Three Essays in Judgment and Decision Making Highlighting the Importance of the Question, “What Is the Right Control or Null Hypothesis?”
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Management
First Advisor
Zauberman, Gal
Abstract
Empirical researchers usually must ask themselves, “What is the right control? What is the null hypothesis to disprove?” The importance of thinking deeply about these questions is highlighted in this dissertation, in which I investigate various research questions in the field of judgment and decision making.In Essay 1, my co-authors and I develop and validate the spiritual contagion scale, a measure of people’s beliefs in the transfer of metaphysical entities from a source to a target. Researchers studying contagion have often distinguished between physical contagion (the perceived transfer of physical entities, such as germs or pathogens) and spiritual contagion (the perceived transfer of metaphysical entities, such as essence and moral characteristics). While sensitivity to physical contagion is a component of several existing scales, there has not been an established scale that measures sensitivity to spiritual contagion. We thus introduce a measure of Spiritual Contagion Sensitivity (SCS), which considers positive, negative, and neutral aspects of spiritual contagion. We demonstrate the scale’s discriminant validity from existing measures of physical contagion sensitivity, such as Perceived Vulnerability to Disease and Disgust Sensitivity. Moreover, we demonstrate the scale’s construct validity by showing the correlation between SCS and a variety of spiritual contagion phenomena. Lastly, we demonstrate the scale’s predictive utility by showing significant moderation of spiritual contagion effects in the literature. In Essay 2, we examine how individuals judge distributional outcomes to reflect “bias” in decisions, such as hiring and admissions. Often, such judgments of bias (e.g., “Company / Organization / Group X is biased against Y”) are based on an observed imbalance in a distributional outcome, namely the under- or over-representation of a target group relative to some baseline (e.g., the population base rate). Across 26 studies (N = 17,011), we find that judgments of bias depend on both the target’s characteristics (whether the target of bias is or is not traditionally dominant, known, or ideologically relevant) and the observer’s political ideology (liberal vs. conservative). Specifically, when traditionally nondominant targets (e.g., women, Blacks, immigrants) face unfavorable distributional outcomes, conservatives have a higher threshold for judgment of bias than liberals (i.e., require greater imbalances against the target before recognizing “bias”). In contrast, when traditionally dominant targets (e.g., men, Whites, native-born citizens) face unfavorable distributional outcomes, now liberals have a higher threshold for judgment of bias than conservatives. Such relationships between political ideology and judgments of bias significantly weaken for unknown targets (e.g., “Type Js”) or ideologically irrelevant targets (e.g., animals). Our results suggest that judgments of bias themselves are context-dependent and may be biased—as the judgments are sensitive to the target’s characteristics, the observer’s political ideology, and their interaction. Importantly, determining who is more biased (e.g., liberals or conservatives) depends on the standard of comparison. In Essay 3, we examine the impact of superhuman artificial intelligence (AI) on human decision making in Go and investigate one possible mechanism behind the impact. Specifically, we use a superhuman AI program on a data set containing more than 5.8 million moves to estimate the quality and novelty of decisions made by professional Go players over the past 71 years (1950-2021). We find that humans began to make significantly better decisions following the advent of superhuman AI. Moreover, we find that novel decisions (i.e., previously unobserved moves) occurred more frequently and became associated with higher decision quality after the advent of superhuman AI. Our findings suggest that the development of superhuman AI programs may have prompted human players to break away from traditional strategies and induced them to explore novel moves, which in turn may have improved their decision-making. Together, these three essays illustrate the importance of carefully contemplating the aforementioned question: “What is the right control / null hypothesis?” In Essay 1, we develop our spiritual contagion scale, demonstrating that its validity and utility are greater than those of the “control”—the scales used in the existing literature. In Essay 2, we demonstrate that the same results can produce different—even opposite—conclusions depending on how we define the “control,” or the standard used to determine the extent of bias (in judgments of bias). In Essay 3, not only do we show the increases in decision quality and novelty following the advent of superhuman AI in go, but also, we document their impressive magnitude relative to the “control,” or the trends of decision quality and novelty in the 65 years preceding the exogenous AI shock. In short, the three essays in this dissertation provide a compelling demonstration of why empirical researchers must think long and hard about the question “What is the right control or null hypothesis?”
Recommended Citation
Kim, Jin, "Three Essays in Judgment and Decision Making Highlighting the Importance of the Question, “What Is the Right Control or Null Hypothesis?”" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1007.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1007
