Individual Behaviour
8 May 2012
Chair:
Professor Mark Taylor (Dean of WBS)
Panel:
Professor Graham Loomes
• Introduction to the Individual Behaviour GPP theme
Dr Thomas Hills
• Search in space and mind: how we find what we are looking for
Dr Dawn Eubanks
• The Impact of Leader Errors on Follower Perceptions
Professor Nick Chater
• The Mind is Flat
Global Priorities Programme - Overview
 Supporting and enhancing multidisciplinary and crossdepartmental research
 Demonstrating the impacts of research and engaging
with key users
 Generating research income through interdisciplinary
research that addresses major global issues
Individual Behaviour
Professor Graham Loomes
Behavioural Science Group, Warwick Business School
Academic Lead:
Graham Loomes
[email protected]
Research Support Lead:
Ronni Littlewood
[email protected]
What IS ‘individual behaviour’? What would individuals
be without other individuals and the families, groups,
organisations and other individuals we interact with?
We may view things from the perspective of an
individual – how each of us perceive, absorb, make
sense of, decide about and act upon the world and the
people around us
Many areas, many puzzles
Do we behave rationally? Predictably irrationally? On average?
What abilities have we evolved to perceive, decide, act?
How do we judge, evaluate, choose?
How do we understand and handle risk and uncertainty – personal
and financial?
How do we trade off between present and different future times?
How do we interact with others – co-operating and/or competing?
This GPP aims to be open and welcoming – interested in
new associations and cross-fertilisation
Too broad and diverse to cover in one evening
– so some examples . . .
Search in space and mind: how
we find what we are looking for
Dr Thomas Hills
Department of Psychology
RATE
TIME
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TIME
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TIME
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We solve a similar problem both in space and
mind: When to explore and when to exploit?
Area-restricted search
The exploration-exploitation trade-off
Exploitation
Exploration
Innovation and Patent law
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Drug addiction
Looking for your car in a parking lot
Trying to solve a research problem
The evolution of the trade-off
Memory search across the lifespan
The Future
How can we be helped to navigate
our own minds?
What’s the cognitive basis of
disorders like Alzheimer’s disease
and depression?
How does the way information is
structured influence what we
learn and remember?
The Impact of Leader Errors on
Follower Perceptions
Dr Dawn Eubanks
Behavioural Science Group and MSM, Warwick Business School
[email protected]
Project Collaborators
Sam Hunter – Penn State
Ethan Waples
University of Central Oklahoma
Why leader errors?
• Given the complex and ambiguous decisions that
leaders are required to make, incidents of error
are understandable - indeed expected
• “an avoidable action (or inaction) is chosen by a
leader which results in an initial outcome outside
of the leader’s original intent, goal, or prediction”
– Hunter, Tate, Dzieweczynsk, Bedell-Avers (The
Leadership Quarterly, 2011)
Errors take many forms
• Titanic steering error
– 1,517 casualties
• BP Deepwater Horizon
– 11 casualties
Judgement of errors
• Not all errors are judged equally.
• Some are viewed as “unfortunate
human mistakes”.
• Others make us feel that something
corrupt or unjust occurred.
• Our perceptions of errors and judgement
of leaders vary.
A short study
• How do different types of errors influence
follower perceptions of justice?
• Data were collected from 187 undergraduate
students.
• Each participant read a vignette where one type
of error was represented 3 times. They then
completed measures of Justice Perceptions.
Variables of interest
• Error types –
Based on Fleishman et al. 1991
– information search and structuring
– information use in problem solving
– managing personnel resources
– managing material resources
• Justice perceptions (Moorman 1991)
What we found
1) Information search and structuring errors
appear to have the lowest amount of negative
influence on justice perceptions compared to
other error types.
2) Managing material resources errors seem to
have the largest negative impact on justice
perceptions compared to other error types.
What does this mean then?
Take home message:
If there is a perception that a leader is poorly
managing resources that are critical to the job
performance of the follower, there may be a
stronger negative reaction for justice perceptions
than when there is a perception that a leader didn’t
include all the important components in an
information search and structuring activity.
Just the beginning!
• Errors and the role of time
• Errors and creativity/innovation
Thank You!
Questions?
Behavioural Science Website:
http://warwickbehaviouralscience.com
The Mind is Flat:
The illusion of mental depth
Professor Nick Chater
Behavioural Science Group, Warwick Business School
The myth of introspection:
• Peering into one’s mental “depths”
– What do I believe?
– What do I want?
– How do I act?
...
– What shall I buy?
– How should I answer this questionnaire?
But we cannot peer into our own minds...
• We infer our own inner life
from our words and
actions, just as we infer
those of a third person
• And then invent what we
will do and say next
Inferring our own preferences
• Johansson, Hall et al.,
Science
• False feedback on choices
–
–
–
–
–
not noticed
rationalization given
later preferences changed
And it works with jam
And ethical dilemmas
The utilitarian dream
• Bentham’s dream of morality and
public policy seeking to maximize
“utility”
• We might even hope some
approximation to be delivered by
the market (welfare economics)
• But this presupposes stable
“utilities” can somehow be
“extracted” from our hidden mental
depths
But if the mind is flat, there is no hidden utility
to measure
• Test case: can we measure the “(dis)utility”
of pain?
• A “BDM” auction with small electric shocks
Vlaev, Seymour, Dolan & Chater, Psychological Science, 2009
You receive 40p
You will receive
a shock
Select price to avoid
15 further shocks
0p
20p
40p
Market price is
determined randomly
0p
time
30p
10p
20p
You offered 14p
Market price was 4p
Sale authorised
Sale price = 4p
Pain magnitudes were presented in pairs
in three blocks of ten trials
Two “endowment” conditions
£0.40 per trial
£0.80 per trial
35
Endowment = 40 pence
30
Price Offered
25
High
Medium
Low
20
15
10
5
0
Low-Medium
Medium-High
Context Condition
Low-High
70
Endowment = 80 pence
60
Price Offered
50
High
Medium
Low
40
30
20
10
0
Low-Medium
Medium-High
Low-High
Context Condition
• People double their offers, when they have double the money...
• Value of pain changes by x2 within minutes!
Utilitarianism fails...
• Not because utility is hard to measure
• But because there is no utility to be measured
– our underlying preferences, desires, “utilities” are
illusory
– i.e., continually re-invented for each new time and
situation
So prices don’t reveal, but are shaped by, prices
• People can’t “know” their values
• So they must partly infer them
from market prices
“value”
“price”
• Allowing feedback loops between
values and prices
• One origin of booms and
crashes?
“People know the price of everything, but the value of nothing”
The mind is flat!
...Consumer behaviour...
...Ethical theory...
...Market behaviour...
Mental “depth” is an illusion
Next Ideas Cafe
Thursday 14 June 5.30pm
Chancellor’s Suite, Rootes Social Building
Global Governance