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Biomedical subjects

R E Nisbett

Publications and source records attributed to R E Nisbett.

9 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1992

Protecting the self from the negative consequences of risky decisions.

Three experiments tested the idea that a motive to protect self-esteem (SE) from the threat of regret can influence decision making. Threat to SE was manipulated by varying whether people expected to know the outcome of their decisions. Study 1 showed that when Ss expected feedback about their decisions, only Ss low in SE made regret-minimizing choices. Study 2 showed that when Ss did not expect to know the outcome of their decisions, SE differences in choice strategies disappeared. Study 3 manipulated expectations about feedback on chosen and unchosen alternatives and showed that the more feedback that was expected, the more likely low but not high SE Ss were to make regret-minimizing choices. These studies suggest that people base decisions not only on objective attributes of choice alternatives, but also on the damage to SE that is perceived to result from a poor-decision outcome.

Adult↗
PubMed1991

Immediate and delayed transfer of training effects in statistical reasoning.

Ss were trained on the law of large numbers in a given domain through the use of example problems. They were then tested either on that domain or on another domain either immediately or after a 2-week delay. Strong domain independence was found when testing was immediate. This transfer of training was not due simply to Ss' ability to draw direct analogies between problems in the trained domain and in the untrained domain. After the 2-week delay, it was found that (a) there was no decline in performance in the trained domain and (b) although there was a significant decline in performance in the untrained domain, performance was still better than for control Ss. Memory measures suggest that the retention of training effects is due to memory for the rule system rather than to memory for the specific details of the example problems, contrary to what would be expected if Ss were using direct analogies to solve the test problems.

Attention↗
PubMed1987

Teaching reasoning.

Twentieth-century psychologists have been pessimistic about teaching reasoning, prevailing opinion suggesting that people may possess only domain-specific rules, rather than abstract rules; this would mean that training a rule in one domain would not produce generalization to other domains. Alternatively, it was thought that people might possess abstract rules (such as logical ones) but that these are induced developmentally through self-discovery methods and cannot be trained. Research suggests a much more optimistic view: even brief formal training in inferential rules may enhance their use for reasoning about everyday life events. Previous theorists may have been mistaken about trainability, in part because they misidentified the kind of rules that people use naturally.

Education↗
PubMed1985

Perception of social distributions.

Accurate representation of the distribution of social attitudes and behaviors can guide effective social behavior and is often essential for correct inferences. We examined the accuracy of people's beliefs about the distributions of a large number of attitudinal and behavioral dimensions. In two studies we measured actual attitudes and behaviors in a student population, and we assessed beliefs by asking subjects to estimate the distribution of 100 students on these dimensions. We examined the accuracy of subjects' perceptions of the means, standard deviations, and distribution shapes. Subjects showed a number of systematic biases, including overestimation of dispersion and overestimation of the means of behavioral distributions and a false consensus bias, but their overall accuracy was impressive.

Attitude↗
PubMed1975

Age and sex differences in behaviors mediated by the ventromedial hypothalamus.

Age and sex differences in behaviors mediated by the ventromedial hypothalamus (VMH) were examined in the rat. Circadian rhythm, emotionality, and taste responsiveness (except for responsiveness to quinine adulteration) were found to shift, in one or both sexes, toward a pattern suggesting decreased VMH functioning with increasing age. A post hoc analysis of the configuration of positive and negative results suggests that, for those behaviors known to show both immediate and sustained effects of VMH lesion, male rats show a marked trend toward the lesioned pattern of behavior with increasing age, whereas females show weaker or nonexistent age trends in the same behaviors. For those behaviors that have been shown to change only during the static, obese phase, or for which data re controversial as to whether changes take place as a result of the VMH lesion at all, this age and sex pattern does not emerge.

Aging↗