Conceptual representations of uncertainty predict risky decision-making.

Decisions made under uncertainty often are considered according to their perceived subjective value. We move beyond this traditional framework to explore the hypothesis that conceptual representations of uncertainty influence risky choice. Results reveal that uncertainty concepts are represented along a dimension that jointly captures probabilistic and valenced features of the conceptual space. These uncertainty representations predict the degree to which an individual engages in risky decision-making. Moreover, we find that most individuals have two largely distinct representations: one for uncertainty and another for certainty. In contrast, a minority of individuals exhibit substantial overlap between their representations of uncertainty and certainty. Together, these findings reveal the relationship between the conceptualization of uncertainty and risky decisions.

Emotional responses to prosocial messages increase willingness to self-isolate during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic may be one of the greatest modern societal challenges that requires widespread collective action and cooperation. While a handful of actions can help reduce pathogen transmission, one critical behavior is to self-isolate. Public health messages often use persuasive language to change attitudes and behaviors, which can evoke a wide range of negative and positive emotional responses. In a U.S. representative sample (N = 955), we presented two messages that leveraged either threatening or prosocial persuasive language, and measured self-reported emotional reactions and willingness to self-isolate. Although emotional responses to the interventions were highly heterogeneous, personality traits known to be linked with distinct emotional experiences (extraversion and neuroticism) explained significant variance in the arousal response. While results show that both types of appeals increased willingness to self-isolate (Cohen's d = 0.41), compared to the threat message, the efficacy of the prosocial message was more dependent on the magnitude of the evoked emotional response on both arousal and valence dimensions. Together, these results imply that prosocial appeals have the potential to be associated with greater compliance if they evoke highly positive emotional responses.

Automating weighing of faces and voices based on cue saliency in trustworthiness impressions.

When encountering people, their faces are usually paired with their voices. We know that if the face looks familiar, and the voice is high-pitched, the first impression will be positive and trustworthy. But, how do we integrate these two multisensory physical attributes? Here, we explore 1) the automaticity of audiovisual integration in shaping first impressions of trustworthiness, and 2) the relative contribution of each modality in the final judgment. We find that, even though participants can focus their attention on one modality to judge trustworthiness, they fail to completely filter out the other modality for both faces (Experiment 1a) and voices (Experiment 1b). When asked to judge the person as a whole, people rely more on voices (Experiment 2) or faces (Experiment 3). We link this change to the distinctiveness of each cue in the stimulus set rather than a general property of the modality. Overall, we find that people weigh faces and voices automatically based on cue saliency when forming trustworthiness impressions.

Uncertainty aversion predicts the neural expansion of semantic representations.

Correctly identifying the meaning of a stimulus requires activating the appropriate semantic representation among many alternatives. One way to reduce this uncertainty is to differentiate semantic representations from each other, thereby expanding the semantic space. Here, in four experiments, we test this semantic-expansion hypothesis, finding that uncertainty-averse individuals exhibit increasingly differentiated and separated semantic representations. This effect is mirrored at the neural level, where uncertainty aversion predicts greater distances between activity patterns in the left inferior frontal gyrus when reading words, and enhanced sensitivity to the semantic ambiguity of these words in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Two direct tests of the behavioural consequences of semantic expansion further reveal that uncertainty-averse individuals exhibit reduced semantic interference and poorer generalization. Together, these findings show that the internal structure of our semantic representations acts as an organizing principle to make the world more identifiable.

Is political extremism supported by an illusion of understanding?

Polarization is rising in most countries in the West. How can we reduce it? One potential strategy is to ask people to explain how a political policy works-how it leads to consequences- because that has been shown to induce a kind of intellectual humility: Explanation causes people to reduce their judgments of understanding of the issues (their "illusion of explanatory depth"). It also reduces confidence in attitudes about the policies; people become less extreme. Some attempts to replicate this reduction of polarization have been unsuccessful. Is the original effect real or is it just a fluke? In this paper, we explore the effect using more timely political issues and compare judgments of issues whose attitudes are grounded in consequentialist reasoning versus protected values. We also investigate the role of social proof. We find that understanding and attitude extremity are reduced after explanation but only for consequentialist issues, not those based on protected values. There was no effect of social proof.

