Confirmation bias in the utilization of others' opinion strength

Left-digit bias in self-reported height

Left-digit bias is a cognitive bias wherein individuals assess the magnitude of numbers by emphasizing the leftmost digit. For instance, people often perceive the difference between $9.99 and $10.00 larger than that between $10.00 and $10.01, given the distinct left digits in the former two numbers. This study associates self-reported height with this cognitive bias. Taller stature is frequently associated with desirable attributes such as higher earnings and leadership positions; individuals may aspire to be taller and, consequently, report a height greater than their actual measurement. We posit that this inclination is more pronounced when combined with left-digit bias. In other words, individuals whose actual height ends in nine, such as 169 cm, are more likely to report their height as 170 cm than individuals with an actual height of 170 cm who report it as 171 cm. To conduct this analysis, we used data from an annual health survey of adolescents in grades 7-12. Our findings indicate that male adolescents exhibit a left-digit bias in reporting their height, whereas female adolescents do not. We contribute to the literature by providing new evidence of left-digit bias.

Do Human Assertions Really Adhere Strictly to Norms? The Effect of Threatening Content in Information on Personalized Norm Perception

Assertion is the use of declarative sentences to convey information, which necessitates meeting the "justified-belief norm" as a prerequisite. However, a significant amount of misinformation that did not meet these conditions was spread during COVID-19, leading to a reintroduction of the assertion norm. One possible hypothesis is that the threatening content of the misinformation influenced the perception of the norm. However, this remains unclear to researchers. Therefore, we conducted two experiments to investigate the effect of threatening content in information on individuals' perceptions of norms. In all the experiments, participants read backstories with and without threatening content, followed by answering assertion questions. It was observed that people do follow a looser assertion norm for information that contains threatening content. Additionally, further exploration revealed that threatening factors also lead individuals to more easily perceive the related content as truth and reduce the probability of being blamed. These two outcomes provide some explanation for the underlying mechanism of threatening factors' influence. The research results further refined the theory of assertion norms, offering a certain basis for information management.

What are the antecedents of nosiness among nurses? A qualitative study

PURPOSE

Nosiness is an annoying behavior at the workplace that can lead to negative consequences. It is characterized by being overly curious about other people's affairs. Specifically, this study aims to identify the factors contributing to nosiness among nurses.

DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH

We conducted an exploratory qualitative interview study involving 38 nurses in Iran. The participants were selected by purposive sampling.

FINDINGS

We identified nine themes as the antecedents of nosiness among nurses: defamation motive, the need for certainty, the need for power, recreational motive, empathy, social comparison, the allure of the subject for the individual, having an employee-friendly workplace, and work environment and workload.

ORIGINALITY/VALUE

Understanding the antecedents of nosiness can help healthcare organizations curtail this phenomenon and foster a positive work environment, particularly in nursing where empathy, compassion, and attention to detail make them susceptible to nosiness.

People see what they want to see: an EEG study

This study explored selective exposure and confirmation bias in the choices participants made about which political videos to watch, and whether their political positions changed after they watched videos that either agreed with or opposed their positions on two controversial issues in South Korea: North Korea policy and social welfare policy. The participants completed questionnaires before and after they watched the videos, were asked to select thumbnails of videos before they watched any, and had their brain wave activity measured through electroencephalogram (EEG) as they watched both types of videos. The participants demonstrated selective exposure as they primarily selected video thumbnails with content that matched their political orientations, and they demonstrated confirmation bias as their questionnaire responses after they watched the videos indicated that their positions had hardened. There were also statistically significant differences in alpha, beta, sensory motor rhythm, low beta, mid beta, and fast alpha activity depending on the political orientation consistency between the participants and the videos. Future studies could expand this line of research beyond college students and beyond Asia, and longitudinal work could also be conducted to determine if the obtained patterns remain constant over time.

An inferential spatiotemporal approach for knowledge synthesis to identify trends in public health research

Background

Decisions follow patterns that are introduced by human perception. Research and development (R&D) are influenced by these patterns. Furthermore, R&D publications can represent repetitive attempts to solve similar, or the same problems. Literature reviews serve as an important tool for identifying these trends, but they are time consuming. The time commitment of a literature review can be reduced by using a sample of research. This will allow an infinite population of research to be generalized. Additionally, spatiotemporal analysis is most appropriate for fields that follow time and geographic trends, such as public health. Also, using research locations to perform this analysis potentially captures the social return of R&D, as knowledge gained. As a result, an inferential spatiotemporal methodological framework is introduced to quickly identify research trends using public health research. This was applied to a childhood Pb exposure case study.

