Retrospective and Prospective Evaluations of Mammography Screening Narratives.

We investigated the role of previous experience when providing summary judgments of mammography narratives. A total of 807 women who either did or did not have previous experience of a mammogram were presented with a written description of a mammography visit. We manipulated the presentation position of a negative element within the narrative to alter its accessibility in memory and determine whether the latter impacted equally on two types of summary judgments. After the narrative presentation, participants were asked to provide both retrospective and prospective evaluations, that is, summary judgments about the described event and an appraisal of the likelihood of participating in future instances of such event, respectively. A recency effect was observed only for retrospective but not for prospective evaluations. When examined only for the subset of women who had undergone a mammography visit themselves, prospective evaluations were shown to be predicted by the reported quality of the mammography participants experienced themselves. The findings support and extend the accessibility model of emotional self-report and suggest that own experience leaks into evaluations of hypothetical scenarios by selectively impacting on prospective evaluations.

Exploring the roles of physical effort and visual salience within the proximity effect.

BACKGROUND: Recent work has explored the effectiveness of the Proximity Effect, where increasing the physical distance between consumer and snacks reduces intake. Foods requiring less effort to attain, or being more visually appealing, are seen to be consumed more. Relatedly, perceived effort and visual salience are suggested mechanisms for the proximity effect, but no prior studies have directly manipulated these in association with the effect. Two between-subjects studies conducted in university laboratories are presented. METHOD: Twenty chocolate brownies that were either wrapped or unwrapped (Study 1, N = 85), or 250g of M&M's, either colourful or plain brown (Study 2, N = 80), were presented as effort and salience manipulations respectively to participants at either 20 cm or 70 cm. Consumption was measured as 'likelihood of consumption' (Yes/No) and 'actual consumption' (units/grams). Potential moderating variables including perceived effort and perceived visual salience were also measured. RESULTS: Likelihood of consumption was positively predicted by perceived visual salience in both Studies, and by distance in Study 2. Significant main effects of distance, p < .001, ȵ2 = 0.102 (20 cm > 70 cm), effort, p < .001, ȵ2 = 0.089 (unwrapped > wrapped), and distance × effort interaction, p = .003, ȵ2 = 0.111, were observed in Study 1 for actual consumption. A main effect of distance was found in Study 2 for actual consumption, p < .001, ȵ2 = 0.062 (20 cm > 70 cm). Perceived visual salience positively correlated with actual consumption in both Studies. CONCLUSIONS: Increasing physical effort and placing snacks further away appear to act independently and interactively to reduce snack consumption. Manipulating snack colour does not appear to influence consumption, whereas perceptions of visual salience appear to influence consumption. As such, perceived visual salience and physical effort are thought to be key mechanisms underpinning the proximity effect. PRE-REGISTRATION: Both Studies were pre-registered on the Open Science Framework (Study 1: 10.31234/osf.io/rmnys; Study 2: 10.31234/osf.io/u8bsz).

Exploring the underpinning mechanisms of the proximity effect within a competitive food environment.

OBJECTIVE: One method of influencing an individual's food consumption involves placing unhealthy snacks further away from individuals, known as the "proximity effect". However, only one laboratory study has explored the effect while both an unhealthy and a healthy option are presented simultaneously. Further, little is known about the potential underpinning mechanisms of the effect. The current study aims to replicate the proximity effect in a competitive environment, and to explore the role of visual salience and effort in the proximity effect. METHOD: Fifty-six participants were asked to complete a two-part questionnaire under the cover story of a relaxation study. Two bowls were presented to participants, each containing either 250 g chocolate M&M's or 250 g mixed fruit pieces. Each bowl was positioned either 20 cm or 70 cm from the participant, creating four proximity conditions. Consumption of each snack was compared between proximity conditions. RESULTS: No main effects were found. A significant interaction between snack type and chocolate position was found (p = .010, ȵ2 = 0.159), with fruit consumption being significantly higher when chocolate was at located at 20 cm compared to 70 cm (53.35 g vs 22.35 g, p = .042). Higher visual salience of each snack type correlated to more of the snack being consumed, ps < .017. Results were similar when calories consumed were analysed. CONCLUSIONS: We found an unconventional proximity effect where the consumption of a snack did not depend on its position, but rather the relative position of another snack. Implications of the study could inform café and supermarket layouts to exploit the interaction between moving healthy items closer in addition to moving unhealthy items further away, in order to maximise choice of healthy items.

Registered Replication Report: Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg (1998).

Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg (1998) reported that participants primed with a category associated with intelligence ("professor") subsequently performed 13% better on a trivia test than participants primed with a category associated with a lack of intelligence ("soccer hooligans"). In two unpublished replications of this study designed to verify the appropriate testing procedures, Dijksterhuis, van Knippenberg, and Holland observed a smaller difference between conditions (2%-3%) as well as a gender difference: Men showed the effect (9.3% and 7.6%), but women did not (0.3% and -0.3%). The procedure used in those replications served as the basis for this multilab Registered Replication Report. A total of 40 laboratories collected data for this project, and 23 of these laboratories met all inclusion criteria. Here we report the meta-analytic results for those 23 direct replications (total N = 4,493), which tested whether performance on a 30-item general-knowledge trivia task differed between these two priming conditions (results of supplementary analyses of the data from all 40 labs, N = 6,454, are also reported). We observed no overall difference in trivia performance between participants primed with the "professor" category and those primed with the "hooligan" category (0.14%) and no moderation by gender.

