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Consumers are often shown investment returns with high levels of precision, which could lead them to misunderstand the inherent uncertainty. We test whether consumers are drawn to precision-that is offset the uncertainty in investment decisions by over-relying on precise numerical information. Five incentivized experiments compared decisions when expected growth is presented in precise forecasts as opposed to ranges. Consumers are more likely to prefer and invest more in precise forecasts when they are evaluated jointly with ranges and when the range features a potential loss. Under these circumstances, precise forecasts give consumers more confidence to invest. This effect holds when consumers are told investment returns are uncertain. On the other hand, experiencing discrepancies between expected and actual growth dissipates the preference for precise forecasts. We identify conditions under which consumers are more likely to favor precise forecasts and how this could be avoided if necessary. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Objective: To examine the impact of the government communicating uncertainties relating to COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness on vaccination intention and trust after people are exposed to conflicting information., Design: Experimental design where participants were randomly allocated to one of two groups., Setting: Online., Participants: 328 adults from a UK research panel., Intervention: Participants received either certain or uncertain communications from a government representative about COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness, before receiving conflicting information about effectiveness., Main Outcome Measures: Vaccination intention and trust in government., Results: Compared with those who received the uncertain announcement from the government, participants who received the certain announcement reported a greater loss of vaccination intention (d = 0.34, 95% CI (0.12 to 0.56), p=0.002) and trust (d = 0.34, 95% CI (0.12 to 0.56), p=0.002) after receiving conflicting information., Conclusions: Communicating with certainty about COVID-19 vaccines reduces vaccination intention and trust if conflicting information arises, whereas communicating uncertainties can protect people from the negative impact of exposure to conflicting information. There are likely to be other factors affecting vaccine intentions, which we do not account for in this study., Trial Registration Number: Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/c73px/., Competing Interests: Competing interests: All authors declare: support from the Think Forward Initiative for the funding of the submitted work; no financial relationships with any organisations that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous three years; no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work., (© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2022. Re-use permitted under CC BY. Published by BMJ.)

Conviction Narrative Theory (CNT) is a theory of choice under radical uncertainty - situations where outcomes cannot be enumerated and probabilities cannot be assigned. Whereas most theories of choice assume that people rely on (potentially biased) probabilistic judgments, such theories cannot account for adaptive decision-making when probabilities cannot be assigned. CNT proposes that people use narratives - structured representations of causal, temporal, analogical, and valence relationships - rather than probabilities, as the currency of thought that unifies our sense-making and decision-making faculties. According to CNT, narratives arise from the interplay between individual cognition and the social environment, with reasoners adopting a narrative that feels "right" to explain the available data; using that narrative to imagine plausible futures; and affectively evaluating those imagined futures to make a choice. Evidence from many areas of the cognitive, behavioral, and social sciences supports this basic model, including lab experiments, interview studies, and econometric analyses. We identify 12 propositions to explain how the mental representations (narratives) interact with four inter-related processes (explanation, simulation, affective evaluation, and communication), examining the theoretical and empirical basis for each. We conclude by discussing how CNT can provide a common vocabulary for researchers studying everyday choices across areas of the decision sciences.

The growing ecosystem of peer-to-peer enterprise - the Sharing Economy (SE) - has brought with it a substantial change in how we access and provide goods and services. Within the SE, individuals make decisions based mainly on user-generated trust and reputation information (TRI). Recent research indicates that the use of such information tends to produce a positivity bias in the perceived trustworthiness of fellow users. Across two experimental studies performed on an artificial SE accommodation platform, we test whether users' judgments can be accurate when presented with diagnostic information relating to the quality of the profiles they see or if these overly positive perceptions persist. In study 1, we find that users are quite accurate overall (70%) at determining the quality of a profile, both when presented with full profiles or with profiles where they selected three TRI elements they considered useful for their decision-making. However, users tended to exhibit an "upward quality bias" when making errors. In study 2, we leveraged patterns of frequently vs. infrequently selected TRI elements to understand whether users have insights into which are more diagnostic and find that presenting frequently selected TRI elements improved users' accuracy. Overall, our studies demonstrate that - positivity bias notwithstanding - users can be remarkably accurate in their online SE judgments., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Zloteanu, Harvey, Tuckett and Livan.)