Methods

A body of more than 1000 childhood elevated blood lead (Pb) level (EBLL) research articles were used to extract publication years, research locations, and subtopics. These publications were grouped into research locations (i.e., U.S. states where research was conducted; not publication location) and averaged over years published (i.e., 29 years). Binary indicator variables were derived using the subtopics extracted and the periods identified in time trend analyses. Explanatory variables were used to conduct hypothesis testing. Significant variables were used to generalize the population of the annual average EBLL articles written per state.

Results

The range of the annual average of EBLL research articles by state was 0-1.7 articles, with a mean of 0.3 articles. Thirty-eight explanatory variables suggested a significant effect on research article production. These included temporal, sociodemographic, education, structure age, environmental, and economic variables. The strongest effect on research production for U.S. states came from the number of structures built before 1950. A predictive model was selected to generalize the population of articles using time-periods 1990-95, environmental subtopic, and structures built before 1950. The locations with the most research production for this topic were California and New York. The locations with the least research production for this topic were Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Mississippi, Delaware, and New Hampshire.

Conclusion

If the trend for R&D is to make fast decisions, more human bias will be introduced into the decision-making process. Analytical tools that enable researchers to identify trends and ask more questions about their field will mitigate these biases. This hypothesis testing and predictive modeling methodology provide researchers and other decision makers with analytical tools they can use to quickly identify research trends and narrow their field of research. Additionally, this analysis potentially captures the impact of discovered ideas, as a social return spillover, for this topic.

Research Report: A Link between Sertraline Treatment and Susceptibility to (Mis)information

Recent research revealed that several psycho-cognitive processes, such as insensitivity to positive and negative feedback, cognitive rigidity, pessimistic judgment bias, and anxiety, are involved in susceptibility to fake news. All of these processes have been previously associated with depressive disorder and are sensitive to serotoninergic manipulations. In the current study, a link between chronic treatment with the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) sertraline and susceptibility to true and fake news was examined. Herein, a sample of 1162 participants was recruited via Prolific Academic for an online study. Half of the sample reported taking sertraline (Zoloft) for at least 8 weeks (sertraline group), and the other half confirmed not taking any psychiatric medication (control group). The sertraline group was further divided according to their daily dosage (50, 100, 150, and 200 mg/day). All participants completed a susceptibility to misinformation scale, wherein they were asked to determine the veracity of the presented true and fake news and their willingness to behaviorally engage with the news. The results were compared between those of the sertraline groups and the control group. The results showed that sertraline groups did not differ significantly in the assessment of the truthfulness of information or their ability to discern the truth. However, those taking sertraline appeared to have a significantly increased likelihood of behavioral engagement with the information, and this effect was observed for both true and fake news. The research presented here represents the initial endeavor to comprehend the neurochemical foundation of the susceptibility to misinformation. The association between sertraline treatment and increased behavioral engagement with information observed in this study can be explained in light of previous studies showing positive correlations between serotonin (5-HT) system activity and the inclination to engage in social behaviors. It can also be attributed to the anxiolytic effects of sertraline treatment, which mitigate the fear of social judgment. The heightened behavioral engagement with information in people taking sertraline may, as part of a general phenomenon, also shape their interactions with fake news. Future longitudinal studies should reveal the specificity and exact causality of these interactions.

Factual and counterfactual learning in major adolescent depressive disorder, evidence from an instrumental learning study

BACKGROUND

The incidence of adolescent depressive disorder is globally skyrocketing in recent decades, albeit the causes and the decision deficits depression incurs has yet to be well-examined. With an instrumental learning task, the aim of the current study is to investigate the extent to which learning behavior deviates from that observed in healthy adolescent controls and track the underlying mechanistic channel for such a deviation.

METHODS

We recruited a group of adolescents with major depression and age-matched healthy control subjects to carry out the learning task with either gain or loss outcome and applied a reinforcement learning model that dissociates valence (positive v. negative) of reward prediction error and selection (chosen v. unchosen).

RESULTS

The results demonstrated that adolescent depressive patients performed significantly less well than the control group. Learning rates suggested that the optimistic bias that overall characterizes healthy adolescent subjects was absent for the depressive adolescent patients. Moreover, depressed adolescents exhibited an increased pessimistic bias for the counterfactual outcome. Lastly, individual difference analysis suggested that these observed biases, which significantly deviated from that observed in normal controls, were linked with the severity of depressive symoptoms as measured by HAMD scores.

