When evidence changes: Communicating uncertainty protects against a loss of trust.

Scientific findings can be overturned when new evidence arises. This study examines how communicating and explaining uncertainty around scientific findings affect trust in the communicator when findings change. In an online experiment (N = 800, convenience sample), participants read a fictitious statement from a public health authority announcing that there was no link between a new COVID-19 vaccine and heart muscle inflammation. The authority communicated (1) no uncertainty, (2) uncertainty without giving a reason, (3) uncertainty due to imprecision, or (4) uncertainty due to incomplete accounting of patients. Participants were then informed that the authority's statement was no longer correct as new data showed a link between the vaccine and heart muscle inflammation. Participants rated the authority's trustworthiness before and after the evidence update. Our findings indicate that communicating uncertainty buffers against a loss of trust when evidence changes. Moreover, explaining uncertainty does not appear to harm trust.

When tainted money should fund public goods: fundraising professional and public moral preferences.

Philanthropy is essential to public goods such as education and research, arts and culture, and the provision of services to those in need. Providers of public goods commonly struggle with the dilemma of whether to accept donations from morally tainted donors. Ethicists also disagree on how to manage tainted donations. Forgoing such donations reduces opportunities for societal well-being and advancement; however, accepting them can damage institutional and individual reputations. Half of professional fundraisers have faced tainted donors, but only around a third of their institutions had relevant policies (n = 52). Here, we draw on two large samples of US laypeople (ns = 2,019; 2,566) and a unique sample of experts (professional fundraisers, n = 694) to provide empirical insights into various aspects of tainted donations that affect moral acceptability: the nature of the moral taint (criminal or morally ambiguous behavior), donation size, anonymity, and institution type. We find interesting patterns of convergence (rejecting criminal donations), divergence (professionals' aversion to large tainted donations), and indifference (marginal role of anonymity) across the samples. Laypeople also applied slightly higher standards to universities and museums than to charities. Our results provide evidence of how complex moral trade-offs are resolved differentially, and can thus motivate and inform policy development for institutions dealing with controversial donors.

Establishing Infodemic Management in Germany: A Framework for Social Listening and Integrated Analysis to Report Infodemic Insights at the National Public Health Institute.

BACKGROUND: To respond to the need to establish infodemic management functions at the national public health institute in Germany (Robert Koch Institute, RKI), we explored and assessed available data sources, developed a social listening and integrated analysis framework, and defined when infodemic management functions should be activated during emergencies. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to establish a framework for social listening and integrated analysis for public health in the German context using international examples and technical guidance documents for infodemic management. METHODS: This study completed the following objectives: identified (potentially) available data sources for social listening and integrated analysis; assessed these data sources for their suitability and usefulness for integrated analysis in addition to an assessment of their risk using the RKI's standardized data protection requirements; developed a framework and workflow to combine social listening and integrated analysis to report back actionable infodemic insights for public health communications by the RKI and stakeholders; and defined criteria for activating integrated analysis structures in the context of a specific health event or health emergency. RESULTS: We included and classified 38% (16/42) of the identified and assessed data sources for social listening and integrated analysis at the RKI into 3 categories: social media and web-based listening data, RKI-specific data, and infodemic insights. Most data sources can be analyzed weekly to detect current trends and narratives and to inform a timely response by reporting insights that include a risk assessment and scalar judgments of different narratives and themes. CONCLUSIONS: This study identified, assessed, and prioritized a wide range of data sources for social listening and integrated analysis to report actionable infodemic insights, ensuring a valuable first step in establishing and operationalizing infodemic management at the RKI. This case study also serves as a roadmap for others. Ultimately, once operational, these activities will inform better and targeted public health communication at the RKI and beyond.

Studies in Ecological Rationality.

Ecological rationality represents an alternative to classic frameworks of rationality. Extending on Herbert Simon's concept of bounded rationality, it holds that cognitive processes, including simple heuristics, are not per se rational or irrational, but that their success rests on their degree of fit to relevant environmental structures. The key is therefore to understand how cognitive and environmental structures slot together. In recent years, a growing set of analyses of heuristic-environment systems has deepened the understanding of the human mind and how boundedly rational heuristics can result in successful decision making. This article is concerned with three conceptual challenges in the study of ecological rationality. First, do heuristics also succeed in dynamic contexts involving competitive agents? Second, can the mind adapt to environmental structures via an unsupervised learning process? Third, how can research go beyond mere descriptions of environmental structures to develop theories of the mechanisms that give rise to those structures? In addressing these questions, we illustrate that a successful theory of rationality will focus on the adaptive aspects of the mind and will need to account for three components: the mind's information processing, the environment to which the mind adapts, and the intersection between the environment and the mind.

What makes a market transaction morally repugnant?

