Reasoning and decision making as social activities (OLD: 2009 class; the 2010 version is here)
We can’t deny that the social context has an influence on our behavior. The seminar will explore the idea that it has a larger impact than we usually care to admit. More specifically, we will see that abilities that are generally thought of as being very personal, such as reasoning and decision making, are in fact heavily influenced by the social context. To that end, this seminar will review some research in the fields of reasoning and decision making, as well as social psychology.
All papers will be made available to the students, as well as the slides of the presentations (occasionally these may be too heavy to be posted here - but I can give them to anyone with a USB key).
Click here to view some non technical books that are related to this seminar.
I will hold office hours on Tuesdays from 2pm to 6pm and on Wednesdays from 10am to 1pm (room 313 Cohen Hall). You can contact me by email to get an appointment otherwise.
Course requirements
Each student will prepare two presentations, based on one or a couple of (short) papers. This will represent approximately half the grade.
The other half will be a paper, due at the end of the semester that should be 6-8,000 words long (approx. 15-20 pages) (bibliographical references not included). Topics will be chosen in accord with the students who should contact me so that we can settle on a topic.
The slides of the presentations are available if you click on the title of the class.
Week 1 Dual process models of the mind
As an introduction, we will review so-called “dual process models of the mind”. These models, that are starting to dominate psychology, posit an important distinction between intuitive and reflective processes. Intuitive processes (or intuitions) tend to be fast, effortless and unconscious. Reflective processes (or reasoning) are slower, take some effort and are generally conscious.
Denes-Raj, V., & Epstein, S. (1994). Conflict between intuitive and rational processing: when people behave against their better judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66(5), 819-829.
A nice illustration of a conflict between intuitive and reflective processes.
Evans, J. S. B. T. (2003). In two minds: dual-process accounts of reasoning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(10), 454-459.
A general introduction to dual process theories in reasoning.
Wilson, T. D., Lindsey, S., & Schooler, T. Y. (2000). A model of dual attitudes. Psychological Review, 107(1), 101-126.
One of the main dual process model in social psychology.
Week 2 The evolutionary perspective
One underlying idea of this seminar will be the use of an evolutionary perspective. So it is worth giving a lengthy introduction to the topic. Special emphasis will be put on the evolution of social cognition.
Papers to be presented
Lieberman, D., Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (2007) The architecture of human kin detection. Nature 445(7129):727–31.
Byrne, R. W. (1996). Machiavellian intelligence. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 5(5), 172-180
Machiavellian intelligence is the name given to the idea that intelligence evolves mostly for social purposes.
Bonus
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1997). Evolutionary Psychology: a Primer.
An introduction, by two of the founders of the field.
Mercier, H., & Sperber, D. (in press). Intuitive and reflective inferences. In J. S. B. T. Evans & K. Frankish (Eds.), In Two Minds. New York: Oxford University Press.
An overview of the argumentative theory of reasoning. Will be used as a thread throughout the seminar.
Week 3 The power of intuitions
Even though this seminar will focus on reasoning, it is important to grasp the power of intuitions. To that end, we will look at some experimental and observational evidence showing that in many situations intuitions can be uncannily accurate. And to put intuitions in a broader perspective, we will glance at the work that is being done on infants and non-human primates that show how much they can already accomplish.
Papers to be presented
Fiske, S.T., Cuddy, A. J. C., Glick, P. (2007). Universal dimensions of social cognition: warmth and competence. Trends in Cognitive Sciences,11, 77-83.
Intuitions applied to person perception.
Todorov, A., Mandisodza, A. N., Goren, A., & Hall, C. C. (2005). Inferences of competence from faces predict election outcomes. Science, 308, 1623-1626.
An amazing example of the power of intuitions.
Klein, G. (1998). Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Chapter 4]
Intuitions at work in natural settings.
Bonus (these two papers have been discussed in the last class)
Surian, L., Caldi, S., & Sperber, D. (2007). Attribution of Beliefs by 13-Month-Old Infants. Psychological Science, 18(7), 580-586.
A demonstration that infants have an intuitive grasp of the mental states of others.
Hare, B., & Tomasello, M. (2004). Chimpanzees are more skillful in competitive than in cooperative cognitive tasks. Animal Behaviour, 68, 571-581.