CONCLUSIONS

By leveraging an incentivized instrumental learning task with computational modeling within a reinforcement learning framework, the current study reveals a mechanistic decision-making deficit in adolescent depressive disorder. These findings, which have implications for the identification of behavioral markers in depression, could support the clinical evaluation, including both diagnosis and prognosis of this disorder.

When the Media Omits or Includes Scientific Evidence in Its Publications: Science and Battles on X about Child Sexual Abuse

Scientific evidence of social impact demonstrates how violence against children is successfully prevented. Currently, the scientific research on social impact has a focus on the analysis of actions that succeed in the implementation of such scientific evidence. This article is based on scientific research that looks at which media actions help or hinder the implementation of evidence-based actions to solve the most sensitive social problems. The social media analytics methodology has identified the posts and reposts generated during two consecutive days by news articles published by three newspapers about the official report on child sexual abuse in Spain. Their analyses have been made through communicative methodology, including voices of adult victims or survivors of child sexual abuse. The results indicate that media information that omits scientific evidence of social impact provokes battles between diverse ideological groups, while information based on scientific evidence of social impact generates consensus among people from different ideologies and actions oriented to overcome the problem.

Trends, challenges, and success factors in pharmaceutical portfolio management: Cognitive biases in decision-making and their mitigating measures

Effective portfolio management is crucial for innovation and sustaining revenue in pharmaceutical companies. This article holistically reviews trends, challenges, and approaches to pharmaceutical portfolio management and focuses, in particular, on cognitive biases in portfolio decision-making. Portfolio managers strongly rely on external innovation and face increasing competitive pressure and portfolio complexity. The ability to address biases and make robust decisions remains a challenge. Portfolio management practitioners most commonly face confirmation bias, champion bias, or misaligned incentives, which they seek to mitigate through expert input, team diversity, and rewarding truth-seeking. Ultimately, highest-quality portfolio management decision-making could be enabled by three factors: high-quality data, structured review processes, and comprehensive mitigating measures against biases in decision-making.

Evidence or Confidence: What Is Really Monitored during a Decision?

Assessing our confidence in the choices we make is important to making adaptive decisions, and it is thus no surprise that we excel in this ability. However, standard models of decision-making, such as the drift-diffusion model (DDM), treat confidence assessment as a post hoc or parallel process that does not directly influence the choice, which depends only on accumulated evidence. Here, we pursue the alternative hypothesis that what is monitored during a decision is an evolving sense of confidence (that the to-be-selected option is the best) rather than raw evidence. Monitoring confidence has the appealing consequence that the decision threshold corresponds to a desired level of confidence for the choice, and that confidence improvements can be traded off against the resources required to secure them. We show that most previous findings on perceptual and value-based decisions traditionally interpreted from an evidence-accumulation perspective can be explained more parsimoniously from our novel confidence-driven perspective. Furthermore, we show that our novel confidence-driven DDM (cDDM) naturally generalizes to decisions involving any number of alternative options - which is notoriously not the case with traditional DDM or related models. Finally, we discuss future empirical evidence that could be useful in adjudicating between these alternatives.

Biased belief updating in depression

Cognitive approaches to depression have benefitted from recent research on belief updating, examining how new information is used to alter beliefs. This review presents recent advances in understanding various sources of bias in belief updating in depression. Specifically, research has demonstrated that people with depression have difficulty revising negative beliefs in response to novel positive information, whereas belief updating in depression is not related to an enhanced integration of negative information. In terms of mechanisms underlying the deficient processing of positive information, research has shown that people with depression use defensive cognitive strategies to devalue novel positive information. Furthermore, the disregard of novel positive information can be amplified by the presence of state negative affect, and the resulting persistence of negative beliefs in turn perpetuates chronically low mood, contributing to a self-reinforcing negative feedback loop of beliefs and affect. Synthesising previous research, this review proposes a coherent framework of when belief change is likely to occur, and argues that future research also needs to elucidate why people with depression hesitate to abandon negative beliefs. Recent insights from belief updating have not only improved the understanding of the psychopathology of depression, but also have the potential to improve its cognitive-behavioural treatment.

