Patrice Rusconi

We investigated whether organizational change and organizational power are antecedents of working self-and other-objectification by focusing on two facets: fungibility and instrumentality. In Study 1 (N = 118), office workers who had experienced an operational review, compared to no exposure, were found to have significantly higher perceptions of being objectified as instrumental by their organization. Further, less powerful employees had significantly higher perceptions of being objectified as fungible, that is, as interchangeable, versus managers and heads of departments. Workers' perception of being objectified as fungible, but not instrumental, predicted tendencies to self-objectify. Furthermore, this relationship was mediated by professional efficacy. In Study 2 (N = 160), we examined other-objectification. The results showed that instrumentality, rather than fungibility, primarily contributed to the objectification of a fictitious worker. These studies highlight the importance of taking a theoretical and methodological multidimensional approach to the study of workplace self-objectification and other-objectification.

Non-compliance with social and legal norms and regulations represents a high burden for society. Social cognition deficits are frequently called into question to explain criminal violence and rule violations in individuals diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder (APD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), and psychopathy. In this article, we proposed to consider the potential benefits of non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) to rehabilitate forensic population. We focused on the effects of NIBS of the prefrontal cortex, which is central in social cognition, in modulating aggression and impulsivity in clinical disorders, as well as in forensic population. We also addressed the effect of NIBS on empathy, and theory of mind in non-clinical and/or prison population. The reviewed data provide promising evidence on the beneficial effect of NIBS on aggression/impulsivity dyscontrol and social cognitive functions, suggesting its relevance in promoting reintegration of criminals into society.

Engaging in unhealthy behaviors (e.g., smoking, drinking) and not engaging in healthy ones (e.g., exercising, consuming fruit and vegetables) are both relatively prevalent among individuals despite the available information about their risks for health. People’s perception of an event’s time course can be used to gauge their risk perception for that event thus casting light on any possible misperception and suggesting directions for health-promoting interventions. This study investigates people’s perception of the time of onset of 5 noncommunicable diseases (e.g., “having high blood pressure”) associated with 4 health-related behaviors: Smoking, drinking, exercising, and eating fruit and vegetable. Participants from Italy (N = 214) and the UK (N = 151) gave onset time estimates of how long they thought it would take for 5 noncommunicable diseases to occur in the life of an 18-year-old person who starts or stops adopting those health-related behaviors. Results showed that participants who rated the noncommunicable diseases as more likely to themselves perceived the onset time of these diseases as more temporally proximal. Participants who were more afraid of developing the noncommunicable diseases estimated their onset time as delayed.

Being targets of an «objectifying gaze» increases women’s objectified body consciousness and self-objectification. Little is known about what can protect women from such effects. Here we investigated the role of perceived personal and interpersonal control. Study 1 examined the relations between personal and interpersonal control with self-objectification and the dimensions of the objectified body consciousness. Results showed that personal control was negatively correlated with body shame and positively with body control beliefs. Study 2 tested whether recalling a situation of perceived control would reduce the negative effects of experiencing an objectifying gaze. Results showed that being target of an objectifying gaze elicited higher self-objectification, body surveillance and body shame in women. These effects were not attenuated by recalling of being in control. Still, personal control was positively correlated with body control beliefs but negatively related with body surveillance. Altogether these preliminary findings suggest that the perception of personal control could protect women from engaging in negative self-evaluations and appearance-related behaviours. Future interventions could aim to strengthen the power women perceive to have and hence reduce the negative impact of sexual objectification.

A ctively thinking of one's future as an older individual could increase perceived risk and risk aversion. This could be particularly relevant for COVID-19, if we consider the common representation of the risk of being infected by COVID-19 as associated with being older. Increased perceived risk could bear consequences on the adoption of preventive behaviours. Thus, we investigated whether increasing the salience of individuals' future as an older adult would impact on their perceived risk for COVID-19 and medical conditions varying for age-relatedness. One hundred and forty-four Italian adults (M age = 27.72, range: 18-56) were randomly assigned to either a future as older adult thinking or control condition. Perceived risk for COVID-19 and other strongly, and weakly age-related medical conditions during the lifetime was measured. Results showed that thinking about the future as an older adult increased perceived risk for strongly and weakly age-related diseases, but not for COVID-19. The salience of the COVID-19 outbreak may have raised the perceived risks in both experimental conditions, making the manipulation ineffective. In conclusion, manipulating future-oriented thinking might be a successful communication strategy to increase people's perceived risk of common diseases, but it might not work for highly salient pathologies such as COVID-19.

