Braga et al., 2015). ...
People's intuitive predictions under uncertainty may rely on the representativeness or on the availability heuristics (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). However, the distinction between these two heuristics has never been clear, and both have been proposed to underlie the same judgment tasks. For instance, when judging what outcome is likely to be next in a coin flip after a streak, representativeness leads to predicting an alternation in the outcome, ending the streak (gambler's fallacy), whereas availability leads to predicting the streak's continuation. We propose that availability (direct use of accessibility) is computed earlier than representativeness (comparing to an abstract representation of the expected outcome). In five studies, we pit one heuristic against the other in binary prediction tasks, both in coin flip and athlete's performance contexts. We find that, although the streak outcome is cognitively more available, judgments are usually based on representativeness, leading more often to a prediction of an alternation after a streak. However, under time-pressure conditions, representativeness processes are constrained and participants are more prone to base their predictions on the most salient and cognitively available outcomes.
... More recently, Caruso, Waytz, and Epley (2010) proposed that, because intentional agents behave systematically toward a goal, and because they are perceived to be skillfully guiding their action and therefore controlling the outcome (Malle & Knobe, 1997), the perceived intentionality of the generator agent should underlie the belief in the hot hand. In a series of studies, Caruso et al. (2010) manipulated the perceived intention of the generator agent, while controlling its randomness and humanness, and found that, when agents are perceived to be intentional (unintentional), streaks are expected to continue (stop). ...
... More recently, Caruso, Waytz, and Epley (2010) proposed that, because intentional agents behave systematically toward a goal, and because they are perceived to be skillfully guiding their action and therefore controlling the outcome (Malle & Knobe, 1997), the perceived intentionality of the generator agent should underlie the belief in the hot hand. In a series of studies, Caruso et al. (2010) manipulated the perceived intention of the generator agent, while controlling its randomness and humanness, and found that, when agents are perceived to be intentional (unintentional), streaks are expected to continue (stop). ...
... Extant research on predictions of binary random outcomes following a streak has identified conditions leading to predictions of a streak's continuation, the hot hand, or its end, the gambler's fallacy. Particularly important for these predictions is the perceived intentionality of the mechanism generating the sequence (Caruso et al., 2010). In the present paper, we show that the motivation to observe a certain outcome (the streak's continuation or its end) affects participants' reasoning, in terms of their causal attributions, their beliefs, and consequently their predictions. ...
The present paper explores the role of motivation to observe a certain outcome in people's predictions, causal attributions, and beliefs about a streak of binary outcomes (basketball scoring shots). In two studies we found that positive streaks (points scored by the participants' favourite team) lead participants to predict the streak's continuation (belief in the hot hand), but negative streaks lead to predictions of its end (gambler's fallacy). More importantly, these wishful predictions are supported by strategic attributions and beliefs about how and why a streak might unfold. Results suggest that the effect of motivation on predictions is mediated by a serial path via causal attributions to the teams at play and belief in the hot hand.
... More recently, Caruso, Waytz, and Epley (2010) proposed that, because intentional agents behave systematically toward a goal, and because they are perceived to be skillfully guiding their action and therefore controlling the outcome (Malle & Knobe, 1997), the perceived intentionality of the generator agent should underlie the belief in the hot hand. In a series of studies, Caruso et al. (2010) manipulated the perceived intention of the generator agent, while controlling its randomness and humanness, and found that, when agents are perceived to be intentional (unintentional), streaks are expected to continue (stop). ...
... More recently, Caruso, Waytz, and Epley (2010) proposed that, because intentional agents behave systematically toward a goal, and because they are perceived to be skillfully guiding their action and therefore controlling the outcome (Malle & Knobe, 1997), the perceived intentionality of the generator agent should underlie the belief in the hot hand. In a series of studies, Caruso et al. (2010) manipulated the perceived intention of the generator agent, while controlling its randomness and humanness, and found that, when agents are perceived to be intentional (unintentional), streaks are expected to continue (stop). ...
... Extant research on predictions of binary random outcomes following a streak has identified conditions leading to predictions of a streak's continuation, the hot hand, or its end, the gambler's fallacy. Particularly important for these predictions is the perceived intentionality of the mechanism generating the sequence (Caruso et al., 2010). In the present paper, we show that the motivation to observe a certain outcome (the streak's continuation or its end) affects participants' reasoning, in terms of their causal attributions, their beliefs, and consequently their predictions. ...
Predictions about binary events are dominated by two well-known effects: the gambler's fallacy (the tendency to alternate after a streak) and the hot-hand (the tendency to continue the streak). We argue that people can use either one or the other tendency strategically, depending on the motivation for the streak to continue or to cease. The choice should also underlie shifts in causal attributions underlying such reasoning. In a series of studies using human performance contexts (predictions during a basketball games), we show that the streak is expected to continue when it represents a favorable outcome, but is expected to cease if it represents a negative outcome. Our data also suggest that predictions of continuation (hot-hand) are related to internal causal attributions, whereas alternations (gambler's fallacy) are not. Implications for the understanding of both decision mechanisms and the role of motivation in such processes are discussed.
... When a fair coin is tossed five times and results in consecutive heads, people tend to believe that the outcome of the next toss will be tails, even though the probability of the next outcome is entirely unrelated to the previous outcomes and remains at 50%; this is an example of the so-called "gambler's fallacy," which is the erroneous belief that a different outcome is more likely to occur than previous trials immediately following a sequence of consecutive identical outcomes (Laplace, 1825(Laplace, /2019Tversky & Kahneman, 1971, 1974. In particular, previous studies have suggested that people are more prone to fall into the gambler's fallacy when the sequence generation mechanism is specified to be random (e.g., Ayton & Fischer, 2004;Burns & Corpus, 2004;Caruso et al., 2010; for a review, see Oskarsson et al., 2009). However, gamblers playing baccarat, one of the most popular casino games, are suggested to exhibit a fallacy that is entirely opposite to the gambler's fallacy (Huang, 2016), despite the evident randomness of the generation mechanism. ...
... Conversely, they exhibit positive recency when they perceive the sequence generation mechanism as reliant on skilled human performance (e.g., sports). This account has been supported by findings from experimental studies (e.g., Ayton & Fisher, 2004;Burns & Corpus, 2004;Caruso et al., 2010). For example, Ayton and Fisher (2004) conducted Experiment 1 involving a simulated roulette that generated entirely random sequences. ...
This study investigated the cognitive biases underlying baccarat gambling behaviors through an analysis of 17,970,830 games played by 6,625 customers in a casino. Baccarat, a popular high-stakes game in East Asia, involves predicting the outcome of two hands, where the results are inherently unpredictable, similar to the structure of games such as roulette. In contrast to existing theories predicting the emergence of the gambler’s fallacy—or negative recency—when the outcome generation mechanism is clearly random, most baccarat gamblers exhibit the opposite bias, demonstrating a tendency toward positive recency. Specifically, customers increasingly placed bets on future outcomes to match past consecutive outcomes as streaks grew longer. This trend-following behavior diminished when streaks were interrupted, ruling out explanations based on the “hot outcome” fallacy, which is typically associated with adaptive behaviors such as resource foraging. Moreover, betting amounts increased slightly but reliably when gamblers followed trends. These findings provide new insights into cognitive biases in gambling, challenge established theories of positive and negative recency, and underscore the importance of considering the unique structural characteristics of specific games when studying gambling behavior. This perspective may also contribute to a deeper understanding of pathological and problem gambling.
... Numerous studies have shown that thinking in a foreign language can lead to both positive and negative decision-making processes and outcomes. On one hand, some scholars have stated that using a foreign language can reduce biases in decision-making, because this process enables people to rely on systematic processes that are more remote from the immediate intuitive system than they are when one is thinking in one's native language [8]. For example, when using their native language, one study's participants were less likely to overestimate the likelihood of positive outcomes after a series of previous successes than when the situations were presented in their second language [8]. ...
... On one hand, some scholars have stated that using a foreign language can reduce biases in decision-making, because this process enables people to rely on systematic processes that are more remote from the immediate intuitive system than they are when one is thinking in one's native language [8]. For example, when using their native language, one study's participants were less likely to overestimate the likelihood of positive outcomes after a series of previous successes than when the situations were presented in their second language [8]. In addition, Keysar, Hayakawa and An [9] reported that, when the Asian Disease Paradigm was introduced in a foreign language, asymmetry in framing effects was lessened in relation to both losses and gains. ...
The present study examined foreign language effects on the decisions made in a series of strategic behavioral games (e.g., the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Oligopolistic Competition, and the Volunteer’s Dilemma). We recruited 154 native Chinese-speaking university students, with English as their second language, as participants. They were asked to make decisions while playing four simple behavioral games in either Chinese or English language version and to complete a Language History Questionnaire. The results showed that 1) the participants in each language group performed differently in the Prisoner’s Dilemma Game and in one condition of the Volunteer’s Dilemma Game which involved a relatively high level of uncertainty; and 2) foreign language proficiency, frequency of application and cultural identity triggered by the corresponding foreign language moderated the foreign language effects. This pattern of results is consistent with the Cultural Accommodation Hypothesis and the risk-aversion preference to use one’s native language.
... Attributions of intentionality impact people's inference about not only the motivation of the agent, but also the ability of the agent. Specifically, if people believe that an agent's actions unexpectedly led to an outcome, they would infer that the agent possesses less skill and exerted less effort to achieve the outcome than if they believe that the outcome was intended by the agent (Caruso, Waytz, and Epley 2010;Malle and Knobe 1997). For example, people believe that a streak of consistent but random events will continue to emerge (e.g., an agent is likely to get a hot hand) if they attribute intentionality to the streak's agent. ...
