Several scholars have suggested that Americans’ (distorted) beliefs about the rate of upward social mobility in the United States may affect political judgment and decision-making outcomes. In this article, we consider the psychometric properties of two different questionnaire items that researchers have used to measure these subjective perceptions. Namely, we report the results of a new set of experiments (N = 2,167 U.S. MTurkers) in which we compared the question wording employed by Chambers, Swan and Heesacker (2015) with the question wording employed by Davidai and Gilovich (2015). Each (independent) research team had prompted similar groups of respondents to estimate the percentage of Americans born into the bottom of the income distribution who improved their socio-economic standing by adulthood, yet the two teams reached ostensibly irreconcilable conclusions: that Americans tend to underestimate (Chambers et al.) and overestimate (Davidai & Gilovich) the true rate of upward social mobility in the U.S. First, we successfully reproduced both contradictory results. Next, we isolated and experimentally manipulated one salient difference between the two questions’ response-option formats: asking participants to divide the population into either (a) “thirds” (tertiles) or (b) “20%” segments (quintiles). Inverting this tertile-quintile factor significantly altered both teams’ findings, suggesting that these measures are inappropriate (too vulnerable to question-wording and item-formulation artifacts) for use in studies of perceptual (in)accuracy. Finally, we piloted a new question for measuring subjective perceptions of social mobility. We conclude with tentative recommendations for researchers who wish to model the causes and consequences of Americans’ mobility-related beliefs.

Accountability pressures are a ubiquitous feature of social systems: virtually everyone must answer to someone for something. Behavioral research has, however, warned that accountability, specifically a focus on being responsible for outcomes, tends to produce suboptimal judgments. We qualify this view by demonstrating the long-term adaptive benefits of outcome accountability in uncertain, dynamic environments. More than a thousand randomly assigned forecasters participated in a ten-month forecasting tournament in conditions of control, process, outcome or hybrid accountability. Accountable forecasters outperformed non-accountable ones. Holding forecasters accountable to outcomes (“getting it right”) boosted forecasting accuracy beyond holding them accountable for process (“thinking the right way”). The performance gap grew over time. Process accountability promoted more effective knowledge sharing, improving accuracy among observers. Hybrid (process plus outcome) accountability boosted accuracy relative to process, and improved knowledge sharing relative to outcome accountability. Overall, outcome and process accountability appear to make complementary contributions to performance when forecasters confront moderately noisy, dynamic environments where signal extraction requires both knowledge pooling and individual judgments.

Adding to prior literature that has examined the relationship between maximization and dissatisfaction, the present research suggests that maximizers, as defined by the original maximization scale, are unhappier decision makers than satisficers because maximizers fail to adequately handle dissonant experiences. Throughout three studies that use different conceptualization and measurement of maximization, we show that maximizers are more vulnerable to negative feedback about one’s choice such that they decrease positivity toward the chosen option to a greater level than satisficers. However, this effect was mainly driven by the decision difficulty factor in the conceptualization of maximization. When decision difficulty was conceptualized as a defining component of maximization (Study 1 and 2), “maximizers” show greater positivity drop in the face of negative feedback. However, in the absence of a decision difficulty component, a recently proposed two-component model of maximization (the goal to get the best and search for alternatives; Cheek & Schwartz, 2016) did not play a significant role in predicting positivity drop, while perceived decision difficulty did (Study 3). Together our findings suggest that previously reported contradictory outcomes of maximization may be due to inconsistent conceptualization and measurement, especially treating decision difficulty as a defining component of maximization.

Voters prefer political candidates who are currently in office (incumbents) over new candidates (challengers). Using the premise of query theory (Johnson, Häubl & Keinan, 2007), we clarify the underlying cognitive mechanisms by asking whether memory retrieval sequences affect political decision making. Consistent with predictions, Experiment 1 (N= 256) replicated the incumbency advantage and showed that participants tended to first query information about the incumbent. Experiment 2 (N= 427) showed that experimentally manipulating participants’ query order altered the strength of the incumbency advantage. Experiment 3 (N= 713) replicated Experiment 1 and, in additional experimental conditions, showed that the effects of incumbency can be overridden by more valid cues, like the candidates’ ideology. Participants queried information about ideologically similar candidates earlier and also preferred these ideologically similar candidates. This is initial evidence for a cognitive, memory-retrieval process underling the incumbency advantage and political decision making.

