Essays
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Concepts and Semantic Memory - Malt, Barbara C.
Humans accumulate vast amounts of knowledge over the life span. Much work aimed at understanding this knowledge store has been called either concepts or semantic memory research. This essay reviews early research on the nature of concrete concepts (concepts of concrete objects) and their organization in memory. It then raises considerations of abstract and relational concepts and of how action affects representation and vice versa. Additional advances discussed come from statistically based views of semantics, connectionist modeling, and neuroscientific evidence, all showing how distributed sources of information can be integrated to create semantic or conceptual content. Cross‐cultural and cross‐linguistic evidence indicate, though, that models based on evidence from any one cultural or language group may not apply well to others. The essay concludes by arguing that key issues for future research include broadening the kinds of knowledge structures that are studied and clarifying how language and nonlinguistic representations are related. -
Cognitive Processes Involved in Stereotyping - Fiske, Susan T.
Social psychologists have studied stereotypes since the start of the twentieth century. Investigation proceeded at first descriptively, then in a process‐oriented manner that evolved with the broader field into increasingly cognitive explanations, and now marrying those approaches to social neuroscience. The illustrative case is stereotype content, first studied in the 1930s, then dormant as more process‐oriented topics dominated, and recently revisited in several models including the stereotype content model reviewed here. Fundamental dimensions of social cognition, including stereotypes, depend on inferred intentions for good or ill (warmth) and ability to enact them (competence). These dimensions follow, respectively, from inferred cooperation/competition and from inferred societal status. In turn, the warmth‐by‐competence space predict emotional prejudices and discriminatory tendencies, as evidenced by laboratory experiments, social neuroscience, random sample surveys, and cross‐cultural comparison. -
Coevolution of Decision‐Making and Social Environments - Bruch, Elizabeth
Social scientists have a longstanding theoretical interest in the relationship between individual behavior and social dynamics. A growing body of work demonstrates that, when human behavior is interdependent—that is, what one person does depends on the past, present, or anticipated future actions of others—there is not a simple or linear relationship between the choices of individuals and their collective consequences. Outside of the academy, policy makers are increasingly aware that well‐intentioned interventions can backfire if they fail to account for how people change their behavior in response to the intervention. This type of problem requires a systematic modeling approach. Our entry provides a brief introduction to a growing body of research that brings together two disparate literatures—studies of decision‐making and studies of the interplay between individuals' decisions and features of the social environment—through dynamic computational modeling. Cognitive scientists characterize human decision‐making under uncertainty using heuristics, rules‐of‐thumb that produce satisfactory choices quickly and with limited information. The heuristics we use and information samples we gather have profound consequences for the choices we make. At the same time, the social context defined by the choices of others feeds back to affect individual decision‐making. In recent years, there has been growing interest in methods such as agent‐based modeling and systems dynamics that can capture the dynamic interplay between individuals' choices and features of the environment. However, historically these approaches have not been grounded in cognitively plausible models of human behavior. We identify areas of high potential for future research, and lay out a preliminary framework to help guide understanding of the decision‐making process and its consequences in different social domains. -
Choice Architecture - Camilleri, Adrian R.
“Choice architecture” is a metaphor capturing the idea that all choices occur within a structure of contextual and task features. These features in turn help to “construct” a person's choice. In this chapter, we summarize the academic literature on three types of choice architecture tools—defaults, information restructuring, and information feedback—and document some real‐world examples where these tools have been applied as successful “nudges.” We end the chapter with a discussion of some key challenges and opportunities associated with this new field—including the need for customized choice architecture and the political acceptability of the use of choice architecture—and highlight some avenues for future research. -
Behavioral Economics - Hochman, Guy
Standard economic models portray decision makers as perfectly rational agents who act selfishly to maximize their total earnings. In contrast, ample evidence in behavioral research suggests that people systematically deviate from the extreme rational assumption of such economic models. Behavioral economics is aimed at identifying the forces which shape the economic decisions that people make, in order to provide important insights of the human nature. This type of research often deals with questions such as how the presentation of information effect decision making, how different types and valances effect behavior, and what are the social, emotional, and situational factors that underlie economic decision making. This article describes foundational research in behavioral decision making and economics that lead to the emergence of behavioral economics; outline cutting‐edge research on applied behavioral economics, debiasing techniques, and neuroeconomics; and discusses key issues for future research, such as the use of field experiments and tailor‐made methodologies, and focusing on a more comprehensive approach. Our hope is that as behavioral economics advances it will examine not only the nature of the decisions people make but also their underlying cognitive processes. -
Attitude: Construction versus Disposition - Lord, Charles G.
