Download Essays on Effort Prediction, Risk Perception, and Distortion Detection in Fluency and Judg and more Schemes and Mind Maps Social Psychology in PDF only on Docsity!
THE EFFECTS OF PROCESSING FLUENCY ON JUDGMENT AND PROCESSING
STYLE: THREE ESSAYS ON EFFORT PREDICTION, RISK PERCEPTION, AND
DISTORTION DETECTION
by
Hyunjin Song
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Psychology) in The University of Michigan 2009
Doctoral Committee: Professor Norbert W. Schwarz, Chair Professor Richard D. Gonzales Assistant Professor Katherine A. Burson Assistant Professor Stephen M. Garcia
ii
Acknowledgements
I extend my many thanks to people without whom this dissertation and my memorable life in graduate school could not exist. First and foremost, I want to thank my mentor and dissertation chair, Norbert Schwarz. His intellectual and emotional support and guidance motivated me to be persistent in my research throughout good and bad days in graduate school, and his life as a researcher full of tremendous insights and resources always inspired me to the core. Norbert was an advisor that I could not expect any more. I believe and hope that his influence on my life could continue to run through my career as a researcher and also my life as a person. I am greatly indebted to Stephen Garcia and Oscar Ybarra for helping me extend my interests to various areas by working with them. Stephen has introduced me to diverse research topics in decision making and helped me to independently build my ideas during the last three years in graduate school. I appreciate his sincerity and encouragements. Oscar helped to get a sense of experimental studies and introduced me to diverse topics in social cognition during my first two years in graduate school. I am thankful for his kind guidance for a new graduate student. With great pleasure, I also want to thank my dissertation committee members, Stephen Garcia, Richard Gonzales, and Katherine Burson for their comments, suggestions, and investments in time and energy on my work. I thank my colleagues at Social Cognition Lab, Social Psychology Area, and research assistants, and Department of Psychology for supporting my work and providing useful comments for my research. Finally I thank my friends and family who provided me with great emotional and spiritual support throughout my life as a graduate student in a foreign country, and I thank my eternally good Shepherd, Lord, Jesus for transforming my simple passion and interests into calling and purpose for a lifetime. I wish this purpose to realize continuously even after this dissertation.
iv
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………..ii List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………….vi List of Tables…………………………………………………………………………….vii Abstract………………………………………………………………………………….viii Chapter I. Introduction………………………………………………………………. Processing fluency and judgment……………………………………. Feeling as information: Affect and Naïve theories…………………... Current research……………………………………………………… Reference…………………………………………………………….. II. If it’s hard to read, it’s hard to do: Processing fluency and effort prediction (Studies 1-3)...……………………………………………….. Effort estimation…………………………………………………... Feeling of fluency and judgment of effort………………………… Current research…………………………………………………… Study 1…………………………………………………………….. Study 2…………………………………………………………….. Study 3…………………………………………………………….. General discussion………………………………………………… Reference………………………………………………………….. III. If it’s hard to pronounce, it must be risky: Processing fluency and risk perception (Studies 4-6)...………………………………………………. Fluency and familiarity……………………………………………. Study 4…………………………………………………………….. Study 5…………………………………………………………….. Study 6……………………………………………………………..
v
- General discussion………………………………………………… - Reference…………………………………………………………..
- and detection of distortions (Studies 7-8)...…………………………….. IV. Low processing fluency attenuates the Moses Illusion: Processing fluency
- Fluency, familiarity and processing style………………………….
- The present research……………………………………………….
- Study 7……………………………………………………………..
- Study 8……………………………………………………………..
- Discussion………………………………………………………….
- Reference…………………………………………………………..