... For example, people believe that a streak of consistent but random events will continue to emerge (e.g., an agent is likely to get a hot hand) if they attribute intentionality to the streak's agent. Similarly, they believe that a streak of random events will reverse if they do not attribute intentionality to the streak's agent (Caruso et al. 2010). ...
Product tests are a common feature before any product launch. During product tests, marketers might discover that the product can deliver additional unintended benefits to the users. Should marketers communicate such unexpectedly found benefits to their potential customers as an unexpectedly discovered benefit or as an intended benefit? Across six experiments, including a field experiment, the current research shows that framing a product benefit as unexpected increases desire for the product, when consumers have a heightened motivation to seek rewards. However, framing an undesirable product feature (e.g., a side effect) as unexpected can negatively impact product desirability for consumers, who have a heightened motivation to avoid losses. Finally, highlighting another managerially important boundary condition, our findings show that the unexpected-framing effect is attenuated when the benefit framed as unexpected is incongruent with the product category. Theoretical and managerial implications of unexpected framing are discussed.
... In principle, people may notice these co-occurrences without assuming that the events are causally connected-for example, they perceive the co-occurrence as a random coincidence. In practice, however, people appear to find it hard to resist attributing co-occurrences to a proximal causal mechanism, rather than to chance (e.g., Braga, Mata, Ferreira, & Sherman, 2016;Caruso, Waytz, & Epley, 2010). As van Prooijen et al. (2018), p. 321 wrote: ...
... Each participant was presented with one scenario describing a streak of human tragedies (either the deaths of three or four journalists, or the poisoning of three or four local politicians). Streaks in events, even when they occur by chance, often trigger implausible causal perceptions such as gambler's belief in a "hot hand" (Braga et al., 2016;Caruso et al., 2010). Conspiracy explanations for the most recent of these tragedies were measured, and participants were also asked whether the events are causally connected. ...
Previous research indicates that conspiracy thinking is informed by the psychological imposition of order and meaning on the environment, including the perception of causal relations between random events. Four studies indicate that conspiracy belief is driven by readiness to draw implausible causal connections even when events are not random, but instead conform to an objective pattern. Study 1 (N = 195) showed that conspiracy belief was related to the causal interpretation of real‐life, spurious correlations (e.g., between chocolate consumption and Nobel prizes). In Study 2 (N = 216), this effect held adjusting for correlates including magical and non‐analytical thinking. Study 3 (N = 214) showed that preference for conspiracy explanations was associated with the perception that a focal event (e.g., the death of a journalist) was causally connected to similar, recent events. Study 4 (N = 211) showed that conspiracy explanations for human tragedies were favoured when they comprised part of a cluster of similar events (vs. occurring in isolation); crucially, they were independently increased by a manipulation of causal perception. We discuss the implications of these findings for previous, mixed findings in the literature and for the relation between conspiracy thinking and other cognitive processes.
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... Although the perpetrator did not succeed in the attempted harm condition, their intention to harm symbolically damaged the team (as assessed in the item 'damage to the team'). Additionally, people's intentions are used as reliable predictors of future behavior (Caruso, Waytz, & Epley, 2010;Waytz, Gray, Epley, & Wegner, 2010). Therefore, anger about the intention to harm (and the subsequent punishment of the perpetrator) could protect the team from deviant members and other team members from potential harm in the future. ...
... Anger at the intent to harm could ultimately serve to prevent future moral violations. Intentional harm-doers could commit additional violations because intentions suggests that there may be future repetition of an action (Caruso et al., 2010;Waytz et al., 2010), even if they were unsuccessful in their initial attempt. Accordingly, previous research has shown that the willingness to punish is reduced when the perpetrator signals understanding that they have committed a moral violation (Funk, McGeer, & Gollwitzer, 2014). ...
Moral violations seem to elicit moral outrage because of the wrongfulness of the deed. However, recent studies have questioned the existence of moral outrage, because moral violations are confounded with the harm done to victims. Such harm elicits empathic anger rather than moral outrage (Batson et al., 2007; Batson et al., 2009). Thus, moral outrage is triggered by the wrongfulness of an action (i.e., a perpetrator's intention to harm), whereas empathic anger is triggered by its harmfulness (i.e., the actual harm done). Four studies (N = 1065) in varying contexts orthogonally crossed these antecedents of anger to differentiate between moral outrage and empathic anger. The results demonstrate that anger mainly emerged from the intention to harm, rather than the actual harm done. In contrast, the actual harm elicited empathy with victims. The findings suggest that anger about moral violations emerges separately from empathic reactions, although these reactions are difficult to distinguish in most instances. Likewise, the intention to harm provoked a willingness to punish the perpetrator much more than the actual harm did. Moral violations thus elicit moral outrage independently of their harmful consequences, even though such anger may often overlap with concern for others.
... Although the present studies refer to events generated by a random mechanism and emphasize the fair and balanced nature of the die/coin, these studies do not include measures controlling for participants' beliefs or expectations about the sequence or if they were ascribing intentionality to the agent generating the sequences. Previous research showed that perceiving the outcomes of a sequence as intentionally generated increases predictions consistent with the hot-hand (e.g., Caruso et al., 2010); however, it is unclear how the level of construal would impact predictions if participants were attributing intentionality to the observed sequences of outcomes. Considering that causal and dispositional attributions are stronger for high (vs. ...
... These biophysiological findings regarding the performers' transmission and the environment's reception of success in competitive interactions, could be related to a corpus of literature on the human tendency to detect patterns and construct causality in random data . For example, the gambler's fallacy (Croson & Sundali, 2005;Kong et al., 2020;Sundali & Croson, 2006) or the principle of intentionality, where a sequence is either expected to continueif it is generated by deliberate and motivated agents such as athletes, or reverseif it is generated by a non-intentional random process such as lottery (Caruso et al., 2010). Yet it is important to remember that the above-mentioned biophysiological mechanisms of momentum perceptions (e.g., nonverbal behavior), greatly differ from the cognitive processes that are associated with the gambler's fallacy (e.g., representativeness heuristic). ...
... Boynton, 2003;Gilovich, Vallone, & Tversky, 1985;Fischer & Savranevski, 2015;Vergin, 2001). Some researchers suggest observers believe there is something special about human performance (Ayton & Fischer, 2004), or about the intentional mind of human actors (Caruso, Waytz, & Epley, 2010;Roney & Trick, 2009). But, people only exhibit hot hand beliefs for human actors whose performances they perceive as non-random (Burns & Corpus, 2004;Tyszka, Zielonka, Dacey, & Sawicki, 2008). 2 ...
Beliefs like the Gambler's Fallacy and the Hot Hand have interested cognitive scientists, economists, and philosophers for centuries. We propose that these judgment patterns arise from the observer's mental models of the sequence‐generating mechanism, moderated by the strength of belief in an a priori base rate. In six behavioral experiments, participants observed one of three mechanisms generating sequences of eight binary events: a random mechanical device, an intentional goal‐directed actor, and a financial market. We systematically manipulated participants’ beliefs about the base rate probabilities at which different outcomes were generated by each mechanism. Participants judged 18 sequences of outcomes produced by a mechanism with either an unknown base rate, a specified distribution of three equiprobable base rates, or a precise, fixed base rate. Six target sequences ended in streaks of between two and seven identical outcomes. The most common predictions for subsequent events were best described as pragmatic belief updating, expressed as an increasingly strong expectation that a streak of identical signals would repeat as the length of that streak increased. The exception to this pattern was for sequences generated by a random mechanical device with a fixed base rate of .50. Under this specific condition, participants exhibited a bias toward reversal of streaks, and this bias was larger when participants were asked to make a dichotomous choice versus a numerical probability rating. We review alternate accounts for the anomalous judgments of sequences and conclude with our favored interpretation that is based on Rabin's version of Tversky & Kahneman's Law of Small Numbers.
... Note that what would be required for the particularity of depicted objects to be perceived is something much stronger: the perceptual representation of a causal link, where one of the causal relata is not perceived at all. Second, while there is, again, a debate about whether we can perceive someone's intentions when looking at their face (see, e.g., Caruso et al., 2010), what would be required for the particularity of depicted objects to be perceived is something much stronger: the perceptual representation of someone's intention without seeing their face (and, usually, without ever having seen them). ...
When I am looking at an apple, I perceptually attribute certain properties to certain entities. Two questions arise: what are these entities (what is it that I perceptually represent as having properties) and what are these properties (what properties I perceive this entity as having)? This paper is about the former, less widely explored, question: what does our perceptual system attribute properties to? In other words, what are these ‘sensory individuals’. There have been important debates in philosophy of perception about what sensory individuals would be the most plausible candidates for which sense modalities. The aim of this paper is to ask a related question about picture perception: what is the sensory individual of picture perception? When we look at a picture and see an apple depicted in it, what kind of entity do we see? What do we perceptually attribute properties to? I argue that the most straightforward candidates (ordinary objects, sui generis sensory individuals, no sensory individuals) are all problematic and that the most plausible candidate for the sensory individuals of picture perception are spatiotemporal regions.
... The "hot hand fallacy" is "the intuition that a short run of consistent, but statistically independent, events is likely to continue" (Caruso, Waytz, & Epley, 2010 , p. 149). Originally it described people's intuition that a basketball player's streak of successful hoops would persist (Gilovich, Vallone, & Tversky, 1985 ). Caruso et al. ( 2010 ) explored the relationship between the perception of intentions and the tendency to endorse the hot hand account. They presented participants with a video clip of a person tossing a coin, and were told that the tosser was trying to flip heads. ...
