Miroslav Sirota
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 916801 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Miroslav Sirota |
| PRENOMES | Miroslav |
| SOBRENOME | Sirota |
| ASSINATURA | SIROTA M |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Essex |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2117-9532 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 30 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 39 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 30 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1980 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Negative verbal probabilities undermine communication of climate science
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recommends describing low-probability outcomes using negative verbal probability terms such as unlikely, rather than positive terms such as a small probability. However, we propose that this choice of probability terms might undermine public perception and understanding of climate science. Across eight preregistered experiments ( N = 4,150), we find that participants perceive outcomes described…
Investigating object orientation effects across 18 languages
Mental simulation theories of language comprehension propose that people automatically create mental representations of objects mentioned in sentences. Mental representation is often measured with the sentence-picture verification task, wherein participants first read a sentence that implies the object property (i.e., shape and orientation). Participants then respond to an image of an object by indicating whether it was an object from the sentenc…
Measuring the semantic priming effect across many languages
When intuitive Bayesians need to be good readers
Are humans intuitive Bayesians? It depends. People seem to be Bayesians when updating probabilities from experience but not when acquiring probabilities from descriptions (i.e., Bayesian textbook problems). Decades of research on textbook problems have focused on how the format of the statistical information (e.g., the natural frequency effect) affects such reasoning. However, it pays much less attention to the wording of these problems. Mathemat…
Self‐serving perception of charitable donation request
The psychological consequences of prosocial behavior depend on people's perceptions of their own volition. Building on this, we hypothesized that people who donate increase their volition and the benefits of donations by judging donation requests as polite (non‐coercive), whereas non‐donors reduce their volition and the drawback of refusing to donate by judging the request as less polite (too coercive). Three weeks after providing baseline polite…
Science Communication as a Collective Intelligence Endeavor
Effective science communication is challenging when scientific messages are informed by a continually updating evidence base and must often compete against misinformation. We argue that we need a new program of science communication as collective intelligence—a collaborative approach, supported by technology. This would have four key advantages over the typical model where scientists communicate as individuals: scientific messages would be inform…
We must harness the power of social and behavioural science against the growing pandemic of antimicrobial resistance
Framing Effects, Social Norm Perception, and Tolerance of Lesbian and Gay Individuals
Perceptions of social norms can have downstream consequences for attitudes and behaviors, especially when it comes to the acceptance of marginalized groups. While interventions focusing on social norms may boost tolerance, few studies test whether variations in norm communication affect individuals' perceptions. Thus, in this paper, we test the effectiveness of three communicative aspects-valence framing (Experiments 1-3), point of view (Experime…
The factor structure of cognitive reflection, numeracy, and fluid intelligence
The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is one of the most popular measures of individual differences in rational thought and decision making. To overcome the issue of overlap with numeracy, a novel measure of cognitive reflection less related to numeracy and math anxiety than Numerical CRT was developed—Verbal CRT. The present research had two main aims: first to investigate the generalizability of Verbal CRT in cultural contexts outside the United …
Author Correction
Situational factors shape moral judgements in the trolley dilemma in Eastern, Southern and Western countries in a culturally diverse sample
Differences between decisions made using verbal or numerical quantifiers
Past research suggests that people process verbal quantifiers differently from numerical ones, but this suggestion has yet to be formally tested. Drawing from traditional correlates of dual-process theories, we investigated whether people process verbal quantifiers faster, less accurately, and with less subjective effort than numerical quantifiers. In two pre-registered experiments, participants decided whether a quantity (either verbal or numeri…
Disfluent fonts do not help people to solve math and non-math problems regardless of their numeracy
Prior research has suggested that perceptual disfluency activates analytical processing and increases the solution rate of mathematical problems with appealing but incorrect answers (i.e., the Cognitive Reflection Test, hereafter CRT). However, a recent meta-analysis does not support such a conclusion. We tested here whether insufficient numerical ability can account for this discrepancy. We found strong evidence against the disfluency effect on …
Characteristics of quantifiers moderate the framing effect