Four studies analyzed how sexual orientation (heterosexual vs. gay) and age categories (young vs. elderly) referring to men are cognitively combined. In Study 1, young gay men were judged as more prototypical of gay men than adult or elderly gay men, while young, adult, and elderly heterosexual men were perceived as equally prototypical of heterosexual men. In Study 2, gay men were stereotyped more by young rather than elderly stereotypical traits, while heterosexual men were not stereotyped in terms of age. In Study 3, elderly men were stereotyped more by heterosexual than gay-stereotypical traits, while young men were not stereotyped in terms of sexual orientation. In Study 4, gay men were judged to be young rather than elderly, while elderly men were judged to be heterosexual rather than gay. Overall, elderly gay men were overlooked when processing their constituent categories, “gay” and “elderly” men. Implications for models of intersectionality are discussed.

Over the past few decades, two-factor models of social cognition have emerged as a dominant
framework for understanding impression development. These models suggest that two
dimensions – warmth and competence – are key in shaping our cognitive, emotional, and
behavioral reactions toward social targets. More recently, research has jettisoned the warmth
dimension, distinguishing instead between sociability (e.g., friendliness and likeability) and
morality (e.g., honesty and trustworthiness) and showing that morality is far more important than
sociability (and competence) in predicting the evaluations we make of individuals and groups.
Presenting research from our laboratories, we show that moral categories are central at all stages
of impression development, from implicit assumptions, to information gathering and to final
evaluations. Moreover, moral trait information has a dominant role in predicting people’s
behavioral reactions toward social targets. We also show that morality dominates impression
development, because it is closely linked to the essential judgment of whether another party’s
intentions are beneficial or harmful. Thus, our research informs a new framework for
understanding person and group perception: the Moral Primacy Model (MPM) of impression
development. We conclude by discussing how the MPM relates to classic and emerging models
of social cognition and by outlining a trajectory for future research.

Background: Despite the established evidence and theoretical advances explaining human judgments under uncertainty, developments of mobile health (mHealth) Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) have not explicitly applied the psychology of decision making to the study of user needs. We report on a user needs approach to develop a prototype of a mHealth CDSS for Parkinson's disease (PD), which is theoretically grounded in the psychological literature about expert decision making and judgement under uncertainty.

Morality, which refers to characteristics such as trustworthiness and honesty, has a primary role in social perception and judgment. A negativity effect characterizes the morality dimension, whereby negative information is weighed more than positive information in trait attribution and impression formation. This article reviews the literature on the negativity effect in trait attribution and impression formation. We examine the main boundary conditions of the negativity effect by considering relevant moderators such as behavior consistency and evaluative extremity, level of categorization, and measurement type as well as some theoretical and empirical inconsistencies in the literature. We also review recent studies showing that social perceivers hold negative assumptions about people’s morality. We outline future directions for research on the negativity effect that should consider trait extremity, use alternative measures to the perceived frequency of behaviors, introduce more precise definitions of relevant constructs such as diagnosticity, and test different schemata of trait-behavior relations.