Foreign Language Processing Undermines Affect Labeling.

Identifying emotional states and explicitly putting them into words, known as affect labeling, reduces amygdala activation. Crucially, bilinguals do not only label emotions in their native language; they sometimes do it in their foreign language as well. However, one's foreign languages are less emotional and more cognitively demanding than one's native language. Because of these differences, it is unclear whether labeling emotions in a foreign language will also cause downregulation of affect. Here, 26 unbalanced bilinguals were scanned while labeling emotional faces either in their native or foreign languages. Results on affect labeling in a foreign language revealed that not only did it not reduce amygdala activation, but it also evoked higher activation than affect labeling in a native language. Overall, foreign language processing undermines affect labeling, and it suggests that the language in which people name their emotions has important consequences in how they experience them. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-021-00039-9.

Lenience breeds strictness: The generosity-erosion effect in hiring decisions.

In recruitment processes, candidates are often judged one after another. This sequential procedure affects the outcome of the process. Here, we introduce the generosity-erosion effect, which states that evaluators might be harsher in their assessment of candidates after grading previous candidates generously. Generosity is defined as giving a candidate the lowest possible grade required to progress in the hiring process. Analyzing a high-stake hiring process, we find that for each candidate graded generously, the probability for subsequent candidates to pass decreased by 7.7% (experiment 1; N = 11,281). Testing the boundary conditions of the generosity-effect, we explore a hiring process that, in contrast to the previous process, was very selective, because candidates were more likely to fail than to pass. In this scenario, no evidence is found for the generosity-erosion effect (experiment 2; N = 3171). Practical implications and mechanisms underlying the generosity-erosion effect are further discussed.

The role of intentions and outcomes in the foreign language effect on moral judgements.

We explore the origin of the foreign language effect on moral judgements by assessing whether language context alters the weight given to intentions and outcomes during moral judgement. Specifically, we investigated whether foreign language contexts, compared with native ones, may lead people to focus more on the outcomes of an action and less on the intentions behind it. We report two studies in which participants read scenarios in which the actor's intentions and the resulting consequences were manipulated. As previously shown, people considered both the actor's intentions and the action's outcomes when assessing the damage, cause, moral wrongness, responsibility, and punishment deserved. However, although the foreign language context reduced the impact of intentions on damage assessment, the overall effect of intention and outcomes on these variables was mainly the same in the foreign and the native language contexts. We conclude that differential weighting of intentions and outcomes is unlikely to account for the impact of foreign language use on moral judgement.

The limits of the foreign language effect on decision-making: The case of the outcome bias and the representativeness heuristic.

Language context (native vs. foreign) affects people's choices and preferences in a wide variety of situations. However, emotional reactions are a key component driving people's choices in those situations. In six studies, we test whether foreign language context modifies biases and the use of heuristics not directly caused by emotional reactions. We fail to find evidence that foreign language context modifies the extent to which people suffer from outcome bias (Experiment 1a & 1b) and the use of the representativeness heuristic (Experiment 2a & 2b). Furthermore, foreign language context does not modulate decision-making in those scenarios even when emotion is brought into the context (Experiment 1c & 2c). Foreign language context shapes decision-making, but the scope of its effects might be limited to decision-making tendencies in which emotion plays a causal role.

Tolerance to ambiguous uncertainty predicts prosocial behavior.

Uncertainty is a fundamental feature of human life that can be fractioned into two distinct psychological constructs: risk (known probabilistic outcomes) and ambiguity (unknown probabilistic outcomes). Although risk and ambiguity are known to powerfully bias nonsocial decision-making, their influence on prosocial behavior remains largely unexplored. Here we show that ambiguity attitudes, but not risk attitudes, predict prosocial behavior: the greater an individual's ambiguity tolerance, the more they engage in costly prosocial behaviors, both during decisions to cooperate (experiments 1 and 3) and choices to trust (experiment 2). Once the ambiguity associated with another's actions is sufficiently resolved, this relationship between ambiguity tolerance and prosocial choice is eliminated (experiment 3). Taken together, these results provide converging evidence that attitudes toward ambiguity are a robust predictor of one's willingness to engage in costly social behavior, which suggests a mechanism for the underlying motivations of prosocial action.