Neural activity tracking identity and confidence in social information

Humans learn about the environment either directly by interacting with it or indirectly by seeking information about it from social sources such as conspecifics. The degree of confidence in the information obtained through either route should determine the impact that it has on adapting and changing behaviour. We examined whether and how behavioural and neural computations differ during non-social learning as opposed to learning from social sources. Trial-wise confidence judgements about non-social and social information sources offered a window into this learning process. Despite matching exactly the statistical features of social and non-social conditions, confidence judgements were more accurate and less changeable when they were made about social as opposed to non-social information sources. In addition to subjective reports of confidence, differences were also apparent in the Bayesian estimates of participants' subjective beliefs. Univariate activity in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and posterior temporoparietal junction more closely tracked confidence about social as opposed to non-social information sources. In addition, the multivariate patterns of activity in the same areas encoded identities of social information sources compared to non-social information sources.

Brain Systems Underlying Fundamental Motivations of Human Social Conformity

From birth to adulthood, we often align our behaviors, attitudes, and opinions with a majority, a phenomenon known as social conformity. A seminal framework has proposed that conformity behaviors are mainly driven by three fundamental motives: a desire to gain more information to be accurate, to obtain social approval from others, and to maintain a favorable self-concept. Despite extensive interest in neuroimaging investigation of social conformity, the relationship between brain systems and these fundamental motivations has yet to be established. Here, we reviewed brain imaging findings of social conformity with a componential framework, aiming to reveal the neuropsychological substrates underlying different conformity motivations. First, information-seeking engages the evaluation of social information, information integration, and modification of task-related activity, corresponding to brain networks implicated in reward, cognitive control, and tasks at hand. Second, social acceptance involves the anticipation of social acceptance or rejection and mental state attribution, mediated by networks of reward, punishment, and mentalizing. Third, self-enhancement entails the excessive representation of positive self-related information and suppression of negative self-related information, ingroup favoritism and/or outgroup derogation, and elaborated mentalizing processes to the ingroup, supported by brain systems of reward, punishment, and mentalizing. Therefore, recent brain imaging studies have provided important insights into the fundamental motivations of social conformity in terms of component processes and brain mechanisms.

Why and When Beliefs Change

Why people do or do not change their beliefs has been a long-standing puzzle. Sometimes people hold onto false beliefs despite ample contradictory evidence; sometimes they change their beliefs without sufficient reason. Here, we propose that the utility of a belief is derived from the potential outcomes associated with holding it. Outcomes can be internal (e.g., positive/negative feelings) or external (e.g., material gain/loss), and only some are dependent on belief accuracy. Belief change can then be understood as an economic transaction in which the multidimensional utility of the old belief is compared against that of the new belief. Change will occur when potential outcomes alter across attributes, for example because of changing environments or when certain outcomes are made more or less salient.

People adaptively use information to improve their internal states and external outcomes

Information can strongly impact people's affect, their level of uncertainty and their decisions. It is assumed that people seek information with the goal of improving all three. But are they successful at achieving this goal? Answering this question is important for assessing the impact of self-driven information consumption on people's well-being. Here, over five experiments (total N = 727) we show that participants accurately predict the impact of information on their internal states (e.g., affect and cognition) and external outcomes (e.g., material rewards), and use these predictions to guide information-seeking choices. A model incorporating participants' subjective expectations regarding the impact of information on their affective, cognitive, and material outcomes accounted for information-seeking choices better than a model that included only objective proxies of those measures. This model also accounted for individual differences in information-seeking choices. By balancing considerations of the impact of information on affective, cognitive and material outcomes when seeking knowledge, participants became happier, more certain and made better decisions when they sought information relative to when they did not, suggesting that the actual consequences of receiving information aligned with their subjective expectations.

Behavioral strategy in the wild

Purpose

A decade after Powell et al.’s (2011) seminal article on behavioral strategy, which called for models to solve real-world problems, the authors revisit the field to ask whether behavioral strategy is coming of age. The purpose of this paper is to explain how behavioral strategy can and has been used in real-world settings.

Design/methodology/approach

This study presents a conceptual review with case study examples of the impact of behavioral strategy on real-world problems.

Findings

This study illustrates several examples where behavioral strategy debiasing has been effective. Although no causal claims can be made, with the stark contrast between the negative impact of biased strategies and the positive results emerging from debiasing techniques, this study argues that there is evidence of the benefits of a behavioral strategy mindset, and that this should be the mindset of a responsible strategic leader.

Practical implications

This study presents a demonstration of analytical, debate and organizational debiasing techniques and how they are being used in real-world settings, specifically military intelligence, Mergers and acquisitions deal-making, resource allocation and capital projects.