Although Charles Darwin conceptualized attitudes as things that organisms do, many psychologists and laypeople today make the fundamental attribution error of conceptualizing attitudes as dispositions people have that make them do what they do. Recent attitudes research, however, has begun to explore the basic process by which people construct attitudes—a process that operates in the same way when answering general attitude questions as for any other evaluative response to an attitude object. In the basic evaluation process, the evaluator activates associations to the attitude object, perceives the implications of those associations, and bases evaluative responses at least in part on those implications. Instead of trying to measure a relatively stable disposition that predicts future behavior, the emerging research investigates influences on which associations get activated (e.g., chance, recency, and priming) and influences on how the activated associations are perceived (including subjective ease, the perceived source, and their perceived relevance). Interestingly, the two steps in the basic evaluation process parallel the two strategies that people use when they try to change their own attitudes. Emerging research directions that were suggested by conceptualizing attitudes as things people do, not what they have, include understanding the effects of evaluation goals on activating and perceiving associations, assessing attitude accuracy according to how adaptive are the attitudes that people take, and applying network theory to the basic evaluation process. -
Attention and Perception - Rensink, Ronald A.
This essay discusses several key issues concerning the study of attention and its relation to visual perception, with an emphasis on behavioral and experiential aspects. It begins with an overview of several classical works carried out in the latter half of the twentieth century, such as the development of early filter and spotlight models of attention. This is followed by a survey of subsequent research that extended or modified these results in significant ways. It includes work on various forms of induced blindness and on the capabilities of nonattentional processes. It also covers proposals about how a “just‐in‐time” allocation of attention can create the impression that we see our surroundings in coherent detail everywhere, as well as how the failure of such allocation can result in various perceptual deficits. The final section examines issues that have not received much consideration to date, but that may be important for new lines of research in the near future. These include the prospects for a better characterization of attention, the possibility of more systematic computational explanations, factors that may significantly modulate attentional operation, and the possibility of several kinds of visual attention and visual experience. -
Against Game Theory - Lucas, Gale M.
People make choices. Often, the outcome depends on choices other people make. What mental steps do people go through when making such choices? Game theory, the most influential model of choice in economics and the social sciences, offers an answer, one based on games of strategy such as chess and checkers: the chooser considers the choices that others will make and makes a choice that will lead to a better outcome for the chooser, given all those choices by other people. It is universally established in the social sciences that classical game theory (even when heavily modified) is bad at predicting behavior. But instead of abandoning classical game theory, those in the social sciences have mounted a rescue operation under the name of “behavioral game theory.” Its main tool is to propose systematic deviations from the predictions of game theory, deviations that arise from character type, for example. Other deviations purportedly come from cognitive overload or limitations. The fundamental idea of behavioral game theory is that, if we know the deviations, then we can correct our predictions accordingly, and so get it right. There are two problems with this rescue operation, each of them is fatal. (i) For a chooser, contemplating the range of possible deviations, as there are many dozens, actually makes it exponentially harder to figure out a path to an outcome. This makes the theoretical models useless for modeling human thought or human behavior in general. (ii) Modeling deviations are helpful only if the deviations are consistent, so that scientists (and indeed decision makers) can make predictions about future choices on the basis of past choices. But the deviations are not consistent. In general, deviations from classical models are not consistent for any individual from one task to the next or between individuals for the same task. In addition, people's beliefs are in general not consistent with their choices. Accordingly, all hope is hollow that we can construct a general behavioral game theory. What can replace it? We survey some of the emerging candidates.