Adam Waytz’s research while affiliated with Northwestern University and other places

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Publications (93)


Comparison of support for domestic sustainability policies between learning and control conditions across all studies.
Learning about successfully implemented sustainability policies abroad increases support for sustainable domestic policies
  • Article
  • Full-text available

May 2024

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45 Reads

Matejas Mackin

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Trevor Spelman

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Adam Waytz

Anthropogenic climate change poses an existential threat to life on Earth, hastening the need to generate support for sustainability policies. Four preregistered studies (total N = 2524) tested whether informing United States citizens about the successful implementation of sustainability policies abroad increased support for similar domestic policies. Studies 1 and 2 found that learning about the successful implementation of sustainability policies (reducing automobile use, using wind energy) abroad increased (1) support for similar domestic policies, (2) intentions to modify behavior to facilitate the adoption of sustainability policies, and (3) behavioral support for sustainability policies. Study 3 found that learning about sustainability policies in both WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) (France) and non-WEIRD (Colombia) countries increased support for similar domestic policies. Study 4 found that learning about sustainability policies abroad increased support for domestic policy proposals that would impact participants’ city of residence. Overall, these findings suggest that educating citizens about the implementation of sustainability policies abroad can bolster support for domestic policies that combat climate change.

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Fig. 2. Set-up for Experiment 1. Participants first read the table or the bar chart, predicted a winner and provided justification. Next, they matched their justification with one of four options we offered.
Fig. 3. Results from Experiment 1a. Left: distribution of slider responses on election outcome prediction for bar and table. The color encodes the specific green or blue supporting features participants chose as their reasoning for their predictions. Right: prediction results for binary forced choice task from bar and table conditions. Error bars are calculated by estimating standard errors for proportions and then multiplied to a total sample size.
Fig. 5. Procedure for the line chart portion of Experiment 2.
Fig. 6. Left: Histograms showing the distribution of bar chart election outcome prediction and line chart market share prediction. The color encodes the specific pattern participants indicated as salient, following the same color schemes as in Experiment 1. The lines connecting the two histograms show what the same participants predicted across the two charts. Purple lines represent those who made congruent predictions (blue/top or green/bottom), and gray lines represent those that made incongruent predictions (blue/bottom or green/top). Middle Left: Binary response results on the predicted winner by chart features they found salient. Middle Right: Scatterplot showing how bar chart prediction slider values correlate with those for the line chart. Overall, more participants made congruent predictions, with R = 0.21. Right: Binary response results for the bar chart and the line chart. Error bars represent standard error calculated by estimating standard errors for proportions and then multiplied to a total sample size.
Fig. 8. Number of people who made congruent and incongruent predictions with the annotated and highlighted visualizations.
Same Data, Diverging Perspectives: The Power of Visualizations to Elicit Competing Interpretations

April 2024

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35 Reads

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10 Citations

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

People routinely rely on data to make decisions, but the process can be riddled with biases. We show that patterns in data might be noticed first or more strongly, depending on how the data is visually represented or what the viewer finds salient. We also demonstrate that viewer interpretation of data is similar to that of ‘ambiguous figures’ such that two people looking at the same data can come to different decisions. In our studies, participants read visualizations depicting competitions between two entities, where one has a historical lead (A) but the other has been gaining momentum (B) and predicted a winner, across two chart types and three annotation approaches. They either saw the historical lead as salient and predicted that A would win, or saw the increasing momentum as salient and predicted B to win. These results suggest that decisions can be influenced by both how data are presented and what patterns people find visually salien




The effects of priming on rhinologic patient reported outcome measures: a randomized controlled trial

October 2023

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4 Reads

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3 Citations

Rhinology Journal

Background: Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) are questionnaires designed to assess a patient's perception of their medical condition. The 22-item Sino-Nasal Outcomes Test (SNOT-22), the Rhinosinusitis Disability Index (RSDI) and the mini-Rhinoconjunctivitis Quality of Life Questionnaire (MiniRQLQ) are validated PROMs commonly used to assess rhinologic conditions. The objective of this study is to determine if responses on these PROMs may be influenced by priming respondents with positive or negative health-related questionnaires. Methods: Nine hundred patients were prospectively randomized to one of nine groups. Groups A, D and G were positively primed prior to completing the SNOT-22, the RSDI and MiniRQLQ, respectively. Groups B, E, and H were negatively primed. Groups C, F, and I served as control groups, completing the PROMs without priming. Priming was performed by administering a survey designed to make patients think about their health-related quality of life in a positive or negative way. Results: Patients who were primed negatively had statistically significantly worse scores on the SNOT-22, RSDI and MiniRQLQ when compared to patients who were primed positively. When compared to the control group, patients who were primed negatively had statistically worse scores on the SNOT-22 and RSDI. There was no significant difference in scores between the positive priming and the control groups for any PROM. Conclusions: Priming subjects regarding their health-related quality of life impacts their responses on rhinologic PROMs. Further study is required to understand the clinical and research implications of this novel finding and to clarify the optimal manner for administering and interpreting PROMs.



