If John is taller than Jake, where is John? Spatial inference from magnitude comparison.

Skylark, William J.

doi:10.1037/xlm0000505

Cited by 7 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…These questions are motivated by a long line of research showing that people internalize and exploit ecological regularities to make inferences when they have incomplete information (e.g., Brunswick, 1943;Gigerenzer et al, 1999;Skylark, 2018), and that recent experience with attribute values and trade-offs shapes the attractiveness of a given option (e.g., Stewart et al, 2003;Tversky & Simonson, 1993;Rigoli & Dolan, 2019). Most pertinent to the current work is a series of studies by Pleskac and colleagues investigating people's expectations about the trade-off between risk and reward.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The delay-reward heuristic: What do people expect in intertemporal choice tasks?

et al. 2020

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Recent research has shown that risk and reward are positively correlated in many environments, and that people have internalized this association as a “risk-reward heuristic”: when making choices based on incomplete information, people infer probabilities from payoffs and vice-versa, and these inferences shape their decisions. We extend this work by examining people’s expectations about another fundamental trade-off — that between monetary reward and delay. In 2 experiments (total N = 670), we adapted a paradigm previously used to demonstrate the risk-reward heuristic. We presented participants with intertemporal choice tasks in which either the delayed reward or the length of the delay was obscured. Participants inferred larger rewards for longer stated delays, and longer delays for larger stated rewards; these inferences also predicted people’s willingness to take the delayed option. In exploratory analyses, we found that older participants inferred longer delays and smaller rewards than did younger ones. All of these results replicated in 2 large-scale pre-registered studies with participants from a different population (total N = 2138). Our results suggest that people expect intertemporal choice tasks to offer a trade-off between delay and reward, and differ in their expectations about this trade-off. This “delay-reward heuristic” offers a new perspective on existing models of intertemporal choice and provides new insights into unexplained and systematic individual differences in the willingness to delay gratification.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The delay-reward heuristic: What do people expect in intertemporal choice tasks?

et al. 2020

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“…For example, in the production task, a small-large spatial arrangement of the items led to a weaker HULC effect (i.e., an increase in the tendency to write, for example, "One square is smaller than the other" relative to that seen with a largesmall layout). More recently, Skylark (2018) replicated this effect and also found that message-receivers use the choice of comparative adjective to infer the spatial arrangement of the original items (e.g., "John is taller than Jake" leads to the inference that John was on the left).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 83%

“…The present paper provides a first exploration of this issue. In a series of studies, we had people complete self-report questionnaires to probe traits and states that we thought might be associated with the tendency to choose smaller vs larger comparatives; we probed the latter using the same kinds of language production choice tasks as Matthews and Dylman (2014) and Skylark (2018). Previous research examining individual differences in language use has focussed on freelyproduced text (e.g., by examining people's blog posts or conversations; Mehl, Gosling & Pennebaker, 2006;Yarkoni, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who says “larger” and who says “smaller”? Individual differences in the language of comparison

2018

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When comparing a pair of attribute values, English speakers can use a “larger” comparative (“A is larger/longer/higher/more than B”) or a “smaller” comparative (“B is smaller/shorter/lower/less than A”). This choice matters because it affects people’s inferences about the absolute magnitudes of the compared items, and influences the perceived truthfulness of the comparative sentence itself. In 4 studies (total N = 2335), we investigated the language that people use to describe ordinal relations between attributes. Specifically, we examined whether demography, emotion, and personality predict the tendency to use “larger” comparatives rather than “smaller” ones. Participants viewed pairs of items differing in a single attribute and indicated the word they would use to describe the relationship between them; they also completed a series of self-report measures. Replicating previous work, we found a robust tendency to use “larger” comparatives, both when people chose between two adjectives and when they freely produced their own words in a sentence completion task. We also found that this tendency was more pronounced in older participants, those with positive mood or outlook, and among people high in agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability. However, these effects were very small, with meta-analytic effect sizes indicating they explain less than 1% of the variance. We conclude that, although people’s use of comparative adjectives is influenced by properties of the items that are being compared, the way that people describe magnitude relations is relatively stable across variation in a range of important traits and dispositions, protecting decision-makers from a potentially undesirable source of bias in their inferences and representations of described options.

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“…When people choose before estimating, we suggest that there is a tendency to avoid the ambiguous option purely because it is ambiguous, and that this preference then shapes subsequent explicit estimates of the likely value of the ambiguous attribute. It seems that both preferences and inferences are "constructed" rather than "revealed" (e.g., Skylark, 2018;Slovic, 1995), such that the role of the delay-reward heuristic in choice behaviour depends on the specific conditions under which people are asked to choose.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inference and preference in intertemporal choice

2021

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When choosing between immediate and future rewards, how do people deal with uncertainty about the value of the future outcome or the delay until its occurrence? Skylark et al. (2020) suggested that people employ a delay-reward heuristic: the inferred value of an ambiguous future reward is a function of the stated delay, and vice-versa. The present paper investigates the role of this heuristic in choice behaviour. In Studies 1a–2b, participants inferred the value of an ambiguous future reward or delay before the true value was revealed and a choice made. Preference for the future option was predicted by the discrepancy between the estimated and true values: the more pleasantly surprising the delayed option, the greater the willingness to choose it. Studies 3a–3c examined the association between inference and preference when the ambiguous values remained unknown. As predicted by the use of a delay-reward heuristic, inferred delays and rewards were positively related to stated rewards and delays, respectively. More importantly, choices were associated with inferred rewards and, in some circumstances, delays. Critically, estimates and choices were both order-dependent: when estimates preceded choices, estimates were more optimistic (people inferred smaller delays and larger rewards) and were subsequently more likely to choose the delayed option than when choices were made before estimates. These order effects argue against a simple model in which people deal with ambiguity by first estimating the unknown value and then using their estimate as the basis for decision. Rather, it seems that inferences are partly constructed from choices, and the role of inference in choice depends on whether an explicit estimate is made prior to choosing. Finally, we also find that inferences about ambiguous delays depend on whether the estimate has to be made in “days” or in a self-selected temporal unit, and replicate previous findings that older participants make more pessimistic inferences than younger ones. We discuss the implications and possible mechanisms for these findings.

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If John is taller than Jake, where is John? Spatial inference from magnitude comparison.

Cited by 7 publications

References 53 publications

The delay-reward heuristic: What do people expect in intertemporal choice tasks?

The delay-reward heuristic: What do people expect in intertemporal choice tasks?

Who says “larger” and who says “smaller”? Individual differences in the language of comparison

Inference and preference in intertemporal choice

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