In their (competitive) way chimpanzees have remarkable social intuitions as well.
Week 4 Failures of reasoning and decision making
After having learned about the power of intuitions, we will take reasoning off of its pedestal by showing that it can fail quite spectacularly, both in experimental and in natural settings.
Papers to be presented
Hsee, C. K., & Hastie, R. (2006). Decision and experience: why don't we choose what makes us happy? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10(1), 31-37.
A review of the shortcomings of decision making when it comes to maximizing our satisfaction.
Hsee, C. K., Zhang, J., Yu, F., & Xi, Y. (2003). Lay rationalism and inconsistency between predicted experience and decision. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 16(4), 257-272.
Funny effects of our tendency to try to make 'rational' decisions.
Dijksterhuis, A., Bos, M. W., Nordgren, L. F., & van Baaren, R. B. (2006). On making the right choice: The deliberation-without-attention effect. Science, 311(5763), 1005-1007.
Shows that sometimes reasoning doesn't help making better decisions as consumers.
Klein, G. (1998). Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Chapter 15 and 16]
Naturalistic examples of the failures of reasoning.
Kahneman, Daniel. 2003. Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics. American Economic Review, 93(5): 1449–75.
A review of the heuristic and biases framework, by it's most famous proponent.
Bonus
Johnson-Laird, P. N., Legrenzi, P., Girotto, V., & Legrenzi, M. S. (2000). Illusions in reasoning about consistency. Science, 288(5465), 531.
A funny example of a failure of reasoning.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211(4481), 453-458.
Classic demonstration that decision making can be influence by non-normative factors.
Week 5 The confirmation bias
The confirmation bias is a tendency to be lenient with views we agree with and overly critical of positions we disagree with. We will see that it may be the most prevalent bias in reasoning, that it is extremely robust and that it can explain some dramatic mistakes.
Papers to be presented
Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomena in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2, 175-220.
A review of the experimental findings regarding the confirmation bias, with some real life implications.
Taber, C. S., & Lodge, M. (2006). Motivated skepticism in the evaluation of political beliefs. American Journal of Political Science, 50(3), 755-769.
Some of the consequences of the confirmation bias for political decision making.
Klayman, J., & Ha, Y. (1987). Confirmation, disconfirmation, and information in hypothesis testing. Psychological Review, 94, 211-228.
A standard paper debunking some of the earlier claims regarding the confirmation bias.
Bonus
Smith, S. M., Fabrigar, L. R., & Norris, M. E. (2008). Reflecting on six decades of selective exposure research: Progress, challenges, and opportunities. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2(1), 464-493.
Selective exposure is the tendency to preferentially attend to confirming information.
Poletiek, F. H. (1996). Paradoxes of falsification. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 49A, 447-462.
An experimental demonstration of the robustness of the confirmation bias.
Cowley, M., & Byrne, R. M. J. (2005). When falsification is the only path to truth. Paper presented at the Twenty-Seventh Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Stresa, Italy.
Shows that we stop being biased if the opinion we examine is... someone else's.
Week 6 Motivated reasoning
Sometimes reasoning is used only so that we can try to justify a decision we have already made. This is called “motivated reasoning”. It can lead to many problematic outcomes, including overconfidence, attitude bolstering and polarization, and belief perseverance.
Papers to be presented
Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108, 480-498.
A review of the literature demonstrating the effects of motivated reasoning.
Lord, C. G., Lepper, M. R., & Preston, E. (1984). Considering the opposite: A corrective strategy for social judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47, 1231-1243.
Explore which debiasing strategies work and which doesn't.
Guenther, C. L., & Alicke, M. D. (2008). Self-enhancement and belief perseverance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44(3), 706-712.
Shows that motivated reasoning can lead to the perseverance of false beliefs.
Koriat, A. (2008) Subjective confidence in one's answers: the consensuality principle. Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition. 34(4), 945-959.
Reveals that our confidence judgments are not based on whether our answers are correct, but on whether they are consensual.
Bonus
Tesser, A. (1976). Attitude Polarization as a Function of Thought and Reality Constraints. Journal of Research in Personality, 10(2), 183-194.
How simply thinking about a topic can lead to us entertain unjustified stronger views.
