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Effective risk communication about medical procedures is critical to ethical shared decision-making. Here, we explore the potential for development of an evidence-based lexicon for verbal communication of surgical risk. We found that Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) surgeons expressed a preference for communicating such risks using verbal probability expressions (VPEs; e.g., "high risk"). However, there was considerable heterogeneity in the expressions they reported using (Study 1). Study 2 compared ENT surgeons' and laypeople's (i.e., potential patients) interpretations of the ten most frequent VPEs listed in Study 1. While both groups displayed considerable variability in interpretations, lay participants demonstrated more, as well as providing systematically higher interpretations than those of surgeons. Study 3 found that lay participants were typically unable to provide unique VPEs to differentiate between the ranges of (low) probabilities required. Taken together, these results add to arguments that reliance on VPEs for surgical risk communication is ill-advised. Not only are there systematic interpretational differences between surgeons and potential patients, but the coarse granularity of VPEs raises severe challenges for developing an appropriate evidence-based lexicon for surgical risk communication. We caution against the use of VPEs in any risk context characterized by low, but very different, probabilities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Most of the claims we encounter in real life can be assigned some degree of plausibility, even if they are new to us. On Gilbert's (1991) influential account of belief formation, whereby understanding a sentence implies representing it as true, all new propositions are initially accepted, before any assessment of their veracity. As a result, plausibility cannot have any role in initial belief formation on this account. In order to isolate belief formation experimentally, Gilbert, Krull, and Malone (1990) employed a dual-task design: if a secondary task disrupts participants' evaluation of novel claims presented to them, then the initial encoding should be all there is, and if that initial encoding consistently renders claims 'true' (even where participants were told in the learning phase that the claims they had seen were false), then Gilbert's account is confirmed. In this pre-registered study, we replicate one of Gilbert et al.'s (1990) seminal studies ("The Hopi Language Experiment") while additionally introducing a plausibility variable. Our results show that Gilbert's 'truth bias' does not hold for implausible statements - instead, initial encoding seemingly renders implausible statements 'false'. As alternative explanations of this finding that would be compatible with Gilbert's account can be ruled out, it questions Gilbert's account.

How people update their beliefs when faced with new information is integral to everyday life. A sizeable body of literature suggests that people's belief updating is optimistically biased, such that their beliefs are updated more in response to good news than bad news. However, recent research demonstrates that findings previously interpreted as evidence of optimistic belief updating may be the result of flaws in experimental design, rather than motivated reasoning. In light of this controversy, we conduct three pre-registered variations of the standard belief updating paradigm (combined N = 300) in which we test for asymmetric belief updating with neutral, non-valenced stimuli using analytic approaches found in previous research. We find evidence of seemingly biased belief updating with neutral stimuli — results that cannot be attributed to a motivational, valence-based, optimism account — and further show that there is uninterpretable variability across samples and analytic techniques. Jointly, these results serve to highlight the methodological flaws in current optimistic belief updating research.

ObjectivesThe aims of this study were (1) to document the clinical condition of patients considered to be in the last 2 weeks of life and (2) to compare patients who did or did not survive for 72 hours.DesignA prospective observational study.SettingTwo sites in London, UK (a hospice and a hospital palliative care team).ParticipantsAny inpatient, over 18 years old, English speaking, who was identified by the palliative care team as at risk of dying within the next 2 weeks was eligible.Outcome measuresPrognostic signs and symptoms were documented at a one off assessment and patients were followed up 7 days later to determine whether or not they had died.ResultsFifty participants were recruited and 24/50 (48%) died within 72 hours of assessment. The most prevalent prognostic features observed were a decrease in oral food intake (60%) and a rapid decline of the participant’s global health status (56%). Participants who died within 72 hours had a lower level of consciousness and had more care needs than those who lived longer. A large portion of data was unavailable, particularly that relating to the psychological and spiritual well-being of the patient, due to the decreased consciousness of the patient.ConclusionsThe prevalence of prognostic signs and symptoms in the final days of life has been documented between those predicted to die and those who did not. How doctors make decisions with missing information is an area for future research, in addition to understanding the best way to use the available information to make more accurate predictions.

