Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation.

COVID-19 accelerated a decade-long shift to remote work by normalizing working from home on a large scale. Indeed, 75% of US employees in a 2021 survey reported a personal preference for working remotely at least one day per week1, and studies estimate that 20% of US workdays will take place at home after the pandemic ends2. Here we examine how this shift away from in-person interaction affects innovation, which relies on collaborative idea generation as the foundation of commercial and scientific progress3. In a laboratory study and a field experiment across five countries (in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia), we show that videoconferencing inhibits the production of creative ideas. By contrast, when it comes to selecting which idea to pursue, we find no evidence that videoconferencing groups are less effective (and preliminary evidence that they may be more effective) than in-person groups. Departing from previous theories that focus on how oral and written technologies limit the synchronicity and extent of information exchanged4-6, we find that our effects are driven by differences in the physical nature of videoconferencing and in-person interactions. Specifically, using eye-gaze and recall measures, as well as latent semantic analysis, we demonstrate that videoconferencing hampers idea generation because it focuses communicators on a screen, which prompts a narrower cognitive focus. Our results suggest that virtual interaction comes with a cognitive cost for creative idea generation.

The Effect of Auditory and Visual Recommendations on Choice.

We explore the effect of recommendation modality on recommendation adherence. Results from five experiments run on various online platforms (N = 6,103 adults from TurkPrime and Prolific) show that people are more likely to adhere to recommendations that they hear (auditory) than recommendations that they read (visual). This effect persists regardless of whether the auditory recommendation is spoken by a human voice or an automated voice and holds for hypothetical and consequential choices. We show that the effect is in part driven by the relative need for closure-manifested in a sense of urgency-that is evoked by the ephemerality of auditory messages. This work suggests that differences in the physical properties of auditory and visual modalities can lead to meaningful psychological and behavioral consequences.

Anticipating divine protection? Reminders of god can increase nonmoral risk taking.

Religiosity and participation in religious activities have been linked with decreased risky behavior. In the current research, we hypothesized that exposure to the concept of God can actually increase people's willingness to engage in certain types of risks. Across seven studies, reminders of God increased risk taking in nonmoral domains. This effect was mediated by the perceived danger of a risky option and emerged more strongly among individuals who perceive God as a reliable source of safety and protection than among those who do not. Moreover, in an eighth study, when participants were first reminded of God and then took a risk that produced negative consequences (i.e., when divine protection failed to materialize), participants reported feeling more negatively toward God than did participants in the same situation who were not first reminded of God. This research contributes to an understanding of the divergent effects that distinct components of religion can exert on behavior.

Extraneous factors in judicial decisions.

Are judicial rulings based solely on laws and facts? Legal formalism holds that judges apply legal reasons to the facts of a case in a rational, mechanical, and deliberative manner. In contrast, legal realists argue that the rational application of legal reasons does not sufficiently explain the decisions of judges and that psychological, political, and social factors influence judicial rulings. We test the common caricature of realism that justice is "what the judge ate for breakfast" in sequential parole decisions made by experienced judges. We record the judges' two daily food breaks, which result in segmenting the deliberations of the day into three distinct "decision sessions." We find that the percentage of favorable rulings drops gradually from ≈ 65% to nearly zero within each decision session and returns abruptly to ≈ 65% after a break. Our findings suggest that judicial rulings can be swayed by extraneous variables that should have no bearing on legal decisions.

Compatibility effects in the perception of dispersion.

In this paper, we show how one property of an average affects perceptions of the variance of the distribution that the average is derived from. Specifically, we find that when people view average ratings compatible with a possible input they perceive these ratings to come from less variable distributions-even when this is statistically less likely. Six experiments and four supplemental studies (total N = 16,988) document evidence for this effect: People perceive less dispersion in the distributions of "compatible average ratings" (i.e., averages matching a possible input; e.g., 4; 4.0; 4.00 on a discrete scale from 1 to 5 stars) compared to those of "non-compatible average ratings" (i.e., averages that do not match a possible input; e.g., 4.01 and 4.10). We argue that this error can be explained by a compatibility principle which states that the weighting of an input increases with its degree of compatibility with the output. People rely on the perceived compatibility between an output and input when forming judgments about the frequency of the input, affecting their assessment of the dispersion associated with the average. For instance, people recognize that a 4.0 average matches a 4 and thus perceive this average to be comprised of more 4s and indicative of less dispersion. We close with a discussion of consequences of this perception for choice and search.

