Judgments in the Sharing Economy: The Effect of User-Generated Trust and Reputation Information on Decision-Making Accuracy and Bias

The growing ecosystem of peer-to-peer enterprise – the Sharing Economy (SE) – has brought with it a substantial change in how we access and provide goods and services. Within the SE, individuals make decisions based mainly on user-generated trust and reputation information (TRI). Recent research indicates that the use of such information tends to produce a positivity bias in the perceived trustworthiness of fellow users. Across two experimental studies performed on an artificial SE accommodation platform, we test whether users’ judgments can be accurate when presented with diagnostic information relating to the quality of the profiles they see or if these overly positive perceptions persist. In study 1, we find that users are quite accurate overall (70%) at determining the quality of a profile, both when presented with full profiles or with profiles where they selected three TRI elements they considered useful for their decision-making. However, users tended to exhibit an “upward quality bias” when making errors. In study 2, we leveraged patterns of frequently vs. infrequently selected TRI elements to understand whether users have insights into which are more diagnostic and find that presenting frequently selected TRI elements improved users’ accuracy. Overall, our studies demonstrate that – positivity bias notwithstanding – users can be remarkably accurate in their online SE judgments.

Are You for Real? Perceptions of Authenticity are Not Accurate and Systematically Biased

Can people accurately perceive who is authentic? People believe they can tell who is authentic, and report that authenticity is an important attribute in others (N=369). However, when we directly tested the accuracy of perceived authenticity, we found that people were not accurate: there was no significant correlation between other- and self-rated authenticity in two cohorts of students in randomly-assigned teams (4,042 self-other observations). We found that perceived authenticity was biased in two ways: a) other-rated authenticity showed a positivity bias compared to self-ratings, and b) other-rated authenticity was biased by the rater’s own authenticity. In Study 3, we also investigated authenticity meta-perceptions; although people expect their authenticity to be accurately perceived by others, their meta-perceptions did not correlate with other-rated authenticity. That is, the beliefs about the visibility of one’s authenticity are similarly not accurate. Overall, we found no evidence that people can accurately identify who is authentic.

Preprint - Exposure to the Positivity Bias and Adolescents’ Differential Longitudinal Links with Inspiration and Envy Depending on Social Media Literacy

Social media literacy is assumed to protect adolescents from negative social media effects, yet research supporting this is lacking. The current three-wave panel study among N = 1,032 adolescents tests this moderating role of social media literacy. Specifically, we examine between- vs. within-person relations of exposure to the positivity bias, social comparison, envy, and inspiration. We find significant positive relations between these variables at the between-person level. At the within-person level, higher exposure to others’ perfect lives on social media was related to increased inspiration, and higher social comparison was related to increased envy. Finally, multiple group tests showed that the within-person cross-lagged relation between social comparison and envy only occurred for adolescents with low affective social media literacy.

Prospective Memory and Positivity Bias in the COVID-19 Health Crisis: The Effects of Aging

This study aimed to determine whether the observed tendency to remember more positive than negative past events (positivity phenomena) also appears when recalling hypothetical events about the future. In this study, young, middle-aged, and older adults were presented with 28 statements about the future associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, half positive and half negative. In addition, half of these statements were endowed with personal implications while the other half had a more social connotations. Participants rated their agreement/disagreement with each statement and, after a distraction task, they recalled as many statements as possible. There was no difference in the agreement ratings between the three age groups, but the participants agreed with positive statements more than with negative ones and they identified more with statements of social content than of personal content. The younger and older individuals recalled more statements than the middle-aged people. More importantly, older participants recalled more positive than negative statements (positivity effect), and showed a greater tendency to turn negative statements into more positive or neutral ones (positivity bias). These findings showed that the positivity effect occurs in even such complex and situations as the present pandemic, especially in older adults. The results are discussed by reference to the notion of commission errors and false memories resulting from the activation of cognitive biases.

Effects of posed smiling on memory for happy and sad facial expressions

The perception and storage of facial emotional expressions constitutes an important human skill that is essential for our daily social interactions. While previous research revealed that facial feedback can influence the perception of facial emotional expressions, it is unclear whether facial feedback also plays a role in memory processes of facial emotional expressions. In the present study we investigated the impact of facial feedback on the performance in emotional visual working memory (WM). For this purpose, 37 participants underwent a classical facial feedback manipulation (FFM) (holding a pen with the teeth—inducing a smiling expression vs. holding a pen with the non-dominant hand—as a control condition) while they performed a WM task on varying intensities of happy or sad facial expressions. Results show that the smiling manipulation improved memory performance selectively for happy faces, especially for highly ambiguous facial expressions. Furthermore, we found that in addition to an overall negative bias specifically for happy faces (i.e. happy faces are remembered as more negative than they initially were), FFM induced a positivity bias when memorizing emotional facial information (i.e. faces were remembered as being more positive than they actually were). Finally, our data demonstrate that men were affected more by FFM: during induced smiling men showed a larger positive bias than women did. These data demonstrate that facial feedback not only influences our perception but also systematically alters our memory of facial emotional expressions.

Tone variation in financial news: A comparison of companies, journalists and financial analysts

This article reports the findings of a comparative study of the financial news produced by companies, financial analysts, financial newspapers and news agencies about the same news events, including data before and after the financial crisis. We ground this study in second-level agenda-setting, according to which news producers select substantive and evaluative attributes for the issues they cover. Using computer-assisted text analysis, we conduct pairwise comparisons of the evaluative tone of corporate quarterly earnings press releases and the corresponding analyst reports and news stories. Our overall hypothesis is that these actors produce news about the same events with an evaluative tone that furthers their own goals as well as the goals of those actors they are dependent on, which we find partial support for. We find a positivity bias in corporate earnings press releases and analyst reports, while financial journalists eliminate the corporate positivity bias, but do not add more negativity. The results also indicate differences in the tone of financial news before and after the financial crisis. Although all actors produce news in the period after the financial crisis that is less positive and less negative than before the crisis, the balance of positive and negative tone as well as relative differences among the actors suggest that news writing by financial journalists at financial newspapers and news agencies is more negative in tone after the financial crisis, thus providing also empirical support of their independence.