- V. Conclusions...…………………………………………………………… - Summary of findings……………………………………………… - Theoretical implications…………………………………………... - Practical implications……………………………………………… - Future directions…………………………………………………... - Reference…………………………………………………………..
vii
List of Tables
Tables
2.1. Time and effort prediction in easy-to-read and hard-to-read exercise instructions (Study 1)…………………………………………………………………………………. 2.2. Time and skill prediction in easy-to-read and hard-to read recipes (Study 2 & 3)…. 3.1. Ease of pronunciation and pleasantness of sounds for easy and hard names....……. 4.1. Frequency of answers in Study 7………….………………………………………... 4.2. Frequency of answers in Study 8………….………………………………………...
viii
Abstract The Effects of Processing Fluency on Judgment and Processing Style: Three Essays on Effort Prediction, Risk Perception, and Distortion Detection
by Hyunjin Song
Chair: Norbert W. Schwarz
This dissertation investigates the role of processing fluency in human judgment; it consists of three essays. The first essay, “If it’s hard to read, it’s hard to do: Processing fluency and effort prediction,” examines how the fluency of processing task descriptions influences people’s predictions of the effort required for the actual tasks. Three studies show that the same behavior is assumed to take more time, effort, and skill when the print font of the instructions is difficult to read, with adverse effects on the willingness to engage in the behavior. These studies provide first evidence that people misread the difficulty of processing instructions as indicative of the difficulty of executing the behavior, with downstream motivational effects. The second essay, “If it’s hard to pronounce, it must be risky: Processing fluency and risk perception,” brings processing fluency to bear on risk perception. Three studies show that low processing fluency fosters the impression that a stimulus is unfamiliar, which in turn results in perceptions of higher risk, independent of whether the risk is desirable or undesirable. In two studies, ostensible food additives were rated as more harmful when their names were difficult rather than easy to pronounce; mediation analyses indicated that this effect is mediated by the perceived novelty of the substance. I n a third study, amusement park rides were rated as more likely to make one sick (an undesirable risk) as well as more exciting and adventurous (a desirable risk)
1
Chapter I: Introduction
Traditional views on judgment and decision making have focused on how people base their judgments on declarative information (for reviews see Higgins, 1996). This view assumes that people deliberately investigate the features of the target or assess the possible outcomes of choices, and subsequently integrate the information through rational calculus to reach a judgment or make a decision (Anderson, 1981; for review see Harless, & Camerer, 1994). However, more recently, a growing body of research has shown that human judgments do not merely depend on deliberate thought processes and rational calculation, but also our experiential systems such as moods (e.g., Keltner, Ellsworth, & Edwards, 1993; Schwarz & Clore, 1983), bodily feelings (e.g., Strack, Martin & Stepper, 1988; Freedman & Förster, 2000), and metacognitive experiences (e.g, Reber & Schwarz, 1999; Schwarz, Bless, Strack, Klumpp, Ritternauer-Schatka, & Simons, 1991; Zajonc, 1980) influences our judgments, decision making and cognition. For instance, people generally tend to evaluate anything at hand more positively when they are in a positive mood than in negative mood (Schwarz & Clore, 1983), and avoidance arm movements generate more careful information processing than approach arm movements (Friedman & Förster, 2000). From evolutionary perspective, experiential systems had informational value to human beings to help them discriminate between benefits and harms instinctively and rapidly; therefore, they developed even before rational thinking emerged (Slovic & Peters, 2006; Zajonc, 1980). As a result, experiential information has been suggested as both more basic and faster than rational thinking even in modern human beings (Damasio, 1994; Slovic & Peters, 2006; Zajonc, 1980). The present research intends to investigate the effects of one element of experiential information that plays a substantial role in judgments and decision making: processing fluency. Processing fluency is one of the metacognitive experiences, feelings that accompany cognitive processes such as ease of processing a new stimuli or ease of
2
