Journal of Experimental Psychology-Applied最新文献

Attribute conditioning refers to the phenomenon that target stimuli acquire specific attributes by pairing them with stimuli possessing these attributes. We apply attribute conditioning to a marketing context where brands are often displayed with stimuli possessing semantic attributes to establish brand-attribute associations. In particular, we examine whether it is more effective from a brand image perspective to associate a brand with only one attribute, two related attributes, or two unrelated attributes. Across four experimental studies, we find that pairing a single attribute (e.g., athletic) with a brand is most effective for building brand-attribute associations and that pairing multiple, related attributes (athletic and healthy) is more effective than pairing multiple, unrelated attributes (athletic and smart). Supplementing this finding, an analysis of observational data from real brands suggests that attributing two orthogonal attributes to a brand is associated with negative effects on marketing-relevant outcomes. Our findings extend previous research on multiattribute conditioning and highlight the importance of the number and relationship between attributes for building effective brand associations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Many decisions rely on intuitive predictions based on time series data showing a trend. For instance, the current upward trend in global temperatures might lead to specific predictions about the extent to which global temperatures will rise in the future, and these predictions might be used to inform judgments about the urgency with which climate change must be addressed. However, those predictions often need to be revised to incorporate the effects of unexpected events that might accelerate a trend (i.e., increase its rate of change), such as an unanticipated increase in CO₂ emissions, or decelerate a trend (i.e., decrease its rate of change), such as an unanticipated reduction in CO₂ emissions. In this work, we uncover a new cognitive bias by which people neglect how much a trend can accelerate (vs. decelerate) due to unexpected events. We explain this bias in terms of momentum theory and a naive understanding of physics. These findings have important implications for businesses and policymakers seeking to communicate information about topics such as climate change, stock market prices, or disease prevention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Reminders such as calendar entries and digital alerts are highly effective at helping people remember what they need to do. Recent work has explored the triggers of reminder setting, also known as intention offloading, finding that low confidence is associated with more offloading in laboratory tasks. This supports a metacognitive model of cognitive offloading. Here, we investigated whether this model generalizes to real-world intentions. We asked 112 participants about their upcoming plans and subsequent fulfillment of those plans in two online surveys conducted in 2022. Participants were more likely to set reminders for plans that (a) they were less confident they would remember and (b) they judged to be more important. Participants with lower confidence that they would remember to return for the second survey were more likely to set a reminder for this plan. This, in turn, predicted greater fulfillment. Therefore, ironically, lower confidence predicted greater success. These findings show that intention offloading predicts fulfillment of real-world intentions. They also point toward metacognition as a target for interventions to facilitate this. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Teachers and students often report using examples to support learning. Research has shown benefits of viewing provided examples and generating examples during declarative concept learning; however, there is less work showing clear benefits when learners generate their own examples on comprehension measures while students are attempting to learn from expository science texts. The present study tested whether generating examples would be useful for improving comprehension and comprehension monitoring in the context of an undergraduate science course. In a pre-post design, students completed an initial reading activity, followed by taking practice tests on each topic. Some students were assigned to complete an additional example generation activity after taking the practice tests. Some students also evaluated the quality of generated examples and received explanatory feedback. While there was an overall improvement in comprehension for all students, those who generated examples without the opportunity to evaluate the quality had the smallest overall learning gains. Students who evaluated the quality of examples showed the greatest learning gains on application-based test questions. And, although overall overconfidence decreased, there were no differences between conditions. These results suggest that example generation may not always be as helpful for improving learning as many students and teachers assume. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Given the finding that retrieval practice improves memory, it is frequently suggested that students test themselves while studying. This study examined whether participants benefit from testing if they create and use their own test questions. In Experiment 1, participants read passages, generated questions about the passages, and then either answered their questions as they created them (the procedure used in previous studies) or after a delay. