Robyn M Dawes
Biographic Data
| ID | 366068 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robyn M Dawes |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robyn M |
| FAMILY NAME | Dawes |
| SIGNATURE | DAWES R M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Carnegie Mellon University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 59 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 886 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 59 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1961 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Everyday Irrationality: How Pseudo-Scientists, Lunatics, and the Rest of Us Systematically Fail to Think Rationally
Probabilistic Thinking
Preferences for change: Do individuals prefer voluntary actions, soft regulations, or hard regulations to decrease fossil fuel consumption
What you don’t know won’t hurt me: Costly (but quiet) exit in dictator games
Comparing holistic and disaggregated ratings in the evaluation of scientific presentations
The National Institutes of Health refused to switch to disaggregated ratings as a method for evaluating proposals, because no contest between disaggregated and holistic ratings had ever used scientific materials as the to‐be‐rated stimuli. We designed two studies to fill this research void. Participants rated scientific convention presentations either using a holistic procedure in which one overall rating was given or a disaggregated procedure in…
Clinical and statistical prediction after 50 years: A dedication to Paul Meehl
The Ethics of Using or Not Using Statistical Prediction Rules in Psychological Practice and Related Consulting Activities
Professionals often believe that they must “exercise judgment” in making decisions critical to other people's lives. The relative superiority (established in roughly 150 studies) of statistical prediction rules (SPR's) to intuitive judgment for combining incomparable sources of information to predict important human outcomes leads us to question this personal input belief. Some professionals hence use SPR's to “educate” intuitive judgment, rather…
Swift Neighbors and Persistent Strangers: A Cross-Cultural Investigation of Trust and Reciprocity in Social Exchange
In four countries, levels of trust and reciprocity in direct-reciprocal exchange are compared with those in network-generalized exchanges among experimentally manipulated groups’ members (neighbors) or random experimental participants (strangers). Results show that cooperation decreases as social distance increases; and, that identical network-generalized exchanges generate different amounts of trusting behavior due solely to manipulated social i…
Psychological Science Can Improve Diagnostic Decisions
John A. Swets, Robyn M. Dawes, and John Monahan BBN Technologies (emeritus), Cambridge, Massachusetts; Radiology Department, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and School of Law, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia
A Theory Of Irrationality As A ‘Reasonable’ Response To An Incomplete Specification
Teen Expectations for Significant Life Events
Journal Article Teen Expectations for Significant Life Events Get access BARUCH FISCHHOFF, BARUCH FISCHHOFF Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar ANDREW M. PARKER, ANDREW M. PARKER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar WÄNDI BRUINE DE BRUIN, WÄNDI BRUINE DE BRUIN Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar JULIE DOWNS, JULIE DOWNS Search for other w…
The Nature of Human Nature: An Empirical Case for Withholding Judgment: Perhaps Indefinitely
Claims to understanding the nature of human nature must be evaluated empirically. Specifically, understanding implies and ability to predict (although not vice versa), an ability greater than the benchmark ability based on characteristics and categorizations naively used in social prediction - such as age, gender, social and educational status, medical and legal history, and so on. Moreover, an understanding of human nature implies a predictive a…
Social Welfare, Cooperators' Advantage, and the Option of Not Playing the Game
The AA. outline a model of how freedom to choose between playing and not playing particular Pisoner's dilemma games can (1) increase social welfare and (2) provide relative gains to intending cooperators. When cooperators are relatively more willing to play, they will interact more frequently with each other and their pay off per encounter will be higher - potentially higher than that of intending defectors. The AA. speculate about the cognitive …
The Importance of Alternative Hypotheses--and Hypothetical Counterfactuals in General--in Social Science: (413022005-002)
Religion, Context, and Constraint toward Strangers
Although it is widely believed that religion can constrain egoistic behavior, this has not been tested with behavioral data. This article provides such a test, using prisoner's dilemma data collected in Logan, Utah, and in Eugene-Springfield, Oregon-contexts that differ sharply in both the incidence of religious affiliation and the extent to which one religious group dominates that context. There were three major findings: a widespread belief, sh…
Hypothetical studies and civil liberties
Hypothetical studies and civil liberties
What Should Rational Cognitive Misers Do