... Evidence supporting this belief was found in casinos, and is known as the 'gambler's fallacy' (Croson & Sundali, 2005). Caruso et al. (2010) conducted a series of studies to explain why streaks produced by basketball players are expected to continue, whereas streaks produced by the roulette wheel are expected to be reversed. They concluded that the degree to which people perceive that the agent generating the streak is acting intentionally (i.e. ...
The belief in momentum and the hot hand has often been attributed to misperception and biased judgment. Here we review the major theoretical and empirical advances in the investigation of the success breeds success processes, and demonstrate that the term momentum has been uncritically applied in a wide range of domains to denote various manifestations of streakiness. In the first part of the paper we review three lines of research regarding the influence of success on (a) the performer's psychological state, (b) the performer's and observer's behavior and (c) the subsequent success. We highlight the fact that research on momentum has rather overlooked several essential theories. Thus, in the second part, we integrate momentum-based behaviors and beliefs with the relevant biological and physiological literature. We conclude that in human competitions, like in nature, winners experience psychophysiological responses to success, and project their recent victory onto their surroundings by demonstrating aggressiveness, dominance and determination. The result is that both performers and observers are evolutionarily wired to react to success in competitive situations. Consequently, the term psychophysiological momentum is fitting in the context of sports competitions. ARTICLE HISTORY
... When it comes to nonrandom processes, such as sports performance, people tend to expect sequences of continuous success to continue longer than they actually do (Bar-Eli, Avugos, & Raab, 2006;Caruso, Waytz, & Epley, 2010;Koehler & Conley, 2003). For instance, people overestimate how likely a basketball player is to hit his next shot if he has hit his previous shot than if he missed his previous shot (Gilovich, Vallone, & Tversky, 1985;Simonsohn, 2020). ...
We present evidence in 9 studies (n = 2,625) for the Streaking Star Effect-people's greater desire to see runs of successful performance by individuals continue more than identical runs of success by groups. We find this bias in an obscure Italian sport (Study 1), a British trivia competition (Study 2), and a tennis competition in which the number of individual versus team competitors is held constant (Study 3). This effect appears to result from individual streaks of success inspiring more awe than group streaks-and that people enjoying being awe-inspired. In Studies 4 and 5, we found that the experience of awe inspired by an individual streak drives the effect, a result that is itself driven by the greater dispositional attributions people make for the success of individuals as opposed to groups (Study 6). We demonstrate in Studies 7a and 7b that this effect is not an artifact of identifiability. Finally, Study 8 illustrates how the Streaking Star Effect impacts people's beliefs about the appropriate market share for companies run by a successful individual versus a successful management team. We close by discussing implications of this effect for consumer behavior, and for how people react to economic inequality reflected in the success of individuals versus groups. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
... This corresponds with the principle of "intentionality", which is crucial in interpretation of streaks (Burns & Corpus, 2004). A sequence is expected to continue if it is generated by deliberate and motivated agents (e.g., basketball players), and to reverse if it is generated by a random process (e.g., a roulette) (Caruso, Waytz & Epley, 2010). The results in Table 6 showed that respondents who assigned the comeback team higher chances to win (presumably due to a positive momentum) endorsed various statements about the advantages of being the comeback team more strongly. ...
Momentum is often cited in the media and in other sources as an important factor in performance over time in business, politics, sports and other areas. Yet, academic research on whether momentum actually exists is mixed. This study aims to assess momentum perceptions in a context in which momentum could be relevant, but where empirical data have shown that no momentum exists. In particular, we take the scenario of a basketball game that is tied at the end of regulation time. We designed questionnaires where one of the teams closed a moderate or a large score gap during the last few minutes of the fourth quarter (and in a control treatment, the score was balanced during these minutes). In the first study, 107 fans and 73 practitioners answered these questionnaires. Then, in the second study, 250 additional respondents completed questionnaires containing the same game scenarios but with additional "opposite-framing" versions and a set of questions regarding the reasons for momentum-based beliefs. The respondents also answered several questions about their level of knowledge and interest in basketball, which allowed us to categorize them to fans and laymen. The responses revealed that coming back into the game by reducing a significant score gap during the final minutes of regular time was perceived to increase the teams' chances to win in overtime (which can be interpreted as a positive momentum). Fans exhibit stronger momentum beliefs compared to laymen. Overall, respondents' perceptions contradict the existing empirical evidence that shows that the comeback team does not have higher chances to win the game in overtime. We discuss possible reasons for the discrepancy between the perceptions we observed and the empirical data.
... Boynton, 2003;Gilovich, Vallone, & Tversky, 1985;Fischer & Savranevski, 2015;Vergin, 2000). Some researchers suggest people believe there is something "special" about human performance (Ayton & Fischer, 2004), or about the intentional mind of human actors (Caruso, Waytz, & Epley, 2010;Roney & Trick, 2009). But, people only seem to exhibit hot hand beliefs for human actors whose performances they specifically perceive as nonrandom (Burns & Corpus, 2004;Tyszka, Zielonka, Dacey, & Sawicki, 2008). 2 2 Burns and Corpus (2004) and Tyska, Zielonka, Dacey, and Sawicki (2009) both asked experimental participants to judge sequences produced by two different human actors: one rated as more random (your little sister shooting baskets in Burns & Corpus; a fortune-teller in Tyska et al.), and another rated as less random (a competitive car salesman in Burns & Corpus; a basketball player shooting baskets in Tyska et al.). ...
We report on six experiments studying participants’ predictions of the next outcome in a sequence of binary events. Participants faced one of three mechanisms generating 18 sequences of 8 events: a random mechanical bingo cage, an intentional goal-directed actor, and a financial market. We systematically manipulated participants’ beliefs about the base rate probabilities at which different types of outcomes were generated by each mechanism. Participants either faced unknown (ambiguous) base rates, a specified distribution of three equiprobable base rates, or a precise, stationary base rate. Six target sequences ended in streaks of between two and seven identical outcomes. We focused on participants’ predictions of the ninth, unobserved outcome in each of these target sequences. Across all generating mechanisms and prior belief conditions, the most common prediction pattern was best described as close-to-rational belief updating, producing an increasingly strong bias toward repetition of streaks. The exception to this generalization was for sequences generated by a random mechanical bingo cage with a precise, stationary base rate of .50. Under these conditions, participants exhibited a bias toward reversal of streaks. This effect was irrational, given our instructions on the nature of the generator. We conclude that the dominant judgment habit when predicting outcomes of sequences of binary events is reasonable belief updating. We review alternate accounts for the anomalous judgments of sequences produced by random mechanical devices with a precise, stationary base rate.
... Consumers tend to evaluate some of the actions of the brand based on the extent to which the brand is anthropomorphised. Attribution of mindfulness leads to the perception that the agent's behaviour is under the control of an agent and is in accordance with thoughtful underlying reasons (Caruso, Waytz, & Epley, 2010). This is because mental qualities such as intentions, cognition and emotions are perceived as crucial in explaining the behaviour and determining blame and responsibility of an independent entity (Bering, 2002). ...
Brand anthropomorphism is recognised as an important construct in marketing, yet it lacks clarity in operationalisation and valid measurement. The objective of this research, therefore, is to develop and validate the brand anthropomorphism scale (BASC). Brand anthropomorphism is defined as the perception of brand as an entity that has analogical human-like features, mental and emotional states that people believe to be distinctively human. It is conceptualised as a multidimensional superordinate construct. Across six studies (N = 1666), this research develops a valid and reliable measure of brand anthropomorphism that has psychometric properties for convergent, discriminant and predictive validity. The results indicate that brand anthropomorphism is a valid predictor of outcomes such as brand trust and brand commitment. Finally, in support of incremental validity, it is identified that the BASC explains variance in brand trust and brand commitment above and beyond the measure of brand anthropomorphism commonly employed in the literature. Theoretical implications for research and implications for practice are also discussed.
... In such a paradigm, the probability overestimation of the predicted outcome is implicitly assumed. Only a few studies (Burns & Corpus, 2004;Caruso, Waytz, & Epley, 2010;Dohmen et al., 2009;Matarazzo, Carpentieri, Greco, & Pizzini, 2017;Navarrete & Santamaria, 2012) used a procedure where participants had to indicate, in addition to the outcome prediction, the explicit probability estimate of the next outcome. ...
Background and aims:
Although numerous correlational studies have shown an association between cognitive distortions and problem gambling, only a few behavioral studies have investigated this topic by comparing problem (PGs) and non-problem gamblers (N-PGs). This quasi-experiment investigated the occurrence in both groups of a widespread cognitive distortion, the gambler's fallacy (GF), using a fictitious roulette game. Moreover, it investigated whether the GF increased the bet amount and whether impulsivity and sensation seeking were associated with the GF.
Methods:
Two indices of the GF were used: a cognitive index, the probability estimate of each outcome (black/red) after manipulating the final run length (the same outcome occurring four times/once), and a behavioral index, the choice of the outcome on which to bet. A total of 320 (160 PGs and 160 N-PGs) unpaid male volunteers, aged between 18 and 68, participated in this study.
Hypotheses:
Erroneous probability estimates should mediate the effect of longer runs on the alternation choice (i.e., the choice of an outcome different from the previous one) to support the occurrence of GF. The GF should increase betting. PGs should be more prone than N-PGs to GF.
Results:
The choice of the outcome depended on both cognitive (erroneous probability estimates) and affective (preference for red) factors. PGs bet more than N-PGs but they were not more prone than N-PGs to incurring GF. Although impulsivity and sensation seeking were more intense in PGs than in N-PGs, they scarcely affected GF.
