Individual Behaviour8 May 2012Chair: Professor Mark Taylor (Dean of WBS)Panel: Professor Graham Loomes•Introduction to the Individual Behaviour GPP themeDr Thomas Hills•Search in space and mind: how we find what we are looking forDr Dawn Eubanks•The Impact of Leader Errors on Follower PerceptionsProfessor Nick Chater•The Mind is Flat

Global Priorities Programme - Overview Supporting and enhancing multidisciplinary and cross-

departmental 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 Loomesg.c.loomes@warwick.ac.uk

Research Support Lead:Ronni Littlewood

V.R.Littlewood@warwick.ac.uk

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

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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

ExploitationExploitation ExplorationExplorationExploitationExploitation ExplorationExploration

Innovation and Patent lawObsessive Compulsive DisorderDrug addictionLooking for your car in a parking lotTrying to solve a research problem

The evolution of the trade-off

Memory search across the lifespan

The FutureHow 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 Schooldawn.eubanks@wbs.ac.uk

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

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20p

10p30p

You offered 14p

Market price was 4p

Sale authorisedSale price = 4p

time

Pain magnitudes were presented in pairs in three blocks of ten trials

Two “endowment” conditions£0.40 per trial£0.80 per trial

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• 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

“value” “price”

“People know the price of everything, but the value of nothing”

• People can’t “know” their values

• So they must partly infer them from market prices

• Allowing feedback loops between values and prices

• One origin of booms and crashes?

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