individual behaviour 8 may 2012 chair: professor mark taylor (dean of wbs) panel: professor graham...
TRANSCRIPT
Individual Behaviour8 May 2012Chair: Professor Mark Taylor (Dean of WBS)Panel: Professor Graham Loomes•Introduction to the Individual Behaviour GPP themeDr Thomas Hills•Search in space and mind: how we find what we are looking forDr Dawn Eubanks•The Impact of Leader Errors on Follower PerceptionsProfessor Nick Chater•The Mind is Flat
Global Priorities Programme - Overview Supporting and enhancing multidisciplinary and cross-
departmental research
Demonstrating the impacts of research and engaging with key users
Generating research income through interdisciplinary research that addresses major global issues
Individual Behaviour
Professor Graham Loomes
Behavioural Science Group, Warwick Business School
What IS ‘individual behaviour’? What would individuals be without other individuals and the families, groups, organisations and other individuals we interact with?
We may view things from the perspective of an individual – how each of us perceive, absorb, make sense of, decide about and act upon the world and the people around us
Many areas, many puzzles
Do we behave rationally? Predictably irrationally? On average?
What abilities have we evolved to perceive, decide, act?
How do we judge, evaluate, choose?
How do we understand and handle risk and uncertainty – personal and financial?
How do we trade off between present and different future times?
How do we interact with others – co-operating and/or competing?
This GPP aims to be open and welcoming – interested in new associations and cross-fertilisation
Too broad and diverse to cover in one evening – so some examples . . .
Search in space and mind: how we find what we are looking for
Dr Thomas Hills
Department of Psychology
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We solve a similar problem both in space and mind: When to explore and when to exploit?
Area-restricted search
The exploration-exploitation trade-off
ExploitationExploitation ExplorationExplorationExploitationExploitation ExplorationExploration
Innovation and Patent lawObsessive Compulsive DisorderDrug addictionLooking for your car in a parking lotTrying to solve a research problem
The evolution of the trade-off
Memory search across the lifespan
The FutureHow can we be helped to navigate our own minds?
What’s the cognitive basis of disorders like Alzheimer’s disease and depression?
How does the way information is structured influence what we learn and remember?
The Impact of Leader Errors on Follower Perceptions
Dr Dawn Eubanks
Behavioural Science Group and MSM, Warwick Business [email protected]
Project Collaborators
Sam Hunter – Penn State Ethan Waples University of Central Oklahoma
Why leader errors?• Given the complex and ambiguous decisions that leaders
are required to make, incidents of error are understandable - indeed expected
• “an avoidable action (or inaction) is chosen by a leader which results in an initial outcome outside of the leader’s original intent, goal, or prediction” – Hunter, Tate, Dzieweczynsk, Bedell-Avers (The Leadership Quarterly, 2011)
Errors take many forms
• Titanic steering error– 1,517 casualties
• BP Deepwater Horizon– 11 casualties
Judgement of errors
• Not all errors are judged equally.• Some are viewed as “unfortunate
human mistakes”.• Others make us feel that something
corrupt or unjust occurred.• Our perceptions of errors and judgement of leaders
vary.
A short study
• How do different types of errors influence follower perceptions of justice?
• Data were collected from 187 undergraduate students.
• Each participant read a vignette where one type of error was represented 3 times. They then completed measures of Justice Perceptions.
Variables of interest• Error types – Based on Fleishman et al. 1991
– information search and structuring– information use in problem solving– managing personnel resources– managing material resources
• Justice perceptions (Moorman 1991)
What we found
1) Information search and structuring errors appear to have the lowest amount of negative influence on justice perceptions compared to other error types.
2) Managing material resources errors seem to have the largest negative impact on justice perceptions compared to other error types.
What does this mean then?Take home message: If there is a perception that a leader is poorly managing resources that are critical to the job performance of the follower, there may be a stronger negative reaction for justice perceptions than when there is a perception that a leader didn’t include all the important components in an information search and structuring activity.
Just the beginning!
• Errors and the role of time
• Errors and creativity/innovation
Thank You!Questions?
Behavioural Science Website:http://warwickbehaviouralscience.com
The Mind is Flat:The illusion of mental depth
Professor Nick Chater
Behavioural Science Group, Warwick Business School
The myth of introspection: • Peering into one’s mental “depths”
– What do I believe?– What do I want?– How do I act?
...– What shall I buy?– How should I answer this questionnaire?
But we cannot peer into our own minds...• We infer our own inner life
from our words and actions, just as we infer those of a third person
• And then invent what we will do and say next
Inferring our own preferences• Johansson, Hall et al.,
Science• False feedback on choices
– not noticed– rationalization given– later preferences changed– And it works with jam– And ethical dilemmas
The utilitarian dream• Bentham’s dream of morality and
public policy seeking to maximize “utility”
• We might even hope some approximation to be delivered by the market (welfare economics)
• But this presupposes stable “utilities” can somehow be “extracted” from our hidden mental depths
But if the mind is flat, there is no hidden utility to measure
• Test case: can we measure the “(dis)utility” of pain?
• A “BDM” auction with small electric shocks Vlaev, Seymour, Dolan & Chater, Psychological Science, 2009
You receive 40p
You will receive a shock
Select price to avoid 15 further shocks
0p 20p 40p
Market price is determined randomly
0p
20p
10p30p
You offered 14p
Market price was 4p
Sale authorisedSale price = 4p
time
Pain magnitudes were presented in pairs in three blocks of ten trials
Two “endowment” conditions£0.40 per trial£0.80 per trial
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35
Low-Medium Medium-High Low-High
Pri
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red
Context Condition
Endowment = 40 pence
HighMediumLow
0
10
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Low-Medium Medium-High Low-High
Pri
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Context Condition
Endowment = 80 pence
HighMediumLow
• People double their offers, when they have double the money...
• Value of pain changes by x2 within minutes!
Utilitarianism fails...• Not because utility is hard to measure• But because there is no utility to be measured
– our underlying preferences, desires, “utilities” are illusory
– i.e., continually re-invented for each new time and situation
So prices don’t reveal, but are shaped by, prices
“value” “price”
“People know the price of everything, but the value of nothing”
• People can’t “know” their values
• So they must partly infer them from market prices
• Allowing feedback loops between values and prices
• One origin of booms and crashes?
The mind is flat!
...Consumer behaviour......Ethical theory...
...Market behaviour...
Mental “depth” is an illusion
Next Ideas Cafe
Thursday 14 June 5.30pm
Chancellor’s Suite, Rootes Social Building
Global Governance