Multiple Reputations: Selective Attention to Competence and Character.

Reputation is multidimensional, with some traits being more relevant than others in particular contexts. Can people selectively respond to reputational cues relevant to the task at hand? Across three studies, we examined how people weigh cues about helpfulness and competence when forming expectations about strangers' behavior. Using adapted investment games, we varied whether a stranger's helpfulness or competence predicted participants' future payoffs.

The role of episodic memory sampling in evaluation.

Many models of choice assume that people retrieve memories of past experiences and use them to guide evaluation and choice. In this paper, we examine whether samples of recalled past experiences do indeed underpin our evaluations of options. We showed participants sequences of numerical values and asked them to recall as many of those values as possible and also to state how much they would be willing to pay for another draw from the sequence.

Incomparability and Incommensurability in Choice: No Common Currency of Value?

Models of decision-making typically assume the existence of some common currency of value, such as utility, happiness, or inclusive fitness. This common currency is taken to allow comparison of options and to underpin everyday choice. Here we suggest instead that there is no universal value scale, that incommensurable values pervade everyday choice, and hence that most existing models of decision-making in both economics and psychology are fundamentally limited.

Political Attitudes and Disease Threat: Regional Pathogen Stress Is Associated With Conservative Ideology Only for Older Individuals.

What environmental factors are associated with individual differences in political ideology, and do such associations change over time? We examine whether reductions in pathogen prevalence in U.S. states over the past 60 years are associated with reduced associations between parasite stress and conservatism.

Do Misconceptions About Health-Related Quality of Life Affect General Population Valuations of Health States?

Objectives: Healthcare resource allocation decisions are often informed by the expected gains in patients' quality-adjusted life-years. Misconceptions about ill-health's consequences for quality of life (QOL) may however affect evaluations of health states by the general population and hence affect resource allocation decisions informed by quality-adjusted life-years. We examine whether people selectively misestimate the QOL consequences of moderate anxiety or depression compared with other dimensions of health, and we test whether informing people of actual changes in QOL associated with health states changes appraisals of their relative undesirability.

Rank-based alternatives to mean-based ensemble models of satisfaction with earnings: Comment on Putnam-Farr and Morewedge (2020).

How much satisfaction do we derive from a new salary or from receiving a bonus payment in an experiment? People do not judge monetary amounts in isolation but compare them to other amounts-judgments are context sensitive. A key question is, however, how context affects judgment. Across eight experiments, Putnam-Farr and Morewedge (2020) showed that people's self-reported satisfaction with a sum of money is predicted by the difference between that amount and the highest or lowest amount received by others.

Social sampling and expressed attitudes: Authenticity preference and social extremeness aversion lead to social norm effects and polarization.

A cognitive model of social influence (Social Sampling Theory [SST]) is developed and applied to several social network phenomena including polarization and contagion effects. Social norms and individuals' private attitudes are represented as distributions rather than the single points used in most models. SST is explored using agent-based modeling to link individual-level and network-level effects.

Of tinfoil hats and thinking caps: Reasoning is more strongly related to implausible than plausible conspiracy beliefs.

People who strongly endorse conspiracy theories typically exhibit biases in domain-general reasoning. We describe an overfitting hypothesis, according to which (a) such theories overfit conspiracy-related data at the expense of wider generalisability, and (b) reasoning biases reflect, at least in part, the need to reduce the resulting dissonance between the conspiracy theory and wider data. This hypothesis implies that reasoning biases should be more closely associated with belief in implausible conspiracy theories (e.

The Endowment Effect and Beliefs About the Market.

The endowment effect occurs when people assign a higher value to an item they own than to the same item when they do not own it, and this effect is often taken to reflect an ownership-induced change in the intrinsic value people assign to the object. However recent evidence shows that valuations made by buyers and sellers are influenced by market prices provided for the individual products, suggesting a role for beliefs about the markets. Here we elicit individuals' beliefs about whole distributions of market prices, enabling us to quantify whether or not a given transaction constitutes a "good deal" and to demonstrate how an endowment effect may reflect such considerations.

Inequality and Social Rank: Income Increases Buy More Life Satisfaction in More Equal Countries.

How do income and income inequality combine to influence subjective well-being? We examined the relation between income and life satisfaction in different societies, and found large effects of income inequality within a society on the between individuals' incomes and their life satisfaction. The income-satisfaction gradient is steeper in countries with more equal income distributions, such that the positive effect of a 10% increase in income on life satisfaction is more than twice as large in a country with low income inequality as it is in a country with high income inequality. These findings are predicted by an income rank hypothesis according to which life satisfaction is derived from social rank.

Comparing indices of relative deprivation using behavioural evidence.

What measure of relative deprivation best predicts health? While numerous indices of relative deprivation exist, few studies have compared how well different measures account for empirical data. Hounkpatin et al. (2016) demonstrated that the relative ranked position of an individual i's income within a comparison group (their relative rank) was a better predictor of i's health than i's relative deprivation as assessed by the widely-used Yitzhaki index.

Individual-Level Analyses of the Impact of Parasite Stress on Personality: Reduced Openness Only for Older Individuals.

The parasite stress hypothesis predicts that individuals living in regions with higher infectious disease rates will show lower openness, agreeableness, and extraversion, but higher conscientiousness. This article, using data from more than 250,000 U.S.

Benchmarks provide common ground for model development: Reply to Logie (2018) and Vandierendonck (2018).