Discussion and conclusions:
Overall, our results corroborate the tested model of the GF that links mistaken probability estimates, choice of the outcome on which to bet, and bet amount. However, they are similar to PGs and N-PGs and fail to corroborate the hypothesis that the GF is more evident in PGs.
... Hence, they preferentially chose the controlled machine over the non-controlled machine while exhibiting a marked preference for both highly rewarding and low-variable machines. In the context of goal-directed control, this preference for high reward and low variance is reminiscent of the literature on selfattribution biases: adults are more likely to believe they control the occurrence of positive, relative to negative, events (e.g., Mezulis et al., 2004) while spontaneously assuming that series of low-variable events are more likely to be generated by intentional than nonintentional agents (e.g., Boland and Pawitan, 1999;Caruso, Waytz and Epley, 2010). Unsurprisingly, the pattern of preference exhibited across all 3 sessions suggests that participants construe their action, not only as a mean to make a difference in the world (instrumental divergence) but also as an instrument to bring about positive events and to reduce the inherent variability of the environment. ...
Most people envision themselves as operant agents endowed with the capacity to bring about changes in the outside world. This ability to monitor one's own causal power has long been suggested to rest upon a specific model of causal inference, i.e., a model of how our actions causally relate to their consequences. What this model is and how it may explain departures from optimal inference, e.g., illusory control and self-attribution biases, are still conjecture. To address this question, we designed a series of novel experiments requiring participants to continuously monitor their causal influence over the task environment by discriminating changes that were caused by their own actions from changes that were not. Comparing different models of choice, we found that participants' behaviour was best explained by a model deriving the consequences of the forgone action from the current action that was taken and assuming relative divergence between both. Importantly, this model agrees with the intuitive way of construing causal power as "difference-making" in which causally efficacious actions are actions that make a difference to the world. We suggest that our model outperformed all competitors because it closely mirrors people's belief in their causal power - a belief that is well-suited to learning action-outcome associations in controllable environments. We speculate that this belief may be part of the reason why reflecting upon one's own causal power fundamentally differs from reasoning about external causes.
... The "hot hand fallacy" is "the intuition that a short run of consistent, but statistically independent, events is likely to continue" (Caruso, Waytz, & Epley, 2010 , p. 149). Originally it described people's intuition that a basketball player's streak of successful hoops would persist (Gilovich, Vallone, & Tversky, 1985 ). Caruso et al. ( 2010 ) explored the relationship between the perception of intentions and the tendency to endorse the hot hand account. They presented participants with a video clip of a person tossing a coin, and were told that the tosser was trying to flip heads. ...
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 the tools laypeople use to make sense of what is largely not understandable to them: metaphors, heuristics, ideology, reliance on psychological traits and more.
The book lays out what all this means for policy makers, and makes recommendations based on the (glum) picture it documents.
... However, it is worth noticing that some deviation from the geometric mean in experiments with humans could originate from more sophisticated cognitive processes. For instance, some of these results were successfully explained by the gambler's fallacy (Caruso, Waytz, & Epley, 2010). Additionally, previous work (Balci, Freestone, Simen, et al., 2011) has shown that bisection times can move closer to the geometric or the arithmetic mean of the reference intervals, depending on the endogenous timing uncertainty. ...
Perceiving time intervals is an essential ability of many animals, whose psychophysical properties have yet to be fully understood. A common theoretical approach is to consider that internal representations of time intervals are reflected in probability distribution functions. Depending on the mechanism proposed for interval timing inverse Gaussian and log-normal probability distributions are candidate distributions to represent internal representations of time. In this article, we show that these two distributions approximate each other under the assumptions of mean accuracy and scalar timing when considering experimentally-relevant Weber fractions. Afterward, we show that both distributions may be used in the description of the temporal bisection task, predicting bisection times approximately at the geometric mean of reference time intervals for the experimental range of Weber fractions. Taken together these results suggest that the log-normal and the inverse Gaussian, when adapted to model subjective time intervals, are experimentally indistinguishable, and so are the models that use them as benchmarks.
... Most empirical research examining human (mis-) understanding of randomness has used equiprobable binary outcomes (see Oskarsson, Van Boven, McClelland, & Hastie, 2009, for a review), such as the occurrence of red or black on a roulette wheel (e.g., Ayton & Fischer, 2004), or birth order of boys and girls in a particular family (Kahneman & Tversky, 1972). The most common scenario is the occurrence of heads and tails when repeatedly tossing a fair, unbiased coin (e.g., Caruso, Waytz, & Epley, 2010;Diener & Thompson, 1985;Kareev, 1992). Across a variety of tasks-including choosing the most random of a set of sequences (e.g. ...
When people consider a series of random binary events, such as tossing an unbiased coin and recording the sequence of heads (H) and tails (T), they tend to erroneously rate sequences with less internal structure or order (such as HTTHT) as more probable than sequences containing more structure or order (such as HHHHH). This is traditionally explained as a local representativeness effect: Participants assume that the properties of long sequences of random outcomes-such as an equal proportion of heads and tails, and little internal structure-should also apply to short sequences. However, recent theoretical work has noted that the probability of a particular sequence of say, heads and tails of length n, occurring within a larger (>n) sequence of coin flips actually differs by sequence, so P(HHHHH) <P(HTTHT). In this alternative account, people apply rational norms based on limited experience. We test these accounts. Participants in Experiment 1 rated the likelihood of occurrence for all possible strings of 4, 5, and 6 observations in a sequence of coin flips. Judgments were better explained by representativeness in alternation rate, relative proportion of heads and tails, and sequence complexity, than by objective probabilities. Experiments 2 and 3 gave similar results using incentivized binary choice procedures. Overall the evidence suggests that participants are not sensitive to variation in objective probabilities of a sub-sequence occurring; they appear to use heuristics based on several distinct forms of representativeness.
... When participants were presented with a series of independent gambles, people using a native language overestimated the likelihood of a positive outcome after a series of prior successes, an effect that was reduced when using a foreign language. It should be noted that this 'hot hand' fallacy is generally only present when individuals perceive that the outcomes are generated not by chance, but by an intentional agent who may continue 'streaking' [5]. This brings us to yet another effect of language: peo- ple are less sensitive to intention and more sensitive to outcomes when using a for- eign tongue [6]. ...
A growing literature demonstrates that using a foreign language affects choice. This is surprising because if people understand their options, choice should be language independent. Here, we review the impact of using a foreign language on risk, inference, and morality, and discuss potential explanations, including reduced emotion, psychological distance, and increased deliberation.
... The Individual Differences in Anthropomorphism Questionnaire (IDAQ) proposed and tested by Waytz et al., (2010a) is a 30-item scale composed of 15 questions measuring anthropomorphic tendency, and 15 'filler' questions. This scale has found support, most notably in psychology (Caruso et al., 2010;Timpano and Shaw, 2012;Willard and Norenzayan, 2013), but also in neuroscience (Cullen et al., 2014), with some initial research utilising the IDAQ in marketing (e.g., Voorn, 2013). ...
Purpose
This paper aims to addresses an important gap in anthropomorphism research by examining the individual-level factors that correlate with anthropomorphic tendency.
Design/methodology/approach
The extant psychology, marketing and consumer psychology literature is reviewed, and eight hypotheses devised. Data from 509 online survey respondents are analysed to identify individual characteristics associated with anthropomorphic tendency.
Findings
The results reveal that anthropomorphic tendency varies by individual and is significantly related to personality, age, relationship status, personal connection to animals and experiential thinking.
Research limitations/implications
This paper extends on recent research into the individual nature of anthropomorphic tendency, once thought to be a universal trait. Given that this paper is the first of its kind, testing of further traits is merited. It is suggested that future research further examine personality, as well as other elements of individual difference, and test the role of anthropomorphic tendency in the development of processing abilities with age.
Practical implications
Findings show that anthropomorphic tendency may prove to be a key variable in the segmentation of markets and the design of marketing communications, and that younger, single, more creative, conscientious consumers are an appropriate target for anthropomorphic messages. The importance of personal connection to animals, as well as experiential thinking, is also highlighted.
Originality/value
Given the importance of anthropomorphic tendency for the processing of messages involving non-human endorsers, as well as the formation of relevant attitudes and behaviours, this paper fulfils an identified need to further understand the characteristics of those high on this tendency.
... Further support for these findings has been provided byBurns and Corpus (2004), who showed that when the generating mechanism of a sequence is believed to be less random, participants tend to expect the sequence to continue in a similar manner, and by Tyszka, Zielonka, Dacey, and Sawicki (2008), who showed that people tend to expect more alternations when they believe a sequence is generated by random devices such as a coin or a fortune teller. (For a thorough examination of the impacts of beliefs associated with the generating mechanisms on the perception of sequences, see also Caruso,Waytz, & Epley, 2010;Croson & Sundali, 2005;Gold & Hester, 2008;and Olivola & Oppenheimer, 2008.) In spite of this profound body of research, only two perceptual categories have demonstrated a systematic impact on the perception of uncertain processes: chance mechanisms and human skilled performance. ...
In this study, we examined perceptions of binary sequences under uncertainty in an attempt to depict a holistic and unifying framework. The first experiment applied a projection method that motivated participants to observe binary series and provide descriptions of their possible underlying mechanisms or processes. This procedure revealed four distinct perceptual categories: two previously studied categories of chance mechanisms and human performance, associated with the gambler's and hot-hand fallacies, and two newly identified categories-periods and processes and traits and preferences. The next three experiments tested the associations between the four categories and the alternation rates of the observed sequences under three categorical decisions structures: screening, discrimination, and classification. The results reveal the relativity of binary sequence perception. They show that the categories of chance mechanisms and periods and processes reflected rather stable perception across all tested conditions, whereas the other two categories were more susceptible to the context in which they were embedded. The findings support previous research on the gambler's fallacy and show that the hot-hand fallacy is confined to comparisons of human performance and chance mechanisms. A proposed developmental hierarchy suggests that all four categories embody basic cognitive structures that assist in detecting, decoding, and interpreting both inanimate and social aspects of the environment.
