{"id":5669,"date":"2026-03-30T15:13:56","date_gmt":"2026-03-30T15:13:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.proefschriftmaken.nl\/portfolio\/anna-katharina-spalti\/"},"modified":"2026-03-30T15:14:01","modified_gmt":"2026-03-30T15:14:01","slug":"anna-katharina-spalti","status":"publish","type":"us_portfolio","link":"https:\/\/www.proefschriftmaken.nl\/en\/portfolio\/anna-katharina-spalti\/","title":{"rendered":"Anna Katharina Spalti"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":5670,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"us_portfolio_category":[45],"class_list":["post-5669","us_portfolio","type-us_portfolio","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","us_portfolio_category-new-template"],"acf":{"naam_van_het_proefschift":"How Decision-Making Processes Shape Both Our Choices and Our Reputations","samenvatting":"Samenvatting van hoofdstuk 2. Ik heb een query-theoriebenadering toegepast om het voordeel van de zittende macht (incumbency advantage), een status quo bias in politieke besluitvorming, te begrijpen, te voorspellen en te veranderen. Ik vond dat, in lijn met de uitgangspunten van de query-theorie, de volgorde waarin kiezers informatie uit hun geheugen ophalen voorspellend is voor hun voorkeur voor een politieke zittende machthebber. Kiezers zoeken eerst naar informatie ten gunste van de kandidaat die als zittend is gelabeld en pas later over hun tegenstander. Bovendien verandert het experimenteel wijzigen van de query-volgorde het voordeel van de zittende macht. In een laatste experiment vond ik dat het voordeel van de zittende macht volledig tenietgedaan en zelfs omgekeerd kan worden door een relevantere aanwijzing op te nemen, in dit geval de politieke ideologie.\n\nSamenvatting van hoofdstuk 3. Ik heb getest hoe processen van geheugenherstel een status quo bias vormen in een consumentenbesluitvormingscontext. Het endowment-effect is een sterk en robuust effect waarbij bezit wordt beschouwd als referentiepunt voor de status quo. In twee experimenten ontdekte ik dat deelnemers het meest geneigd waren om het geschonken product te kiezen wanneer dit in lijn was met hun sterk aanwezige eerdere voorkeur. In tegenstelling tot politieke ideologie overrulede eerdere voorkeuren het endowment-effect niet volledig, maar ze waren niet ineffectief. Het endowment-effect werd afgezwakt wanneer het geschonken product niet in lijn was met de eerdere voorkeuren.\n\nSamenvatting van hoofdstuk 4. Ik heb de effecten gemeten van het bewust maken van waarnemers van de beslistijd bij drie verschillende soorten afwegingen van heilige waarden: taboe-afwegingen, tragische afwegingen en seculiere afwegingen. In lijn met de persoonsgerichte benadering van morele besluitvorming, vond ik dat het toevoegen van de beslistijd karakterbeoordelingen vormgeeft, maar geen invloed heeft op hoe acceptabel de waarnemer de beslissing vond. Ik vond geen verschillen in het effect van beslistijd tussen tragische en seculiere afwegingen. Omgekeerd had de beslistijd wel invloed op de karakterbeoordelingen van besluitvormers in taboe-afwegingen. Dit suggereert dat beslistijd het nuttigst is in contexten waar het voor waarnemers duidelijk is welke optie de (moreel) 'juiste' keuze is.\n\nSamenvatting van hoofdstuk 5. Ik heb nader gekeken naar de effecten van het verstrekken van informatie over het besluitvormingsproces aan waarnemers in taboe-afwegingen. Ik veronderstelde dat de beslistijd minder effectief is in het verstrekken van informatie over intern conflict dan directere signalen zoals moeilijkheid, twijfel of inspanning. Ik vond geen steun voor deze hypothese voor beoordelingen van warmte en moraliteit; elk type informatie dat een hint gaf van intern conflict werd gebruikt. Voor competentiebeoordelingen vond ik een iets ander patroon, waarbij twijfel en moeilijkheid betere voorspellers waren dan beslistijd. Ik suggereer dat informatie over procesverwerking wordt gebruikt om cognitieve capaciteit te bepalen in het competentiedomein, waarvoor bepaalde soorten directe informatie informatiever zijn.","summary":"Discussion of Chapter 5. I took a closer look at the effects of providing decision processing information to observers in taboo trade-offs. The goal was to determine the impact of different types of decision processing information on character evaluations. Decision time, the decision process information I studied in Chapter 4, is believed to provide observers with a glimpse into the internal conflict, or lack thereof, that decision makers experience while making their decision. I hypothesized that decision time is less effective in providing information about this conflict than more direct cues of decision processing. Decision time can be unclear and ambiguous, and is generally used to make inferences about difficulty, doubt, or effort on the part of the decision maker. As such, giving participants this information directly (i.e., difficulty, doubt and effort) would be more effective at shaping character evaluations, than letting them infer this information from decision time.\n\nI did not find support for this hypothesis for warmth and morality evaluations. It seems that any type of information that provided even a hint of internal conflict was used when evaluating the decision maker\u2019s warmth and morality. For competence ratings, I found a slightly different pattern of results which partially supported the hypothesis. Doubt and, to some extent, difficulty were better predictors of competence ratings than decision time. I suggest that the same decision processing cue is interpreted differently depending on the task at hand, that is, determining warmth\/morality or competence traits. Rather than being used to determine internal conflict, decision processing information is used to determine cognitive capacity in the competence domain, for which certain types of decision processing are more informative than others.