Narrative framing may increase human suboptimal choice behavior.

Under certain conditions, multiple nonhuman species have been observed engaging in choice behavior that resulted in less food earned when compared to the amount of food that was available to be earned over the course of a session. This phenomenon is particularly strong in pigeons, but has also been observed in rats and nonhuman primates. Conversely, human participants have demonstrated a propensity to choose more optimally. However, human participants do not exclusively choose the alternative associated with more reinforcement. Framing a task in a real-world narrative has been effective in improving problem-solving on other tasks such as the Wason Four-Card problem. The present study gave human participants a choice task with either abstract stimuli or with a real-world narrative. In addition, participants were given terminal stimuli that were either predictive or unpredictive of reinforcement. Thus, participants were assigned to one of four conditions: Abstract Predictive, Abstract Unpredictive, Narrative Predictive, or Narrative Unpredictive. In contrast to the improved performance on the Wason Four-Card task, the current study found no evidence that the addition of a real-world narrative improved optimal choice performance. Rather, it may have interfered with optimal choice selection in that participants who received the narrative and unpredictive terminal stimuli were at chance performance at the end of the experimental session. Conversely, participants in the Abstract Unpredictive, Abstract Predictive, and Narrative Predictive conditions all demonstrated a preference for the optimal alternative. Possible mechanisms for these findings and future directions are discussed.

Authoritative parenting style positively correlates with increased adherence to COVID-19 health and safety guidelines by college students.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been inconsistency in choice behavior across people with regards to compliance with health and safety guidelines suggested by the CDC. The current study aimed to identify a possible correlation between parenting style experienced during childhood and opinions/actions regarding CDC COVID-19 health guidance. College students were given a self-report survey aimed to measure childhood experience, parent-child relationship, and COVID-19 pandemic behavior. Participants that identified with Authoritarian parenting scored higher on the COVID Behavior measure, indicating a higher degree of compliance compared to participants that identified with Authoritative parenting. Additionally, gender and race category differences on the COVID Behavior measure were observed. Specifically, African American/Black participants scored higher than White or Other race identifying participants on the COVID Behavior measure. Lastly, females identifying as African American/Black or Other race scored higher than males identifying as African American/Black or Other race on the COVID Behavior measure. These findings begin to illuminate some of the variables that might play a role in choice behavior with regard to compliance to health guidelines. Further investigation into these variables could inform us about what plays a role in choice behavior and how better to integrate this knowledge when messaging the public about health guidelines.