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The Perils of Being the Decider
Making business judgments, like forecasting the weather, always entails an element of uncertainty. Sound decision-making about when to spend capital – or, analogously, when to prepare for an incoming storm – requires assessing the degree of uncertainty and gauging whether the benefits outweigh the risks. Susan Joslyn, researcher at the University of Washington, studies how we make decisions when outcomes are unclear. In a recent article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Joslyn and co-author Jared LeClerc examine which factors lead to better (or worse) decision-making in uncertain situations.
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Sensory Memory Can Improve Decision Making
Conventional wisdom holds that your memory of an experience is strongest right when it’s encoded – after all, if over a century of memory research has taught us anything, it’s that memory traces typically decay over time. But new research published in the September 2013 issue of Psychological Science suggests that a brief delay between seeing a stimulus and having to make a decision about that stimulus can improve the accuracy of our decision making, even if we don’t receive any new information about what the stimulus looked like in the meantime.
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Diminishing Fear Vicariously By Watching Others
Watching someone safely interact with a supposedly harmful object can help to extinguish conditioned fear responses, and prevent them from resurfacing.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Interactive Effect of Anger and Disgust on Moral Outrage and Judgments Jessica M. Salerno and Liana C. Peter-Hagene Although most people are familiar with the feeling of moral outrage, its emotional components are still unclear. The authors hypothesized that moral outrage is actually composed of a combination of anger and disgust. In the first of two studies, participants read vignettes about moral transgressions and then rated their levels of anger, disgust, and moral outrage in response to the stories. Supporting the authors' hypothesis, a combination of anger and disgust predicted moral outrage.
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The Opt-Out Option
Getting employees to sign up for the company health plan, the 401(k), and other benefits can often be as daunting as getting a cat to fetch a stick. Researchers have learned that options and services too often falter because they’re designed to depend on people taking some kind of action. Studies show that relying on inaction yields better results. Some experiments with organ donation serve as a model. In the United States, 85 percent of Americans say they approve of organ donation, but only 28 percent give their consent to be donors by signing a donor card. The difference means that far more Americans die awaiting transplants. But psychologists Eric J.
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Everyday Sadists Take Pleasure In Others’ Pain
People who score high on a measure of sadism seem to derive pleasure from behaviors that hurt others, and are even willing to expend extra effort to make someone else suffer, a study shows.