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Atir, S., Rosenzweig, E., & Dunning D. A. (OBHDP, under 3rd round review). Title Hidden for Blind Review.
Atir S., Rosenzweig, E, & Dunning D. A. (Management Science, R&R). Title Hidden for Blind Review.
Atir, S., Rosenzweig, E., & Dunning D. A. (OBHDP, R&R). Title Hidden for Blind Review.
Atir, S. & Risen, J. (JEP: General, R&R). Title Hidden for Blind Review.
Despite having more opportunities than ever to connect with strangers, and much to gain from doing so, people often refrain from talking with, and listening to, strangers. We propose a framework that classifies obstacles to connecting with strangers into three categories concerning intention (underestimating the benefits of conversations), competence (misunderstanding how to appear likeable and competent in conversation), and opportunity (being constrained in access to a diverse set of strangers). To promote conversations among strangers, interventions have attempted to calibrate people's expectations, improve their communication, and create more opportunities for strangers to connect. We identify the need to better understand how miscalibrated beliefs emerge and are sustained, what contextual factors impact conversation likelihood, and how conversations evolve as relationships develop.
Detecting named entities in text has long been a core NLP task. However, not much work has gone into distinguishing whether an entity mention is addressing the entity vs. referring to the entity; e.g., John, would you turn the light off? vs. John turned the light off. While this distinction is marked by a vocative case marker in some languages, many modern Indo-European languages such as English do not use such explicit vocative markers, and the distinction is left to be interpreted based on context. In this paper, we present a new annotated dataset that captures the address vs. reference distinction in English, an automatic tagger that performs at 85% accuracy in making this distinction, and demonstrate how this distinction is important in NLP and computational social science applications in English language.
A meaningful amount of people’s knowledge comes from their conversations with others. The amount people expect to learn predicts their interest in having a conversation (pretests 1 and 2), suggesting that the presumed information value of conversations guides decisions of whom to talk with. The results of seven experiments, however, suggest that people may systematically underestimate the informational benefit of conversation, creating a barrier to talking with—and hence learning from—others in daily life. Participants who were asked to talk with another person expected to learn significantly less from the conversation than they actually reported learning afterward, regardless of whether they had conversation prompts and whether they had the goal to learn (experiments 1 and 2). Undervaluing conversation does not stem from having systematically poor opinions of how much others know (experiment 3) but is instead related to the inherent uncertainty involved in conversation itself. Consequently, people underestimate learning to a lesser extent when uncertainty is reduced, as in a nonsocial context (surfing the web, experiment 4); when talking to an acquainted conversation partner (experiment 5); and after knowing the content of the conversation (experiment 6). Underestimating learning in conversation is distinct from underestimating other positive qualities in conversation, such as enjoyment (experiment 7). Misunderstanding how much can be learned in conversation could keep people from learning from others in daily life.
Emerging research points to the power of language to shape how we think of gender in the professional domain. However, there is tension between two opposing strategies for communicating gender: gender-marking and gender-neutrality. Each strategy has the potential to combat gender bias, but also to reinforce it.
A person’s well-being depends heavily on forming and maintaining positive relationships, but people can be reluctant to connect in ways that would create or strengthen relationships. Emerging research suggests that miscalibrated social cognition may create psychological barriers to connecting with others more often. Specifically, people may underestimate how positively others will respond to their own sociality across a variety of social actions, including engaging in conversation, expressing appreciation, and performing acts of kindness. We suggest that these miscalibrated expectations are created and maintained by at least three mechanisms: differential construal, uncertain responsiveness, and asymmetric learning. Underestimating the positive consequences of social engagement could make people less social than would be optimal for both their own and others’ well-being.
Gender inequality persists in many professions, particularly in high-status fields such as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). We report evidence of a new form of gender bias that may contribute to this state: gender influences the way people speak about professionals. When discussing professionals or their work, it is common to refer to them by surname alone (e.g., Darwin developed the theory of evolution). We present evidence that people are more likely to refer to male than female professionals in this way. This gender bias emerges in archival data across domains; students reviewing professors online and pundits discussing politicians on the radio are more likely to use surname when speaking about a man (vs. a woman). Participants’ self-reported references also indicate a preference for using surname when speaking about male (vs. female) scientists, authors, and others. Finally, experimental evidence provides convergent evidence: participants writing about a fictional male scientist are more likely to refer to him by surname than participants writing about an otherwise-identical female scientist. We find that, on average, people are over twice as likely to refer to male than female professionals by surname. Critically, we identified consequences of this gender bias in speaking about professionals. Those referred to by surname are judged as more famous and eminent. They are consequently seen as higher-status and more deserving of eminence-related benefits and awards. For instance, scientists referred to by surname were seen as 14% more deserving of a National Science Foundation career award.
Focusing attention on one item typically interferes with the ability to process other information. Yet, target detection can both facilitate memory for items paired with the target (the attentional boost effect) and increase the perceived value of those items (cued approach). Because long-term memory is better for valuable items than for neutral items, we asked whether the attentional boost effect is due to changes in the perceived value of items that are paired with targets. In three experiments participants memorised a series of briefly presented images that depicted valuable (e.g., food) or neutral (e.g., toys) items. Whenever an item appeared, a square flashed in its center. Participants pressed a button if the square was a target color but not if it was a distractor color. Consistent with previous research, target-paired items were remembered better than distractor-paired items and were rated as more valuable. Importantly, if memory for target-paired items is enhanced because they increased in perceived value, then valuable items should have been better remembered than neutral items. However, we found no evidence that value enhanced memory for the items in this task. Thus, it is unlikely that the attentional boost effect is due to changes in perceived value.
People overestimate their own knowledge, erring at times by claiming knowledge of concepts, events, and people that do not exist and cannot be known, a phenomenon called overclaiming. Why and when do people claim such impossible knowledge? We proposed that people overclaim to the extent they perceive their expertise as high rather than low. Supporting this hypothesis, in Study 1, self-perceived knowledge in personal finance positively predicted claiming knowledge of nonexistent financial concepts. Study 2 demonstrated that self-perceived knowledge within specific domains (e.g., biology) was associated specifically with overclaiming within those domains. In Study 3, warning participants that some concepts did not exist did not reduce the relationship between self-perceived knowledge and overclaiming, suggesting that the relationship is not driven by self-presentational concerns. Finally, in Study 4, boosting self-perceived expertise in geography prompted assertions of familiarity with nonexistent places, supporting a causal role for self-perceived expertise in claiming impossible knowledge.