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Study 3: This project investigates self-other differences in risky choices using a differentiated approach of simultaneous parameter estimation that integrates and tests components of three relevant theories in the field: Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT) (Tversky & Kahneman, 1992), Construal Level Theory (Trope & Liberman, 2010), and the Risk as Feelings Hypothesis (Loewenstein et al., 2001). By manipulating the target for whom the decision is made (i.e. self vs. a close friend vs. another participant in the study), I examine the effects of psychological distance via social distance on risk preferences, characterized by the CPT parameters alpha, lambda, gamma and phi.

Study 2: This project investigates self-other differences in risky choices using a differentiated approach of simultaneous parameter estimation that integrates and tests components of three relevant theories in the field: Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT) (Tversky & Kahneman, 1992), Construal Level Theory (Trope & Liberman, 2010), and the Risk as Feelings Hypothesis (Loewenstein et al., 2001). By manipulating the target for whom the decision is made (i.e. self vs. another participant in the study), I examine the effects of psychological distance via social distance on risk preferences, characterized by the CPT parameters alpha, lambda, gamma and phi.

This document provides detailed information for the first round of data collection on a project on bribery in an international context. We plan to collecting data in three countries (Germany, Spain and Mexico) and a sample size of N = 300 participants per country.

Previous studies showed that the processing of objective cues could be influenced by gender stereotypes. For example, Dorrough et al. (2017) gave participants decision matrices with male and female experts recommending products and found the expert’s gender to influence the decision. This bias disappeared when participants were explicitly instructed to use only the recommendations. Since the analysis was only done on a group level, this could both be caused by a reduction of the bias as well as by aggregation artifacts. Furthermore, the paradigm did not directly relate to hiring studies. We modified the design such that the cues were gender-neutral, whereas the options were gendered, making it closer to designs in hiring studies. Participants decided between a female and a male job candidate for a job associated with either gender. Thus, a stereotype bias could both cause participants to favor one of the genders in general, as well as to favor applicants if the job category matched the gender. As three experiments (with different manipulations) showed no influence on the gender information, we conducted this fourth experiment where the instructions did not emphasize to ignore the gender information as in the previous experiments.

Reproducibility is a defining feature of science, but the extent to which it characterizes current research is unknown. We conducted replications of 100 experimental and correlational studies published in three psychology journals using high-powered designs and original materials when available.

According to coherence-based models of legal judgment, individuals form coherent mental representations to make sense of the available evidence. In this process, evidence supporting the emerging assessment is accentuated, resulting in coherence effects. Dependent on specific implementations of coherence-based models, in legal tasks both overweighting of evidence that is presented early (a primacy effect) or late (a recency effect) can be predicted. In two studies (N-1 = 221, N-2 = 332), we investigate coherence effects, order effects, and their interrelation in a mock legal case. We manipulate the order in which the evidence is presented, and whether or not individuals are induced to assess provisionally whether they deem the defendant guilty after seeing half of the evidence (leaning). This leaning manipulation should increase primacy effects. We consistently observed recency effects and no stronger influence of primacy effects when people indicate a leaning. Order and leaning did not influence the magnitude of coherence effects. In contrast to previous findings in consumer research and risky choice tasks, coherence effects did not mediate the effect of the order in which the evidence in legal judgments is presented. If our results hold more generally, coherence-based models of legal judgment might have to be revised to give more weight to recency effects as compared to the typically predicted primacy effects. This revision would have implications for the design of criminal procedure.

Positive contact between members of different groups reduces prejudice and increases cooperation, findings known as intergroup contact effects. Yet in real-world settings not only positive, but also negative intergroup contact occurs, which have opposing effects. To date little is known about whether and how an individual's valenced history of intergroup contact influences contact effects and how this dynamic change happens during specific instances of intergroup contact. A pilot study examined the psychological impact of a novel paradigm to assess intergroup contact using a behavioral game. We then conducted two studies, which allowed us to observe a sequence of up to 23 in- and outgroup interactions and their behavioral outcomes in a continuous prisoner's dilemma behavioral game (N = 116, 2,668 interactions; N = 89, 1,513 interactions). As expected, participants showed a clear ingroup bias in expectations and cooperation. Furthermore, the quality of contact history moderated contact effects. Specifically, intergroup contact following a positive history of intergroup contact had a stronger effect on intergroup expectations than contact following a negative history thereof. Findings are discussed in view of the importance of considering the valenced history of intergroup contact, as well as new research questions on intergroup contact that can be addressed with this novel contact paradigm. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