Social implications

Behavioral strategy has broad application in private and public sectors. It has proven practical value in various settings, for example, the application of reference class forecasting in large infrastructure projects.

Originality/value

A conceptual review of behavioral strategy in the wild.

Intermittent brain network reconfigurations and the resistance to social media influence

Since its development, social media has grown as a source of information and has a significant impact on opinion formation. Individuals interact with others and content via social media platforms in a variety of ways, but it remains unclear how decision-making and associated neural processes are impacted by the online sharing of informational content, from factual to fabricated. Here, we use EEG to estimate dynamic reconfigurations of brain networks and probe the neural changes underlying opinion change (or formation) within individuals interacting with a simulated social media platform. Our findings indicate that the individuals who changed their opinions are characterized by less frequent network reconfigurations while those who did not change their opinions tend to have more flexible brain networks with frequent reconfigurations. The nature of these frequent network configurations suggests a fundamentally different thought process between intervals in which individuals are easily influenced by social media and those in which they are not. We also show that these reconfigurations are distinct to the brain dynamics during an in-person discussion with strangers on the same content. Together, these findings suggest that brain network reconfigurations may not only be diagnostic to the informational context but also the underlying opinion formation.

COVID-19 conspiracy ideation is associated with the delusion proneness trait and resistance to update of beliefs

The rapid spread of conspiracy ideas associated with the recent COVID-19 pandemic represents a major threat to the ongoing and coming vaccination programs. Yet, the cognitive factors underlying the pandemic-related conspiracy beliefs are not well described. We hypothesized that such cognitive style is driven by delusion proneness, a trait phenotype associated with formation of delusion-like beliefs that exists on a continuum in the normal population. To probe this hypothesis, we developed a COVID-19 conspiracy questionnaire (CCQ) and assessed 577 subjects online. Their responses clustered into three factors that included Conspiracy, Distrust and Fear/Action as identified using principal component analysis. We then showed that CCQ (in particular the Conspiracy and Distrust factors) related both to general delusion proneness assessed with Peter's Delusion Inventory (PDI) as well as resistance to belief update using a Bias Against Disconfirmatory Evidence (BADE) task. Further, linear regression and pathway analyses suggested a specific contribution of BADE to CCQ not directly explained by PDI. Importantly, the main results remained significant when using a truncated version of the PDI where questions on paranoia were removed (in order to avoid circular evidence), and when adjusting for ADHD- and autistic traits (that are known to be substantially related to delusion proneness). Altogether, our results strongly suggest that pandemic-related conspiracy ideation is associated with delusion proneness trait phenotype.

Decision neuroscience and neuroeconomics: Recent progress and ongoing challenges

In the past decade, decision neuroscience and neuroeconomics have developed many new insights in the study of decision making. This review provides an overarching update on how the field has advanced in this time period. Although our initial review a decade ago outlined several theoretical, conceptual, methodological, empirical, and practical challenges, there has only been limited progress in resolving these challenges. We summarize significant trends in decision neuroscience through the lens of the challenges outlined for the field and review examples where the field has had significant, direct, and applicable impacts across economics and psychology. First, we review progress on topics including reward learning, explore-exploit decisions, risk and ambiguity, intertemporal choice, and valuation. Next, we assess the impacts of emotion, social rewards, and social context on decision making. Then, we follow up with how individual differences impact choices and new exciting developments in the prediction and neuroforecasting of future decisions. Finally, we consider how trends in decision-neuroscience research reflect progress toward resolving past challenges, discuss new and exciting applications of recent research, and identify new challenges for the field. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Reasoning and Decision Making Psychology > Emotion and Motivation.

Evidence integration and decision confidence are modulated by stimulus consistency

Evidence integration is a normative algorithm for choosing between alternatives with noisy evidence, which has been successful in accounting for vast amounts of behavioural and neural data. However, this mechanism has been challenged by non-integration heuristics, and tracking decision boundaries has proven elusive. Here we first show that the decision boundaries can be extracted using a model-free behavioural method termed decision classification boundary, which optimizes choice classification based on the accumulated evidence. Using this method, we provide direct support for evidence integration over non-integration heuristics, show that the decision boundaries collapse across time and identify an integration bias whereby incoming evidence is modulated based on its consistency with preceding information. This consistency bias, which is a form of pre-decision confirmation bias, was supported in four cross-domain experiments, showing that choice accuracy and decision confidence are modulated by stimulus consistency. Strikingly, despite its seeming sub-optimality, the consistency bias fosters performance by enhancing robustness to integration noise.