Fig. 2. Occupational AI exposure and belief in God. (A) A boxplot representing the central tendency and distribution of God belief among workers who worked in occupations with high exposure to biology, chemistry, mathematics, medicine/dentistry, programming/AI, or none of the categories (an importance score of less than 25/100 on all science categories). (B) The relationship between exposure to different scientific domains and God belief at no lag, a one-wave lag, and a two-wave lag. Dashed error bars represent 95% CI. (C) A scatterplot of God belief on AI exposure. Nodes are occupations, node color represents mathematics exposure, and the trendline is a loess curve.
Exposure to automation explains religious declines

August 2023

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188 Reads

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9 Citations

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

The global decline of religiosity represents one of the most significant societal shifts in recent history. After millennia of near-universal religious identification, the world is experiencing a regionally uneven trend toward secularization. We propose an explanation of this decline, which claims that automation-the development of robots and artificial intelligence (AI)-can partly explain modern religious declines. We build four unique datasets composed of more than 3 million individuals which show that robotics and AI exposure is linked to 21st-century religious declines across nations, metropolitan regions, and individual people. Key results hold controlling for other technological developments (e.g., electricity grid access and telecommunications development), socioeconomic indicators (e.g., wealth, residential mobility, and demographics), and factors implicated in previous theories of religious decline (e.g., individual choice norms). An experiment also supports our hypotheses. Our findings partly explain contemporary trends in religious decline and foreshadow where religiosity may wane in the future.



Figure 1. Study 1 Tweet Stimuli and Bot Attribution Measures Note. In the upper left and bottom right Tweets, the first Tweet responses are liberal leaning, whereas in the upper right and lower left Tweets, the first Tweet responses are conservative leaning.
Figure 2. Attribution of Liberal-Versus Conservative-Leaning Tweets to Bots or Humans, Moderated by Political Affiliation (Democrat vs, Republican) Note. Error bars represent + /2 1 SEM.
Figure 3. An Example of a Tweet (Left) and Tweetstorm (Right) Used in Study 4
Political Bot Bias in the Perception of Online Discourse

February 2023

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228 Reads

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7 Citations

Social Psychological and Personality Science

Four nationally representative studies ( N = 1,986; three preregistered) find evidence for a bias in how people perceive opposing viewpoints expressed through online discourse. These studies elucidate a political bot bias, where political partisans (vs. their out-party) are more likely to view counter-ideological (vs. ideologically consistent) tweets to be social media bots (vs. humans). Study 1 demonstrates that American Democrats and Republicans are more likely to attribute tweets to bots when those tweets express counter-ideological views. Study 2 demonstrated this bias with actual bot tweets generated by the Russian government and comparable human tweets. Study 3 demonstrated this bias manifests in the context of real recent elections and is associated with markers of political animosity. Study 4 experimentally demonstrates the consequences of bot attribution for perceptions of online political discourse. Our findings document a consistent bias that has implications for political discussion online and political polarization more broadly.


Citations (70)


... For example, as shown from Fig. 1, the annotation within the visualization likely exacerbates the misunderstanding by implying an inaccurate causal link between the legislation and gun death rates. Building on these observations, our review categorizes 15 empirical studies on misleading elements, grouping them based on their focus on two key elements: graphical elements or contextual elements (Bearfield et al., 2024;Ceja et al., 2021;Ciccione et al., 2022;Fig. 4 Overview of the article search process for RQ2 Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. ...

Reference:

Exploring Educational Approaches to Addressing Misleading Visualizations
Same Data, Diverging Perspectives: The Power of Visualizations to Elicit Competing Interpretations

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

... Finally, it can be inspiring to learn how marginalized individuals have been helped by allyship. For example, white men working in the USA reported stronger intentions to engage in ally behaviours when they read testimonials from women and people of colour discussing how they have benefited from and appreciated such actions, compared to men who had not read the testimonials 176 . ...