Psychoanalytic training has been an object of controversy for many years. Arguments have been intense about the details, sometimes called "requirements", and particularly over whether or not training institutes should have routine external validation. We describe these arguments and present preliminary conclusions about the core challenges psychoanalytic trainings face using a unique set of detailed observations collected during structured "conversations" inside nine European institutes. We conclude that whether a psychoanalytic training is "working" is not a matter of compliance with requirements. Rather, it is an issue of how candidates, training analysts, supervisors and committee members, confront within and between each other the consequences of the unconscious dynamics that psychoanalytic training must inevitably create. Institutional psychoanalytic capacity is to take itself as the object. Consequentially, we propose that training committees that seek to claim that their psychoanalytic training is genuinely and safely producing psychoanalysts would be ones that institute routine procedures to show to themselves, transparently, how they attend to the dynamics just mentioned and how they take a neutral inquisitive stance towards them. Fear of oversight, we suggest, is a symptom of deeper anxieties. They can be faced by creating an appropriate setting. Properly conducted visits from outsiders are welcomed.

This contribution to honour the Journal's centenary elaborates the classical view that what is primarily at stake in a psychoanalysis are ideas patients and analysts have that are prevented from becoming conscious. It is argued, drawing on a "bare bones" or parsimonious model of psychoanalytic treatment, that the ideas concerned are mainly the worrying unconscious beliefs patients have about their experience with their analysts. These are ideas saturated with feeling and derived from the internal templates that patients use to respond to current experience, based on ways they have registered experience from the beginning of their lives. Because such ideas are unconscious , they cannot be taken as hypotheses until revised. Rather, they are assumed to be facts, knowledge of which, because they generate feelings like anxiety, guilt or shame, is to be avoided and hidden. After introducing the model and discussing two short vignettes from psychoanalytic treatment, the author elaborates the view that recognising which ideas are being prevented from becoming conscious in sessions is the kernel of psychoanalytic therapy.

What psychoanalysts consider psychoanalytic interpretation, in what setting it emerges and specifically why, when and how transference should be interpreted, have become increasingly unclear and controversial. In this paper I set out, elaborate, illustrate and argue the value for post-session reflection, certainly within the object relations traditions, of adopting a parsimonious model of practice. The model rests on the foundations of a specific understanding of free association, evenly suspended attention, resistance and transference and separating two epistemologically distinct intentions in transference interpretation. One, transference construction, aims to make a patient aware of the unconscious ways a patient is behaving in sessions (and then outside them) and how and why that is happening. A second, transference designation, focuses on the more limited aim of making patients aware of how they unconsciously experience the psychoanalyst at specific moments of resistance in sessions. Both types of interpretation may help but, I argue, it is the latter that must form the bedrock for fundamental change.

The Sharing Economy (SE) is a growing ecosystem focusing on peer-to-peer enterprise. In the SE the information available to assist individuals (users) in making decisions focuses predominantly on community-generated trust and reputation information. However, how such information impacts user judgement is still being understood. To explore such effects, we constructed an artificial SE accommodation platform where we varied the elements related to hosts' digital identity, measuring users' perceptions and decisions to interact. Across three studies, we find that trust and reputation information increases not only the users' perceived trustworthiness, credibility, and sociability of hosts, but also the propensity to rent a private room in their home. This effect is seen when providing users both with complete profiles and profiles with partial user-selected information. Closer investigations reveal that three elements relating to the host's digital identity are sufficient to produce such positive perceptions and increased rental decisions, regardless of which three elements are presented. Our findings have relevant implications for human judgment and privacy in the SE, and question its current culture of ever increasing information-sharing., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