... Experimental evidence suggests that observers use streaks as a cue for an agent's intentionality. For instance, if streaks such as basketball shots are performed by a player intentionally, participants predict that streaks may continue, whereas if a robot performs the same task, hot hand streaks are attributed to chance (Caruso, Waytz, & Epley, 2012). It seems, then, that humans are well equipped for understanding the goal-directed behaviors of others and, critically, are also attuned to contextual factors. ...
Previous discussions of the hot hand belief, wherein athletes believe that they have a greater chance of scoring after 2 or 3 hits (successes) compared with 2 or 3 misses, have focused on whether this is the case within game statistics. Researchers have argued that the perception of the hot hand in random sequences is a bias of the cognitive system. Yet most have failed to explore the impact of framing on the stability of the belief and the behavior based on it.
The authors conducted 2 studies that manipulated the frame of a judgment task. In Study 1, framing was manipulated via instructions in a playmaker allocation paradigm in volleyball. In Study 2, the frame was manipulated by presenting videos for allocation decisions from either the actor or observer perspective.
Both manipulations changed the hot hand belief and sequential choices. We found in both studies that the belief in continuation of positive or negative streaks is nonlinear and allocations to the same player after 3 successive hits are reduced.
The authors argue that neither the hot hand belief nor hot hand behavior is stable, but rather, both are sensitive to decision frames. The results can inform coaches on the importance of how to provide information to athletes.
... If this model is correct, it would align with existing research in other domains. This research reveals that other kinds of magnitude biases arise from motivation (19), and that the perceived intentionality of agents can influence people's predictions about numerical magnitude in probabilistic settings (42). ...
Significance
This paper examines how detecting harmful intent creates downstream consequences for assessing damage, magnifying its cost. If intentional harms seem worse, society may spend more money on them than on objectively more damaging unintentional harms or on naturally occurring harms. Why might this occur? Various psychological theories identify the cause as motivation; however, the presence of this motivation has been inferred indirectly. Drawing on animal-model research, we present more direct evidence for blame motivation, and discuss how it may help to explain the magnification of intentional harms. This approach acknowledges the nonrational biases in damage estimates and potential policy priorities.
... It follows that research on anthropomorphism has broad appeal within psychology. For example, studies employing the IDAQ have found dispositional anthropomorphism is related to perception of intentionality in financial markets (Caruso, Waytz, & Epley, 2010; study 4), hoarding behavior (e.g., sentimental attachment to objects; Timpano & Shaw, 2013), paranormal beliefs (Willard & Norenzayan, 2013), and grey matter volume of the temporaparietal junction (Cullen, Kanai, Bahrami, & Rees, 2013). ...
The study of anthropomorphism in adults has received considerable interest with the development of the Individual Differences in Anthropomorphism Questionnaire (IDAQ; Waytz, Cacioppo, & Epley, 201029.
Waytz, A., Cacioppo, J., & Epley, N. (2010). Who sees human? The stability and importance of individual differences in anthropomorphism. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5, 219–232. doi:10.1037/a0020240View all references). Anthropomorphism in children – its development, correlates, and consequences – is also of significant interest, yet a comparable measure does not exist. To fill this gap, we developed the IDAQ-Child Form (IDAQ-CF) and report on two studies. In Study 1a, adults (N = 304) were administered the IDAQ and IDAQ-CF to directly assess comparability between the measures. In Study 1b, an additional 350 adults were administered the IDAQ-CF to confirm that the new measure had the same underlying structure as the original IDAQ when the measures were not administered together. In Study 2, children (N = 90) in three age groups—5, 7, and 9 years—were administered the IDAQ-CF and an Attribution Interview which probed their conceptions of a robot and puppet. Results indicated the IDAQ-CF (a) is comparable to the original IDAQ in adult (Studies 1a and 1b) and child (Study 2) samples and (b) predicts children's tendency to attribute animate characteristics to inanimate entities (Study 2). This research provides strong evidence that the IDAQ-CF is an effective adaptation of the original IDAQ for use with children.
At present, the mainstream of cognitive neuroscience literature on alien intentionality (AI) symptoms in schizophrenia is divided between research into perceptual-motor AI (primarily motor passivity and auditory verbal hallucinations), in which the dominant theory is self-monitoring deficit, and cognitive AI (delusions of alien control/persecution), in which the dominant theory is reasoning biases and deficits. Both theories have some support in data, but they also have numerous limitations, suggesting the need for novel approaches to the problem. A review of the phenomenological literature on AI suggests novel hypotheses which go beyond the perceptual-motor/cognitive division: First, there appears to be a “family similarity” across the range of AI symptoms, including delusions and auditory verbal hallucinations as well as a range of other AI symptoms (e.g., alien emotion, sense of alien self). This suggests that a superordinate mechanism may underlie all AI symptoms (rather than unrelated mechanisms underlying the perceptual-motor vs. cognitive symptoms). Second, full-blown AI symptoms appear to emerge only after an early illness period of “delusional mood” characterized by incipient degradation of normal perceptual and self experiences. This suggests the possibility that AI symptoms emerge in response to these early experiences. Based on these observations, it is hypothesized that AI symptoms reflect the brain’s effort to make or find meaning in response to the breakdown of existing meaning structures. Across inferential domains (perceptual, motor, motivational, cognitive), AI themes emerge because the brain takes an “intentional stance” toward finding/making meaning. That is, ambiguous stimuli are perceived and inferred as resulting from the goals, desires, and beliefs of an intending agent. It is hypothesized that this occurs because the intentional stance is a neurally fine-tuned default explanatory framework that can flexibly integrate otherwise incompatible information within an internally consistent account. We conclude by presenting neuroimaging evidence which supports the intentionalist stance as a possible triggering mechanism of auditory verbal hallucinations.
When predicting someone's performance, people expect that short runs of consistent successful outcomes will continue—the hot‐hand. This tendency has been shown in contexts where athletes show a local performance streak, but no other information about their performance is provided. In real‐life settings, performance predictions often use global‐performance records like success‐rate probabilities, although judgements often neglect such statistical information. Aimed at understanding psychological momentums, in a classical sports domain the present work explores how global‐performance information (success rates) about an athlete impacts intentionality judgements and moderate predictions of success after a streak. Four studies show that (1) although participants tend to predict the continuation of streaks of success, they are less likely to predict that successful streaks will continue when success rates are low (vs. high or unknown); (2) sensitiveness to local performance's consistency affects perceived ability for high‐success rate athletes and perceived effort for low success‐rate athletes; (3) the mediation model describing that intentionality attributions mediate the effect of global success‐rate information on performance predictions fits the data. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
In organizational contexts, managers often have to judge and predict others' performance. Previous research has consistently shown that when predicting someone's performance, people expect that a local sequence of successful outcomes will continue—the hot‐hand. The present work proposes that hot‐hand predictions occur when local streaks are dispositionally attributed to the agents' intentionality and explores how the inclusion of global performance success rates may guide intentionality inferences and moderate predictions of success after a streak. Three studies, using within‐ and between‐subjects' designs, manipulate agent's global success rate and show that after a local streak, intentionality attributions and predictions of success are lower when success rates are low (vs. high or unknown); intentionality attributions mediate the effect of success rate on predictions; hot‐hand predictions are lower for low success rate agents (vs. high or unknown) as they are not perceived as more responsible for streaky than for alternated performances.
Using Figurative Language presents results from a multidisciplinary decades-long study of figurative language that addresses the question, 'Why don't people just say what they mean?' This research empirically investigates goals speakers or writers have when speaking (writing) figuratively, and concomitantly, meaning effects wrought by figurative language usage. These 'pragmatic effects' arise from many kinds of figurative language including metaphors (e.g. 'This computer is a dinosaur'), verbal irony (e.g. 'Nice place you got here'), idioms (e.g. 'Bite the bullet'), proverbs (e.g. 'Don't put all your eggs in one basket') and others. Reviewed studies explore mechanisms - linguistic, psychological, social and others - underlying pragmatic effects, some traced to basic processes embedded in human sensory, perceptual, embodied, cognitive, social and schematic functioning. The book should interest readers, researchers and scholars in fields beyond psychology, linguistics and philosophy that share interests in figurative language - including language studies, communication, literary criticism, neuroscience, semiotics, rhetoric and anthropology.
Creations can be fundamentally intended or unintended from their outset. Past work has focused on intentional creations, finding that people place a premium on effort. We examine the role of unintentionality in the inception of creations in six studies using a variety of stimuli ( N = 1,965), finding that people offer a premium to unintentional creations versus otherwise identical intentional creations. We demonstrate that the unintentionality involved in the inception of a creation results in greater downward counterfactual thought about how the unintentional creation may have never been created at all, and this in turn heightens perceptions that the creation was a product of fate, causing people to place a premium on such creations. We provide evidence for this causal pathway using a combination of mediation and moderation approaches. Further, we illuminate that this premium is not offered when a negative outcome is ascribed to an unintentional creation.