Week 7 Reasoning in groups
One way to circumvent some failures of reasoning is to have people debate about the problems at hand. However, if the group members have uniform opinions, then debating can lead to worse outcomes: in the absence of dissent, opinions can become more extreme.
Papers to be presented
Moshman, D., & Geil, M. (1998). Collaborative reasoning: Evidence for collective rationality. Thinking and Reasoning, 4(3), 231-248.
A dramatic improvement of the performances in group, with the most widely used reasoning problem.
Sunstein, C. R. (2002). The law of group polarization. Journal of Political Philosophy, 10(2), 175-195.
Likewise, shows that reasoning in group can lead to stronger (but not better) beliefs or actions.
Esser, J. K. (1998). Alive and Well after 25 Years: A Review of Groupthink Research. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 73(2-3), 116-141.
How the lack of dissent can lead to catastrophes.
Bonus
Schulz-Hardt, S., Brodbeck, F. C., Mojzisch, A., Kerschreiter, R., & Frey, D. (2006). Group decision making in hidden profile situations: dissent as a facilitator for decision quality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(6), 1080-1093.
Experimental demonstration of the importance of diversity of opinion within groups.
Week 8 Reason based choice
Faced with some novel choices, intuitions may be a poor guide. People can then use reasoning. But will this lead to better decisions? Not necessarily. Instead, many studies show that reasoning leads towards decisions that are easy to justify – decisions for which we can provide reasons. But these decisions may not follow normative rules, or even be the best for us.
Papers to be presented
Schwarz, N. (2004). Metacognitive experiences in consumer judgment and decision making. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 14(4), 332-348.
How we use our feelings to make decisions. Some very funny and counterintuive results.
Shafir, E., Simonson, I., & Tversky, A. (1993). Reason-based choice. Cognition, 49(1-2), 11-36.
Review article on reason-based choice.
Arkes, H. R., & Ayton, P. (1999). The sunk cost and Concorde effects: Are humans less rational than lower animals. Psychological Bulletin, 125(5), 591–600.
An explanation of the sunk cost effect based on an overuse of rules.
Bonus
Okada, E. M. (2005). Justification effects on consumer choice of hedonic and utilitarian goods. Journal of Marketing Research, 42(1), 43-53.
How we make utilitarian decisions when we should have gone for the choice that sounded more like fun.
Hsee, C. K., & Zhang, J. (2004). Distinction bias: Misprediction and mischoice due to joint evaluation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86(5).
Again, a case of making bad decisions so that we can justify them.
Week 9 Moral hypocrisy
Classically, reasoning is not only supposed to lead us to practically better decisions, but also to morally superior ones. However, we will see that sometimes reasoning is instead used to justify wrongful acts. By allowing us to find such justifications, reasoning can then allow us to perform these wrongful acts.
Papers to be presented
Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814-834.
When moral judgments are made on the basis of intuitions -- and reasoning has nothing to say about it.
Bandura, A. (1990). Selective activation and disengagement of moral control. Journal of Social Issues, 46, 27–46.
Important paper reviewing the strategies we use to alleviate our guilt.
Dana, J., Weber, R. A., & Kuang, J. X. (2007). Exploiting moral wiggle room: Experiments demonstrating an illusory preference for fairness. Economic Theory, 33(1), 67-80.
Are we really fair, or do we just pretend to?
Bonus
Maes, J. (1994). Blaming the victim: Belief in control or belief in justice? Social Justice Research, 7(1), 69-90.
How we come to blame victims to maintain a view of ourselves and the world as just.
Snyder, M., Kleck, R. E., Strenta, A., & Mentzer, S. J. (1979). Avoidance of the handicapped: an attributional ambiguity analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(12), 2297-2306.
We can be jerks... if we think we can get away with it.
Valdesolo, P., & DeSteno, D. (2008). The duality of virtue: Deconstructing the moral hypocrite. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
How stopping people from reasoning can make them behave morally.
Week 10 The self: maintaining a cover of competence and benevolence
The self is one of the central concepts of psychology. We will review evidence purporting to show that its function is primarily social. We try to maintain a facade of benevolence and competence in order to improve our interactions with others. This is one of the reasons we try to maintain consistency between our actions and our words.
Papers to be presented
Leary, M. R. (2005). Sociometer theory and the pursuit of relational value: Getting to the root of self-esteem. European Review of Social Psychology, 16(1), 75-111.
