Biomedical subjects

Daniel M Oppenheimer

Publications and source records attributed to Daniel M Oppenheimer.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Predicting short-term stock fluctuations by using processing fluency.

Three studies investigated the impact of the psychological principle of fluency (that people tend to prefer easily processed information) on short-term share price movements. In both a laboratory study and two analyses of naturalistic real-world stock market data, fluently named stocks robustly outperformed stocks with disfluent names in the short term. For example, in one study, an initial investment of 1,000 US dollars yielded a profit of 112 US dollars more after 1 day of trading for a basket of fluently named shares than for a basket of disfluently named shares. These results imply that simple, cognitive approaches to modeling human behavior sometimes outperform more typical, complex alternatives.

Behavior↗

PubMed2006

Different methods of presenting risk information and their influence on medication compliance intentions: results of three studies.

BACKGROUND: Pharmaceutical noncompliance is an increasingly important problem in the United States, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths and billions of wasted dollars each year. Patients' fear of adverse events (AEs) is one possible reason for lack of compliance. OBJECTIVES: The aims of the 3 studies described in this article were to investigate whether commonly used methods of conveying AE risk might influence subjects' perceptions of their risk of experiencing drug-related AEs and whether disclosing this information by other means might subsequently influence their intentions to comply with prescribed medication regimens. METHODS: In study 1, randomly selected participants were surveyed to estimate their percentage risk for medication AEs. In study 2, randomly selected participants were presented with a fictitious medical scenario, informed of their AE risk either in terms of specific percentages or in general semantic terms (eg, "some people may experience"), and then asked to rate their fear of AEs and likelihood of compliance. Study 3 was a randomized, controlled experiment in which we duplicated the methods of study 2, with the addition of real-life stimuli (pharmaceutical advertisements). RESULTS: In study 1, 40 subjects were surveyed. Participants overestimated their risk of AEs when information was disclosed semantically. In study 2, people were more fearful of experiencing AEs and less likely to intend to comply with prescribed medication regimens (both, P < 0.01) when presented with AE risk information in the form of semantic risk frames rather than actual risk percentages. In study 3, 120 subjects participated. Again, participants expressed stronger intent to comply with medication regimens when they received AE risk information as percentages rather than in semantic terms (P < 0.04). In addition, intended likelihood to comply was negatively correlated with fear of experiencing AEs (P < 0.01). CONCLUSIONS: In these studies, informing participants of actual percentage risk of AEs was associated with less fear about AEs and greater intent to comply with prescribed regimens. Using verbal descriptors to disclose AE risk information was associated with less intent to comply.

Adverse Drug Reaction Reporting Systems↗

PubMed2006

Speakers gaze at objects while preparing intentionally inaccurate labels for them.

When describing scenes, speakers gaze at objects while preparing their names (Z. M. Griffin & K. Bock, 2000). In this study, the authors investigated whether gazes to referents occurred in the absence of a correspondence between visual features and word meaning. Speakers gazed significantly longer at objects before intentionally labeling them inaccurately with the names of similar things (e.g., calling a horse a dog) than when labeling them accurately. This held for grammatical subjects and objects as well as agents and patients. Moreover, the time spent gazing at a referent before labeling it with a novel word or accurate name was similar and decreased as speakers gained experience using the novel word. These results suggest that visual attention in speaking may be directed toward referents in the absence of any association between their visual forms and the words used to talk about them.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2004

Spontaneous discounting of availability in frequency judgment tasks.

Discounting is a causal-reasoning phenomenon in which increasing confidence in the likelihood of a particular cause decreases confidence in the likelihood of all other causes. This article provides evidence that individuals apply discounting principles to making causal attributions about internal cognitive states. In particular, the three studies reported show that individuals will fail to use the availability heuristic in frequency estimations when salient causal explanations for availability exist. Experiment 1 shows that fame is used as a cue for discounting in estimates of surname frequency. Experiment 2 demonstrates that individuals discount the availability of their own last name. Experiment 3, which used individuals' initials in a letter-frequency estimation task, demonstrates that simple priming of alternative causal models leads to discounting of availability. Discounting of cognitive states can occur spontaneously, even when alternative causal models are never explicitly provided.

Adult↗

PubMed2003

Not so fast! (and not so frugal!): rethinking the recognition heuristic.

The 'fast and frugal' approach to reasoning (Gigerenzer, G., & Todd, P. M. (1999). Simple heuristics that make us smart. New York: Oxford University Press) claims that individuals use non-compensatory strategies in judgment--the idea that only one cue is taken into account in reasoning. The simplest and most important of these heuristics postulates that judgment sometimes relies solely on recognition. However, the studies that have investigated usage of the recognition heuristic have confounded recognition with other cues that could also lead to similar judgments. This paper tests whether mere recognition is actually driving the findings in support of the recognition heuristic. Two studies provide evidence that judgments do not conform to the recognition heuristic when these confounds are accounted for. Implications for the study of simple heuristics are discussed.

Adolescent↗