A rose by any other name: A social-cognitive perspective on poets and poetry
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2012, Vol 7, Issue 2
Abstract
Evidence, anecdotal and scientific, suggests that people treat (or are affected by) products of prestigious sources differently than those of less prestigious, or of anonymous, sources. The “products” which are the focus of the present study are poems, and the “sources” are the poets. We explore the manner in which the poet’s name affects the experience of reading a poem. Study 1 establishes the effect we wish to address: a poet’s reputation enhances the evaluation of a poem. Study 2 asks whether it is only the reported evaluation of the poem that is enhanced by the poet’s name (as was the case for The Emperor’s New Clothes) or the enhancement is genuine and unaware. Finding for the latter, Study 3 explores whether the poet’s name changes the reader’s experience of it, so that in a sense one is reading a “different” poem. We conclude that it is not so much that the attributed poem really differs from the unattributed poem, as that it is just ineffably better. The name of a highly regarded poet seems to prime quality, and the poem becomes somehow better. This is a more subtle bias than the deliberate one rejected in Study 2, but it is a bias nonetheless. Ethical implications of this kind of effect are discussed.
Authors and Affiliations
Maya Bar-Hillel, Alon Maharshak, Avital Moshinsky and Ruth Nofech
Counterfactual thinking and regulatory fit
According to regulatory fit theory (Higgins, 2000), when people make decisions with strategies that sustain their regulatory focus orientation, they ``feel right'' about what they are doing, and this ``feeling-right'' ex...
A new test of the risk-reward heuristic
Risk and reward are negatively correlated in a wide variety of environments, and in many cases this trade off approximates a fair bet. Pleskac and Hertwig (2014) recently proposed that people have internalized this relat...
Prosociality in the economic Dictator Game is associated with less parochialism and greater willingness to vote for intergroup compromise
Is prosociality parochial or universalist? To shed light on this issue, we examine the relationship between the amount of money given to a stranger (giving in an incentivized Dictator Game) and intergroup attitudes and b...
The effectiveness of imperfect weighting in advice taking
We investigate decision-making in the Judge-Advisor-System where one person, the “judge”, wants to estimate the number of a certain entity and is given advice by another person. The question is how to combine the judge’s...
The Decision Making Individual Differences Inventory and guidelines for the study of individual differences in judgment and decision-making research
Individual differences in decision making are a topic of longstanding interest, but often yield inconsistent and contradictory results. After providing an overview of individual difference measures that have commonly bee...