Many people find it morally impermissible to put kidneys, jury duty exemptions, or permits for having children on the free market. All of these are examples of repugnant transactions-market transactions that third parties want to prevent. In two studies (N = 1,554), using respondents' judgments of 51 different market transactions across 21 characteristics, we show that repugnance can be decomposed into five higher-order dimensions: moral outrage, need for regulation, incommensurability, exploitation, and unknown risk. Repugnance toward the 51 market transactions was highly consistent across two samples. Our results can help identify mismatches between public sentiments and current regulations (selling carbon emissions is currently legal but considered repugnant), anticipate responses to novel markets that have not been publicly scrutinized (often arising from technological advances, such as markets for "designer babies"), and help design less repugnant markets (e.g., by making the risks involved in a transaction known to sellers).

The ecology of competition: A theory of risk-reward environments in adaptive decision making.

In many choice environments, risks and rewards-or probabilities and payoffs-seem tightly coupled such that high payoffs only occur with low probabilities. An adaptive mind can exploit this association by, for instance, using a potential reward's size to infer the probability of obtaining it. However, a mind can only adapt to and exploit an environmental structure if it is ecologically reliable, that is if it is frequent and recurrent. We develop the competitive risk-reward ecology theory (CET) that establishes how the ecology of competition can make the association of high rewards with low probabilities ubiquitous. This association occurs because of what is known as the ideal free distribution (IFD) principle. The IFD states that competitors in a landscape of resource patches distribute themselves proportionally to the gross total amount of resources in the patches. CET shows how this principle implies a risk-reward structure: an inverse relationship between probabilities and payoffs. It also identifies boundary conditions for the risk-reward structure, including heterogeneity of resources, computational limits of competitors, and scarcity of resources. Finally, a set of empirical studies (N = 1,255) demonstrate that people's beliefs map onto properties predicted by CET and change as a function of the environment. In sum, grounding people's inferences in CET demonstrates how the behaviors of a boundedly rational mind can be better predicted once accounts of the mind and the environment are fused. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

When money talks: Judging risk and coercion in high-paying clinical trials.

Millions of volunteers take part in clinical trials every year. This is unsurprising, given that clinical trials are often much more lucrative than other types of unskilled work. When clinical trials offer very high pay, however, some people consider them repugnant. To understand why, we asked 1,428 respondents to evaluate a hypothetical medical trial for a new Ebola vaccine offering three different payment amounts. Some respondents (27%) used very high pay (£10,000) as a cue to infer the potential risks the clinical trial posed. These respondents were also concerned that offering £10,000 was coercive- simply too profitable to pass up. Both perceived risk and coercion in high-paying clinical trials shape how people evaluate these trials. This result was robust within and between respondents. The link between risk and repugnance may generalize to other markets in which parties are partially remunerated for the risk they take and contributes to a more complete understanding of why some market transactions appear repugnant.

Exploiting risk-reward structures in decision making under uncertainty.

People often have to make decisions under uncertainty-that is, in situations where the probabilities of obtaining a payoff are unknown or at least difficult to ascertain. One solution to this problem is to infer the probability from the magnitude of the potential payoff and thus exploit the inverse relationship between payoffs and probabilities that occurs in many domains in the environment. Here, we investigated how the mind may implement such a solution: (1) Do people learn about risk-reward relationships from the environment-and if so, how? (2) How do learned risk-reward relationships impact preferences in decision-making under uncertainty? Across three experiments (N = 352), we found that participants can learn risk-reward relationships from being exposed to choice environments with a negative, positive, or uncorrelated risk-reward relationship. They were able to learn the associations both from gambles with explicitly stated payoffs and probabilities (Experiments 1 & 2) and from gambles about epistemic events (Experiment 3). In subsequent decisions under uncertainty, participants often exploited the learned association by inferring probabilities from the magnitudes of the payoffs. This inference systematically influenced their preferences under uncertainty: Participants who had been exposed to a negative risk-reward relationship tended to prefer the uncertain option over a smaller sure option for low payoffs, but not for high payoffs. This pattern reversed in the positive condition and disappeared in the uncorrelated condition. This adaptive change in preferences is consistent with the use of the risk-reward heuristic.

Mechanisms of Choice Behavior Shift Using Cue-approach Training.

Cue-approach training has been shown to effectively shift choices for snack food items by associating a cued button-press motor response to particular food items. Furthermore, attention was biased toward previously cued items, even when the cued item is not chosen for real consumption during a choice phase. However, the exact mechanism by which preferences shift during cue-approach training is not entirely clear. In three experiments, we shed light on the possible underlying mechanisms at play during this novel paradigm: (1) Uncued, wholly predictable motor responses paired with particular food items were not sufficient to elicit a preference shift; (2) Cueing motor responses early - concurrently with food item onset - and thus eliminating the need for heightened top-down attention to the food stimulus in preparation for a motor response also eliminated the shift in food preferences. This finding reinforces our hypothesis that heightened attention at behaviorally relevant points in time is key to changing choice behavior in the cue-approach task; (3) Crucially, indicating choice using eye movements rather than manual button presses preserves the effect, thus demonstrating that the shift in preferences is not governed by a learned motor response but more likely via modulation of subjective value in higher associative regions, consistent with previous neuroimaging results. Cue-approach training drives attention at behaviorally relevant points in time to modulate the subjective value of individual items, providing a mechanism for behavior change that does not rely on external reinforcement and that holds great promise for developing real world behavioral interventions.