How do we know how other people evaluate us?
Kurzban, R., & Aktipis, A. (2007). Modularity and the Social Mind: Are Psychologists Too Self-ish? Personality and Social Psychology Review, 11(2), 131.
Develops the hypothesis that the self is a facade that we use to make others like us.
Gawronski, B., & Strack, F. (2004). On the propositional nature of cognitive consistency: Dissonance changes explicit, but not implicit attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40(4), 535-542.
Shows that we only strive to maintain some forms of coherence at the reflexive level.
Tedeschi, J. T., Schlenker, B. R., & Bonoma, T. V. Cognitive dissonance: Private ratiocination or public spectacle? American Psychologist, 1971, 26, 685-695.
An interesting take on one of the most fundamental discovery of social psychology.
Bonus
Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J. C., & Glick, P. (2007). Universal dimensions of social cognition: warmth and competence. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(2), 77-83.
How do we evaluate other people?
Week 11 Temporal discounting
One of the functions reasoning can play is to allow us to resist temptation. On the other hand, by helping us to find justifications (I can have a desert since I’ll be walking home…), reasoning can also make us yield to temptation. These two sides of reasoning have led to very exciting empirical work, but have also shed light on deep philosophical issues.
Papers to be presented
Ainslie, G. (2004). Breakdown of Will. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
A model of why we succumb to temptation.
Metcalfe, J., & Mischel, W. (1999). A hot/cool-system analysis of delay of gratification: Dynamics of willpower. Psychological Review, 106, 3-19.
A dual process model of temporal discounting and impulse control.
Bonus
Hsee, C. K. (1995). Elastic justification: How tempting but task-irrelevant factors influence decisions. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 62(3), 330-337.
When reasoning allows us to yield to temptation.
Duckworth, A. L., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2005). Self-Discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting Academic Performance of Adolescents. Psychological Science, 16(12), 939-944.
Shows the importance of the ability to delay gratification.
Nozick, R. (1993). The Nature of Rationality. New York: Princeton University Press. [Chapter 1]
A philosophical exploration of our ability to be guided by principles.
Week 12 Cross-cultural differences (and commonalities)
The view of reasoning that is defended in this seminar predicts that culture will only have a relatively shallow effect on our reasoning mechanisms. On the other hand, by making more or less available different justifications, culture can still affect our decisions in significant ways.
Papers to be presented
Norenzayan, A., Smith, E., & Kim, B. (2002). Cultural preferences for formal versus intuitive reasoning. Cognitive Science, 26, 653–684.
Briley, D. A., Morris, M. W., & Simonson, I. (2000). Reasons as carriers of culture: Dynamic versus dispositional models of cultural influence on decision making. Journal of Consumer Research, 27(2), 157-178.
How having to justify oneself can reinforce the effects of culture.
Sedikides, C., Gaertner, L., & Toguchi, Y. (2003). Pancultural self-enhancement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(1), 60-79.
Are some people really modest?
Bonus
Yamagishi, T., Hashimoto, H., & Schug, J. (2008). Preferences versus strategies as explanations for culture-specific behavior. Psychological Science, 19(6), 579-584.
On the superficiallity of cross-cultural differences.
Ariely, D., & Levav, J. (2000). Sequential Choice in Group Settings: Taking the Road Less Traveled and Less Enjoyed. Journal of Consumer Research, 27(3), 279-290.
How culture can push us towards bad decisions -- but differently bad depending on the culture.
Week 13 Political and economic consequences
Understanding the workings of reasoning can help explaining many apparently irrational behaviors in the fields of economics and politics. It can also help us devise ways to overcome these problems.
Thaler, R., & Sunstein, C. (2007). Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven: Yale University Press. [Chapter 1 to 5]
An exploration of ways to improve decisions through policies.
Barber, B. M., & Odean, T. (1999). The Courage of Misguided Convictions. Financial Analysts Journal, 55(6).
Some of the financial consequences of the failures of reasoning.
Taber, C. S. (2003). Information processing and public opinion. In D. O. Sears, L. Huddy & R. Jervis (Eds.), Oxford Handboook of Political Psychology (pp. 433-476). New York: Oxford University Press.
How do we come to have the opinions we do?
Week 14 Presentations