Cambridge Core - Cognition - How Language Makes Meaning - by Herbert L. Colston
The magnification of skill component in gambling as well as the gambler's and hot hand fallacies are gambling-related cognitive distortions. The magnification of skill component refers to the belief that one's ability can be used to win in gambling and that there is a reliable way to do so. The gambler's fallacy refers to the belief that a given outcome is unlikely to follow a preceding run of the same outcome (e.g. a coin coming up heads following a run of heads), while the hot hand fallacy refers to the belief that a streak of wins is going to continue. The biopsychological basis of these cognitive distortions can be analyzed by examining the processing of near outcomes and outcome sequences in gambling. Near outcomes refer to close wins and losses that would have almost resulted in the other outcome. The current study aims to investigate the electrophysiological basis of said cognitive distortions as well as its modulation by gambling problems. In the current study a group of problem gamblers and matched controls gambled on a wheel of fortune and a coin toss paradigm. The processing of near outcomes and outcome sequences was analyzed using event-related potentials (FRN, P300). Near outcomes evoked smaller P300 amplitudes in both groups. Furthermore, previous wins were associated with increased P300 amplitudes. Outcome closeness and previous outcome sequences did not modulate the FRN amplitude. The processing of near outcomes and outcome sequences was not modulated by gambling problems. General differences between problem gamblers and controls were found, with problem gamblers showing reduced peak-to-peak FRN amplitudes. This might point towards a generally more favorable evaluation of gambling outcomes in problem gamblers while the electrophysiological correlates of the analyzed cognitive distortions do not differ from those of healthy controls.
El término efecto hot hand (‘fenómeno de estar en racha’) hace referencia a un hipotético aumento
del rendimiento tras el encadenamiento de varios ensayos acertados. Se identifican tres tipos de investigaciones en contextos deportivos: (1) centradas en la (in)existencia de rachas, (2) en los mecanismos psicológicos de la creencia humana en las rachas y (3) en las posibles consecuencias conductuales provocadas por la creencia. Esta revisión abarca los dos últimos aspectos: la psicología de la creencia en rachas y de la conducta provocada por ésta. El proceso de revisión sistemática se llevó a cabo mediante un protocolo estandarizado basado en las pautas sugeridas por Fernández-Ríos y Buela-Casal (2009). Los estudios relacionados con la creencia en rachas confirman que las personas creen firmemente en su existencia en la mayoría de deportes observándose diferencias en función del nivel de pericia y de modificaciones de framing. No obstante, aún queda por investigar en profundidad en los factores situacionales y las características psicológicas que afectan a la percepción de rachas. Desde un punto de vista conductual, los estudios demuestran que creer en la existencia de rachas tiene un enorme impacto en las decisiones. Los estudios aquí revisados parecen mostrar que la influencia de la creencia en rachas provoca una toma de decisiones peor y más arriesgada. Sin embargo, queda por aclarar en el futuro el impacto de esa tendencia sobre indicadores objetivos de rendimiento en contextos reales de juego.
Immanent justice reasoning involves causally attributing a deserved outcome to someone’s prior moral deeds or character, even when such a causal connection is physically implausible. This chapter describes a body of work showing that immanent justice reasoning is (a) motivated, in part, by the need to construe outcomes as deserved; (b) driven by intuitive more than controlled mental processes; and (c) more openly expressed among individuals who believe in supernatural phenomena. This review also documents several additional lines of inquiry exploring key assumptions about the nature, origins, and functions of immanent justice reasoning, including immanent justice reasoning for self-relevant fortuitous outcomes, the social-communicative function of immanent justice reasoning, and the interplay between immanent justice and normative causal reasoning. Early research portrayed immanent justice reasoning as unique to children, but this chapter identifies several conditions under which it is predictably displayed by adults. Immanent justice reasoning serves important psychological functions in adulthood, and is underpinned by reasoning processes and metaphysical assumptions that are not put away when children become adults.
With the advancement of technological platforms, the use of recommendation agents that can provide highly customisable solutions has become more ubiquitous. Marketing academics and practitioners alike have begun to investigate various communication styles and functionality designs of such decision aid systems. One variant of a design of a recommendation agent is to imbue it with humanlike features (i.e. to anthropomorphise it). However, academic research is silent with respect to whether this type of design would lead to more favourable consumer evaluations. To fill this gap, our research investigates the downstream consequences of anthropomorphising a recommendation agent, when the recommendation itself may require the exchange of personally sensitive information, and the message is customised. The results of two experiments reveal that, when a message is customised, the effect of an anthropomorphised recommendation agent on attitude towards the advertisement is predominantly negative and is mediated by consumers' unwillingness to provide personal information to an anthropomorphic recommendation agent, as well as by greater psychological resistance towards the advertisement. Our research concludes with theoretical and practical implications, as well as further research directions.
This research shows that brand anthropomorphization increases the perceived unfairness of price increases and the perceived fairness of price decreases. First, analyzing a household panel data set, the authors demonstrate the real-world consequences of brand humanization on consumers' price sensitivity. Second, building on the theoretical premise that fairness judgments depend on consumer focus on the self versus others, they find that brand humanization enhances perceived unfairness of price increases for agency-oriented consumers, who tend to maximize their own self-interests. However, for communion-oriented consumers, who generally consider the needs of others, brand humanization increases perceived fairness of both price increases and decreases. Furthermore, because consumers' focus on the self versus others also depends on relationship goals, the nature of consumer-brand relationships interacts with agency-communion orientation to influence the effect of brand humanization on perceived price fairness. For example, exchange relationship norms reduce the power of brand anthropomorphization to enhance perceived fairness of price changes for communion-oriented consumers. In contrast, the communal nature of these relationships makes both agency- and communion-oriented consumers infer greater positive intent from a humanized (vs. nonhumanized) brand, thus leading to a more positive effect of brand humanization on price fairness for price decreases.
Purpose:
Recent evidence of the hot hand in sport-where success breeds success in a positive recency of successful shots, for instance-indicates that this pattern does not actually exist. Yet the belief persists. We used 2 studies to explore the effects of framing on the hot hand belief in sport. We looked at the effect of sport experience and task on the perception of baseball pitch behavior as well as the hot hand belief and free-throw behavior in basketball.
Method:
Study 1 asked participants to designate outcomes with different alternation rates as the result of baseball pitches or coin tosses. Study 2 examined basketball free-throw behavior and measured predicted success before each shot as well as general belief in the hot hand pattern.
Results:
The results of Study 1 illustrate that experience and stimulus alternation rates influence the perception of chance in human performance tasks. Study 2 shows that physically performing an act and making judgments are related. Specifically, beliefs were related to overall performance, with more successful shooters showing greater belief in the hot hand and greater predicted success for upcoming shots.
Conclusions:
Both of these studies highlight that the hot hand belief is influenced by framing, which leads to instability and situational contingencies. We show the specific effects of framing using accumulated experience of the individual with the sport and knowledge of its structure and specific experience with sport actions (basketball shots) prior to judgments.
We investigate whether people are influenced to make investment decisions based on random shock signals and to what extent they do so by exploiting a unique data set from a popular Chinese lottery game with over one million observations. We first present evidence that people, as individual investors in the field, not only systematically commit the hot-hand fallacy in chasing the winners who happen to pick the lucky numbers in the latest round of the lottery game, but are also willing to bear a cost in doing so although winning the lottery is merely a random shock. We then propose a simple model to account for the observed market behaviors. We further estimate the lottery players’ willingness to pay for the random shock signals, and find that the market value of such illusion is significantly high.
Gambling near‐misses are non‐rewarded events that resemble a winning configuration. Past research using slot machines has shown that moderate rates of near‐misses increase gambling persistence, but the mechanisms supporting this persistence are unclear. One hypothesis is that near‐misses are mistakenly interpreted as signals of skill acquisition, supporting learning and fuelling the ‘illusion of control’. A slot machine simulation was administered to 60 volunteers, with ratings of the perceived chances of winning, pleasure and motivation to play following particular outcomes. Psychophysiological measures (electrodermal activity and heart rate) were taken, and gambling persistence was measured after 30 trials. Near‐misses were similar to full‐miss outcomes in that they were regarded as unpleasant. However, near‐misses were akin to win outcomes in that they increased motivations to play and electrodermal activity. Learning was evidenced by the expectancy of winning increasing following wins and decreasing after losses. Although there was no overall change in expectancy of winning after near‐misses across all participants, those subjects reporting a greater increase in the expectancy of winning following a near‐miss showed more persistent play, consistent with the learning hypothesis. Greater heart rate acceleration following near‐misses was also associated with persistence. We also observed differential effects of near‐misses where the reel stopped either side of the winning position (‘payline’): motivational effects were restricted to near‐misses stopping before the payline, whereas near‐misses that stopped after the payline were primarily aversive. The payline effects are not predicted by the learning hypothesis and may indicate an affective component to near‐misses, possibly linked to counterfactual processing. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
When perceiving, explaining, or criticizing human behavior, people distinguish between intentional and unintentional actions. To do so, they rely on a shared folk concept of intentionality. In contrast to past speculative models, this article provides an empirically based model of this concept. Study 1 demonstrates that people agree substantially in their judgments of intentionality, suggesting a shared underlying concept. Study 2 reveals that when asked to define directly the termintentional,people mention four components of intentionality: desire, belief, intention, and awareness. Study 3 confirms the importance of a fifth component, namely skill. In light of these findings, the authors propose a model of the folk concept of intentionality and provide a further test in Study 4. The discussion compares the proposed model to past ones and examines its implications for social perception, attribution, and cognitive development.