recalling information (for review, see Schwarz, 2004). Particularly, processing fluency is a feeling of ease associated with processing new information, and has been shown to affect various judgments including judgments of loudness (Jacoby, Allan, Collins, & Larwill, 1988), clarity (Whittlesea, Jacoby, & Girard, 1990), preference (Zajonc, 1980; 1998), familiarity (e.g., Whittlesea, 1993), and truth (e.g., Reber & Schwarz, 1999). The present research will examine its effect on novel domains of judgments whose link to fluency are substantial but never investigated, effort prediction and risk perception. In addition, while the effects of various experiential information including mood and bodily feedback on processing styles were demonstrated, the effects of processing fluency were rarely studied in terms of processing style. The present research also demonstrates the fluency effect on processing style, particularly through distortion detection task in communication. Processing fluency and judgment Metacognitive experiences refer to cognitive feelings that accompany thought processes, such as how easily something comes to mind or how easily new information is processed. Metacognitive experiences can affect various judgments independent of thought contents (for review see Schwarz 2004). For instance, when people are asked to list ten good attributes of a product, they generated more positive attributes of a product than when they are asked to list two. However, people who list 10 are more likely to report that they dislike the product than people who list 2 since it feels difficult to generate many rather than few, and people infer their own preference based on the feeling of difficulty associated with their thought processes rather than the number of thought contents (e.g., Menon & Raghubir, 2003; Wanke, Bohner, & Jurowitsch, 1997). Processing fluency is a type of metacognitive experience and refers to ease of identifying stimuli or identifying meanings. Fluent processing can manifest by speedy (Jacoby, 1983) and effortless processing (Schwarz, 1998). Conceptual fluency indicates the ease associated with identifying meanings of new information, and can be increased by semantic relatedness of the materials, the priming of concepts, and rhyming (e.g., Jacoby, 1983; McGlone & Tofighbakhsh, 2000; Roediger, 1990; Reber & Schwarz, 1999; Whittlesea, 1993). Perceptual fluency indicates the ease of identifying stimuli, and figure- ground contrast, visual clarity and print fonts were often used as manipulation of it.
4
major (smiling muscles) which represents positive affective experiences while are negatively correlated with the activation of corrugator supercilli (frowning muscles) associated with negative affective experiences (Harmon-Jones & Ellen, 2001; Winkielman & Cacioppo, 2001). Consistent with these results, studies with self-reports also have shown that repeated exposure (Zajonc, 2000) and a speedy thought process (Pronin & Wegner, 2006) have increased the self-reported feeling of positive mood. As a consequence of these affective reactions, high fluency leads to more positive evaluations of a target such as higher preference and aesthetic judgments, than do low fluency. It is likely that people attribute their positive-negative affect associated with their fluency experience to the target objects and use their feelings as indicative of their own preference of the targets. For instance, everyday objects such as a desk, bird, or plane were preferred more when they were more fluently processed. Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman (1998) found that subliminal priming of degraded contour of everyday objects increased the liking of the same objects in a later presentation. In addition, this effect was not simply limited to the same modality but was replicated even when the associated words were primed before the pictures were presented (Winkielman et al, 2003). Similar results were reported when processing fluency was manipulated by high- low figure ground contrast and long-short presentation duration (Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman, 1998). In sum, while positive affect comes from fluency experience, people attribute these feelings to the objects themselves and perceive them as more likeable. Fluency effects can also be driven by implicit and naïve theories regarding the relationship between fluency and the environment (Schwarz, 2004). Depending on these naïve theories, feeling of fluency, which comes from incidental variables are attributed to the targets of judgments, for instance, exposure duration, familiarity and truth. For instance, naïve theories can relate to relationship between fluency and stimuli presentation (Schwarz, 2004). People falsely infer that they were exposed longer to a visually clear stimulus than unclear one based on their naive theory that long exposure duration leads to high fluency (Whittlesea, Jacoby & Girard, 1990; Witherspoon & Allan, 1985). In this example, fluency experience, which comes from visual clarity, is attributed to another possible source of fluency, exposure duration. Naïve theories also can relate to the relationship between fluency and one’s own
5
