Knowledge that Transforms

Four types of cognitive bias involving selective processing of emotion-relevant information are discussed vis-à-vis their relevance for understanding emotion-cognition interactions and for understanding the etiology and maintenance of the emotional disorders. Anxiety, but not depression, appears to be associated with an attentional bias for threatening material. Depression, but not anxiety, appears to be associated with a memory bias for negative mood-congruent material. Phobias, anxiety, and depression all appear to be associated with mood-congruent judgmental biases. Finally, selective associations in fear conditioning are a form of associative bias implicated in the origins of fears and phobias.

Yes

Subjective expected utility (SEU) embodies four distinct principles of rational behavior. Although all have been called into some question empirically, the least plausible and least studied is the property that formally equivalent gambles are treated as indifferent in preference. The paper describes some results that arise when this property is sharply weakened and to some degree replaced by alternative rational and not-so-rational-assumptions. The resulting utility representations, like SEU, are weighted averages of the utilities of consequences, but with the weights dependent on more than the underlying chance event. In rank-dependent cases, which arise from a restricted assumption about formally equivalent gambles, the weights depend on the rank position of the corresponding consequence. In rank- and sign-dependent models, they depend both on the rank position of the consequence associated to the event and on whether it is a gain or a loss. The theory giving rise to the latter involves an additional primitive, namely, joint receipt of gambles, in terms of which new rational and irrational assumptions are invoked. The result generalizes prospect theory to gambles with more than a single gain and a single loss.

Our research shows that people can apply the cost-benefit rules of microeconomic theory to their everyday decisions. Two populations were examined: (a) people who had previously received extensive formal training in the rules and (b) naive subjects who were randomly assigned to receive brief training in the rules. Training affected reasoning and reported behavior in both populations. The results indicate that extremely general rules govern choices across a wide range of domains and that use of the cost-benefit rules can be improved through training.

In accord with both the sympathetic magical law of similarity and the principle of nominal realism, previous research has shown that American adults have difficulty in ignoring a label indicating toxicity on a food, even though they know the label is false. This study confirms the finding, and shows that there is some reluctance to choose or consume a food entity if it is labelled explicitly as being nontoxic (a label of not sodium cyanide or not poison). Hence this type of magical thinking seems to ignore negatives.

Punishments are not always administered immediately after a crime is committed. Although scholars and researchers claim that third parties should normatively enact punishments proportionate to a given crime, we contend that third parties punish transgressors more severely when there is a time delay between a transgressor's crime and when they face punishment for it. We theorize that this occurs because of a perception of unfairness, whereby third parties view the process that led to time delays as unfair. We tested our theory across eight studies, including two archival data sets of 160,772 punishment decisions and six experiments (five preregistered) across 6,029 adult participants. Our results suggest that as time delays lengthen, third parties punish transgressors more severely because of increased perceived unfairness. Importantly, perceived unfairness explained this relationship beyond other alternative mechanisms. We explore potential boundary conditions for this relationship and discuss the implications of our findings.