Bias and the Psychological Safety in Healthcare Teams

The levels of biases, stereotypes, and prejudices are present at the same level within our healthcare teams as they are in society in general. The effect of biases on teams, team development, and team functioning is less known, but what to do with bias is known and important for all healthcare clinicians to understand. Exploring bias and psychological safety is vital for optimal team development. Teams need trust, sense of belonging, and a culture of open communication to provide the best care possible for their patients; yet often teams do not address their own biases or stereotypes nor do they feel prepared to open these conversations. In this article, we present a case study, provide definitions of bias and psychological safety, as well as offer strategies to combat biases, provide steps all of the healthcare team can employ to promote belongingness in the interprofessional team, and offer strategies of supporting team members experiencing biases.

Different drives of herding: An exploratory study of motivations underlying social conformity

We often align our behaviors, attitudes, and opinions in line with a majority of others, a phenomenon known as "social conformity." A seminal framework has proposed that conformity behaviors are mainly driven by three fundamental motives: a desire to gain more information to be accurate, to obtain social approval from others, and to maintain a favorable self-concept. However, previous studies usually have interpreted conformity behaviors as driven by one motive or another, largely ignoring the fact that human behaviors could be concurrently induced by multiple and even conflicting motivations. Adopting a typical conformity paradigm widely used in previous studies, we explored distinct and concurrent motives underlying the same conformity behavior, combining personality and individual differences with more nuanced analyses of observed conformity behaviors. Our findings provide novel evidence to show that three motivations exist within a single conformity behavior, suggesting that multiple motivations drive the conformity concurrently. These findings provide a potential solution for the extensive debate about what drives human social conformity and help to better understand the conformity behavior in daily life.

Contextualizing cross national patterns in household climate change adaptation

Understanding social and behavioral drivers and constraints of household adaptation is essential to effectively address increasing climate-induced risks. Factors shaping household adaptation are commonly treated as universal; despite an emerging understanding that adaptations are shaped by social, institutional, and cultural contexts. Using original surveys in the United States, China, Indonesia, and the Netherlands (N=3,789) - we explore variations in factors shaping households' adaptations to flooding, the costliest hazard worldwide. We find that social influence, worry, climate change beliefs, self-efficacy, and perceived costs exhibit universal effects on household adaptations, despite countries' differences. Disparities occur in the effects of response efficacy, flood experience, beliefs in governmental actions, demographics, and media, which we attribute to specific cultural or institutional characteristics. Climate adaptation policies can leverage on the revealed similarities when extrapolating best practices across countries, yet should exercise caution as context-specific socio-behavioral drivers may discourage or even reverse household adaptation motivation.

A Revised Framework for the Investigation of Expectation Update Versus Maintenance in the Context of Expectation Violations: The ViolEx 2.0 Model

Expectations are probabilistic beliefs about the future that shape and influence our perception, affect, cognition, and behavior in many contexts. This makes expectations a highly relevant concept across basic and applied psychological disciplines. When expectations are confirmed or violated, individuals can respond by either updating or maintaining their prior expectations in light of the new evidence. Moreover, proactive and reactive behavior can change the probability with which individuals encounter expectation confirmations or violations. The investigation of predictors and mechanisms underlying expectation update and maintenance has been approached from many research perspectives. However, in many instances there has been little exchange between different research fields. To further advance research on expectations and expectation violations, collaborative efforts across different disciplines in psychology, cognitive (neuro)science, and other life sciences are warranted. For fostering and facilitating such efforts, we introduce the ViolEx 2.0 model, a revised framework for interdisciplinary research on cognitive and behavioral mechanisms of expectation update and maintenance in the context of expectation violations. To support different goals and stages in interdisciplinary exchange, the ViolEx 2.0 model features three model levels with varying degrees of specificity in order to address questions about the research synopsis, central concepts, or functional processes and relationships, respectively. The framework can be applied to different research fields and has high potential for guiding collaborative research efforts in expectation research.

Individual differences in information-seeking

Vast amounts of personalized information are now available to individuals. A vital research challenge is to establish how people decide what information they wish to obtain. Here, over five studies examining information-seeking in different domains we show that information-seeking is associated with three diverse motives. Specifically, we find that participants assess whether information is useful in directing action, how it will make them feel, and whether it relates to concepts they think of often. We demonstrate that participants integrate these assessments into a calculation of the value of information that explains information seeking or its avoidance. Different individuals assign different weights to these three factors when seeking information. Using a longitudinal approach, we find that the relative weights assigned to these information-seeking motives within an individual show stability over time, and are related to mental health as assessed using a battery of psychopathology questionnaires.