We propose conviction narrative theory (CNT) to broaden decision-making theory in order to better understand and analyse how subjectively means-end rational actors cope in contexts in which the traditional assumptions in decision-making models fail to hold. Conviction narratives enable actors to draw on their beliefs, causal models, and rules of thumb to identify opportunities worth acting on, to simulate the future outcome of their actions, and to feel sufficiently convinced to act. The framework focuses on how narrative and emotion combine to allow actors to deliberate and to select actions that they think will produce the outcomes they desire. It specifies connections between particular emotions and deliberative thought, hypothesising that approach and avoidance emotions evoked during narrative simulation play a crucial role. Two mental states, Divided and Integrated, in which narratives can be formed or updated, are introduced and used to explain some familiar problems that traditional models cannot., Competing Interests: Declaration of conflicting interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

The underlying concern of this paper is that psychoanalysis as practised today is in danger of losing its specificity and so losing its way. The author suggests this is possible for three reasons: the problem analysts face in responding to the strong emotional demands the great majority of patients necessarily place on them, the unintended consequences of the apparent success of 'here and now technique' and the absence of good clinical theory. The paper mainly discusses the author's ideas about some core elements of the clinical theory that all psychoanalysts must use when they are working and proposes (at the risk of being facile) some relatively simple heuristics related to them which are meant to be helpful. Recalling Kurt Lewin's maxim that 'there is nothing so practical as a good theory', he will suggest that continuous reflection on how one is using theory in daily practice is highly practical, if the theory is good enough. Theory in fact is a necessary 'third' in psychoanalytic practice which, if kept in sufficient working order close enough to clinical experience, provides an ongoing and very necessary check on our sense of reality. But, of course, as a third it can, like reality itself, be the focus of both love and hate with equally problematic consequences. The paper starts with a clinical example of a difficult but apparently successful analysis reaching its end, which will be used throughout the paper to illustrate and elaborate the theoretical ideas set out., (Copyright © 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis.)

This paper sets out to explore if standard psychoanalytic thinking based on clinical experience can illuminate instability in financial markets and its widespread human consequences. Buying, holding or selling financial assets in conditions of inherent uncertainty and ambiguity, it is argued, necessarily implies an ambivalent emotional and phantasy relationship to them. Based on the evidence of historical accounts, supplemented by some interviewing, the authors suggest a psychoanalytic approach focusing on unconscious phantasy relationships, states of mind, and unconscious group functioning can explain some outstanding questions about financial bubbles which cannot be explained with mainstream economic theories. The authors also suggest some institutional features of financial markets which may ordinarily increase or decrease the likelihood that financial decisions result from splitting off those thoughts which give rise to painful emotions. Splitting would increase the future risk of financial instability and in this respect the theory with which economic agents in such markets approach their work is important. An interdisciplinary theory recognizing and making possible the integration of emotional experience may be more useful to economic agents than the present mainstream theories which contrast rational and irrational decision-making and model them as making consistent decisions on the basis of reasoning alone.

It has been difficult to know what does and does not constitute competent psychoanalytic work and so equally difficult to assess when it is being practised and when it is not. This makes difficult any form of disciplined evaluation of the outcome of training, which has a series of problematic outcomes for psychoanalytic practice, psychoanalytic institutions and the relationship to allied disciplines and professions. In this paper, the author considers how far it might be possible to devise aframework for assessment of training programmes within a disciplined psychoanalytic pluralism. The aspiration is to develop a transparent framework, based on an empirically supported demonstration of analytic capacity. The framework needs to be sensitive and subtle, and to be able to withstand challenge. It needs to take cognisance of the twin facts that there is more than one way to practise psychoanalysis and that it is necessary to avoid 'anything goes'. Drawing on an ongoing project undertaken by European IPA institutes, the author describes some of the problems colleagues have been experiencing in European institutes, because they have not had available transparent criteria for assessment. He outlines a preliminary form of a proposed method for making more transparent and supportable assessment. The author intends for this paper to inspire hope, enquiry and debate.