Anthropomorphism is a far-reaching phenomenon that incorporates ideas from social psychology, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and the neurosciences. Although commonly considered to be a relatively universal phenomenon with only limited importance in modern industrialized societies—more cute than critical—our research suggests precisely the opposite. In particular, we provide a measure of stable individual differences in anthropomorphism that predicts three important consequences for everyday life. This research demonstrates that individual differences in anthropomorphism predict the degree of moral care and concern afforded to an agent, the amount of responsibility and trust placed on an agent, and the extent to which an agent serves as a source of social influence on the self. These consequences have implications for disciplines outside of psychology including human–computer interaction, business (marketing and finance), and law. Concluding discussion addresses how understanding anthropomorphism not only informs the burgeoning study of nonpersons, but how it informs classic issues underlying person perception as well.
People have erroneous intuitions about the laws of chance. In particular, they regard a sample randomly drawn from a population as highly representative, that is, similar to the population in all essential characteristics.
Using randomly generated sequences of binary events we asked participants to make predictions about the next event. It turned out that while predicting uncertain events, people do not behave unsystematically. Our research identifies four types of relatively consistent strategies for predicting uncertain binary events: a strategy immune to short-run sequential dependencies consisting of the persistent prediction of long-run majority events, hereafter called the long-run momentum strategy; a strategy immune to short-run sequential dependencies consisting of the persistent prediction of long-run minority events, called the long-run contrarian strategy; a strategy sensitive to short-run sequential dependencies consisting of the prediction of short-run majority events, called the short-run momentum strategy; and a strategy sensitive to short-run sequential dependencies consisting of the prediction of short-run minority events, called the short-run contrarian strategy. When the character of events remains unknown, the most common strategy is the short-run momentum strategy. With the increase of a perceived randomness of the situation, people tend more often to use the short-run contrarian strategy. People differ in their general beliefs about the continuation or reversal of a trend in various natural and social processes. Trend believers, when facing sequences of binary events commonly perceived as random, tend to use momentum strategies, whereas those who believe in the trend's reversal tend to use contrarian strategies.
Studied attributions in a purely chance task (predicting coin tosses) as a function of either a descending, ascending, or random sequence of outcomes and as a function of whether the S performed the task himself or observed another S performing the task. A primary effect was predicted; early successes would induce a skill orientation towards the task. Data from 90 male undergraduates support the prediction. Ss in the descending condition rated themselves as significantly better at predicting the outcomes of coin tosses than Ss in either of the other 2 groups. This group also overremembered past successes and expected more future successes than the other 2 groups. Involvement had the effect of increasing Ss' expectations of future successes and tended to increase their evaluation of their past performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Prepared 5 computer-generated films to investigate the effects of temporal contingency and spatial configuration on the perception of social events in an experiment with 40 undergraduates. The 1st film simulated a chase in which one figure converged on the path of the other, which then deviated from that path. In addition, there was a temporal contingency between changes in direction of the 2 figures. The 2nd film retained the same parameters of motion and temporal contingency, but the trailing circle paralleled rather than converged on the leading circle. In the 3rd film, the circles retained the temporal contingency, but the direction of the trailing circle was free to converge or diverge within limits from the path of the leading circle. In the 4th film, the paths of both circles were generated randomly but still displayed the same lag between changes in direction as the 1st 3 films. The 5th film displayed random paths, as in the previous case, but destroyed the temporal contingency shared by the other 4 films. The temporal contingency factor was crucial for the perception of an interaction between the figures, while the spatial configuration of motion tended to determine the nature of that interaction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This research examined individual differences in action identification level as measured by the Behavior Identification Form. Action identification theory holds that any action can be identified in many ways, ranging from low-level identities that specify how the action is performed to high-level identities that signify why or with what effect the action is performed. People who identify action at a uniformly lower or higher level across many action domains, then, may be characterized in terms of their standing on a broad personality dimension: level of personal agency. High-level agents think about their acts in encompassing terms that incorporate the motives and larger meanings of the action, whereas low-level agents think about their acts in terms of the details or means of action. Research on the convergent, divergent, and predictive validity of this construct examined its implications for the individual's overall competence in action, for the individual's inclination toward planful vs impulsive action, and for the degree to which the individual's actions are organized by and reflected in the self-concept. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The authors review research on judgments of random and nonrandom sequences involving binary events with a focus on studies documenting gambler's fallacy and hot hand beliefs. The domains of judgment include random devices, births, lotteries, sports performances, stock prices, and others. After discussing existing theories of sequence judgments, the authors conclude that in many everyday settings people have naive complex models of the mechanisms they believe generate observed events, and they rely on these models for explanations, predictions, and other inferences about event sequences. The authors next introduce an explanation-based, mental models framework for describing people's beliefs about binary sequences, based on 4 perceived characteristics of the sequence generator: randomness, intentionality, control, and goal complexity. Furthermore, they propose a Markov process framework as a useful theoretical notation for the description of mental models and for the analysis of actual event sequences.
Three studies tested the idea that our analyses of human behavior are guided by an "intentionality bias," an implicit bias where all actions are judged to be intentional by default. In Study 1 participants read a series of sentences describing actions that can be done either on purpose or by accident (e.g., "He set the house on fire") and had to decide which interpretation best characterized the action. To tap people's initial interpretation, half the participants made their judgments under speeded conditions; this group judged significantly more sentences to be intentional. Study 2 found that when asked for spontaneous descriptions of the ambiguous actions used in Study 1 (and thus not explicitly reminded of the accidental interpretation), participants provided significantly more intentional interpretations, even with prototypically accidental actions (e.g., "She broke the vase"). Study 3 examined whether more processing is involved in deciding that something is unintentional (and thus overriding an initial intentional interpretation) than in deciding that something is unpleasant (where there is presumably no initial "pleasant" interpretation). Participants were asked to judge a series of 12 sentences on one of two dimensions: intentional/unintentional (experimental group) or pleasant/unpleasant (control group). People in the experimental group remembered more unintentional sentences than people in the control group. Findings across the three studies suggest that adults have an implicit bias to infer intention in all behavior. This research has important implications both in terms of theory (e.g., dual-process model for intentional reasoning), and practice (e.g., treating aggression, legal judgments).
To reason competently about novel entities, people must discover whether the entity is alive and/or sentient. Exactly how people make this discovery is unknown, although past researchers have proposed that young children--unlike adults--rely chiefly on whether the object can move itself. This study examined the effect of goal-directed versus aimless autonomous movement on children's and adults' attributions of biological and psychological capacities in an effort to test whether goal-directedness affects inferences across documented periods of change in biological reasoning. Half of the participants (adults, and 4-, 5-, 7-, and 10-year-olds; Ns=32) were shown videos of unfamiliar blobs moving independently and aimlessly, and the other half were shown videos of identical blobs moving identically but toward a goal. No age group was likely to attribute biological or psychological capacities to the aimless self-moving blobs. However, for 5-year-olds through adults, goal-directed movement reliably elicited life judgments, and it elicited more biological and psychological attributions overall. Adults differed from children in that goal-directed movement affected their attributions of biological properties more than their attributions of psychological properties. The results suggest that both young children and adults consider the capacity for goal-directed movement to be a decisive factor in determining whether something unfamiliar is alive, though other factors may be important in deciding whether the thing is sentient.
This article presents a theoretical framework of how people explain behavior. The framework, based on the folk concept of intentionality, distinguishes two major modes of explanation-reason explanation and cause explanation-as well as two minor modes and identifies conditions under which they occur. Three studies provide empirical support for these distinctions. As part of the framework, a detailed model of people's reason explanations is developed, which emphasizes the unique conceptual and linguistic features of reasons. This model points to limitations of traditional attribution concepts, which are examined theoretically and empirically. Finally, the theoretical framework incorporates attribution concepts, which apply to some but not all modes of explanation. Several paths for future research are outlined-on novel topics such as the roles of rationality and subjectivity in explanations and on classic topics such as the actor-observer asymmetry and the self-serving bias.
The representativeness heuristic has been invoked to explain two opposing expectations--that random sequences will exhibit positive recency (the hot hand fallacy) and that they will exhibit negative recency (the gambler's fallacy). We propose alternative accounts for these two expectations: (1) The hot hand fallacy arises from the experience of characteristic positive recency in serial fluctuations in human performance. (2) The gambler's fallacy results from the experience of characteristic negative recency in sequences of natural events, akin to sampling without replacement. Experiment 1 demonstrates negative recency in subjects' expectations for random binary outcomes from a roulette game, simultaneously with positive recency in expectations for another statistically identical sequence-the successes and failures of their predictions for the random outcomes. These findings fit our proposal but are problematic for the representativeness account. Experiment 2 demonstrates that sequence recency influences attributions that human performance or chance generated the sequence.
In this research, the authors found that people use speed of movement to infer the presence of mind and mental attributes such as intention, consciousness, thought, and intelligence in other persons, animals, and objects. Participants in 4 studies exhibited timescale bias--perceiving human and nonhuman targets (animals, robots, and animations) as more likely to possess mental states when those targets moved at speeds similar to the speed of natural human movement, compared with when targets performed actions at speeds faster or slower than the speed of natural human movement.
Anthropomorphism describes the tendency to imbue the real or imagined behavior of nonhuman agents with humanlike characteristics, motivations, intentions, or emotions. Although surprisingly common, anthropomorphism is not invariant. This article describes a theory to explain when people are likely to anthropomorphize and when they are not, focused on three psychological determinants--the accessibility and applicability of anthropocentric knowledge (elicited agent knowledge), the motivation to explain and understand the behavior of other agents (effectance motivation), and the desire for social contact and affiliation (sociality motivation). This theory predicts that people are more likely to anthropomorphize when anthropocentric knowledge is accessible and applicable, when motivated to be effective social agents, and when lacking a sense of social connection to other humans. These factors help to explain why anthropomorphism is so variable; organize diverse research; and offer testable predictions about dispositional, situational, developmental, and cultural influences on anthropomorphism. Discussion addresses extensions of this theory into the specific psychological processes underlying anthropomorphism, applications of this theory into robotics and human-computer interaction, and the insights offered by this theory into the inverse process of dehumanization.