In the June 1991 issue of this Review John Orbell and Robyn Dawes have argued that prisoner's dilemma games are shaped, in part, by "cognitive misers"-players who assume other players are like themselves. In such games, this results in more play and in a higher expected payoff by cooperators than by defectors, lain McLean agrees with the conclusions of Orbell and Dawes but takes issue with their reasons and their model. In turn, Orbell and Dawes …
A "Cognitive Miser" Theory of Cooperators Advantage
We propose a new model of cooperators' advantage depending neither on supplementary incentives nor on cooperators' capacity to recognize, and play selectively with, other cooperators. It depends, rather, on players' making the play-no play decision by the heuristic of projecting their own "cooperate-defect" choices onto potential partners. Cooperators offer to play more often, and fellow cooperators will more often accept their offer. When certai…
Selfishness examined: Cooperation in the absence of egoistic incentives
Social dilemmas occur when the pursuit of self-interest by individuals in a group leads to less than optimal collective outcomes for everyone in the group. A critical assumption in the human sciences is that people's choices in such dilemmas are individualistic, selfish, and rational. Hence, cooperation in the support of group welfare will only occur if there are selfish incentives that convert the social dilemma into a nondilemma. In recent year…
Clinical Versus Actuarial Judgment
Professionals are frequently consulted to diagnose and predict human behavior; optimal treatment and planning often hinge on the consultant's judgmental accuracy. The consultant may rely on one of two contrasting approaches to decision-making—the clinical and actuarial methods. Research comparing these two approaches shows the actuarial method to be superior. Factors underlying the greater accuracy of actuarial methods, sources of resistance to t…
Statistical criteria for establishing a truly false consensus effect
Clyde Hamilton Coombs (1912–1988)
Not me or thee but we: The importance of group identity in eliciting cooperation in dilemma situations: Experimental manipulations
Are people who cooperate ‘rational altruists’
The robust beauty of improper linear models in decision making
Proper linear models are those in which predictor variables are given weights in such a way that the resulting linear composite optimally predicts some criterion of interest; examples of proper linear models are standard regression analysis, discriminant function analysis, and ridge regression analysis. Research summarized in Paul Meehl's book on clinical versus statistical prediction—and a plethora of research stimulated in part by that book—all…
Behavior, communication, and assumptions about other people's behavior in a commons dilemma situation
Two experiments investigated effects of communication on behavior in an 8-person commons dilemma of group versus individual gain. Subjects made a single choice involving a substantial amount of money (possible outcomes ranging from nothing to $10.50). In Experiment 1, 4 communication conditions were crossed with the possibility of losing money (loss, no loss). Subjects chose defecting or cooperating responses and predicted responses of other grou…
The Minimal Contributing Set as a Solution to Public Goods Problems
This article reports small group experiments in which subjects may choose to contribute a fixed amount of money toward a monetary public good, and in which the good itself is supplied only if a specified number of contributions (or more) are made. Given the opportunity to communicate, our subjects organized themselves by specifying precisely the number of required contributors and who they would be. This organization, which we call designation of…
Explaining discussion-induced cooperation
Social Welfare, Cooperators' Advantage, and the Option of Not Playing the Game
The AA. outline a model of how freedom to choose between playing and not playing particular Pisoner's dilemma games can (1) increase social welfare and (2) provide relative gains to intending cooperators. When cooperators are relatively more willing to play, they will interact more frequently with each other and their pay off per encounter will be higher - potentially higher than that of intending defectors. The AA. speculate about the cognitive …
A "Cognitive Miser" Theory of Cooperators Advantage
We propose a new model of cooperators' advantage depending neither on supplementary incentives nor on cooperators' capacity to recognize, and play selectively with, other cooperators. It depends, rather, on players' making the play-no play decision by the heuristic of projecting their own "cooperate-defect" choices onto potential partners. Cooperators offer to play more often, and fellow cooperators will more often accept their offer. When certai…
Swift Neighbors and Persistent Strangers: A Cross-Cultural Investigation of Trust and Reciprocity in Social Exchange
In four countries, levels of trust and reciprocity in direct-reciprocal exchange are compared with those in network-generalized exchanges among experimentally manipulated groups’ members (neighbors) or random experimental participants (strangers). Results show that cooperation decreases as social distance increases; and, that identical network-generalized exchanges generate different amounts of trusting behavior due solely to manipulated social i…
Linear models in decision making
Anomalies: Cooperation