Reconstructing the recent visual past: Hierarchical knowledge-based effects in visual working memory.

This paper presents two experiments that examine the influence of multiple levels of knowledge on visual working memory (VWM). Experiment 1 focused on memory for faces. Faces were selected from continua that were constructed by morphing two face photographs in 100 steps; half of the continua morphed a famous face into an unfamiliar one, while the other half used two unfamiliar faces. Participants studied six sequentially presented faces each from a different continuum, and at test they had to locate one of these within its continuum. Experiment 2 examined immediate memory for object sizes. On each trial, six images were shown; these were either all vegetables or all random shapes. Immediately after each list, one item was presented again, in a new random size, and participants reproduced its studied size. Results suggested that two levels of knowledge influenced VWM. First, there was an overall central-tendency bias whereby items were remembered as being closer to the overall average or central tokens (averaged across items and trials) than they actually were. Second, when object knowledge was available for the to-be-remembered items (i.e., famous face or typical size of a vegetable) a further bias was introduced in responses. The results extend the findings of Hemmer and Steyvers (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16, 80-87, 2009a) from episodic memory to VWM and contribute to the growing literature which illustrates the complexity and flexibility of the representations subtending VWM performance (e.g., Bae, Olkkonen, Allred, & Flombaum, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(4):744-63, 2015).

Retrospective Evaluations of Sequences: Testing the Predictions of a Memory-Based Analysis.

Retrospective evaluation (RE) of event sequences is known to be biased in various ways. The present paper presents a series of studies that examined the suggestion that the moments that are the most accessible in memory at the point of RE contribute to these biases. As predicted by this memory-based analysis, Experiment 1 showed that pleasantness ratings of word lists were biased by the presentation position of a negative item and by how easy the negative information was to retrieve. Experiment 2 ruled out the hypothesis that these findings were due to the dual nature of the task called upon. Experiment 3 further manipulated the memorability of the negative items--and corresponding changes in RE were as predicted. Finally, Experiment 4 extended the findings to more complex stimuli involving event narratives. Overall, the results suggest that assessments were adjusted based on the retrieval of the most readily available information.

Social norms and rank-based nudging: Changing willingness to pay for healthy food.

People's evaluations in the domain of healthy eating are at least partly determined by the choice context. We systematically test reference level and rank-based models of relative comparisons against each other and explore their application to social norms nudging, an intervention that aims at influencing consumers' behavior by addressing their inaccurate beliefs about their consumption relative to the consumption of others. Study 1 finds that the rank of a product or behavior among others in the immediate comparison context, rather than its objective attributes, influences its evaluation. Study 2 finds that when a comparator is presented in isolation the same rank-based process occurs based on information retrieved from memory. Study 3 finds that telling people how their consumption ranks within a normative comparison sample increases willingness to pay for a healthy food by over 30% relative to the normal social norms intervention that tells them how they compare to the average. We conclude that social norms interventions should present rank information (e.g., "you are in the most unhealthy 10% of eaters") rather than information relative to the average (e.g., "you consume 500 calories more than the average person").

Sentencing, severity, and social norms: a rank-based model of contextual influence on judgments of crimes and punishments.

Context effects have been shown to bias lay people's evaluations of the severity of crimes and punishments. To investigate the cognitive mechanisms behind these effects, we develop and apply a rank-based social norms approach to judgments of perceived crime seriousness and sentence appropriateness. In Study 1, we find that (a) people believe on average that 84% of people illegally download software more than they do themselves and (b) their judged severity of, and concern about, their own illegal software downloading is predicted not by its amount but by how this amount is believed (typically inaccurately) to rank within a social comparison distribution. Studies 2 and 3 find that the judged appropriateness of a given sentence length is highly dependent on the length of other sentences available in the decision-making context: The same objective sentence was judged as approximately four times stricter when it was the second longest sentence being considered than when it was the fifth longest. It is concluded that the same mechanisms that are used to judge the magnitude of psychophysical stimuli bias judgments about legal matters.

Domain effects and financial risk attitudes.

We investigated whether financial risk preferences are dependent on the financial domain (i.e., the context) in which the risky choice options are presented. Previous studies have demonstrated that risk attitudes change when gambles are framed as gains, losses, or as insurance. Our study explores this directly by offering choices between identical gambles, framed in terms of seven financial domains. Three factors were extracted, explaining 68.6% of the variance: Factor 1 (Positive)-opportunity to win, pension provision, and job salary change; Factor 2 (Positive-Complex)-investments and mortgage buying; Factor 3 (Negative)-possibility of loss and insurance. Inspection of the solution revealed context effects on risk perceptions across the seven scenarios. We also found that the commonly accepted assumption that women are more risk averse cannot be confirmed with the context structure suggested in this research; however, it is acknowledged that in the students' population the variance across genders might be considerably less. These results suggest that our financial risk attitude measures may be tapping into a stable aspect of "context dependence" of relevance to real-world decision making.