| Are People Excessive Or Judicious In Their Egocentrism? A Modeling Approach To Understanding Bias And Accuracy In People’s Optimism |
2008 |
1841 |
People are often egocentric when judging their likelihood of success in competitions, leading to overoptimism about winning when circumstances are generally easy and to overpessimism when the circumstances are difficult. Yet, egocentrism might be gro... |
| Behaving Optimistically: How The (Un)Desirability Of An Outcome Can Bias People's Preparations For It |
2015 |
272 |
Past research on the desirability bias and on bracing for bad news has focused on the potential influence of outcome desirability on people's stated expectations. The present studies examined its influence on behavior—that is, what is done in anticip... |
| Biased Calculations: Numeric Anchors Influence Answers To Math Equations |
2011 |
1901 |
Does desire for an outcome inflate optimism? Previous experiments have produced mixed results regarding the desirability bias, with the bulk of supportive findings coming from one paradigm—the classic marked-card paradigm in which people make discret... |
| Confidently Biased: Comparisons With Anchors Bias Estimates And Increase Confidence |
2016 |
1022 |
Across a wide variety of situations, exposure to anchors has been shown to bias people’s estimates. What is not known, however, is whether externally provided anchors influence the confidence that people have in their estimates. Our studies had two g... |
| Debiasing Egocentrism And Optimism Biases In Repeated Competitions |
2012 |
1148 |
When judging their likelihood of success in competitive tasks, people tend to be overoptimistic for easy tasks and overpessimistic for hard tasks (the shared circumstance effect; SCE). Previous research has shown that feedback and experience from rep... |
| The Desirability Bias In Predictions: Going Optimistic Without Leaving Realism |
2010 |
904 |
Does desire for an outcome inflate optimism? Previous experiments have produced mixed resultsregarding the desirability bias, with the bulk of supportive findings coming from one paradigm—the classic marked-card paradigm in which people make discrete... |
| The Effect Of Target Group Size On Risk Judgments And Comparative Optimism: The More, The Riskier |
2006 |
873 |
In 5 experiments, college students exhibited a group size effect on risk judgments. As the number of individuals in a target group increased, so did participants’ judgments of the risk of the average member of the group for a variety of negative life... |
| An Examination Of Circadian Impacts On Judgments |
2020 |
1062 |
Many people suffer from insufficient sleep and the adverse effects of sleep deprivation or chronic sleep restriction are well documented. Relatedly, recent research has shown that people’s judgments and decisions can be affected by circadian timing. ... |
| Hope To Be Right: Biased Information Seeking Following Arbitrary And Informed Predictions |
2013 |
1755 |
Five studies tested when and why individuals engage in confirmatory information searches (selective exposure) following predictions. Participants engaged in selective exposure following their own predictions, evenwhen their predictions were completel... |
| Hoping For More: The Influence Of Outcome Desirability On Information Seeking And Predictions About Relative Quantities |
2012 |
1601 |
People must often engage in sequential sampling in order to make predictions about the relativequantities of two options. We investigated how directional motives influence sampling selections and resulting predictions in such cases. We used a paradig... |
| Knowledge Matters: Anchoring Effects Are Moderated By Knowledge Level |
2012 |
1898 |
Previous research into the relationship between knowledge level and anchoring effects has led to mixed conclusions. This paper presents four studies that used a diverse set of stimuli and paradigms to further investigate this relationship. In Study 1... |
| Optimism Following A Tornado Disaster |
2013 |
1936 |
Effects of exposure to a severe weather disaster on perceived future vulnerability were assessed in college students, local residents contacted through random-digit dialing, and community residents of affected versus unaffected neighborhoods. Student... |
| The Relationship Between Anxiety And Risk Taking Is Moderated By Ambiguity |
2016 |
1849 |
By definition, risk taking involves uncertainty surrounding potential outcomes. However, risky decisions can vary in the amount of ambiguity about the likelihood of each outcome occurring. The current study tested the hypothesis that the amount of am... |
| Resisting Anchoring Effects: The Roles Of Metric And Mapping Knowledge |
2015 |
1451 |
The biasing influence of anchors on numerical estimates is well established, but the relationshipbetween knowledge level and the susceptibility to anchoring effects is less clear. In two studies,we addressed the potential mitigating effects of having... |
| Risk It? Direct And Collateral Impacts Of Peers' Verbal Expressions About Hazard Likelihoods |
2017 |
189 |
When people encounter potential hazards, their expectations and behaviours can be shaped by a variety of factors including other people's expressions of verbal likelihood (e.g., unlikely to harm). What is the impact of such expressions when a person ... |
| Sample Size Bias In The Estimation Of Means |
2010 |
1583 |
The present research concerns the hypothesis that intuitive estimates of the arithmetic mean of a sample ofnumbers tend to increase as a function of the sample size; that is, they reflect a systematic sample size bias. A similar bias has been observe... |
| Sample Size Bias In Judgments Of Perceptual Averages |
2014 |
581 |
Previous research has shown that people exhibit a sample size bias when judging the average of a set of stimuli on a single dimension. The more stimuli there are in the set, the greater people judge the average to be. This effect has been demonstrate... |
| Sample Size Bias In Retrospective Estimates Of Average Duration |
2017 |
1149 |
People often estimate the average duration of several events (e.g., on average, how long does it take to drive from one's home to his or her office). While there is a great deal of research investigating estimates of duration for a single event, few ... |
| Sources Of Bias In Peoples' Social-Comparative Estimates Of Food Consumption |
2016 |
275 |
Understanding how healthfully people think they eat compared to others has implications for their motivation to engage in dietary change and the adoption of health recommendations. Our goal was to investigate the scope, sources, and measurements of b... |
| Why So Confident?: The Influence Of Outcome Desirability On Selective Exposure And Likelihood Judgment |
2013 |
1079 |
Previous studies that have directly manipulated outcome desirability have often found little effect on likelihood judgments (i.e., no desirability bias or wishful thinking). The present studies tested whetherselections of new information about outcom... |