When people can profit financially by lying, they do so to the extent to which they can justify their lies. One type of justification is the observation and production of desirable counterfactual information. Here, we disentangle observing and producing of desired counterfactuals and test whether the mere observation is sufficient or whether one actually needs to produce the information in order to justify lying. By employing a modified version of the Die-Under-Cup task, we ask participants to privately roll a die three times and to report the outcome of the first die roll (with higher values corresponding to higher payoffs). In all three conditions, participants produce (roll the die) and observe the first die roll, which is relevant for pay. We manipulate whether participants produce and observe versus only observe the second and third die roll outcomes, which are both irrelevant for pay. Results reveal that people lie to the same extent-when producing and observing the counterfactuals, and when merely observing them. It seems that merely observing counterfactual information is sufficient to allow people to use this information to justify their lies. We further test whether creativity and moral disengagement are associated with dishonesty and replicate the finding showing that unethical behavior increases with creativity.

In two comprehensive and fully incentivized studies, we investigate the development of ingroup favoritism as one of two aspects of parochial altruism in repeated social dilemmas. Specifically, we test whether ingroup favoritism is a fixed phenomenon that can be observed from the very beginning and remains stable over time, or whether it develops (increases vs. decreases) during repeated contact. Ingroup favoritism is assessed through cooperation behavior in a repeated continuous prisoner's dilemma where participants sequentially interact with 10 members of the ingroup (own city and university) and subsequently with 10 members of the outgroup (other city and university), or vice versa. In none of the experiments do we observe initial differences in cooperation behavior for interaction partners from the ingroup, as compared to outgroup, and we only observe small differences in expectations regarding the interaction partners' cooperation behavior. After repeated interaction, however, including a change of groups, clear ingroup favoritism can be observed. Instead of being due to gradual and potentially biased updating of expectations, we found that these emerging differences were mainly driven by the change of interaction partners' group membership that occurred after round 10. This indicates that in social dilemma settings ingroup favoritism is to some degree dynamic in that it is enhanced and sometimes only observable if group membership is activated by thinking about both the interaction with the ingroup and the outgroup.

In the last years, research on risky choice has moved beyond analyzing choices only. Models have been suggested that aim to describe the underlying cognitive processes and some studies have tested process predictions of these models. Prominent approaches are evidence accumulation models such as Decision Field Theory (DFT), simple serial heuristic models such as the Adaptive Toolbox, and connectionist approaches such as the Parallel Constraint Satisfaction Model (PCS). In two studies involving measures of attention and pupil dilation, we investigate hypotheses derived from these models in choices between two gambles with two outcomes each. We show that attention to an outcome of a gamble increases with its probability and its value and that attention shifts towards the subsequently favored gamble after about two thirds of the decision process, indicating a gaze-cascade effect. Information search occurs mostly within gambles, and the direction of search does not change over the course of decision making. Pupil dilation, which reflects both cognitive effort and arousal, increases during the decision process and increases with mean Expected Value. Overall, the results support aspects of automatic integration models for risky choice such as DFT and PCS, but in their current specification none of them can account for the full pattern of results.

Do decisions from description and from experience trigger different cognitive processes? We investigated this general question using cognitive modeling, eye-tracking, and physiological arousal measures. Three novel findings indeed suggest qualitatively different processes between the two types of decisions. First, comparative modeling indicates that evidence-accumulation models assuming averaging of all fixation-sampled outcomes predict choices best in decisions from experience, whereas Cumulative Prospect Theory predicts choices best in decisions from descriptions. Second, arousal decreased with increasing difference in expected value between gambles in description-based choices but not in experience. Third, the relation between attention and subjective weights given to outcomes was stronger for experience-based than for description-based tasks. Overall, our results indicate that processes in experience-based risky choice can be captured by sampling-and-averaging evidence-accumulation model. This model cannot be generalized to description-based decisions, in which more complex mechanisms are involved.