The Bilingual Patient’s Dilemma: Same Question, Different Answer.Michał Białek -2024 -American Journal of Bioethics 24 (11):84-86.detailsConsider Maria, a 32-year-old Spanish-speaking expectant mother who immigrated to the United States five years ago. Despite taking English classes and working in a predominantly English-speaking en...
Your Health vs. My Liberty: Philosophical beliefs dominated reflection and identifiable victim effects when predicting public health recommendation compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic.Nick Byrd &Michał Białek -2021 -Cognition 104649 (C).detailsIn response to crises, people sometimes prioritize fewer specific identifiable victims over many unspecified statistical victims. How other factors can explain this bias remains unclear. So two experiments investigated how complying with public health recommendations during the COVID19 pandemic depended on victim portrayal, reflection, and philosophical beliefs (Total N = 998). Only one experiment found that messaging about individual victims increased compliance compared to messaging about statistical victims—i.e., "flatten the curve" graphs—an effect that was undetected after controlling for other factors. (...) However, messaging about flu (vs. COVID19) indirectly reduced compliance by reducing perceived threat of the pandemic. Nevertheless, moral beliefs predicted compliance better than messaging and reflection in both experiments. The second experiment’s additional measures revealed that religiosity, political preferences, and beliefs about science also predicted compliance. This suggests that flouting public health recommendations may be less about ineffective messaging or reasoning than philosophical differences. (shrink)
Conflict detection predicts the temporal stability of intuitive and deliberate reasoning.Aikaterini Voudouri,Michał Białek,Artur Domurat,Marta Kowal &Wim De Neys -2023 -Thinking and Reasoning 29 (4):427-455.detailsAlthough reasoning has been characterized as the essence of our being, it is often prone to cognitive biases. Decades of research in the reasoning and decision making fields have shown that when fa...
Limits of the foreign language effect: intertemporal choice.Michał Białek,Artur Domurat,Mariola Paruzel-Czachura &Rafał Muda -2022 -Thinking and Reasoning 28 (1):97-124.detailsIntertemporal choice requires one to decide between smaller sooner and larger later payoffs and is captured by discount rates. Across two preregistered experiments testing three language pairs (Polish vs. English, Spanish, and German; Experiment 1) and with incentivized participants (Experiment 2), we found no evidence that using a foreign language decreased the strength or increased the consistency of intertemporal choices. On the contrary, there was some evidence of stronger discounting when a foreign language was used. We confirmed prior findings that (...) more reflective individuals discount less strongly but observed that they were just as (un)affected by using foreign language as less reflective individuals. Thus, we provide preliminary evidence that the foreign language effect is robust to individual differences in cognitive reflection. (shrink)
Social bias insights concern judgments rather than real-world decisions.Michał Białek &Igor Grossmann -2022 -Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45.detailsJudgments differ from decisions. Judgments are more abstract, decontextualized, and bear fewer consequences for the agent. In pursuit of experimental control, psychological experiments on bias create a simplified, bare-bone representation of social behavior. These experiments resemble conditions in which people judge others, but not how they make real-world decisions.
Explaining bias with bias.Krzysztof Przybyszewski,Dorota Rutkowska &Michał Białek -2022 -Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45:e237.detailsBermúdez argues that a framing effect is rational, which will be true if one accepts that the biased editing phase is rational. This type of rationality was called procedural by Simon. Despite being procedurally rational in the evaluation phase framing effect stems from biased way we set a reference point against which outcomes are compared.
Overlapping defaults. The case of intertemporal choices.Michał Białek &Przemysław Sawicki -2017 -Polish Psychological Bulletin 48 (4):440-444.detailsPeople make different choices depending on which decision is the default option. In intertemporal choices, the default option is typically imposed externally. For example, people expect more for delaying the gain than are willing to pay for accelerating the future gain over the same period. We claim that apart from the external default, people’s choices are also influenced by the internal default such as the time perspective resulting in the reference point in the present. By manipulating the congruency between the (...) internal and external defaults, we show that incongruence between defaults decreases the strength of discounting of gains, but not of losses. (shrink)
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Approach to Resource Management and Physical Strength Predict Differences in Helping: Evidence From Two Small-Scale Societies.Marina Butovskaya,Michalina Marczak,Michał Misiak,Dmitry Karelin,Michał Białek &Piotr Sorokowski -2020 -Frontiers in Psychology 11.detailsHelping behavior is likely to have evolved to increase summary chances for survival of an individual and their group. Nevertheless, populations differ significantly in their eagerness to help, and still little is known about populational and inter-individual determinants of these differences. Previous studies indicated that economic and physiological factors might influence helping behavior. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of approach to resource management of a society (immediate-return economy vs. delayed-return economy), prenatal androgenization (based on (...) second-to-fourth digit ratio), and physical strength (based on hand grip strength) on helping behavior towards others. Helping was assessed in terms of both general eagerness to help and differential helping towards: (1) kin, (2) other group members indiscriminately, (3) friends, and (4) those from whom help was obtained in the past. Based on data collected in two small-scale societies, we found that people in the egalitarian immediate-return society (the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania) engaged in helping behavior significantly more often than representatives of a more stratified delayed-return economy (Yali horticulturalists of Papua). Additionally, our results revealed that physical strength was a significant predictor of helping behavior in women but not in men. We discuss our findings in the light of the adaptive value of helping behavior. (shrink)