Knowledge that Transforms

Across five studies ( N = 1428), we documented an important prediction problem in recruitment: Job candidates mispredicted how much recruiters valued expressions of intrinsic motivation (e.g., learning that a candidate desired meaningful work). In contrast, candidates more accurately predicted how much recruiters valued expressions of extrinsic motivation (e.g., learning that a candidate desired opportunities for career advancement). Social distance produced this discrepancy: People failed to realize others cared about intrinsic motivation as much as they did; therefore, they underestimated how much expressing that they valued intrinsic motivation mattered to others. Indeed, recruiters giving recruitment pitches also mispredicted how much admitted candidates valued learning that a company emphasized intrinsic motivation. As a consequence of the misprediction, candidates chose suboptimal pitches that failed to express their intrinsic motivation during job interviews, unless explicitly encouraged to take the recruiters’ perspective.

The present research examines how a limited time perspective influences the processing of new information during choice making. Specifically, we examine how perceptions of a limited future promote the distortion of new information in favor of one’s prior beliefs. Across five studies, we provide evidence of a link between more-limited time perspectives and higher information distortion, and we illuminate the proposed process: the adoption of a cognitive consistency goal when the time perspective is limited. Overall, the current work identifies a new driver of distortion—the amount of time individuals believe remains in the future. Furthermore, it contributes a novel source of biased information processing that is motivational in nature rather than the result of a lack of cognitive resources: the mere belief regarding how much time remains in the future influences information processing goals and, subsequently, how decision-makers process new information.

It is well established that people are more likely to act in a self-serving manner towards those dissimilar to themselves. Less well understood is how people actively shape perceptions of dissimilarity towards victims in order to minimize their own discomfort. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Motivated Dissimilarity Construal (MDC) – the act of purposely and proactively distancing oneself psychologically from the victim of one’s own self-serving behavior. In doing so, we challenge the notion that potential victims of self-serving acts are perceived objectively and independently of a decision maker’s motivation, as traditional rationalist models of decision making might suggest. Across three experiments, we demonstrate how, why and when MDC is likely to occur, and discuss implications of these findings for theory and research on behavioral ethics and interpersonal similarity.

Inside and outside of workplaces, individuals’ performance on a metric (e.g., sales) is often decoupled from past performance (rather than being tracked as a continuation of past performance). How do people respond to such performance resets, a type of fresh start on performance records, particularly when resets are not anticipated? Three laboratory experiments and one field study analyzing 40 years of data from professional baseball players demonstrate their impact. Specifically, unanticipated resets increase self-efficacy and thus boost motivation and future performance when they follow weak performance. However, such resets decrease self-efficacy and thus harm motivation and future performance when they follow strong performance. By identifying the conditions that determine whether performance resets improve or harm motivation, and highlighting the role of self-efficacy, this paper provides novel insights into how different ways of tracking performance influence motivation, as well as how fresh starts change behavior.

The over-precision bias refers to the tendency for individuals to believe that their predictions are much more accurate than they really are. We investigated whether this type of overconfidence is moderated by how task-relevant information is obtained. We contrast cases in which individuals were presented with information about two options with equal average performance – one with low variance the other with high variance – in experience format (i.e., observed individual performance outcomes sequentially) or description format (i.e., presented with a summary of the outcome distribution). Across three experiments, we found that those learning from description tended to be over-precise whereas those learning from experience were under-precise. These differences were driven by a relatively better calibrated representation of the underlying outcome distribution by those presented with experience-based information. We argue that those presented with experience-based information have better learning due to more opportunities for prediction-error.

We propose a “ratings pattern heuristic” in judgments of expertise—that is, people’s tendency to undervalue critics who assign the same rating to multiple options, overlooking diagnostic information which would clearly justify the uniform ratings. The heuristic is driven by a strong association between discrimination and expertise and a focus on summary ratings. People “punish” uniform (vs. varied) raters even when (a) uniform ratings are acknowledgedly more likely (studies 1a and 1b), (b) the uniform rater’s past performance is superior (studies 2 and 3), and (c) the uniform rater also reports varied sub-ratings (study 4a), unless participants are prompted to assess the sub-ratings prior to choosing a critic (studies 4b and 5). Study 6 reveals that critics are less aware than judges of the impact of the pattern of their ratings on others’ perceptions.

Six experiments found that people are more likely to engage in preventive behaviors when they are exposed to preventive messages, which present health-related numerical cues as round numbers (e.g., 15.00%) versus precise numbers (e.g., 15.29%). When participants were exposed to round numbers in preventive messages, they indicated a higher intention to get vaccinated against flu, spent longer time flossing their teeth and were more likely to reduce their consumption of unhealthy food, compared with when they were exposed to precise numbers. Providing evidence for an affect-based mechanism, the current research shows that round numbers intensify people’s negative affective reactions toward the health risk, which, in turn, increase their likelihood to engage in preventive behaviors. These findings indicate that presenting health-related numerical cues as round versus precise numbers in preventive messages can have a powerful impact on preventive behaviors.