The informational leakage account of attribute framing effects proposes that a communicator's choice of frame provides informational value, such that different frames are not informationally equivalent. Across five studies communicating food risks, we investigated the adaptability of communication recipients' (our participants) use of frame information by manipulating the degree to which the communicator ostensibly had a choice over how the information was framed. Within-participants framing effects were observed across all conditions of all studies. Only in Study 4 (the only study in which communicator choice was manipulated within-participants) was there any evidence for an attenuation of framing effects where the communicator was not responsible for how the information was framed. Overall, regardless of whether or not framing effects are driven by the informational value contained in a communicator's choice of frame, people show little sensitivity to situations where that choice is removed.

Previous research suggests that people systematically overestimate the occurrence of both positive and negative events, compared with neutral future events, and that these biases are due to a misattribution of arousal elicited by utility (stake-likelihood hypothesis; SLH; Vosgerau, 2010). However, extant research has provided only indirect support for these arousal misattribution processes. In the present research, we initially aimed to provide a direct test of the SLH by measuring arousal with galvanic skin responses to examine the mediating role of arousal. We observed no evidence that measured arousal mediated the impact of utility on probability estimates. Given the lack of direct support for the SLH in Experiment 1, Experiments 2-5 aimed to assess the SLH by replicating some of the original findings that provided support for arousal misattribution as a mechanism. Despite our best efforts to create experimental conditions under which we would be able to demonstrate the stake-likelihood effect, we were unable to replicate previous results, with a Bayesian meta-analysis demonstrating support for the null hypothesis. We propose that accounts based on imaginability and loss function asymmetry are currently better candidate explanations for the influence of outcome utility on probability estimates.

Is the inferred preference of a deceased relative to donate his or her organs stronger when the choice was made under a mandated rather than under an automatic default (i.e., nudged choice) legislative system? The answer to this is particularly important, because families can, and do, veto the choices of their deceased relatives. In three studies, we asked American and European participants from countries that have either a default opt-in or a default opt-out system to take on the role of a third party to judge the likelihood that an individual's "true wish" was to actually donate his or her organs, given that the decedent was registered to donate on the organ donation register. In each study participants were randomly assigned to one of four organ donation legislative systems (default opt-in, default opt-out, mandated choice, mandatory). Overall, regardless of which country participants came from, they perceived the donor's underlying preference to donate as stronger under the default opt-in and mandated choice systems as compared with the default opt-out and mandatory donor systems. We discuss the practical issues that result from using default systems in the domain of organ donation and propose potential ways to ameliorate the uncertainty around inferences of underlying preference from a nudged choice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

The appeal to expert opinion is an argument form that uses the verdict of an expert to support a position or hypothesis. A previous scheme-based treatment of the argument form is formalized within a Bayesian network that is able to capture the critical aspects of the argument form, including the central considerations of the expert's expertise and trustworthiness. We propose this as an appropriate normative framework for the argument form, enabling the development and testing of quantitative predictions as to how people evaluate this argument, suggesting that such an approach might be beneficial to argumentation research generally. We subsequently present two experiments as an example of the potential for future research in this vein, demonstrating that participants' quantitative ratings of the convincingness of a proposition that has been supported with an appeal to expert opinion were broadly consistent with the predictions of the Bayesian model.

Within UK policing it is routinely the responsibility of fingerprint laboratory practitioners to chemically develop areas of latent fingerprint ridge detail on evidential items and to determine which areas of ridge detail are of sufficient quality to be submitted to fingerprint experts for search or comparison against persons of interest. This study assessed the effectiveness of the fingermark submission process within the Evidence Recovery Unit Fingerprint Laboratory of the Metropolitan Police Service. Laboratory practitioners were presented with known source fingermark images previously deemed identifiable or insufficient by fingerprint experts, and were asked to state which of the marks they would forward to the Fingerprint Bureau. The results indicated that practitioners forwarded a higher percentage of insufficient fingermarks than is acceptable according to current laboratory guidelines, and discarded a number of marks that were of sufficient quality for analysis. Practitioners forwarded more insufficient fingermarks when considering fingermarks thought to be related to a murder and discarded more sufficient fingermarks when considering those thought to be related to a crime of ‘theft from vehicle’. The results highlight the need for fingerprint laboratories to work alongside fingerprint experts to ensure that a consistent approach to decision-making is, as far as possible, achieved, and that appropriate thresholds are adopted so as to prevent the loss of valuable evidence and improve the efficiency of the fingerprint filtering process.