state of knowledge (Schwarz, 2004). For instance, people often infer that fluency may indicate familiarity based on the experience that familiar stimuli are often more easily processed than unfamiliar ones in real life. Therefore, they misjudge stimuli with high fluency as familiar even when the fluency merely results from presentation variables like high figure-ground contrast, long exposure times, or easy to read print fonts (for reviews see Kelley & Rhodes, 2002; Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman, 2004; Whittlesea, Jacoby, & Girard, 1990). Again, fluency experience is misattributed to familiarity. This familiarity judgment can also have a downstream effect on truth judgments because feeling of familiarity can be associated with inference of social consensus. This effect was demonstrated by Reber & Schwarz (1999)’s study which showed that participants judged the generic statements such as ‘Orsono is a city in Chile’ with high figure-ground contrasts as truer than the ones with low figure-ground contrast. Not only the perceptual fluency but also phonemic fluency led to similar results. People found proverbs more truthful when they were presented in a rhyming format as in ‘Woes unite foes,’ than without rhyming as in ‘Woes unite enemies’(Mcglone & Tofighbakhsh, 2000). These results are presumably driven by the tendency to infer truth values based on social consensus, and familiarity indicates high consensus (Weaver, Garcia, Schwarz, & Miller, 2007). As a result, feelings of fluency, which comes from incidental variables such as print fonts and rhyming, is attributed to the truth value of statements. In conclusion, regardless of affect or naïve theory, when encountering the judgments at hand, people ask themselves, “how do I feel about it?” and attribute feeling of fluency from incidental variables to their judgment of domains at hand. Current research The current research intends to introduce judgment domains whose link to fluency is presumed fundamental but not yet thoroughly investigated. Considering that feelings of fluency depend on feelings of speed and effort, judgments relevant to speed and effort should be directly affected by feelings of fluency. The first essay suggests time and effort prediction as one of the substantial domains of judgments under the influence of fluency. The results show that people use the ‘how do I feel about’ heuristic in time and effort predictions and use the relevant experiential information, that is, the processing fluency, in their judgments.
7
Reference
Anderson, N. H. (1981). Foundations of information integration theory. New York: Academic Press.
Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: Putnam.
Friedman, R. S., & Föster, J. (2000). The effects of approach and avoidance motor actions on the elements of creative insight. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79 , 477-492.
Gorn, G., J., Goldberg, M. E., & Basu, K. (1993). Mood, awareness, and product evaluation. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2(3), 237-256.
Harless, D. W., & Camerer, C. F. (1994). The predictive utility of generalized expected utilitity theories. Econometrica, 62 , 1251-1289.
Harmon-Jones, E., & Allen, J. J. B. (2001). The role of affect in the mere exposure effect: Evidence from psychophysiological and individual differences approaches. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27 , 889-898.
Higgins, E. T. (1996). Knowledge activation: Accessibility, applicability, and salience. In E. T. Higgins & A. Kruglanski (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles. (pp. 133-168). New York: Guilford Press.
Higgins, E. T. (1998). The aboutness principle: A pervasive influence on human inference. Social Cognition, 16 , 173-198.
Jacoby, L. L. (1983). Perceptual enhancement: Persistent effects of an experience. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 9 , 21-38.
Jacoby, L. L., Allan, L. G., Collins, J. C., & Larwill, L. K. (1988). Memory influences subjective experience: Noise judgments. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 14, 240-247.
Kelley, C. M., & Rhodes, M. G. (2002). Making sense and nonsense of experience: Attributions in memory and judgment. The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 41 , 293-320.
Keltner, D., Ellsworth, P. C., & Edwards, K. (1993). Beyond simple pessimism: Effects of sadness and anger on social perception, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64 (5), 740-752.
Lowenstein, G. F., Weber, E. U., Hsee, C. K., & Welch, N. (2001). Risk as feelings. Psychological Bulletin, 127 (2), 267-286.
8
McGlone, M. S., & Tofighbakhsh, J. (2000). Birds of a feather flock conjointly (?): Rhyme as Reason in Aphorisms, Psychological Science, 11 , 424-428.
Menon, G. & Raghubir, P. (2003). Ease of retrieval as an automatic input in judgments: A mere-accessibility framework? Journal of Consumer Research, 30 , 230-243.