Much economic analysis -- and virtually all game theory -- starts with the assumption that people are both rational and selfish. The predictions derived from this assumption of rational selfishness are, however, violated in many familiar contexts. In this column and the next one, the evidence from laboratory experiments is examined to see what has been learned about when and why humans cooperate. This column considers the particularly important c…
Statistical criteria for establishing a truly false consensus effect
A case study of graduate admissions: Application of three principles of human decision making
Teen Expectations for Significant Life Events
Journal Article Teen Expectations for Significant Life Events Get access BARUCH FISCHHOFF, BARUCH FISCHHOFF Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar ANDREW M. PARKER, ANDREW M. PARKER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar WÄNDI BRUINE DE BRUIN, WÄNDI BRUINE DE BRUIN Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar JULIE DOWNS, JULIE DOWNS Search for other w…
The evaluation of complex social stimuli
Organizing Groups for Collective Action
How can the beneficiaries of collective action be persuaded to contribute the resources (time, energy, money) necessary for the effort to succeed? Rational and selfish players will recognize they can free ride on the successful contributions of others. If the effort is not successful, they will lose a contribution-and be "suckered." Other than relying on altruism, organizers of the group effort can modify incentives so that players are more prepa…
Sex bias, diagnosis, and DSM-III
An experimental analysis of the contrast effect and its implications for intergroup communication and the indirect assessment of attitude
Experiments I and II were designed to differentiate between alternative interpretations of the contrast effect. Experiment I examines and rejects the hypothesis that the effect is specific to rating scales, since the effect also occurs when subjects are asked to make CDmparative judgments. Experiment II leads to the rejection of the hypothesis that the effect is purely semantic (i.e., specific to situations in which verbal labels are applied to a…
Religion, Context, and Constraint toward Strangers
Although it is widely believed that religion can constrain egoistic behavior, this has not been tested with behavioral data. This article provides such a test, using prisoner's dilemma data collected in Logan, Utah, and in Eugene-Springfield, Oregon-contexts that differ sharply in both the incidence of religious affiliation and the extent to which one religious group dominates that context. There were three major findings: a widespread belief, sh…
The Decision to Pollute
One way of studying the pollution problem is to examine the decision making process in situations in which gain accrues directly to an individual, while loss is spread out across the group of which the individual is a member. Such a situation has been termed a commons dilemma by Lloyd in 1833; it is a variant of the well known prisoner's dilemma. The mathematical model of rational decision making when facing the commons dilemma implies the dismal…
Preferences for change: Do individuals prefer voluntary actions, soft regulations, or hard regulations to decrease fossil fuel consumption
Comparing holistic and disaggregated ratings in the evaluation of scientific presentations
The National Institutes of Health refused to switch to disaggregated ratings as a method for evaluating proposals, because no contest between disaggregated and holistic ratings had ever used scientific materials as the to‐be‐rated stimuli. We designed two studies to fill this research void. Participants rated scientific convention presentations either using a holistic procedure in which one overall rating was given or a disaggregated procedure in…
What Should Rational Cognitive Misers Do
In the June 1991 issue of this Review John Orbell and Robyn Dawes have argued that prisoner's dilemma games are shaped, in part, by "cognitive misers"-players who assume other players are like themselves. In such games, this results in more play and in a higher expected payoff by cooperators than by defectors, lain McLean agrees with the conclusions of Orbell and Dawes but takes issue with their reasons and their model. In turn, Orbell and Dawes …
Effect of judges' attitudes on judgment
The Nature of Human Nature: An Empirical Case for Withholding Judgment: Perhaps Indefinitely
Claims to understanding the nature of human nature must be evaluated empirically. Specifically, understanding implies and ability to predict (although not vice versa), an ability greater than the benchmark ability based on characteristics and categorizations naively used in social prediction - such as age, gender, social and educational status, medical and legal history, and so on. Moreover, an understanding of human nature implies a predictive a…
Clinical and statistical prediction after 50 years: A dedication to Paul Meehl
The Ethics of Using or Not Using Statistical Prediction Rules in Psychological Practice and Related Consulting Activities
Professionals often believe that they must “exercise judgment” in making decisions critical to other people's lives. The relative superiority (established in roughly 150 studies) of statistical prediction rules (SPR's) to intuitive judgment for combining incomparable sources of information to predict important human outcomes leads us to question this personal input belief. Some professionals hence use SPR's to “educate” intuitive judgment, rather…
Cloze Score as a Function of Attitude
