Research

People Believe if 90% Prefer A Over B, A Must be Much Better than B. Are They Wrong? 

with Ioannis Evangelidis and Joachim Vosgerau

How do people make sense of poll results? Might inferences about the options from polls be biased? In this paper, we show that when learning the results of a poll, such as 90% of poll respondents prefer option A and 10% prefer option B, people vastly overestimate how much better option A is than option B. We demonstrate this overestimation by benchmarking against simulations and actual real world data including ratings of beers, jokes, movies, and predictions of Super Bowl games and a election.

https://academic.oup.com/jcr/article/52/1/135/7756740 

Psychological Inequivalence of Mathematically Equivalent Questions: A Cognitive Account of Relative Judgments

with Heeyoung Yoon and Joachim Vosgerau

We are often asked, and ask others, to compare things. How much more do I need to pay to get the upgrades? How much lighter is that cooking pot than the other? We could answer these questions in two ways. One, by simply asking directly as we just did. Or, two by asking, "How much does that steel pot weigh?" And "How much does that ceramic pot weigh?" Then we could compare the two answers and learn how much heavier it is. Thus both asking directly and indirectly can measure the same difference. We demonstrate that asking for the difference directly produces more extreme differences than asking indirectly.

Damned Either Way: Hypocrisy Perceptions When Commitments to Behaviors and to Values Conflict 

with Jonathan Z Berman and Daniel Effron

People who adopt ethical goals run the risk of being scrutinized when they face ethical dilemmas. For example, think of a vegetarian who does not eat meat, nor support others eating meat, because they believe it is harmful for the environment. The vegetarian learns that an overpopulation of deer is harming the local ecosystem and ecologists recommend hunting to reduce the deer population. The deer meat is in turn sold to raise funds for the environment. We find that the vegetarian facing this dilemma is judged to be more of a hypocrite regardless of if they support eating the meat (behavioral-commitment inconsistency) or do not support eating the meat (value inconsistency) compared to having never been placed in the dilemma. In other words, they are damned either way, whether they are consistent with their past behavior or consistent with their underlying value.

Perceptual versus Objective Scarcity: Changing Valuations Without Changing Availability

with Adam Greenberg and Emily Prinsloo

When we think of scarcity, we think of a good that has relatively little left of its supply. But what if how much is left of a good's supply is unchanged, can our perceptions of that good's scarcity change? We demonstrate that an alternative good's scarcity affects perceptions of a scarce target good, even when the target good is already extremely scarce (low in supply). This occurs even when some alternative goods are also scarce. In doing so, we disentangle two key reference points used to value scarce goods: that of a good's own initial supply from that of an alternative good's remaining supply.