08:30 - 10:00
Mon-A7-Talk I-
Mon-Talk I-
Room: A7
Chair/s:
Maren Mayer
When making decisions, individuals often receive advice from others and incorporate this advice into their own judgments and decisions-under certain conditions leading to increases in decision quality and confidence. Beyond the typical paradigm examining advice-based decisions, several research avenues emerged in recent years that rely on advice taking and extend the typical paradigm to various different tasks and contexts. In this symposium, we thus introduce several novel directions for advice taking and related research. The first contribution provides an overview of typical paradigms and findings of empirical studies on advice-based decisions conducted over the last 15 years in behavioral and organizational research. The second contribution describes a newly developed (largely) culture-fair estimation task that solely requires secondary school level as a basis for conducting between-culture comparisons of advice taking in Chinese and German students. The third talk will present an application of the advice taking paradigm to investigate social influence in moral judgments at the example of the asymmetric moral conformity effect. The fourth contribution addresses sequential collaboration, a process relying on consecutively improving contributions made by others in which previous contributions can be viewed as advice for later contributors. Some of the previous findings will be reassessed to complement the presentation of a novel statistical modeling approach for process-consistent analysis of judgment formation in part five. The final contribution addresses how people update their beliefs about the validity of effects when being confronted with various scientific evidence, which can be viewed as a form of advice.
Time for an update: Belief updating on the basis of ambiguous scientific evidence
Mon-A7-Talk I-06
Presented by: Marcel R. Schreiner
Marcel R. Schreiner 1, Julian Quevedo Pütter 1, Tobias R. Rebholz 2
1 University of Mannheim, 2 Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen
Scientific evidence for many effects tends to be ambiguous. While the scientific community may be used to the ambiguity of study results, this may not be true for the general public, as suggested by, for example, public reactions to the “replication crisis”. We investigated how people update their preexisting beliefs about psychological effects based on ambiguous scientific evidence. Specifically, we investigated influences of subjective expertise, trust in psychological science, and the number of studies investigating an effect, as well as systematic strategies of belief updating. In an online experiment (N = 297), we presented participants a series of fictitious psychological hypotheses. For each hypothesis, they first had to rate their preexisting belief about the validity of the effect and their subjective expertise on the topic. Participants were then presented a series of fictitious study outcomes, some of them finding confirmatory and some finding contradictory evidence. Finally, they were asked to rate their posterior belief. Controlling for scientific literacy and education, we found a negative effect of subjective expertise and positive effects of trust in psychological science and number of studies on belief updating. We did not find evidence for systematic belief updating except for a strategy according to which participants weight the outcome of the most recent study stronger than that of previous studies. The results advance our understanding of how people adjust their beliefs based on scientific evidence and provide practical implications for science communication.
Keywords: belief updating, science communication, metascience, advice taking, statistical modeling