The Attentional Blink (AB) is a temporary deficit for a second target (T2) when that target appears after a first target (T1). Although sophisticated models have been developed to explain the substantial AB literature in isolation, the current study considers how the AB relates to perceptual dynamics more broadly. We show that the time-course of the AB is closely related to the time course of the transition from positive to negative repetition priming effects in perceptual identification. Many AB tasks involve a switch between a T1 defined in one manner and a T2 defined in a different manner. Other AB tasks are non-switching, with all targets belonging to the same well-known category (e.g., letter targets versus number distractors) or sharing the same perceptual feature. We propose that these non-switching AB tasks reflect perceptual habituation for the target-defining attribute; thus, a ‘perceptual wink’, with perception of one attribute (target identity) undisturbed while perception of another (target detection) is impaired. On this account, the immediate benefit following T1 (lag-1 sparing) reflects positive repetition priming and the subsequent deficit (the blink) reflects negative repetition priming for the realization that a target occurred. In developing the perceptual wink model, we extended the nROUSE model of perceptual priming to explain the results of two new experiments combining the AB and identity repetitions. This establishes important connections between non-switching AB tasks and perceptual dynamics.

Trait inference in person perception is based on observers' implicit assumptions about the relations between trait adjectives (e.g., fair) and the either consistent or inconsistent behaviors (e.g., having double standards) that an actor can manifest. This article presents new empirical data and theoretical interpretations on people' behavioral expectations, that is, people's perceived trait-behavior relations along the morality (versus competence) dimension. We specifically address the issue of the moderate levels of both traits and behaviors almost neglected by prior research by using a measure of the perceived general frequency of behaviors. A preliminary study identifies a set of competence-and morality-related traits and a subset of traits balanced for valence. Studies 1–2 show that moral target persons are associated with greater behavioral flexibility than immoral ones where abstract categories of behaviors are concerned. For example, participants judge it more likely that a fair person would behave unfairly than an unfair person would behave fairly. Study 3 replicates the results of the first 2 studies using concrete categories of behaviors (e.g., telling the truth/ omitting some information). Study 4 shows that the positive asymmetry in morality-related trait-behavior relations holds for both North-American and European (i.e., Italian) individuals. A small-scale meta-analysis confirms the existence of a positive asymmetry in trait-behavior relations along both morality and competence dimensions for moderate levels of both traits and behaviors. We discuss these findings in relation to prior models and results on trait-behavior relations and we advance a motivational explanation based on self-protection.

Cherubini, P., Russo, S., Rusconi, PP, D'Addario, M., & Boccuti, I. (2009). Il ragionamento probabilistico nella diagnosi medica: sensibilità e insensibilità alle informazioni.. In P. Giaretta, A. Moretto, & GF Gensini (a cura di), Filosofia della medicina. Metodo, modelli, cura ed errori.. ...

Evidence evaluation is a crucial process in many human activities, spanning from medical diagnosis to impression formation. The present experiments investigated which, if any, normative model best conforms to people’s intuition about the value of the obtained evidence. Psychologists, epistemologists, and philosophers of science have proposed several models to account for people’s intuition about the utility of the obtained evidence with respect either to a focal hypothesis or to a constellation of hypotheses. We pitted against each other the so called optimal-experimental-design models (i.e., Bayesian diagnosticity, log10 diagnosticity, information gain, Kullback-Leibler distance, probability gain, and impact) and measures L and Z to compare their ability to describe humans’ intuition about the value of the obtained evidence. Participants received words-and-numbers scenarios concerning two hypotheses and binary features. They were asked to evaluate the utility of “yes” and “no” answers to questions about some features possessed in different proportions (i.e., the likelihoods) by two types of extraterrestrial creatures (corresponding to two mutually exclusive and exhaustive hypotheses). Participants evaluated either how an answer was helpful or how an answer decreased/increased their beliefs with respect either to a single hypothesis or to both hypotheses. We fitted mixed-effects models and we used the Akaike information criterion (AIC) and the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) values to compare the competing models of the value of the obtained evidence. Overall, the experiments showed that measure Z was the best-fitting model of participants’ judgments of the value of obtained answers. We discussed the implications for the human hypothesis-evaluation process.