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants either generated questions and answered them after a delay (i.e., self-testing), answered experimenter-provided questions, or reread the passages before taking a final test administered shortly after learning or following a 2-day delay. The experiments found no benefits of answering one's own questions after a delay. In fact, those who self-tested tended to have worse performance on a final assessment of learning than the other learning conditions. Exploratory analyses suggested that participants' questions often did not target material that was on the later criterion test, which may explain why self-testing was not beneficial. The present study suggests that testing may not benefit learning if students create their own test questions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The increasing importance of consumer ratings raises the question of whether people adjust for potentially fake or biased extreme opinions when judging products. Two studies tested treatments that trimmed the extremes of rating distributions. Neither removing extreme ratings while preserving the mean, nor flagging suspicious extreme ratings, nor priming individuals about review manipulation significantly affect judged product quality on average. However, judgments for specific distributions may be made less extreme by flagging or trimming. On average, it is difficult to override usage of the mean rating as the strongest proxy for product quality. When a weighted-mean model is fitted, the estimated weighting profile is hump-shaped and asymmetric. Consumers appear to discount 5-star ratings but are particularly susceptible to being misled by disingenuous 1-star ratings. The weights suggest that there is a binary bias with an inflection point at 2-stars for product ratings, meaning that any rating above this broadly sends an equally strong positive signal of quality. Further theoretical work is required to understand how people form weights for ratings, and applied work should continue to search for decision aids that could help consumers to better adjust for review bias. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

When reading a text in school, the goal is both text comprehension and text retention. We examined the effects of the learning strategies summarization and factual retrieval practice on third- and fourth-grade pupils' text comprehension and retention of factual knowledge from a text, using restudy as a control condition. The experiment was conducted in an authentic classroom setting, with teachers executing the experiment using original course materials. In 2016, 57 regular third- and fourth-grade pupils (M = 9.04 years old) read three different texts, and each applied three different learning strategies (summarization, retrieval practice and restudy, which were counterbalanced across texts) in subsequent practice sessions. After a 2-week delay, a final test was administered. The learning strategy summarization had a larger positive effect on text comprehension than factual retrieval practice, but had a similar effect compared to restudy. The learning strategy factual retrieval practice had a larger positive effect on text retention than both summarization and restudy. Implications for educational practice are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Prior research has demonstrated that adopting the market mindset hinders interpersonal trust. In the present work, we show that this effect is not universal, as trust can rise when people with the market mindset perceive the situation as resembling market-pricing principles. We start by showing that the Trust Game represents an interaction that people perceive as being more similar to market-pricing relationships rather than to communal-sharing relationships (pilot study; N = 114). In a series of three experiments, we then demonstrate that (a) compared to controls, participants with the market mindset make larger allocations in the Trust Game (Experiment 1; N = 131), (b) this effect is mediated by the motivation to use proportional thinking (preregistered Experiment 2; N = 581), and (c) compared to controls, people with the market mindset are more sensitive to proportions-their allocations in the Trust Game are significantly higher when multiplied by 4 compared to when multiplied by 2 (preregistered Experiment 3; N = 931). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Numerous social categories are often seen as vulnerable to harm. In the context of firms causing harm to individuals, we seek to better explain when and why observers absolve firms of responsibility as opposed to holding them more accountable. We propose that when someone's identity is thought to make them vulnerable to harm, identity visibility (how observable the identity is) and frequency (how common the identity is) influence the perceived foreseeability of a harmful event and firm responsibility. Across five studies (total N = 2,101), we find that when visibility and frequency are low, perceptions of foreseeability decrease, in turn decreasing firm responsibility. We illustrate how visibility and frequency, and in turn foreseeability, can vary based on the characteristics of the individual being observed (e.g., the visibility or rarity of a health condition) or context (e.g., an otherwise visible identity may be invisible in an online service context). Foreseeability and firm responsibility increased when the harmed individual's rare health condition was reframed to communicate the firm's likelihood of interacting with any individual with the same health condition. Implications for consumer welfare, policy, and inclusivity are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Taking a pretest before to-be-learned material is studied can improve long-term retention of the material relative to material that was initially only studied. Using weakly associated word pairs (Experiments 1 and 3), Swahili-German word pairs (Experiment 2), and prose passages (Experiment 4) as study material, the present study examined whether this pretesting effect is modulated in size when pretests are repeatedly administered during acquisition. All four experiments consistently showed the typical pretesting effect, with enhanced recall after a single guessing attempt relative to the study-only baseline. Critically, the pretesting effect increased in size when multiple guessing attempts were made during acquisition, regardless of whether the duration of the pretesting phase increased with the number of guesses (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) or was held constant (Experiment 3). The results of Experiment 4 also indicate that neither a single guessing attempt nor multiple guessing attempts easily induce the transfer of learning to previously studied but untested information. Together, the findings demonstrate that additional guesses can promote access to the pretested target material on the final test, suggesting that in educational contexts, extensive pretesting during acquisition may serve as an effective learning strategy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).