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In social-dilemma situations (e.g., public-good games), people may pursue their local self-interests, thereby lowering the overall payoff of their group and, paradoxically, even their individual payoffs as a result. Likewise, in inner-individual dilemmas, even without conflict of interest between persons, people may pursue local goals at the expense of overall utility. Our experiments investigate such dissociations of individual- and group-level effects in the context of personnel evaluation and selection. Participants were given the role of human resource managers selecting workers to optimize the overall payoff for the company. We investigated contexts where the individually best/worst 'employees' systematically caused the worst/best group performance. When workers in a team could substantially increase or decrease coworkers' performance, most participants (albeit not all) tended to focus solely on individual performance without considering their overall contribution even when instructed to maximize group performance. This undue focus on individual information meant that employees who enhanced team performance the most received the most negative evaluations. This may result in a 'tragedy of personnel evaluation' relevant to maladaptive incentive structures (personnel evaluation), job offers (personnel selection), and a substantially negative impact on organizational effectiveness. At the same time, the results suggest ways that this problem may be overcome. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Humans possess a remarkable ability to discriminate structure from randomness in the environment. However, this ability appears to be systematically biased. This is nowhere more evident than in the Gambler's Fallacy (GF)-the mistaken belief that observing an increasingly long sequence of "heads" from an unbiased coin makes the occurrence of "tails" on the next trial ever more likely. Although the GF appears to provide evidence of "cognitive bias," a recent theoretical account (Hahn & Warren, 2009) has suggested the GF might be understandable if constraints on actual experience of random sources (such as attention and short term memory) are taken into account. Here we test this experiential account by exposing participants to 200 outcomes from a genuinely random (p = .5) Bernoulli process. All participants saw the same overall sequence; however, we manipulated experience across groups such that the sequence was divided into chunks of length 100, 10, or 5. Both before and after the exposure, participants (a) generated random sequences and (b) judged the randomness of presented sequences. In contrast to other accounts in the literature, the experiential account suggests that this manipulation will lead to systematic differences in postexposure behavior. Our data were strongly in line with this prediction and provide support for a general account of randomness perception in which biases are actually apt reflections of environmental statistics under experiential constraints. This suggests that deeper insight into human cognition may be gained if, instead of dismissing apparent biases as failings, we assume humans are rational under constraints. (PsycINFO Database Record

A robust finding in social psychology is that people judge negative events as less likely to happen to themselves than to the average person, a behavior interpreted as showing that people are "unrealistically optimistic" in their judgments of risk concerning future life events. However, we demonstrate how unbiased responses can result in data patterns commonly interpreted as indicative of optimism for purely statistical reasons. Specifically, we show how extant data from unrealistic optimism studies investigating people's comparative risk judgments are plagued by the statistical consequences of sampling constraints and the response scales used, in combination with the comparative rarity of truly negative events. We conclude that the presence of such statistical artifacts raises questions over the very existence of an optimistic bias about risk and implies that to the extent that such a bias exists, we know considerably less about its magnitude, mechanisms, and moderators than previously assumed.

We (Hahn & Warren, 2009) recently proposed a new account of the systematic errors and biases that appear to be present in people’s perception of randomly generated events. In a comment on that article, Sun, Tweney, and Wang (2010) critiqued our treatment of the gambler’s fallacy. We had argued that this fallacy was less gross an error than it might at first appear, once the nature of people’s actual experience was taken into account. In support of this claim, we had advanced a series of interconnected arguments. One of these involved a betting game that seemed extremely similar to the gambler’s fallacy but that nevertheless involved a winning strategy. Sun et al. challenged the idea of this game, arguing that we had failed to take its context into account. Here, we implement the original game, demonstrate that it indeed involves a winning strategy as originally claimed, and identify where Sun et al.’s critique went wrong. Finally, key aspects of our general proposal are clarified in light of Sun et al.’s comments.

A long tradition of psychological research has lamented the systematic errors and biases in people's perception of the characteristics of sequences generated by a random mechanism such as a coin toss. It is proposed that once the likely nature of people's actual experience of such processes is taken into account, these "errors" and "biases" actually emerge as apt reflections of the probabilistic characteristics of sequences of random events. Specifically, seeming biases reflect the subjective experience of a finite data stream for an agent with a limited short-term memory capacity. Consequently, these biases seem testimony not to the limitations of people's intuitive statistics but rather to the extent to which the human cognitive system is finely attuned to the statistics of the environment.

One connectionist analysis of the acquired equivalence/distinctiveness of cues assumes that when similar compounds (e.g., AX and BX) are paired with the same outcome (e.g., food, +; or no food, -), their components come to activate the same configural unit (ABX). When these compounds are paired with different outcomes, their components will come to address different units. Here, rats received appetitive training with eight compounds (e.g., AX+, BX+, CX-, DX-, AY+, BY-, CY-, DY+) that should generate the following configural units: ABX, CDX, ADY, and BCY. In Experiment 1, rats then received aversive conditioning to A, which should activate and revalue representations ABX and ADY. Subsequently, compounds that provided dual activation (i.e., BX and DY) of one of the revalued configural units (ABX and ADY) were shown to elicit greater fear than those compounds that provided a single source of activation to each unit (i.e., DX and BY). Experiment 2 confirmed and extended these findings. These results provide support for the connectionist analysis outlined above and are consistent with the application of this approach to the acquired equivalence/distinctiveness of cues.

In this paper, we re-examine a classic informal reasoning fallacy, the so-called argumentam ad ignorantiam. We argue that the structure of some versions of this argument parallels examples of inductive reasoning that are widely viewed as unproblematic. Viewed probabilistically, these versions of the argument from ignorance constitute a legitimate form of reasoning; the textbook examples are inductive arguments that are not unsound but simply weak, due to the nature of the premises and conclusions involved. In an experiment, we demonstrated some of the variables affecting the strength of the argument, and conclude with some general considerations towards an empirical theory of argument strength.