\n\nDiscussion of conflicting findings. One main difference between the findings reported in Chapters 4 and 5 is the amount of variance in character evaluations uniquely explained by decision process information. In Chapter 4, I voiced my concern that the unique effects of decision time only explain less than 1% of the variance in competence, warmth, and morality evaluations. Instead, choices seem to have driven character evaluations to a much larger extent. In the online supplemental materials for Chapter 5, I report the variance explained uniquely by the four different types of decision process information: time, difficulty, doubt, and effort. All four types of decision processing explained more than 1% of variance in character evaluations of warmth and morality (\u0394R2 = Range[0.01, 0.03]). Variance explained for competence evaluations fluctuated more, ranging from less than 1% for time and effort, and more than 3% for doubt. Overall, in our second experiment we find that decision processing information explains almost three times as much variance in our models than in Chapter 4.\n\nI believe that the reasons for this inconsistency is methodological in nature. The models predicting character evaluations in Chapter 4 included different types of sacred value trade-offs. I found that decision processing was only effective for taboo trade-offs. The ineffectiveness of decision time at shaping evaluations in tragic and secular trade-offs reduced the overall variance explained in the models. In Chapter 5, the experimental methodology focused only on taboo trade-offs, thus allowing me to capture the explained variance of decision processing without diluting it by including tragic and secular trade-offs. Overall, I believe that these findings do not contradict my conclusions from Chapter 4. Decision processing information can alter reputations, however, only to a small extent compared to the effects of choice.\n\nRelevant Cues Shape Memory Retrieval, Choices, and Character Evaluations\n\nTraditional, normative models of decision-making proposed that all information is available to decision makers and is incorporated into the decision-making process. However, soon the question arose as to whether all information is available to decision makers and, if so, if it is all incorporated into the decision-making process. Newer models were soon devised, which incorporated knowledge from cognitive psychology on how information is acquired, stored, and retrieved. This resulted in a paradigm shift in the decision-making sciences which now focus on decision-making models that incorporate cognitive processes (Oppenheimer & Kelso, 2015). Following this paradigm shift, I studied how choices are shaped by cognitive processes, specifically memory retrieval processes. My research shows that a common decision-making bias, the status quo bias (Samuelson & Zeckhauser, 1988), can be understood by the order in which people retrieve decision relevant information from memory (Johnson et al., 2007; Weber & Johnson, 2006). These findings are complimentary to heuristic decision-making accounts of biases (Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 1996).\n\nShah and Oppenheimer (2008) suggest that heuristic decision-making reduces cognitive effort during decision processing by 1) examining fewer cues, 2) reducing the difficulty associated with storing and retrieving cues, 3) simplifying the weighting of cues, 4) integrating less information, and 5) examining fewer choice alternatives. My findings support and expand on this heuristic explanation of two distinct instances of the status quo bias. In Chapters 3, I find that participants query information about the relevant cue of incumbency status earlier in the decision retrieval process than cues about the alternative. Due to output interference, later queries are inhibited, leading to an examination of a smaller subset of cues than available within the decision-making context. Additionally, most participants only listed between 1 and 6 queries, suggesting that they are using less information to make the decision than is available to them. Not only does this complement Shah and Oppenheimer (2008), but it is also in line with the definition of heuristics proposed by Gigerenzer and Gaissmaier (2011, p. 454): \u201cA heuristic is a strategy that ignores part of the information, with the goal of making decision more quickly, frugally, and\/or accurately than more complex models.\u201d\n\nIncluding different types of information (\u201ccues\u201d) into decision-making contexts affects preferences, choices, and evaluations. These cues come in many different forms: labeling a choice as a status quo, political ideology, endowment, previous preference, decision time, or more direct types of decision processing information; to name a few. Especially if these cues are relevant and strong, they have the potential to alter decisions because they draw attention away from other cues within the decision-making context. In other words, decision makers ignore or put less weight on previously salient cues (e.g. incumbency labeling) while attending to the new more relevant cue (e.g., political ideology) in order to make their decision quickly, frugally, and hopefully accurately.\n\nThe story becomes slightly more complex when you include different cues within the same status quo. Here, both cues are integrated into the decision-making process. Given the strong boosting effects of two cues pointing in the same direction (e.g., endowment of a smartphone in line with your brand loyalty), I suggest that heuristic decision-making becomes more prevalent in these situations. This can be seen when examining participants\u2019 query orders. In the compatible condition, query orders are strongly in favor of the endowed and preferred option. However, when inconsistency is introduced the decision becomes more complex, which is also apparent in query orders showing that people retrieve information about both options. Thus, it is likely that when there is no clear and strong cue in the decision-making process, people\u2019s decision-making style shifts away from simple heuristics rules of thumb and begins to attend to more cues.