Biomedical subjects

Reid Hastie

Publications and source records attributed to Reid Hastie.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2003

Phineas gauged: decision-making and the human prefrontal cortex.

Poor social judgment and decision-making abilities have often been attributed to people who have suffered injury to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC). However, few laboratory tests of decision-making have been conducted on these patients. The exception to this is the Iowa Gambling Task which has often, but not always, demonstrated differential performance between patients and controls. Results from patients with prefrontal cortex lesions on a novel test of decision-making are presented. Participants explored and chose from pairs of gambles that differed in their underlying distributions, primarily in the variance of their respective outcomes. In accordance with many findings from the behavioral decision-making literature, both young normal participants and older patient controls demonstrated a marked avoidance of risk and selected largely from secure, low variance gambles. In contrast, patients with ventromedial lesions were divided into two clear sub-groups. One group behaved similarly to normals, showing a risk-averse strategy. The other group displayed a distinctive risk-seeking behavior pattern, choosing predominantly from the high-variance, high-risk decks. This research demonstrates some of the advantages of using methods and theories from traditional decision-making research to study the behavior of patients, as well as the benefits of examining individual participants, and provides new insights into the nature of the decision-making deficit in patients with ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions.

Adult↗

PubMed2003

The logic of social sharing: an evolutionary game analysis of adaptive norm development.

Although norms can potentially serve useful constructs to understand human minds, being fundamentally social in evolutionary as well as cultural senses, there are as yet no useful psychological theories of adaptive norm development. This article provides an illustrative model about how a norm emerges in a society. We focus on the "communal-sharing norm" in primordial societies, a norm designating uncertain resources as common properties to be shared with other members. Based on anthropological findings, we develop a theory about how the communal-sharing norm emerges and is maintained. Then, using evolutionary computer simulations, we test several hypotheses about the conditions under which the norm will dominate social resource sharing. We further test behavioral implications of the norm, demonstrating that uncertainty involved in resource acquisition is a key factor that triggers the psychology of sharing even in highly industrialized societies. Finally, we discuss the importance of norm construct for analyzing the dynamic relation between minds and society.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMed2002

Interevent relationships and judgment under uncertainty: structure determines strategy.

A fundamental empirical question regarding judgments about events is whether experienced absolute frequencies or relative frequencies are relied on when the likelihood of a particular occurrence is judged. The present research explicates the conditions under which people rely on remembered raw absolute frequencies versus on inferred relative frequencies or proportions when making predictions. Participants saw opinion poll results for candidates prior to an election and, on the basis of these, made judgments concerning the likelihood of each candidate's winning this election. Certain candidates demonstrated a high absolute frequency of winning in the polls, whereas other candidates had high relative win frequencies. The results indicated that adults are cognitively flexible with regard to the inputs used in this judgment. Certain stimulus event configurations induced reasoning by way of absolute frequencies, whereas other configurations elicited judgments based on relative frequencies. More specifically, as the relational complexity of the event structure increased and more inferences were required to make predictions, the tendency to rely on absolute, as opposed to relative, frequencies also increased.

Humans↗

PubMed2002

The reliability of the DRM paradigm as a measure of individual differences in false memories.

Despite considerable research on the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) false memory paradigm, little attention has been paid to the reliability of the paradigm as a measure of individual differences. In the present research, we examined the reliability of the DRM paradigm in a 2-week test-retest design. This analysis showed that the false memories produced in the paradigm were quite stable across the 2-week period and that this stability had both global (cross-list) and list-specific components. In contrast, correct memories showed only global stability across the testing period.

Psychological Tests↗

PubMed2001

Content Effects on Decision Making.

How does the domain or subject matter of a decision problem affect the outcome of the decision? Although decision-making research typically dismisses content as merely a cover story, the present research shows that it plays a fundamental role in the decision process by influencing the information processing that underlies it. An experiment is reported in which the same basic decision problem was presented in several content domains (legal traffic tickets, academic course grades, stock investments, and casino gambling). The changes in content led to changes in both strategies and mental representations, which in turn led to changes in decision outcomes, even though measures of the subjective utilities of the options remained unchanged. Copyright 2001 Academic Press.

Journal Article↗