Advantaged groups misperceive how allyship will be received
  • Citing Article
  • March 2024

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

... Notably, in both SNOT-22 parameters, overweight/obese people presented worse values. However, despite the extensive data validating SNOT-22's reliability and accuracy, patient responses to PROMs may be impacted by numerous individual factors that remain largely unexplored and/or undocumented, such as anxiety/depression, interactions with healthcare providers, and clinical settings [29,30]. The discrepancy in statistically significant differences concerning NPS and SNOT-22 may be attributed to the multifaceted nature of SNOT-22, which includes various aspects of quality of life and symptomatology beyond nasal polyp burden alone. ...

The effects of priming on rhinologic patient reported outcome measures: a randomized controlled trial
  • Citing Article
  • October 2023

Rhinology Journal

... Notwithstanding the evidence supporting the existential insecurity hypothesis, the proponents of the rationalization theory, which roughly follows the insights of early secularization theoreticians, argue that the main driver of secularization is the mechanization of worldviews associated with increasing technological mastery over the world, not decreasing insecurity (Bruce, 2011). For example, a recent study on automation and religious beliefs found a negative relationship between these variables both between and within countries, and a higher work-related exposure to AI was associated with a later decrease in the intensity of religious beliefs (Jackson et al., 2023). Using education as a proxy for the rationalization and mechanization of worldviews, other studies found that increasing the compulsory years of schooling was associated with decreased religiosity in Canada (Hungerman, 2014) and that earning a college degree was associated with a sudden decline in religiosity in a U.S. longitudinal study (Schwadel, 2016). ...

Exposure to automation explains religious declines

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

... Prior studies have found that the use of artificial intelligence can be very beneficial, in the sense that their use can be a quick and efficient way to find useful information and useful sources for further study and examination, although AI bots cannot be trusted to be 100 percent accurate or reliable (McGee, 2023e). Some AI bots have political biases (Dingler et al., 2018;Hartmann et al., 2023;McGee, 2023aMcGee, , b, c & d, 2024Rozado, 2023;Rutinowski et al., 2023;Schweitzer et al., 2023) and they sometimes make up information and citations out of thin air, which is referred to as hallucinations (McGee, 2023e;Wu et al., 2024;Yan et al., 2020). Thus, the summary I gave above should be verified by additional research. ...

Political Bot Bias in the Perception of Online Discourse

Social Psychological and Personality Science

... Most relevant to the present paper, Buchsbaum et al. [14] argue that pretence and counterfactual reasoning exercise the same underlying causal reasoning mechanisms (see [19,20] for similar arguments) and provide correlational evidence to support this hypothesis. As noted above, the content of counterfactual questions appears to play an important role in children's counterfactual competence. ...

The Oxford Handbook of the Development of Imagination
  • Citing Article
  • April 2013

... Indeed, nonprofit entrepreneurs may engage in moral licensing to justify to themselves and others that it is okay for them to act unethically (e.g., Gamez-Djokic, Kouchaki, & Waytz, 2022; for a meta-analysis, see Blanken, Van de Ven, & Zeelenberg, 2015). In other words, because they help people (a moral good), they may believe they have made deposits in the moral bank, which they can withdraw to "pay for" a moral transgression. ...

Virtuous Startups: The Credentialing Power of the Startup Label
  • Citing Article
  • September 2022

Academy of Management Discoveries

... If people maintain differing relational norms for humans and AI (as compared to human-human relationships), this suggests that what is perceived as appropriate or inappropriate behavior in one case may not translate to the other case. This could shed light on why people react differently, for example, towards identical actions performed by human and AI agents (e.g., [5]). Researchers might also consider further measures probing people's attitudes toward AI behavior (e.g., whether the agent acted intentionally, severity of the norm violation, and so on). ...

Algorithmic Discrimination Causes Less Moral Outrage Than Human Discrimination

Journal of Experimental Psychology General

... A review study, pointed out that influential factors of loneliness in emerging adulthood encompass family relationships, mobile phone use, social environment, health behaviors, growth experiences, romantic relationships, parenting styles, and personality traits [8]. Among them, the sense of power, as an important psychological variable, can change a person's perception of interpersonal relationships and then impact feelings of loneliness [12]. Currently, only limited studies have centered on the relationship between a sense of power and loneliness, and there is a lack of empirical evidence from international student groups. ...

The relationship between power and secrecy
  • Citing Article
  • May 2022

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

... Based on the folk model (Holland and Quinn, 1987) and the work of Tsoi et al. (2021), the current study investigated the impact of situations on Chinese preschool-age children's lying behavior and cognition and the association between them. To achieve our aims, we conducted two experiments in which children were required to respond to two moral situations: lying for mutual interests (the principle of honesty conflicts with mutual interests) and lying for selfinterest (the principle of honesty conflicts with self-interests). ...

A Cooperation Advantage for Theory of Mind in Children and Adults

Social Cognition