When examining social targets, people may ask asymmetric questions, that is, questions for which “yes” and “no” answers are neither equally diagnostic nor equally frequent. The consequences of this information-gathering strategy on impression formation deserve empirical investigation. The present work explored the role played by the trade-off between the diagnosticity and frequency of answers that follow asymmetric questions. In Study 1, participants received answers to symmetric/asymmetric questions on an anonymous social target. In Study 2, participants read answers to a specific symmetric/asymmetric question provided by different group members. Overall, the results of both studies indicate that asymmetric questions had less impact on impressions than did symmetric questions, suggesting that individuals are more sensitive to data frequency than diagnosticity when forming impressions.

Two experiments examined how people perceive the diagnosticity of different answers (“yes” and “no”) to the same question. We manipulated whether the “yes” and the “no” answers conveyed the same amount of information or not, as well as the presentation format of the probabilities of the features inquired about. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with only the percentages of occurrence of the features, which most straightforwardly apply to the diagnosticity of “yes” answers. In Experiment 2, participants received in addition the percentages of the absence of features, which serve to assess the diagnosticity of “no” answers. Consistent with previous studies, we found that participants underestimated the difference in the diagnosticity conveyed by different answers to the same question. However, participants' insensitivity was greater when the normative (Bayesian) diagnosticity of the “no” answer was higher than that of the “yes” answer. We also found oversensitivity to answer diagnosticity, whereby participants valued as differentially diagnostic two answers that were normatively equal in terms of their diagnosticity. Presenting to participants the percentages of occurrence of the features inquired about together with their complements increased their sensitivity to the diagnosticity of answers. We discuss the implications of these findings for confirmation bias in hypothesis testing.

In two studies, we investigated how people use base rates and the presence versus
the absence of new information to judge which of two hypotheses is more likely.
Participants were given problems based on two decks of cards printed with 0–4 letters.
A table showed the relative frequencies of the letters on the cards within each deck.
Participants were told the letters that were printed on or absent from a card the
experimenter had drawn. Base rates were conveyed by telling participants that the
experimenter had chosen the deck by drawing from an urn containing, in different
proportions, tickets marked either ‘deck 1’ or ‘deck 2’. The task was to judge from which
of the two decks the card was most likely drawn. Prior probabilities and the evidential
strength of the subset of present clues (computed as ‘weight of evidence’) were the
only significant predictors of participants’ dichotomous (both studies) and continuous
(Study 2) judgments. The evidential strength of all clues was not a significant predictor
of participants’ judgments in either study, and no significant interactions emerged. We
discuss the results as evidence for additive integration of base rates and the new present
information in hypothesis testing.

Three studies using abstract materials tested possible moderators of the feature-positive effect in hypothesis evaluation whereby people use the presence of features more than their absence to judge which of 2 competing hypotheses is more likely. Drawing on a distinction made in visual perception research, we tested whether the feature-positive effect emerges both when using nonsubstitutive features, which can be removed without replacement by other features, and substitutive features, the absence of which implies the presence of other features (e.g., the colour red, the absence of which entails the presence of another colour). Furthermore, we tested whether presenting to participants both the clue occurrence probabilities (which are needed to consider clue presence) and their complements (which are needed to gauge the impact of the absent clues) decreased the feature-positive effect. The results showed that regardless of the type of feature (i.e., nonsubstitutive vs. substitutive), participants provided more responses consistent with an evaluation of the subset of present clues compared to all other kinds of responses. However, the use of substitutive features combined with an explicit presentation format of probabilistic information had a debiasing effect. Furthermore, the use of substitutive features negated participant sensitivity to the rarity of clues, whereby the feature-positive effect decreased when there was one absent clue and two present clues for problems in which the exclusive consideration of the presence of features did not suggest the correct response.

In three studies, we investigated whether and to what extent the evaluation of two mutually exclusive hypotheses is affected by a feature-positive effect, wherein present clues are weighted more than absent clues. Participants (N = 126) were presented with abstract problems concerning the most likely provenance of a card that was drawn from one of two decks. We factored the correct response (the hypothesis favored by the consideration of all clues) and the ratio of present-to-absent features in each set of observations. Furthermore, across the studies, we manipulated the presentation format of the features’ probabilities by providing the probability distributions of occurrences (Study 1), non-occurrences (Study 3) or both (Study 2). In all studies, both participant preference and accuracy were mostly determined by an over-reliance on present features. Moreover, across participants, both confidence in the responses and the informativeness of the present clues correlated positively with the number of responses given in line with an exclusive consideration of present features. These results were mostly independent of both the rarity of the absent clues and the presentation format. We concluded that the feature-positive effect influences hypothesis evaluation, and we discussed the implications for confirmation bias.

