Learning by doing, a change in beliefs due to experience, is crucial to the adaptive behaviours of organizations as well as the individuals that inhabit them. In this review paper, we summarise different pathologies of learning noted in past literature using a common underlying mechanism based on self-confirming biased beliefs. These are inaccurate beliefs about the environment that are self-confirming because acting upon these beliefs prevents their falsification. We provide a formal definition for self-confirming biased beliefs as an attractor that (...) can lock learning by doing systems into suboptimal actions and provide illustrations based on simulations. We then compare and distinguish self-confirming biased beliefs from other related theoretical constructs, including confirmation bias, self-fulfilling prophecies, and sticking points, and underscore that self-confirming biased beliefs underlie inefficient self-confirming equilibria and hot-stove effects. Lastly, we highlight two fundamental ways to escape self-confirming biased beliefs: taking actions inconsistent with beliefs and getting information on unchosen actions. (shrink)

The social environment influences what information individuals sample: people are often exposed to alternatives that are popular. This can systematically change an individual's evaluation of an alternative if she had previously been avoiding it due to a negative evaluation. The authors show that social exposure can have positive or negative effects on evaluation, depending on how popularity and prior evaluations interact. This theory was supported by a large‐scale analysis of data from a hotel chain.

Our research focuses on the perception of difference in the evaluations of positive and negative options. The literature provides evidence for two opposite effects: on the one hand, negative objects are said to be more differentiated, on the other, people are shown to see greater differences between positive options. In our study, we investigated the perception of difference between fictitious political candidates, hypothesizing greater differences among the evaluations of favorable candidates. Additionally, we analyzed how positive and negative information affect candidate (...) evaluation, predicting further asymmetries. In three experiments, participants evaluated various candidate profiles presented in a numeric and narrative manner. The evaluation tasks were designed as individual or joint assessments. In all three studies, we found more differentiation between positive than negative options. Our research suggests that after exceeding a certain, relatively small level of negativity, people do not see any further increase in negativity. The increase in positivity, on the other hand, is more gradual, with greater differentiation among positive options. Our findings are discussed in light of cognitive-experiential self-theory and density hypothesis. (shrink)

We propose another positive illusion that fits with McKay & Dennett's (M&D's) criteria for adaptive misbeliefs. This illusion is pervasive in adult reasoning but we focus on its prevalence in children's developing theories. It is a strongly held conviction arising from normal functioning of the doxastic system that confers adaptive advantage on the individual.

Decisions in the environmental and in particular the climate domain are burdened with uncertainty. Here, we focus on uncertainties faced by individuals when making decisions about environmental behavior, and we use the statistical sampling framework to develop a classification of different sources of uncertainty they encounter. We then map these sources to different public policy strategies aiming to help individuals cope with uncertainty when making environmental decisions.

Focusing on the individual's internal cognitive architecture, McKay & Dennett (M&D) provide an incomplete analysis because they neglect the crucial role played by the external environment in producing misbeliefs and determining whether those misbeliefs are adaptive. In some environments, positive illusions are not adaptive. Further, misbeliefs often arise because the environment commonly fails to provide crucial information needed to form accurate judgments.

Depression is associated with a bias toward negative interpretations of social situations and resistance to integrating evidence consistent with positive interpretations. These features could contribute to social isolation by generating negative expected value for future social interactions. The present study examined potential associations between depressive symptoms and positive (i.e. trust and liking) and negative (i.e. distrust and disliking) social impression formation of individuals who previously appeared in positive or negative contexts. Participants (N = 213) completed the Interpretation Inflexibility Task and (...) were subsequently asked to provide social impression ratings of characters from each scenario type of the task (i.e. positive and negative) as well as characters not previously encountered. In examining social impression formation, higher severity of depressive symptoms was associated with higher negative social impression ratings regardless of scenario outcome, as well as lower positive social impression ratings, but only for characters who previously appeared in positive contexts. Those higher in depression also rated novel characters as significantly more unlikeable and untrustworthy and to an equivalent degree as the characters previously encountered. These findings suggest a role of negative interpretation bias and inflexibility in contributing to negative evaluations of potential social interaction partners in depression. (shrink)

Naive physics beliefs can be systematically mistaken. They provide a useful test-bed because they are common, and also because their existence must rely on some adaptive advantage, within a given context. In the second part of the commentary we also ask questions about when a whole family of misbeliefs should be considered together as a single phenomenon.

Decision making often takes place in social environments where other actors influence individuals' decisions. The present article examines how advice affects individual learning. Five social learning models combining advice and individual learning‐four based on reinforcement learning and one on Bayesian learning‐and one individual learning model are tested against each other. In two experiments, some participants received good or bad advice prior to a repeated multioption choice task. Receivers of advice adhered to the advice, so that good advice improved performance. The (...) social learning models described the observed learning processes better than the individual learning model. Of the models tested, the best social learning model assumes that outcomes from recommended options are more positively evaluated than outcomes from nonrecommended options. This model correctly predicted that receivers first adhere to advice, then explore other options, and finally return to the recommended option. The model also predicted accurately that good advice has a stronger impact on learning than bad advice. One‐time advice can have a long‐lasting influence on learning by changing the subjective evaluation of outcomes of recommended options. (shrink)

In the present dissertation, I propose a general, robust, and objective characteristic of the information environment, according to which negative information is more diverse than positive information. I present an explanatory framework for this phenomenon based on the non-extremity of positive qualities. Specifically, most attribute dimensions host one “positive” range which is surrounded by two distinct “negative” ranges, resulting in a greater diversity of negative compared to positive attributes, stimuli, and information in general. Chapter 1 of my dissertation reviews evidence (...) for the proposed greater diversity of negative information, showing that positive stimuli are consistently perceived as more similar than negative stimuli. Chapter 2 presents a line of research that demonstrates the same phenomenon in the domain of person perception. People perceive other people they like as more similar to one another than other people they dislike. I further suggest that the greater diversity of negative information as an “extrapsychic” phenomenon can account for a number of valence asymmetries in information processing that have previously been explained based on “intrapsychic” affective reactions. In line with this idea, Chapter 3 presents research showing that negative words enjoy a recognition advantage over positive words because they are more diverse. Chapter 4 discusses limitations, open questions and further implications of the current empirical findings and of the explanatory framework provided. (shrink)