We respond to the comments of Logie and Vandierendonck to our article proposing benchmark findings for evaluating theories and models of short-term and working memory. The response focuses on the two main points of criticism: (a) Logie and Vandierendonck argue that the scope of the set of benchmarks is too narrow. We explain why findings on how working memory is used in complex cognition, findings on executive functions, and findings from neuropsychological case studies are currently not included in the benchmarks, and why findings with visual and spatial materials are less prevalent among them.

Benchmarks for models of short-term and working memory.

Any mature field of research in psychology-such as short-term/working memory-is characterized by a wealth of empirical findings. It is currently unrealistic to expect a theory to explain them all; theorists must satisfice with explaining a subset of findings. The aim of the present article is to make the choice of that subset less arbitrary and idiosyncratic than is current practice.

Income Inequality, Income, and Internet Searches for Status Goods: A Cross-National Study of the Association Between Inequality and Well-Being.

Is there a positive association between a nation's income inequality and concerns with status competition within that nation? Here we use Google Correlate and Google Trends to examine frequency of internet search terms and find that people in countries in which income inequality is high search relatively more frequently for positional brand names such as Prada, Louis Vuitton, or Chanel. This tendency is stronger among well-developed countries. We find no evidence that income alone is associated with searches for positional goods.

A rank based social norms model of how people judge their levels of drunkenness whilst intoxicated.

Background: A rank based social norms model predicts that drinkers' judgements about their drinking will be based on the rank of their breath alcohol level amongst that of others in the immediate environment, rather than their actual breath alcohol level, with lower relative rank associated with greater feelings of safety. This study tested this hypothesis and examined how people judge their levels of drunkenness and the health consequences of their drinking whilst they are intoxicated in social drinking environments.

Methods: Breath alcohol testing of 1,862 people (mean age = 26.

Being paid relatively well most of the time: Negatively skewed payments are more satisfying.

How does the structure of a series of payments influence its recipient's satisfaction? A common hypothesis is that each payment will be compared with a single "standard" or "reference" payment (e.g., the average payment).

Personality, Parasites, Political Attitudes, and Cooperation: A Model of How Infection Prevalence Influences Openness and Social Group Formation.

What is the origin of individual differences in ideology and personality? According to the parasite stress hypothesis, the structure of a society and the values of individuals within it are both influenced by the prevalence of infectious disease within the society's geographical region. High levels of infection threat are associated with more ethnocentric and collectivist social structures and greater adherence to social norms, as well as with socially conservative political ideology and less open but more conscientious personalities. Here we use an agent-based model to explore a specific opportunities-parasites trade-off (OPTO) hypothesis, according to which utility-maximizing agents place themselves at an optimal point on a trade-off between (a) the gains that may be achieved through accessing the resources of geographically or socially distant out-group members through openness to out-group interaction, and (b) the losses arising due to consequently increased risks of exotic infection to which immunity has not been developed.

Why does Income Relate to Depressive Symptoms? Testing the Income Rank Hypothesis Longitudinally.

This paper reports a test of the relative income rank hypothesis of depression, according to which it is the rank position of an individual's income amongst a comparison group, rather than the individual's absolute income, that will be associated with depressive symptoms. A new methodology is developed to test between psychosocial and material explanations of why income relates to well-being. This method was used to test the income rank hypothesis as applied to depressive symptoms.

Improving social norms interventions: Rank-framing increases excessive alcohol drinkers' information-seeking.

Objective: Two types of social norm message frame for encouraging seeking of alcohol-related health information by excessive drinkers were compared: (a) how much the average person actually drinks and (b) how their drinking ranks among others. It was hypothesized, in accordance with recent evidence of how the brain represents value, that Frame (b) would be more effective than Frame (a). This is the first test comparing these frames in any domain of social norms research.

Measuring implicit attitudes: A positive framing bias flaw in the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP).

How can implicit attitudes best be measured? The Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP), unlike the Implicit Association Test (IAT), claims to measure absolute, not just relative, implicit attitudes. In the IRAP, participants make congruent (Fat Person-Active: false; Fat Person-Unhealthy: true) or incongruent (Fat Person-Active: true; Fat Person-Unhealthy: false) responses in different blocks of trials. IRAP experiments have reported positive or neutral implicit attitudes (e.

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.

Income inequality and status seeking: searching for positional goods in unequal U.S. States.

It is well established that income inequality is associated with lower societal well-being, but the psychosocial causes of this relationship are poorly understood. A social-rank hypothesis predicts that members of unequal societies are likely to devote more of their resources to status-seeking behaviors such as acquiring positional goods. We used Google Correlate to find search terms that correlated with our measure of income inequality, and we controlled for income and other socioeconomic factors.

Do Student Evaluations of University Reflect Inaccurate Beliefs or Actual Experience? A Relative Rank Model.

It was shown that student satisfaction ratings are influenced by context in ways that have important theoretical and practical implications. Using questions from the UK's National Student Survey, the study examined whether and how students' expressed satisfaction with issues such as feedback promptness and instructor enthusiasm depends on the context of comparison (such as possibly inaccurate beliefs about the feedback promptness or enthusiasm experienced at other universities) that is evoked. Experiment 1 found strong effects of experimentally provided comparison context-for example, satisfaction with a given feedback time depended on the time's relative position within a context.

Memory Without Consolidation: Temporal Distinctiveness Explains Retroactive Interference.

Is consolidation needed to account for retroactive interference in free recall? Interfering mental activity during the retention interval of a memory task impairs performance, in particular if the interference occurs in temporal proximity to the encoding of the to-be-remembered (TBR) information. There are at least two rival theoretical accounts of this temporal gradient of retroactive interference. The cognitive neuroscience literature has suggested neural consolidation is a pivotal factor determining item recall.