Confidence Modulates the Conformity Behavior of the Investors and Neural Responses of Social Influence in Crowdfunding

The decision about whether to invest can be affected by the choices or opinions of others known as a form of social influence. People make decisions with fluctuating confidence, which plays an important role in the decision process. However, it remains a fair amount of confusion regarding the effect of confidence on the social influence as well as the underlying neural mechanism. The current study applied a willingness-to-invest task with the event-related potentials method to examine the behavioral and neural manifestations of social influence and its interaction with confidence in the context of crowdfunding investment. The behavioral results demonstrate that the conformity tendency of the people increased when their willingness-to-invest deviated far from the group. Besides, when the people felt less confident about their initial judgment, they were more likely to follow the herd. In conjunction with the behavioral findings, the neural results of the social information processing indicate different susceptibilities to small and big conflicts between the own willingness of the people and the group, with small conflict evoked less negative feedback-related negativity (FRN) and more positive late positive potential (LPP). Moreover, confidence only modulated the later neural processing by eliciting larger LPP in the low confidence, implying more reliance on social information. These results corroborate previous findings regarding the conformity effect and its neural mechanism in investment decision and meanwhile extend the existing works of literature through providing behavioral and neural evidence to the effect of confidence on the social influence in the crowdfunding marketplace.

A framework to address cognitive biases of climate change

We propose a framework that outlines several predominant cognitive biases of climate change, identifies potential causes, and proposes debiasing tools, with the ultimate goal of depolarizing climate beliefs and promoting actions to mitigate climate change.

Information discernment and the psychophysiological effects of misinformation

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to determine to what extent a person’s psychophysiological well-being is affected by misinformation and whether their level of information discernment has any positive or negative effect on the outcome.

Design/methodology/approach

Participants (n = 48) were randomly and blindly allocated to one of two groups: control group participants were told a person they were working with was a student; experimental group participants were additionally led to believe that this other participant had extreme religious views. This was both stigmatising and misinforming, as this other person was an actor. Participants completed a pre-screening booklet and a series of tasks. Participants’ cardiovascular responses were measured during the procedure.

Findings

Participants with high levels of information discernment, i.e. those who are curious, use multiple sources to verify information, are sceptical about search engine information, are cognisant of the importance of authority and are aware that knowledge changes and is contradictory at times exhibited an adaptive stress response, i.e. healthy psychophysiological outcomes and responded with positive emotions before and after a stressful task.

Social implications

The findings indicate the potential harmful effects of misinformation and discuss how information literacy or Metaliteracy interventions may address this issue.

Originality/value

The first study to combine the hitherto unrelated theoretical areas of information discernment (a sub-set of information literacy), affective states (positive affect negative affect survey) and stress (challenge and threat cardiovascular measures).

Fooling ourselves and others: confirmation bias and the trustworthiness of qualitative research – Part 1 (the threats)

Purpose

To describe the implicit epistemic flaw of “confirmation bias” and to illustrate and evaluate the threats to qualitative research trustworthiness from that bias.

Design/methodology/approach

The article overviews evidence and analysis from a wide range of disciplines. The adverse effect of three varieties of confirmation bias is described in some detail in illustrative examples.

Findings

It is argued that the threats from the bias go to the heart of the research. A subsequent article summarizes and critiques counter-arguments.

Practical implications

Discussions and illustrations of varieties of confirmation bias can increase awareness of the unwitting bias and reduce its influence.

Social implications

The bias not only threatens the trustworthiness of academic and other professional research but also underpins much ideological extremism, the effectiveness of post-truth politics and inter- and intra-group conflict. These are directly discussed in the article.

Originality/value

The article extends and enriches descriptions of threats to the trustworthiness of qualitative from confirmation bias. Such threats are inadequately recognized in many qualitative research arenas. It identifies a previously unrecognized variety of confirmation bias: hollow citations.