Pronin, E. & Wegner, D. M. (2006). Manic thinking: Independent effects of thought speed and thought content on mood. Psychological Science, 17 (9), 807-813.
Reber, R., & Schwarz, N. (1999). Effects of perceptual fluency on judgments of truth. Consciousness and Cognition, 8 , 338-342.
Reber, R., Schwarz, N., & Winkielman, P. (2004). Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: Is beauty in the perceiver's processing experience? Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8, 364-382.
Reber, R., Winkielman, P., &Schwarz, N. (1998). Effects of perceptual fluency on affective judgments. Psychological Science, 9 , 45-48.
Roediger, H. L. (1990). Implicit memory: Retention without remembering. American Psychologist, 45 , 1043-1056.
Schwarz, N. (1998). Accessible content and accessibility experiences: The interplay of declarative and experiential information in judgment. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2, 87-99.
Schwarz, N. (2004). Meta-cognitive experiences in consumer judgment and decision making. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 14 , 332-348.
Schwarz, N., Bless, H., Strack, F., Klumpp, G., Ritternauer-Schatka, H., & Simons, A. (1991). Ease of retrieval as information: Another look at the availability heuristic. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61 , 195-202.
Schwarz, N., & Clore, G.L. (1983). Mood, misattribution, and judgments of well-being: Informative and directive functions of affective states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45 , 513 - 523.
Schwarz, N., & Clore, G. L. (2007). Feelings and phenomenal experiences. In A. Kruglanski & E. T. Higgins (eds.), Social psychology. Handbook of basic principles (2nd^ ed.; pp. 385-407). New York: Guilford.
Schwarz, N., Sanna, L., Skurnik, I., & Yoon, C. (2007). Metacognitive experiences and the intricacies of setting people straight: Implications for debiasing and public information campaigns. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 39, 127-.
10
social psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 591-632). New York: Oxford University Press.
Zajonc, R. B. (2000). Feeling and thinking: Closing the debate over the independence of affect. In J. P. Forgas (Ed.), Feeling and thinking: The role of affect in social cognition (pp. 31-58). New York: Cambridge University Press.
11
Chapter II: If it’s hard to read, it’s hard to do: Processing fluency and effort prediction (Studies 1-3)
People are more likely to engage in a given behavior the less effort it requires. As numerous studies indicated, high perceived effort is a major impediment to behavior change, from adopting an exercise routine (e.g., DuCharme & Brawley, 1995) to changing one’s diet (e.g., Sparks, Guthrie, & Shepherd, 1997). While previous research has shown that task type (e.g., Buehler, Griffin, & Ross, 1994) and previous experience (e.g, Thomas, Handley, & Newstand, 2007) influence the accuracy of effort predictions, little is known about how people estimate the effort involved in a novel behavior. One possibility is that people run a mental simulation of the behavior and infer effort from the fluency of the simulation. If so, incidental variables that affect the ease with which information about the behavior can be processed may play a key role in effort prediction. Especially, considering that people’s judgments depend on relevant experiential feelings (Schwarz & Clore, 2007), feeling of fluency can be a very relevant information to any types of judgments relevant to effort. The first essay tested this possibility and demonstrated the effect of print fonts as a manipulation of processing fluency on time and effort predictions. Effort estimation In cognitive psychology, estimation of effort was studied mainly in terms of duration estimation of past tasks, and it was considered fundamentally embodied on bodily rhythm or internal clock (e.g., Block, 1990; Fraisse, 1963; Meck & Church, 1983; Poynter, 1989; Zakay, 1989). For instance, Meck and Church (1983) proposed that neural pulses are released and accumulated while people measure an interval, and people depend on the accumulated amount of pulses to estimate durations of past events. On the other hand, social psychology has rather focused on planning fallacy and overconfidence effect-people’s tendency to underestimate time and effort to complete a future task (Buehler, Griffin, & Ross, 1994; Byrahm, 1997; Dunning, Griffin, Milojkovic & Ross, 1990; Hoch, 1985; Kahneman & Tversky, 1979; Thomas, Newstead and Handley,