Adults and children have recently been shown to prefer guessing the outcome of a die roll after the die has been rolled (but remained out of sight) rather than before it has been rolled. This result is contrary to the predictions of the competence hypothesis (Heath & Tversky, 1991), which proposes that people are sensitive to the degree of their relative ignorance and therefore prefer to guess about an outcome it is impossible to know, rather than one that they could know, but do not. We investigated the potential role of agency in guessing preferences about a novel game of chance. When the experimenter controlled the outcome, we replicated the finding that adults and 5- to 6-year-old children preferred to make their guess after the outcome had been determined. For adults only, this preference reversed when they exerted control over the outcome about which they were guessing. The adult data appear best explained by a modified version of the competence hypothesis that highlights the notion of control or responsibility. It is proposed that potential attributions of blame are related to the guesser's role in determining the outcome. The child data were consistent with an imagination-based account of guessing preferences.

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.

Possible measures to mitigate climate change require global collective actions whose impacts will be felt by many, if not all. Implementing such actions requires successful communication of the reasons for them, and hence the underlying climate science, to a degree that far exceeds typical scientific issues which do not require large-scale societal response. Empirical studies have identified factors, such as the perceived level of consensus in scientific opinion and the perceived reliability of scientists, that can limit people's trust in science communicators and their subsequent acceptance of climate change claims. Little consideration has been given, however, to recent formal results within philosophy concerning the relationship between truth, the reliability of evidence sources, the coherence of multiple pieces of evidence/testimonies, and the impact of (non-)independence between sources of evidence. This study draws on these results to evaluate exactly what has (and, more important, has not yet) been established in the empirical literature about the factors that bias the public's reception of scientific communications about climate change.

Verbal probability expressions are frequently used to communicate risk and uncertainty. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for example, uses them to convey risks associated with climate change. Given the potential for human action to mitigate future environmental risks, it is important to understand how people respond to these expressions. In 3 studies employing a novel manipulation of event severity (so as to avoid any confound with event base rate), we demonstrated a systematic effect of event severity on the interpretation of verbal probability expressions. Challenging a previous finding in the literature, expressions referring to a severe event were interpreted as indicating a higher probability than those referring to a more neutral event. The finding was demonstrated in scenarios communicating risks relating to climate change (Studies 1 and 2) and replicated in scenarios involving nanotechnology and nuclear materials (Study 3). This is the first direct demonstration of an effect of outcome severity on the interpretation of verbal probability expressions, correcting a previous (potentially problematic) conclusion attributable to a flawed experimental design. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved). Language: en

Routinely in day-to-day life, as well as in formal settings such as the courtroom, people must aggregate information they receive from different sources. One intuitively important but underresearched factor in this context is the degree to which the reports from different sources fit together, that is, their coherence. The authors examine a version of Bayes' theorem that not only includes factors such as prior beliefs and witness reliability, as do other models of information aggregation, but also makes transparent the effect of the coherence of multiple testimonies on the believability of the information. The results suggest that participants are sensitive to all the normatively relevant factors when assessing the believability of a set of witness testimonies.

How well we are attuned to the statistics of our environment is a fundamental question in understanding human behaviour. It seems particularly important to be able to provide accurate assessments of the probability with which negative events occur so as to guide rational choice of preventative actions. One question that arises here is whether or not our probability estimates for negative events are systematically biased by their severity. In a minimal experimental context involving an unambiguous, objective representation of probability, we found that participants judged a controllable event as more likely to occur when its utility was extremely negative than when it was more neutral. A decision-theoretic explanation based on loss function asymmetries is advanced which supports the claim that probability estimates are not intrinsically biased by utilities.