Physical contact and financial risk taking.

We show that minimal physical contact can increase people's sense of security and consequently lead them to increased risk-taking behavior. In three experiments, with both hypothetical and real payoffs, a female experimenter's light, comforting pat on the shoulder led participants to greater financial risk taking. Further, this effect was both mediated and moderated by feelings of security in both male and female participants. Finally, we established the boundary conditions for the impact of physical contact on risk-taking behaviors by demonstrating that the effect does not occur when the touching is performed by a male and is attenuated when the touch consists of a handshake. The results suggest that subtle physical contact can be strongly influential in decision making and the willingness to accept risk.

1995 feels so close yet so far: the effect of event markers on subjective feelings of elapsed time.

Why does an event feel more or less distant than another event that occurred around the same time? Prior research suggests that characteristics of an event itself can affect the estimated date of its occurrence. Our work differs in that we focused on how characteristics of the time interval following an event affect people's feelings of elapsed time (i.e., their feelings of how distant an event seems). We argue that a time interval that is punctuated by a greater number of accessible intervening events related to the target event (event markers) will make the target event feel more distant, but that unrelated intervening events will not have this effect. In three studies, we found support for the systematic effect of event markers. The effect of markers was independent of other characteristics of the event, such as its memorability, emotionality, importance, and estimated date, a result suggesting that this effect is distinct from established dating biases.

Partition-edit-count: naive extensional reasoning in judgment of conditional probability.

The authors provide evidence that people typically evaluate conditional probabilities by subjectively partitioning the sample space into n interchangeable events, editing out events that can be eliminated on the basis of conditioning information, counting remaining events, then reporting probabilities as a ratio of the number of focal to total events. Participants' responses to conditional probability problems were influenced by irrelevant information (Study 1), small variations in problem wording (Study 2), and grouping of events (Study 3), as predicted by the partition-edit-count model. Informal protocol analysis also supports the authors' interpretation. A 4th study extends this account from situations where events are treated as interchangeable (chance and ignorance) to situations where participants have information they can use to distinguish among events (uncertainty).

Why don't we learn to accurately forecast feelings? How misremembering our predictions blinds us to past forecasting errors.

Why do affective forecasting errors persist in the face of repeated disconfirming evidence? Five studies demonstrate that people misremember their forecasts as consistent with their experience and thus fail to perceive the extent of their forecasting error. As a result, people do not learn from past forecasting errors and fail to adjust subsequent forecasts. In the context of a Super Bowl loss (Study 1), a presidential election (Studies 2 and 3), an important purchase (Study 4), and the consumption of candies (Study 5), individuals mispredicted their affective reactions to these experiences and subsequently misremembered their predictions as more accurate than they actually had been. The findings indicate that this recall error results from people's tendency to anchor on their current affective state when trying to recall their affective forecasts. Further, those who showed larger recall errors were less likely to learn to adjust their subsequent forecasts and reminding people of their actual forecasts enhanced learning. These results suggest that a failure to accurately recall one's past predictions contributes to the perpetuation of forecasting errors.

When questions change behavior: the role of ease of representation.

In three experiments, we examined the mere-measurement effect, wherein simply asking people about their intent to engage in a certain behavior increases the probability of their subsequently engaging in that behavior. The experiments demonstrate that manipulations that should affect the ease of mentally representing or simulating the behavior in question influence the extent of the mere-measurement phenomenon. Participants who were asked about their intention to engage in various behaviors were more likely to engage in those behaviors than participants not asked about their intentions in situations in which mentally simulating the behavior in the intention question was relatively easy. We tested this ease-of-representation hypothesis using both socially desirable and socially undesirable behaviors, and our dependent variables comprised both self-reports and actual behaviors. Our findings have implications for survey research in various social contexts, including assessments of risky behaviors by public health organizations.