The psychological correlates of utilitarian choices in sacrificial moral dilemmas are contentious. In the literature, some research (Greene, et al., 2001) suggested that utilitarianism requires analytic thinking while other research (Kahane et al., 2015) showed that utilitarianism is correlated with psychopathy. In the present research, we looked at the relation of several normative views with analytic cognitive style (ACS), psychopathy and real-world utilitarianism in three Turkish samples. In Study 1 (n = 269), we used four ethical dilemmas and asked participants to select one normative principle as the grounds for their judgment in the dilemma: fatalism, virtue ethics, utilitarianism, deontology and amoralism. The results showed that the majority selected the deontological principle. Additionally, there was a considerable amount of fatalistic and virtue ethical justifications. Utilitarianism and psychopathy had a significant positive correlation. In Study 2 (n = 246), we replicated Study 1 and showed a significant relation between ACS and moral minimalism (the view that the sacrificial act is permissible but not necessary). In Study 3, the results showed that the utilitarian option in the sacrificial dilemmas was positively correlated with both real-life utilitarianism and psychopathy, but the latter two variables were not correlated with each other. All in all, the results suggest that some people choose the utilitarian option in moral dilemmas from psychopathic tendencies (as Kahane argued), while others due to real-life utilitarian reasons (as Greene argued). The findings also indicate that virtue ethical and fatalistic justifications cannot be ignored in understanding lay people’s moral judgments.

The present paper examines the effectiveness of financial overcompensation as a means to enhance customer loyalty after a product failure. Overcompensation implies that customers are entitled to a refund that is larger than the purchase price. It is, however, still unclear whether large overcompensations entail saturation effects, or alternatively, result in an actual drop in customer loyalty. We predicted that the overcompensation-loyalty relationship is generally characterized by an inverted U-shaped function. In line with this prediction, the results of four studies showed that mild overcompensations had, on average, a positive effect on customer loyalty beyond equal compensation, but only up to compensation levels of approximately 150% of the purchase price of faulty products. Beyond this level, the effectiveness of overcompensation diminished, eventually leading to a general drop in customer loyalty. Despite this overall pattern, two studies revealed robust individual differences in how customers react to increasing overcompensation. A majority of customers increased their loyalty when the overcompensation enlarged, but the curve flattened out in the high range. However, there was also a smaller portion of customers who reacted negatively to every form of overcompensation. A practical implication of these findings, therefore, is that companies should not offer compensations that are greater than 150% of the initial price, as these do not contribute to greater loyalty in any category of customers.

Decision quality is often evaluated based on whether decision makers can adequately explain the decision process. Accountability often improves judgment quality because decision makers weigh and integrate information more thoroughly, but it could also hurt judgment processes by disrupting retrieval of previously encountered cases. We investigated to what degree process accountability motivates decision makers to shift from retrieval of past exemplars to rule-based integration processes. This shift may hinder accurate judgments in retrieval-based configural judgment tasks (Experiment 1) but may improve accuracy in elemental judgment tasks requiring weighing and integrating information (Experiment 2). In randomly selected trials, participants had to justify their judgments. Process accountability neither changed how accurately people made a judgment, nor the judgment strategies. Justifying the judgment process only decreased confidence in trials involving a justification. Overall, these results imply that process accountability may affect judgment quality less than expected.

This study aims to provide evidence about two widely held assumptions in the experimental study of moral judgment. First, that different terms used to ask for moral judgment (e.g., blame, wrongness, permissibility…) can be treated as synonyms and hence used interchangeably. Second, that the moral and legal status of the judged action are independent of one another and thus moral judgment have no influence of legal or other conventional considerations. Previous research shows mixed results on these claims. We recruited 660 participants who provided moral judgment to three identical sacrificial dilemmas using seven different terms. We experimentally manipulated the explicit legal status of the judged action. Results suggest that terms that highlight the utilitarian nature of the judged action cause harsher moral judgments as a mechanism of reputation preservation. Also, the manipulation of the legal status of the judged action holds for all considered terms but is larger for impermissibility judgments. Taken as a whole, our results imply that, although subtle, different terms used to ask for moral judgment have theoretically and methodologically relevant differences which calls for further scrutiny.

Public understanding of the water system is vital in confronting contemporary water challenges, as public support is necessary for implementing measures to address shortages and repair infrastructure. In this study, university student participants (N = 457) were asked to draw diagrams illustrating how water reaches the tap in an average home in the U.S. and is then returned to the natural environment. We also conducted an expert elicitation (N = 15) to create a simplified, accurate diagram by which to code each student drawing. Results showed major gaps in understanding, where 29% of the student participants did not draw a water treatment plant, 64% did not draw a wastewater treatment plant, and 1 in 5 participants depicted untreated wastewater returning to the natural environment. For the majority of non-environmental students, the water system stops at the home. These gaps reveal a critical area for public environmental education efforts.