This article examines individuals’ expectations in a social hypothesis testing task. Participants selected questions from a list to investigate the presence of personality traits in a target individual. They also identified the responses that they expected to receive and the likelihood of the expected responses. The results of two studies indicated that when people asked questions inquiring about the hypothesized traits that did not entail strong a priori beliefs, they expected to find evidence confirming the hypothesis under investigation. These confirming expectations were more pronounced for symmetric questions, in which the diagnosticity and frequency of the expected evidence did not conflict. When the search for information was asymmetric, confirming expectations were diminished, likely as a consequence of either the rareness or low diagnosticity of the hypothesis-confirming outcome. We also discuss the implications of these findings for confirmation bias.

Three experiments examined how people gather information on in-group and outgroup members. Previous studies have revealed that category-based expectancies bias
the hypothesis-testing process towards confirmation through the use of asymmetricconfirming questions (which are queries where the replies supporting the prior
expectancies are more informative than those falsifying them). However, to date there is
no empirical investigation of the use of such a question-asking strategy in an intergroup
context. In the present studies, participants were asked to produce (Study 1) or to
choose (Studies 2 and 3) questions in order to investigate the presence of various traits
in an in-group or an out-group member. Traits were manipulated by valence and typicality.
The results revealed that category-based expectancies do not always lead to asymmetricconfirming testing: whereas participants tended to ask questions that confirmed positive
in-group and negative out-group stereotypical attributes, they used a more symmetric
strategy when testing for the presence of negative in-group or positive out-group traits.
Moreover, Study 3 also revealed a moderation effect of in-group identification. The
findings point to the role played by motivational factors associated with preserving a
positive social identity. Possible consequences of these hypothesis-testing processes in
preserving a positive social identity for intergroup relations are discussed.

Research has shown that warmth and competence are core dimensions on which
perceivers judge others and that warmth has a primary role at various phases of
impression formation. Three studies explored whether the two components of warmth
(i.e., sociability and morality) have distinct roles in predicting the global impression
of social groups. In Study 1 (N = 105) and Study 2 (N = 112), participants read an
immigration scenario depicting an unfamiliar social group in terms of high (vs. low)
morality, sociability, and competence. In both studies, participants were asked to report
their global impression of the group. Results showed that global evaluations were
better predicted by morality than by sociability or competence-trait ascriptions. Study 3
(N = 86) further showed that the effect of moral traits on group global evaluations
was mediated by the perception of threat. The importance of these findings for the
impression-formation process is discussed.

Context
Research on decision making suggests that a wide range of spontaneous processes may influence medical judgment.

Objectives
We considered an easily accessible strategy, anchoring and insufficient adjustment, which might contribute to health care professionals’ miscalibration of patients’ pain.

Methods
A sample (n = 423) of physicians, nurses, medical students, and nursing students participated in a computerized task that showed 16 vignettes featuring fictitious patients reporting headache. In the experimental condition, participants were asked to evaluate the severity of the patient’s pain before and after knowing the patient’s rating. In the control condition, participants were shown all information about the patient at the same time and were required to make judgments in a single stage.

Results
When participants could express an initial impression before knowing the patient’s rating, they fully anchored to their initial impressions in almost half of the responses. Moreover, even among those who revised their initial impression, the extent of the revision was often insufficient. Greater anchoring was associated with patients’ ratings that were higher than the participants’ initial impression. Finally, we provided evidence that anchoring increased pain miscalibration. We discuss our findings in terms of their contribution to the understanding of the cognitive processes involved in pain assessment.