\n\nMy research also speaks to the versatility of decision processing. Not only can it predict and change choices, it can also act as a cue to others. When evaluating the character of another person, people need to sample, store, integrate, and retrieve information, thus making impression formation subject to the same \u201crules\u201d as other judgment and decision-making models. In other words, the observer needs to decide about the traits of the decision-maker. Although not directly tested in this dissertation, including cues of decision processing information shapes the memory retrieval processes underlying the observer\u2019s impression formation. For example, the strong cue of \u201cchoice\u201d may lead observers to first think about whether the decision maker made the moral or immoral choice. Next, they may think about how the decision maker went about making that choice; and so on. Indeed, thought listing has been shown to mediate changes in moral attitudes (Luttrell, Philipp-Muller, & Petty, 2019). To my knowledge, memory retrieval processes have not yet been used to understand moral character judgments. Nevertheless, it seems plausible that decision processing information is a strong enough cue to be included during impression formation, even when you are trying to be fast and frugal in your judgment of others.\n\nChanging Decisions: How to Best Alter Decision Processing?\n\nUsing memory retrieval processing as described by query theory (Johnson et al., 2007), I predict and explain people\u2019s choices. I also assess how decisions can be changed. In Chapter 2, I use two different methods to change choices in favor of the status quo: 1) Following previous research on query theory, I altered decisions by altering the order in which participants retrieved information from memory. By experimentally emphasizing the status quo option, we can increase the status quo bias. By experimentally reversing query order so that the alternative option is retrieved first, we can attenuate the status quo bias. 2) Including a more relevant cue into the decision context significantly changed query orders and choices. Including the strong and relevant cue of political ideology, resulted in even stronger boosting and attenuating effects than altering query order, with this new cue driving the effects. While both methods seem to be effective in changing choices to some extent, I recommend including new decision-relevant cues over altering query order.\n\nExperimentally altering query orders is possible, but not easy. In Chapter 2, I found that participants had trouble following instructions that went against their \u201cnatural\u201d memory retrieval processes. Many participants did not follow the instructions, instead reverting back to memory retrieval processes focusing on the status quo, even when explicitly told not to do so. Given the difficulty of altering decision processing in a controlled experimental environment, implementing this method in real-world contexts seems especially problematic. Altering your decision processing requires deliberative and focused attempts at thinking in a different, potentially unnatural, way. In other words, it requires effort, attention, and willingness on the part of the decision maker. Thus, I do not believe it will be useful when trying to target more automatic or habitual decision-making.\n\nIncluding different cues into the decision-making processes may prove more effective at altering decisions, which is also supported by my findings in Chapters 2 and 3. While this approach also alters query orders, it alters them by shifting","auteur":"Anna Katharina Spalti","auteur_slug":"anna-katharina-spalti","publicatiedatum":"20 maart 2020","taal":"EN","url_flipbook":"https:\/\/ebook.proefschriftmaken.nl\/ebook\/annakatharinaspalti?iframe=true","url_download_pdf":"https:\/\/ebook.proefschriftmaken.nl\/download\/ce3ebf8f-215e-403b-aa8e-57dfdba69d69\/optimized","url_epub":"","ordernummer":"FTP-202603301510","isbn":"978-94-6380-718-0","doi_nummer":"","naam_universiteit":"Tilburg University","afbeeldingen":5671,"naam_student:":"","binnenwerk":"","universiteit":"Tilburg University","cover":"","afwerking":"","cover_afwerking":"","design":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proefschriftmaken.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/us_portfolio\/5669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proefschriftmaken.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/us_portfolio"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proefschriftmaken.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/us_portfolio"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proefschriftmaken.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proefschriftmaken.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5669"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.proefschriftmaken.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/us_portfolio\/5669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5672,"href":"https:\/\/www.proefschriftmaken.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/us_portfolio\/5669\/revisions\/5672"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proefschriftmaken.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proefschriftmaken.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"us_portfolio_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proefschriftmaken.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/us_portfolio_category?post=5669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}