Individual Behaviour

1. 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

2. 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

3. Individual Behaviour Professor Graham Loomes Behavioural Science Group, Warwick Business School

4. Academic Lead: Graham Loomes g.c.loomes@warwick.ac.uk Research Support Lead: Ronni LittlewoodV.R.Littlewood@warwick.ac.uk

5. 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

6. 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?

7. 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 . . .

8. Search in space and mind: how we find what we are looking for Dr Thomas Hills Department of Psychology

9. RATE RATE RATE RATE TIME TIME TIME TIME

10. RATE RATE TIME TIME

11. We solve a similar problem both in space and mind: When to explore and when to exploit? Area-restricted search

12. 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

13. The evolution of the trade-off

16. Memory search across the lifespan

17. 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?

18. The Impact of Leader Errors on Follower Perceptions Dr Dawn Eubanks Behavioural Science Group and MSM, Warwick Business School dawn.eubanks@wbs.ac.uk

19. Project Collaborators Ethan Waples University of Central Oklahoma Sam Hunter – Penn State

20. 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)

21. Errors take many forms • Titanic steering error • 1,517 casualties • BP Deepwater Horizon • 11 casualties

22. 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.

23. 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.

24. 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)

25. What we found • Information search and structuring errors appear to have the lowest amount of negative influence on justice perceptions compared to other error types. • Managing material resources errors seem to have the largest negative impact on justice perceptions compared to other error types.

26. 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.

27. Just the beginning! • Errors and the role of time • Errors and creativity/innovation

28. Thank You! Questions? Behavioural Science Website: http://warwickbehaviouralscience.com

29. The Mind is Flat:The illusion of mental depth Professor Nick Chater Behavioural Science Group, Warwick Business School

30. 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?

31. 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

32. 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

33. 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

34. 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

36. Pain magnitudes were presented in pairs in three blocks of ten trials • Two “endowment” conditions • £0.40 per trial • £0.80 per trial

38. People double their offers, when they have double the money... • Value of pain changes by x2 within minutes!

39. 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

40. So prices don’t reveal, but are shaped by, prices “value” “price” • 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? “People know the price of everything, but the value of nothing”

41. The mind is flat! ...Consumer behaviour... ...Ethical theory... ...Market behaviour... Mental “depth” is an illusion

42. Next Ideas Cafe Thursday 14 June 5.30pm Chancellor’s Suite, Rootes Social Building Global Governance