Effect of judges' attitudes on judgment
Mixed group validation: A method for determining the validity of diagnostic signs without using criterion groups
Les accelerateurs de protons de forte intensite posent des problemes specifiques lies a la necessite de limiter les pertes de faisceau. Le probleme est plus aigu dans la partie basse energie (20 MeV et moins) ou le transport du faisceau est le plus difficile. L'accelerateur lineaire a tubes de glissement (DTL) reste la structure de reference pour des energies de quelques MeV a quelques dizaines de MeV, malgre l'apparition de nouveaux types de cav…
The evaluation of complex social stimuli
Development of Response Equivalence among Dissimilar Verbal Units
Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that response generalization could be induced among unrelated nonsense syllables if, prior to the test for generalization, these responses had typically produced similar outcomes (in terms of reinforcement vs no reinforcement) from one stimulus situation to the next. In Exp. I, Ss first learned to associate two nonsense-syllable responses with a common set of four one-digit stimuli; a second p…
"Interaction effects" in the presence of asymmetrical transfer
In defense of rigorous evaluation
Composition of Council: Some counterindicatory data
Composition of Council: Some counterindicatory data
A case study of graduate admissions: Application of three principles of human decision making
Grass Roots Enthusiasm and the Primary Vote
HE DETERMINANTS of primary election outcomes constitute a surprising lacuna in the voting literature. It is surprising because of the important part primary elections play in deciding who will govern the country, and also because of the relative sophistication of theory about the determinants of partisan election outcomes. Formal models have been developed about partisan elections and a great deal of data has been amassed elaborating on them. Pri…
Grass Roots Enthusiasm and the Primary Vote
"In defense of "bootstrapping
An experimental analysis of the contrast effect and its implications for intergroup communication and the indirect assessment of attitude
Experiments I and II were designed to differentiate between alternative interpretations of the contrast effect. Experiment I examines and rejects the hypothesis that the effect is specific to rating scales, since the effect also occurs when subjects are asked to make CDmparative judgments. Experiment II leads to the rejection of the hypothesis that the effect is purely semantic (i.e., specific to situations in which verbal labels are applied to a…
The Decision to Pollute
One way of studying the pollution problem is to examine the decision making process in situations in which gain accrues directly to an individual, while loss is spread out across the group of which the individual is a member. Such a situation has been termed a commons dilemma by Lloyd in 1833; it is a variant of the well known prisoner's dilemma. The mathematical model of rational decision making when facing the commons dilemma implies the dismal…
Linear models in decision making
Formal Models of Dilemmas in Social Decision-Making
Behavior, communication, and assumptions about other people's behavior in a commons dilemma situation
Two experiments investigated effects of communication on behavior in an 8-person commons dilemma of group versus individual gain. Subjects made a single choice involving a substantial amount of money (possible outcomes ranging from nothing to $10.50). In Experiment 1, 4 communication conditions were crossed with the possibility of losing money (loss, no loss). Subjects chose defecting or cooperating responses and predicted responses of other grou…
The robust beauty of improper linear models in decision making
Proper linear models are those in which predictor variables are given weights in such a way that the resulting linear composite optimally predicts some criterion of interest; examples of proper linear models are standard regression analysis, discriminant function analysis, and ridge regression analysis. Research summarized in Paul Meehl's book on clinical versus statistical prediction—and a plethora of research stimulated in part by that book—all…
Social Dilemmas
A revolution in the science of emotion has emerged in recent decades, with the potential to create a paradigm shift in decision theories. The research reveals that emotions constitute potent, pervasive, predictable, sometimes harmful and sometimes ...Read More
Apologia for using what works
Apologia for using what works
Psychotherapy outcome: Smith and Glass' conclusions stand up under scrutiny
Psychotherapy outcome: Smith and Glass' conclusions stand up under scrutiny
The Minimal Contributing Set as a Solution to Public Goods Problems
This article reports small group experiments in which subjects may choose to contribute a fixed amount of money toward a monetary public good, and in which the good itself is supplied only if a specified number of contributions (or more) are made. Given the opportunity to communicate, our subjects organized themselves by specifying precisely the number of required contributors and who they would be. This organization, which we call designation of…
Psychology (49 works) · Social Psychology (26 works) · Economics (18 works) · Political science (18 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies (15 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Microeconomics (11 works)