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- All Subjects: Decision making--Psychological aspects.
- Genre: Academic theses
- Creators: Kwan, Virginia S.Y.
- Creators: Li, Yaqi
Description
Recommendations made by expert groups are pervasive throughout various life domains. Yet not all recommendations--or expert groups--are equally persuasive. This research aims to identify factors that influence the persuasiveness of recommendations. More specifically, this study examined the effects of decisional cohesion (the amount of agreement among the experts in support of the recommendation), framing (whether the message is framed as a loss or gain), and the domain of the recommendation (health vs. financial) on the persuasiveness of the recommendation. The participants consisted of 1,981 undergraduates from Arizona State University. The participants read a vignette including information about the expert group making a recommendation--which varied the amount of expert agreement for the recommendation--and the recommendation, which was framed as either a gain or loss. Participants then responded to questions about the persuasiveness of the recommendation. In this study, there was a linear main effect of decisional cohesion such that the greater the decisional cohesion of the expert group the more persuasive their recommendation. In addition, there was a main effect of domain such that the health recommendation was more persuasive than the financial recommendation. Contrary to predictions, there was no observed interaction between the amount of decisional cohesion and the framing of the recommendation nor was there a main effect of framing. Further analyses show support for a mediation effect indicating that high levels of decisional cohesion increased the perceived entitativity of the expert group--the degree to which the group was perceived as a unified, cohesive group¬--which increased the recommendation's persuasiveness. An implication of this research is that policy makers could increase the persuasiveness of their recommendations by promoting recommendations that are unanimously supported by their experts or at least show higher levels of decisional cohesion.
ContributorsVotruba, Ashley M (Author) / Kwan, Virginia S.Y. (Thesis advisor) / Saks, Michael J. (Committee member) / Demaine, Linda (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Delay discounting is the decline in the present value of a reward with delay to its receipt. (Mazur,1987). The delay discounting task is used to measure delay discounting rate, which requires the participants to choose between two options: one involves immediate delivery of a reward, and other involves delivery after a delay, and the immediate rewards are adjusted in value until the subject feels there is no difference between the immediate and the delayed reward. Some previous studies (Robles and Vargas, 2007; 2008; Robles et al., 2009) found that the order of presentation of the immediate rewards (ascending or descending) significantly influenced the estimated delay discounting rate, which is known as the order effect. Uncertainty about the future and impulsivity could explain delay discounting behavior. The purpose of this study was to explore the order effect in delay discounting assessment. The current study found that the order effect in the delay discounting task can be explained by risk aversion, loss aversion and impulsivity. In the current study, the two kinds of fixed procedure (ascending and descending), and the titrating delay discounting task were used to estimate the degree of delay discounting. Also, two gambling tasks were applied to measure risk and loss aversion indices. The BIS-11 scale was used to assess the level of trait impulsivity. The results indicated that impulsivity biases individuals to choose the immediate small reward rather than the large delayed reward, resulting in lower area under the discounting curve (AUC) when estimated with the ascending-sequence delay discounting task. Also, impulsivity moderated the relationship between loss aversion and AUC estimated with the descending-sequence delay discounting task.
ContributorsLi, Yaqi (Author) / Robles, Elías (Thesis advisor) / Hall, Deborah (Committee member) / Duran, Nicholas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018