Psychoanalysis has insecure foundations. Many of its core theories and therapeutic principles are contested from both within and without the discipline. While it often has little difficulty embracing new ideas it has terrible trouble rejecting old ones. Typically those within the discipline have dealt with this situation by destructive rationalisation, denial, splitting and idealization. Foremost is the tendency to multiply schools and paradigms and to rely on rhetoric and argument by authority. It is argued that to counter such inevitably destructive processes we need to find a way of improving constructive engagement with each other and to achieve a discipline that can grow on the secure foundations of gradually accumulating knowledge. Giving examples, the author describes the ongoing development of a methodology for evaluating psychoanalytic papers according to a common standard. It is proposed that it is possible to conduct reasoned international and cross-cultural peer review. This means that we can in principle evaluate and reach agreement as to the merit of psychoanalytic papers even though their authors may have backgrounds in profoundly different local style and local traditions of argument. Moreover, it is suggested, this can be done without creating the monster of an internationally homogenised style that would numb creativity and original thought.

This paper argues the case that validation in the clinical process depends to a large extent on being as clear and specific as possible about the hypotheses being put forward. In sessions interpretations are made based on intuitive and quite spontaneous links arising from background orientations and what will be called clusters of observed clinical facts. Outside the session, a wider and more developed set of grounded hypotheses can be developed, intended to illuminate what seem to be the core issues that arise over time and the core problems suffered by the patient. Often such hypotheses will only be in the form of working orientations. If they can be conceptualised more precisely into specific hypotheses explaining sets of observed events and predicting consequences, they can be better evaluated--either by the analyst working alone, or in group discussion through the achievement of genuine consensus. A process of building up a 'grounded' hypothesis, by making comparisons in the process of trying to solve a clinical problem, is described using detailed clinical material. This is also intended to illustrate the argument that it can be useful to consider the basic occurrences reported from sessions as data, distinct from the theory put forward to explain them.

This paper is intended to stimulate consideration of the problems we face as psychoanalysts in attempting to discuss our basic data: the material from the clinical setting. Some brief comments are made about the importance of this issue for progress in our field, in the context of several attempts by the author to present and discuss process material from psychoanalytical treatment, and also in the light of discussion at psychoanalytical conferences and congresses, such as the Amsterdam sessions devoted to the clinical papers by Jacobs and Duncan. The question of what is going when psychoanalysts present clinical material to each other and discuss it is approached: firstly, by drawing attention to some features of the context in which discussion of that report takes place; secondly, by considering what it is we are doing when we select what we report of a psychoanalytic session; and, thirdly, by exploring certain inherent features of the psychoanalytic situation itself and their impact on the construction of a report and the response to it of an audience. Taken together, it is argued, these three elements have quite far-reaching implications for how presenter and audience might usefully play their parts in clinical discussion, and on the nature of the culture of enquiry we need to develop if we are to have hopes of building psychoanalytic theory and technique grounded in observations of practice.

This paper aims to highlight some of the contributions Herbert Rosenfeld made to the theory of how psychoanalysis works. Taking Rosenfeld's first psychoanalytic paper as a starting point the author suggests that his technique was rooted in trying to make the patient aware by verbal interpretation of his psychic reality as he experienced it in the session with his analyst. Four of Rosenfeld's theoretical contributions for helping clearly to conceptualize the patient's psychic reality are then outlined: his ideas about narcissism, projective identification, the role of history and external reality and his optimistic insistence that no matter how different it may seem the patient is always trying to communicate his predicament.

Many 'sociological' and 'medical' reasons for informing and not informing patients in medical consultations have been given. This paper reviews and evaluates various empirical attempts to support arguments about the relationship between information-giving and outcomes. It suggests that more attention has been paid to examining the way information is given than to the information itself. When information has been examined this has been in relatively 'empiricist' ways, ignoring the issue as to how illuminating it might be. The paper concludes both that we know very little about the causes and consequences of information exchanged in medical consultations and that we are unlikely to do so unless different approaches are attempted.