Publications by authors named "Carey K Morewedge"

Article Synopsis
  • Discrimination in evaluations contributes significantly to social inequality, yet there is limited knowledge about psychological interventions to combat biased assessments.
  • A research contest tested 30 interventions aimed at reducing discrimination based on physical attractiveness, revealing two effective strategies that reduced both decision noise and bias.
  • The findings highlight the need for concrete strategies that focus on relevant criteria in decision-making and emphasize the challenge of developing scalable interventions to effectively change discriminatory behaviors across various contexts.
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Algorithmic bias occurs when algorithms incorporate biases in the human decisions on which they are trained. We find that people see more of their biases (e.g.

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Psychological ownership may be judged differently or similarly for self and others. Potential differences in how ownership is evaluated by actors and observers raise important questions about the concept of ownership (what is Mine, Ours, and Theirs) and how to resolve conflicting perceptions.

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We compare the predictions of two important proposals made by De Neys to findings in the anchoring effect literature. Evidence for an anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic supports his proposal that system 1 and system 2 are non-exclusive. The relationship between psychophysical noise and anchoring effects, however, challenges his proposal that epistemic uncertainty determines the involvement of system 2 corrective processes in judgment.

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People sometimes exhibit a costly preference for humans relative to algorithms, which is often defined as a domain-general algorithm aversion. I propose it is instead driven by biased evaluations of the self and other humans, which occurs more narrowly in domains where identity is threatened and when evaluative criteria are ambiguous.

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We introduce a theoretical framework distinguishing between anchoring effects, anchoring bias, and judgmental noise: Anchoring effects require anchoring bias, but noise modulates their size. We tested this framework by manipulating stimulus magnitudes. As magnitudes increase, psychophysical noise due to scalar variability widens the perceived range of plausible values for the stimulus.

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People exhibit a circadian rhythm in the variety of foods they eat. Many people happily eat the same foods for breakfast day after day, yet seek more variety in the foods they eat for lunch and dinner. We identify psychological goals as a driver of this diurnal pattern of variety seeking, complementing other biological and cultural drivers.

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Medical artificial intelligence is cost-effective and scalable and often outperforms human providers, yet people are reluctant to use it. We show that resistance to the utilization of medical artificial intelligence is driven by both the subjective difficulty of understanding algorithms (the perception that they are a 'black box') and by an illusory subjective understanding of human medical decision-making. In five pre-registered experiments (1-3B: N = 2,699), we find that people exhibit an illusory understanding of human medical decision-making (study 1).

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Object ownership changes how people perceive objects and self through psychological ownership-the feeling that a thing is MINE. Psychological ownership usually tracks legal ownership, but the two can and do diverge. In this integrative review, I propose a dual-process model of psychological ownership.

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We examine which social comparisons most affect happiness with pay that is unequally distributed (e.g., salaries and bonuses).

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The primary objection to debiasing-training interventions is a lack of evidence that they improve decision making in field settings, where reminders of bias are absent. We gave graduate students in three professional programs ( = 290) a one-shot training intervention that reduces confirmation bias in laboratory experiments. Natural variance in the training schedule assigned participants to receive training before or after solving an unannounced business case modeled on the decision to launch the Space Shuttle Challenger.

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Affective forecasts are used to anticipate the hedonic impact of future events and decide which events to pursue or avoid. We propose that because affective forecasters are more sensitive to outcome specifications of events than experiencers, the outcome specification values of an event, such as its duration, magnitude, probability, and psychological distance, can be used to predict the direction of affective forecasting errors: whether affective forecasters will overestimate or underestimate its hedonic impact. When specifications are positively correlated with the hedonic impact of an event, forecasters will overestimate the extent to which high specification values will intensify and low specification values will discount its impact.

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Plural societies require individuals to forecast how others-both in-group and out-group members-will respond to gains and setbacks. Typically, correcting affective forecasts to include more relevant information improves their accuracy by reducing their extremity. In contrast, we found that providing affective forecasters with social-category information about their targets made their forecasts more extreme and therefore less accurate.

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When people cannot get what they want, they often satisfy their desire by consuming a substitute. Substitutes can originate from within the taxonomic category of the desired stimulus (i.e.

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The endowment effect is the tendency for people who own a good to value it more than people who do not. Its economic impact is consequential. It creates market inefficiencies and irregularities in valuation such as differences between buyers and sellers, reluctance to trade, and mere ownership effects.

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People often resort to superstitious behavior to facilitate goal achievement. We examined whether the specific type of achievement goal pursued influences the propensity to engage in superstitious behavior. Across six studies, we found that performance goals were more likely than learning goals to elicit superstitious behavior.

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The results of three experiments reveal that memory for end enjoyment, rather than beginning enjoyment, of a pleasant gustatory experience determines how soon people desire to repeat that experience. We found that memory for end moments, when people are most satiated, interferes with memory for initial moments. Consequently, end moments are more influential than initial moments when people decide how long to wait until consuming a food again.

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Spontaneous thoughts, the output of a broad category of uncontrolled and inaccessible higher order mental processes, arise frequently in everyday life. The seeming randomness by which spontaneous thoughts arise might give people good reason to dismiss them as meaningless. We suggest that it is precisely the lack of control over and access to the processes by which they arise that leads people to perceive spontaneous thoughts as revealing meaningful self-insight.

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We propose that affective forecasters overestimate the extent to which experienced hedonic responses to an outcome are influenced by the probability of its occurrence. The experience of an outcome (e.g.

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Does liking or wanting predict the delay between consumption episodes? Although these psychological processes are correlated, we find that memory for liking, rather than wanting, determines the number of days that pass until the consumption of a food is repeated. Experiment 1 found that liking (but not wanting) for a food at the end of a consumption experience predicted how many days passed until participants wanted to consume it again. Experiment 2 showed that mitigating the decrease in liking resulting from the repeated consumption of a food eliminates its effect on delay.

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The mind wanders, even when people are attempting to make complex decisions. We suggest that mind wandering-allowing one's thoughts to wander until the "correct" choice comes to mind-can positively impact people's feelings about their decisions. We compare post-choice satisfaction from choices made by mind wandering to reason-based choices and randomly assigned outcomes.

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This research examined how and why group membership diminishes the attribution of mind to individuals. We found that mind attribution was inversely related to the size of the group to which an individual belonged (Experiment 1). Mind attribution was affected by group membership rather than the total number of entities perceived at once (Experiment 2).

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Affective forecasters often exhibit an impact bias, overestimating the intensity and duration of their emotional reaction to future events. Researchers have long wondered whether the impact bias might confer some benefit. We suggest that affective forecasters may strategically overestimate the hedonic impact of events to motivate their production.

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