Conclusion
When estimating patients’ pain intensity, observers are driven by anchoring, a rule of thumb that might have pernicious consequences in terms of unwarranted overreliance on initial impressions and insufficient revision in light of relevant disconfirming evidence. Taking this heuristic into account might foster accurate pain assessment and treatment.

Previous studies on hypothesis-testing behaviour have reported systematic preferences for posing positive questions (i.e., inquiries about features that are consistent with the truth of the hypothesis) and different types of asymmetric questions (i.e., questions where the hypothesis confirming and the hypothesis disconfirming responses have different evidential strength). Both tendencies can contribute – in some circumstances – to confirmation biases (i.e., the improper acceptance or maintenance of an incorrect hypothesis). The empirical support for asymmetric testing is, however, scarce and partly contradictory, and the relative strength of positive testing and asymmetric testing has not been empirically compared. In four studies where subjects were asked to select (Experiment 1) or evaluate (Experiments 2–4) questions for controlling an abstract hypothesis, we orthogonally balanced the positivity/negativity of questions by their symmetry/asymmetry (Experiments 1–3), or by the type of asymmetry (confirmatory vs disconfirmatory; Experiment 4). In all Experiments participants strongly preferred positive to negative questions. Their choices were on the other hand mostly unaffected by symmetry and asymmetry in general, or – more specifically – by different types of asymmetry. Other results indicated that participants were sensitive to the diagnosticity of the questions (Experiments 1–3), and that they preferred testing features with a high probability under the focal hypothesis (Experiment 4). In the discussion we argue that recourse to asymmetric testing – observed in some previous studies using more contextualized problems – probably depends on context-related motivations and prior knowledge. In abstract tasks, where that knowledge is not available, more simple strategies – such as positive testing – are prevalent.

Research on the two fundamental dimensions of social judgment, namely warmth and competence, has shown that warmth has a primary and a dominant role in information gathering about others. In two studies we examined whether the sociability and morality components of warmth play distinct roles in such a process. Study 1 (N = 60) investigated which traits were mostly selected when forming impressions about others. The results showed that, regardless of the task goal, traits related to morality and sociability were differently processed. Furthermore, participants were more interested in obtaining information about morality than about sociability when asked to form a global impression about others. Study 2 (N = 98) explored the adoption of asymmetric/symmetric strategies when asking questions to make inferences on others. As predicted, participants adopted an asymmetrically disconfirming strategy on morality traits, while they looked for more symmetrical evidence on sociability or competence traits. Overall, our findings indicated a distinct and a dominant role of the moral component of warmth in the information-gathering process.

This article presents two experiments aiming to investigate the adoption of a graduated measure to describe credibility attribution by observers who evaluate patients' pain accounts. A total of 160 medical students were required to express a credibility judgment on the pain intensity level of hypothetical patients. We used 16 vignettes based on a factorial mixed-design. Within-participants factors were the reported pain, the presence of a physical sign, the patient's facial expression and the patient's gender, and between-groups factors were the patient's age and the geographical distribution of the patient's name. Results confirm the well-established tendency not to believe patients' self-reports and provide information regarding the evaluators' uncertainty. The findings suggest that a graduated measure is useful for assessing the degree of uncertainty of the observers and subtle effects of different factors upon the judgment of patient's pain.

Two experiments investigated whether dealing with a homogeneous subset of syllogisms with time-constrained responses encouraged participants to develop and use heuristics for abstract (Experiment 1) and thematic (Experiment 2) syllogisms. An atmosphere-based heuristic accounted for most responses with both abstract and thematic syllogisms. With thematic syllogisms, a weaker effect of a belief heuristic was also observed, mainly where the correct response was inconsistent with the atmosphere of the premises. Analytic processes appear to have played little role in the time-constrained condition, whereas their involvement increased in a self-paced, unconstrained condition. From a dual-process perspective, the results further specify how task demands affect the recruitment of heuristic and analytic systems of reasoning. Because the syllogisms and experimental procedure were the same as those used in a previous neuroimaging study by Goel, Buchel, Frith, and Dolan (2000), the result also deepen our understanding of the cognitive processes investigated by that study.