The cherry effect or the issue behind well-being

Humans define well-being on predefined assumptions, based on inner and outer criteria as references. As illustrated, these criteria are subject to constant change, even in a situation when one is acting freely and is in control of all possible external influences. Even in scenarios that seemingly allow autonomy with one variable to analyse, underlying "irrationality" affects our ability to define and operationalize any desirable trait or state, such as well-being, euthymia or health. Before eating a bowl full of cherries, one creates an idea of how much cherries he/she will eat. However, as one starts eating, perception and following assumptions change. As cherries labeled as most desirable disappear, other cherries start to appear more alluring. The cherry effect could be of relevance in defining the terms such as well-being, euthymia and basically any other term encompassing a complex category of the human condition dependent on our perceived reality.

Shared cognitive mechanisms of hypnotizability with executive functioning and information salience

In recent years, evidence linked hypnotizability to the executive control and information salience networks, brain structures that play a role in cognitive conflict resolution and perseveration (insisting on applying a previously learned logical rule on a new set). Despite the growing body of neuroimaging evidence, the cognitive phenotype of hypnotizability is not well understood. We hypothesized that higher hypnotizability would correspond to lower perseveration and set-shifting. Seventy-two healthy adults were tested for hypnotizability and executive functions (perseveration and set-shifting). Multiple regression analyses were performed to test the relationship between hypnotizability and perseveration and set-shifting. Higher hypnotizability was associated with lower perseveration after accounting for age and education. Hypnotizability significantly predicted perseveration but not set-shifting. Our results indicate an inverse relationship between trait hypnotizability and perseveration, an executive function that utilizes regions of both the executive control and the salience systems. This suggests that hypnotizability may share a common cognitive mechanism with error evaluation and implementation of logical rules.

Determinants of the Perceived Credibility of Rebuttals Concerning Health Misinformation

Users provide and share information with a broad audience on different forms of social media; however, information accuracy is questionable. Currently, the health information field is severely affected by misinformation. Thus, addressing health misinformation is integral for enhancing public health. This research can help relevant practitioners (i.e., government officials, medical and health service personnel, and educators) find the most effective correctional interventions for governing health misinformation. We constructed a theoretical model for credibility-oriented determinants refuting misinformation based on the elaboration likelihood model. We aggregated 415 pieces of valid data through a questionnaire survey. A partial least squares structural equation model evaluated this research model. The results indicated that both perceived information quality and perceived source credibility can enhance perceived information credibility. Under some circumstances, the influence of information quality on information credibility may be more important than that of the information source. However, the cognitive conflict and knowledge self-confidence of information receivers weaken the influence of information quality on information credibility. In contrast, cognitive conflict can strengthen the influence of source credibility on information credibility. Further, perceived information quality can be affected by information usefulness, understandability, and relevance, while perceived source reliability can be affected by source expertise and authority.

Belief updating in bipolar disorder predicts time of recurrence

Bipolar disorder is a chronic relapsing condition in which mood episodes are interspersed with periods of wellbeing (euthymia). Shorter periods of euthymia are associated with poorer functioning, so it is crucial to identify predictors of relapse to facilitate treatment. Here, we test the hypothesis that specific valence-dependent learning patterns emerge prior to the clinical manifestation of a relapse, predicting its timing. The ability to update beliefs in response to positive and negative information was quantified in bipolar patients during euthymia, who were then monitored for 5 years. We found that reduced tendency to update beliefs in response to positive relative to negative information predicted earlier relapse. Less updating in response to positive information may generate pessimistic beliefs, which in turn can lead to more severe prodromal symptoms (e.g. sleep disturbance, irritability etc.). The results suggest that measuring valence-dependent belief updating could facilitate risk prediction in bipolar disorder.

The Value of Beliefs

We construct our beliefs to meet two sometimes conflicting goals: forming accurate beliefs to inform our decisions and forming desirable beliefs that we value for their own sake. In this NeuroView, we consider emerging neuroscience evidence on how the brain motivates itself to form particular beliefs and why it does so.

Confidence drives a neural confirmation bias

A prominent source of polarised and entrenched beliefs is confirmation bias, where evidence against one's position is selectively disregarded. This effect is most starkly evident when opposing parties are highly confident in their decisions. Here we combine human magnetoencephalography (MEG) with behavioural and neural modelling to identify alterations in post-decisional processing that contribute to the phenomenon of confirmation bias. We show that holding high confidence in a decision leads to a striking modulation of post-decision neural processing, such that integration of confirmatory evidence is amplified while disconfirmatory evidence processing is abolished. We conclude that confidence shapes a selective neural gating for choice-consistent information, reducing the likelihood of changes of mind on the basis of new information. A central role for confidence in shaping the fidelity of evidence accumulation indicates that metacognitive interventions may help ameliorate this pervasive cognitive bias.