Where do new ideas come from? What is social intelligence? Why do social scientists perform mindless statistical rituals? This vital book is about rethinking rationality as adaptive thinking: to understand how minds cope with their environments, both ecological and social. The author proposes and illustrates a bold new research program that investigates the psychology of rationality, introducing the concepts of ecological, bounded, and social rationality. His path-breaking collection takes research on thinking, social intelligence, creativity, and decision-making out of an ethereal world where the laws of logic and probability reign, and places it into our real world of human behavior and interaction. This book is accessibly written for general readers with an interest in psychology, cognitive science, economics, sociology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and animal behavior. It also teaches a practical audience, such as physicians, AIDS counselors, and experts in criminal law, how to understand and communicate uncertainties and risks.
Many decisions are based on beliefs concerning the likelihood of uncertain events such as the outcome of an election, the guilt of a defendant, or the future value of the dollar. Occasionally, beliefs concerning uncertain events are expressed in numerical form as odds or subjective probabilities. In general, the heuristics are quite useful, but sometimes they lead to severe and systematic errors. The subjective assessment of probability resembles the subjective assessment of physical quantities such as distance or size. These judgments are all based on data of limited validity, which are processed according to heuristic rules. However, the reliance on this rule leads to systematic errors in the estimation of distance. This chapter describes three heuristics that are employed in making judgments under uncertainty. The first is representativeness, which is usually employed when people are asked to judge the probability that an object or event belongs to a class or event. The second is the availability of instances or scenarios, which is often employed when people are asked to assess the frequency of a class or the plausibility of a particular development, and the third is adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical prediction when a relevant value is available.
Prepared 5 computer-generated films to investigate the effects of temporal contingency and spatial configuration on the perception of social events in an experiment with 40 undergraduates. The 1st film simulated a chase in which one figure converged on the path of the other, which then deviated from that path. In addition, there was a temporal contingency between changes in direction of the 2 figures. The 2nd film retained the same parameters of motion and temporal contingency, but the trailing circle paralleled rather than converged on the leading circle. In the 3rd film, the circles retained the temporal contingency, but the direction of the trailing circle was free to converge or diverge within limits from the path of the leading circle. In the 4th film, the paths of both circles were generated randomly but still displayed the same lag between changes in direction as the 1st 3 films. The 5th film displayed random paths, as in the previous case, but destroyed the temporal contingency shared by the other 4 films. The temporal contingency factor was crucial for the perception of an interaction between the figures, while the spatial configuration of motion tended to determine the nature of that interaction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).
Sometimes people believe that a run of similar independent events will be broken (belief in the gambler's fallacy) but, other times, that such a run will continue (belief in the hot hand). Both of these opposite inductions have been explained as being due to belief in a law of small numbers. We argue that one factor that distinguishes these phenomena is people's beliefs about the randomness of the underlying process generating the events. We gave participants information about a streak of events but varied the scenarios in such a way that the mechanism generating the events should vary in how random the participants would judge it to be. A manipulation check confirmed our assumptions about the scenarios. We found that with less random scenarios, the participants were more likely to continue a streak.
Diagnostic labels segregate "normal" from "abnormal," leading to the dehumanization of all people. "Schizophrenia" is one of the most abusive terms applied to people, highlighting the deficits while obscuring the strengths that exist in all human beings. The detachment that diagnosis encourages has sometimes been used to justify destructive forms of treatment. This article examines the value of a poetry workshop as a means of delabeling schizophrenia and enhancing empathic understanding. What makes this annual 7-week experience unique is that it took place within the walls of a state institution and involved about an equal number of college students and hospitalized people, who gradually moved, through the writing and discussion of poems, from a no-man's land of mutual misconception to a high level of group unity and individual respect.
Three studies investigated the role of surface attributes in infants' identification of agents, using a habituation paradigm designed to tap infants' interpretation of grasp-ing as goal directed (Woodward, 1998). When they viewed a bare human hand grasp-ing objects, 7-and 12-month-old infants focused on the relation between the hand and its goal. When the surface properties of the hand were obscured by a glove, how-ever, neither 7-nor 12-month-old infants represented its actions as goal directed (Study 1). Next, infants were shown that the gloved hands were part of a person either prior to (Study 2) or during (Study 3) the habituation procedure. Infants who actively monitored the gloved person in Study 2 and older infants in Study 3 interpreted the gloved reaches as goal directed. Thus, varying the extent to which an entity is identi-fiable as a person impacts infants' interpretation of the entity as an agent. The distinction between animate agents and inanimate objects is fundamental to both everyday and abstract acts of human cognition. Observing a child chasing a soccer ball, we are not surprised when the child swerves to avoid a tree, but we would be if the ball behaved like the child. We identify the child as an animate agent, and therefore interpret her behavior as expressing her underlying goals or intentions. We understand that this interpretation is not appropriately extended to inanimate objects such as balls. Our ability to quickly categorize entities as agents or inanimate objects is supported by rich perceptual regularities. Animate agents differ from inanimate objects in their typical shapes, rigidity, surface properties, sounds, and patterns of motion. These perceptual attributes correlate with the be-havioral and psychological attributes that are central to folk conceptions of agents INFANCY, 6(3), 361–384 Copyright © 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
We investigate the origin and the validity of common beliefs regarding “the hot hand” and “streak shooting” in the game of basketball. Basketball players and fans alike tend to believe that a player's chance of hitting a shot are greater following a hit than following a miss on the previous shot. However, detailed analyses of the shooting records of the Philadelphia 76ers provided no evidence for a positive correlation between the outcomes of successive shots. The same conclusions emerged from free-throw records of the Boston Celtics, and from a controlled shooting experiment with the men and women of Cornell's varsity teams. The outcomes of previous shots influenced Cornell players' predictions but not their performance. The belief in the hot hand and the “detection” of streaks in random sequences is attributed to a general misconception of chance according to which even short random sequences are thought to be highly representative of their generating process.
We investigated two types of metaphors in stock market commentary. Agent metaphors describe price trajectories as volitional actions, whereas object metaphors describe them as movements of inanimate objects. Study 1 examined the consequences of commentators’ metaphors for their investor audience. Agent metaphors, compared with object metaphors and non-metaphoric descriptions, caused investors to expect price trend continuance. The remaining studies examined preconditions, the features of a price trend that evoke agent vs. object metaphors. We hypothesized that the rate of agentic metaphors would depend on the trend direction (upday vs. downday) and steadiness (steady vs. unsteady). Two archival studies tracked the metaphoric content in end-of-day CNBC commentary as a function of daily price trajectories. As predicted, agent metaphors occurred more frequently on updays than downdays and especially so when the trends were relatively steady as opposed to unsteady. This held for both bull (Study 2) and bear market periods (Study 3). Study 4 replicated these findings in a laboratory experiment where participants took the role of stock market commentator.
This article described three heuristics that are employed in making judgements under uncertainty: (i) representativeness,
which is usually employed when people are asked to judge the probability that an object or event A belongs to class or process
B; (ii) availability of instances or scenarios, which is often employed when people are asked to assess the frequency of a
class or the plausibility of a particular development; and (iii) adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical
prediction when a relevant value is available. These heuristics are highly economical and usually effective, but they lead
to systematic and predictable errors. A better understanding of these heuristics and of the biases to which they lead could
improve judgements and decisions in situations of uncertainty.
We present six experiments that tested whether lacking control increases illusory pattern perception, which we define as the identification of a coherent and meaningful interrelationship among a set of random or unrelated stimuli. Participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions. Additionally, we demonstrated that increased pattern perception has a motivational basis by measuring the need for structure directly and showing that the causal link between lack of control and illusory pattern perception is reduced by affirming the self. Although these many disparate forms of pattern perception are typically discussed as separate phenomena, the current results suggest that there is a common motive underlying them.
Research with young children has shown that, like adults, they focus selectively on the aspects of an actor's behavior that are relevant to his or her underlying intentions. The current studies used the visual habituation paradigm to ask whether infants would similarly attend to those aspects of an action that are related to the actor's goals. Infants saw an actor reach for and grasp one of two toys sitting side by side on a curtained stage. After habituation, the positions of the toys were switched and babies saw test events in which there was a change in either the path of motion taken by the actor's arm or the object that was grasped by the actor. In the first study, 9-month-old infants looked longer when the actor grasped a new toy than when she moved through a new path. Nine-month-olds who saw an inanimate object of approximately the same dimensions as the actor's arm touch the toy did not show this pattern in test. In the second study, 5-month-old infants showed similar, though weaker, patterns. A third study provided evidence that the findings for the events involving a person were not due to perceptual changes in the objects caused by occlusion by the hand. A fourth study replicated the 9 month results for a human grasp at 6 months, and revealed that these effects did not emerge when infants saw an inanimate object with digits that moved to grasp the toy. Taken together, these findings indicate that young infants distinguish in their reasoning about human action and object motion, and that by 6 months infants encode the actions of other people in ways that are consistent with more mature understandings of goal-directed action.
Who sees human? The stabilityandimportance anthropomorphism
- A Waytz
- J T Cacioppo
- N Epley
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- L J Moses
- Baldwin
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No 53 puts Italy out of its lottery agony. The Guardian
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The perfect thing: How the iPod shuffles commerce, culture, and coolness How people explain behavior: A new theoretical framework
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Does your iPod play favorites? Newsweek
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Infants selectively encode the goal object of an actor’s reach
- Woodward