Knowing what to know: Implications of the choice of prior distribution on the behavior of adaptive design optimization.

Adaptive design optimization (ADO) is a state-of-the-art technique for experimental design (Cavagnaro et al., 2010). ADO dynamically identifies stimuli that, in expectation, yield the most information about a hypothetical construct of interest (e.

The Strengths and Weaknesses of Crowds to Address Global Problems.

Global climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the spread of misinformation on social media are just a handful of highly consequential problems affecting society. We argue that the rough contours of many societal problems can be framed within a "wisdom of crowds" perspective. Such a framing allows researchers to recast complex problems within a simple conceptual framework and leverage known results on crowd wisdom.

Relationship between lay and expert perceptions of COVID-19 vaccine development timelines in Canada and USA.

Objectives: Compare lay expectations of medical development to those of experts in the context of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine development.

Methods: A short online survey of experts and lay people measuring when participants believe important vaccine milestones would occur and how likely potential setbacks were. Samples of US and Canadian lay people recruited through Qualtrics.

Compositional data analysis tutorial.

This article presents techniques for dealing with a form of dependency in data arising when numerical data sum to a constant for individual cases, that is, "compositional" or "ipsative" data. Examples are percentages that sum to 100, and hours in a day that sum to 24. Ipsative scales fell out of fashion in psychology during the 1960s and 1970s due to a lack of methods for analyzing them.

Capturing richer information: On establishing the validity of an interval-valued survey response mode.

Obtaining quantitative survey responses that are both accurate and informative is crucial to a wide range of fields. Traditional and ubiquitous response formats such as Likert and visual analogue scales require condensation of responses into discrete or point values-but sometimes a range of options may better represent the correct answer. In this paper, we propose an efficient interval-valued response mode, whereby responses are made by marking an ellipse along a continuous scale.

Global-Local Incompatibility: The Misperception of Reliability in Judgment Regarding Global Variables.

A number of important decision domains, including decisions about hiring, global warming, and weather hazards, are characterized by a global-local incompatibility. These domains involve variables that cannot be observed by a single decision maker (DM) and require the integration of observations from locally available information cues. This paper presents a new bifocal lens model that describes how the structure of the environment can lead to a unique form of overconfidence when generalizing the reliability of the local environment to a global scale.

Genome Sequence of sp. Strain EBB-1, a Novel Marine Autotroph Isolated from an Iron-Sulfur Mineral.

sp. strain EBB-1 was isolated from a pyrrhotite biofilm incubated in seawater from East Boothbay (ME, USA). Strain EBB-1 is an autotrophic member of the class with the ability to form iron oxide biominerals.

Exclusion Criteria as Measurements II: Effects on Utility Functions.

Researchers often justify excluding some responses in studies eliciting valuations of health states as not representing respondents' true preferences. Here, we examine the effects of applying 8 common exclusion criteria on societal utility estimates. An online survey of a US nationally representative sample ( 1164) used the standard gamble method to elicit preferences for health states defined by 7 health domains from the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS).

Exclusion Criteria as Measurements I: Identifying Invalid Responses.

In a systematic review, Engel et al. found large variation in the exclusion criteria used to remove responses held not to represent genuine preferences in health state valuation studies. We offer an empirical approach to characterizing the similarities and differences among such criteria.

Judgment and Decision Making.

The science of judgment and decision making involves three interrelated forms of research: analysis of the decisions people face, description of their natural responses, and interventions meant to help them do better. After briefly introducing the field's intellectual foundations, we review recent basic research into the three core elements of decision making: judgment, or how people predict the outcomes that will follow possible choices; preference, or how people weigh those outcomes; and choice, or how people combine judgments and preferences to reach a decision. We then review research into two potential sources of behavioral heterogeneity: individual differences in decision-making competence and developmental changes across the life span.

Public perception and communication of scientific uncertainty.

Understanding how the public perceives uncertainty in scientific research is fundamental for effective communication about research and its inevitable uncertainty. Previous work found that scientific evidence differentially influenced beliefs from individuals with different political ideologies. Evidence that threatens an individual's political ideology is perceived as more uncertain than nonthreatening evidence.

People Believe That They Are Prototypically Good or Bad.

People have been shown to view their beliefs as being prototypical (modal) but their abilities as (falsely) unique (above or below average). It is possible that these two viewpoints - self as prototypical and self as unique - can be reconciled. If the distribution of ability for a given skill is skewed such that many others have high (low) ability and few others have low (high) ability, it is possible that a majority of peoples' self-assessments can be above (below) average.

Improving communication of uncertainty in the reports of the intergovernmental panel on climate change.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assesses information relevant to the understanding of climate change and explores options for adaptation and mitigation. The IPCC reports communicate uncertainty by using a set of probability terms accompanied by global interpretational guidelines. The judgment literature indicates that there are large differences in the way people understand such phrases, and that their use may lead to confusion and errors in communication.