The attribute framing effect, where people judge a quantity of an item more positively with a positively described attribute (e.g., “75% lean”) than its negative, albeit normatively equivalent description (e.g., “25% fat”), is a robust phenomenon, which may be moderated under certain conditions. In this paper, we investigated the moderating effect of the characteristics of the quantifier term: its format (verbal, e.g., “high,” or numerical, e.g.,…
Are Covid‐19 conspiracies a threat to public health? Psychological characteristics and health protective behaviours of believers
We tested the link between COVID‐19 conspiracy theories and health protective behaviours in three studies: one at the onset of the pandemic in the United Kingdom (UK), a second just before the first national lockdown, and a third during that lockdown ( N = 302, 404 and 399). We focused on conspiracy theories that did not deny the existence of COVID‐19 and evaluated the extent to which they predicted a range of health protective behaviours, before…
Effect of information on reducing inappropriate expectations and requests for antibiotics
People often expect antibiotics when they are clinically inappropriate (e.g., for viral infections). This contributes significantly to physicians' decisions to prescribe antibiotics when they are clinically inappropriate, causing harm to the individual and to society. In two pre-registered studies employing UK general population samples (n1 = 402; n2 = 190), we evaluated the relationship between knowledge and beliefs with antibiotic expectations,…
A multi-country test of brief reappraisal interventions on emotions during the Covid-19 pandemic
To which world regions does the valence-dominance model of social perception apply
Over the past 10 years, Oosterhof and Todorov’s valence–dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgements of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear whether these findings apply to other regions. We addressed this question by replicating Oosterhof an…
Focus to an attribute with verbal or numerical quantifiers affects the attribute framing effect
Anxiety‐induced miscalculations, more than differential inhibition of intuition, explain the gender gap in cognitive reflection
The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is among the most common and well‐known instruments for measuring the propensity to engage reflective processing, in the context of the dual‐process theory of high‐level cognition. There is robust evidence that men perform better than women on this test—but we should be wary to conclude that men are more likely to engage in reflective processing than women. We consider several possible loci for the gender diffe…
Measuring cognitive reflection without maths
The cognitive reflection test (CRT) became popular for its impressive power to predict how well people reason and make decisions. Despite the popularity of the CRT, a major issue complicates its interpretation: The numerical nature of the CRT confounds reflection ability with mathematical ability. We have addressed this issue by developing the verbal CRT (CRT‐V), a novel 10‐item measure of cognitive reflection ( https://osf.io/xehbv/ ), using non…
Verbal Uncertainty
When communicating uncertain facts, about risky outcomes or about the likelihood of future prospects, one may use numerical probabilities (e.g. there is a 20% probability) or verbal probabilities (e.g. there is a small chance). The present chapter provides an overview of the research into verbal probabilities; a survey of the methods used to tackle the meaning of verbal probabilities and unveil their usage; and an overview of the key findings in …
Climate Scientists’ Wide Prediction Intervals May Be More Likely but Are Perceived to Be Less Certain
The use of interval forecasts allows climate scientists to issue predictions with high levels of certainty even for areas fraught with uncertainty, since wide intervals are objectively more likely to capture the truth than narrow intervals. However, wide intervals are also less informative about what the outcome will be than narrow intervals, implying a lack of knowledge or subjective uncertainty in the forecaster. In six experiments, we investig…
Adaptive cooperation in the face of social exclusion
The Psychological Science Accelerator
Concerns about the veracity of psychological research have been growing. Many findings in psychological science are based on studies with insufficient statistical power and nonrepresentative samples, or may otherwise be limited to specific, ungeneralizable settings or populations. Crowdsourced research, a type of large-scale collaboration in which one or more research projects are conducted across multiple lab sites, offers a pragmatic solution t…
Measuring cognitive reflection without maths
The cognitive reflection test (CRT) became popular for its impressive power to predict how well people reason and make decisions. Despite the popularity of the CRT, a major issue complicates its interpretation: The numerical nature of the CRT confounds reflection ability with mathematical ability. We have addressed this issue by developing the verbal CRT (CRT‐V), a novel 10‐item measure of cognitive reflection ( https://osf.io/xehbv/ ), using non…
Cognitive Reflection Predicts Real‐Life Decision Outcomes, but Not Over and Above Personality and Decision‐Making Styles
The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), designed to assess the ability to inhibit intuition to process a problem analytically, predicts people's performance in many normative judgement and decision‐making tasks (e.g., Bayesian reasoning, conjunction fallacy and ratio bias). However, how the CRT predicts normative decision‐making performance is unclear, and little is known about the extent to which the CRT predicts real‐life decision outcomes. We inv…
Framing Effects, Social Norm Perception, and Tolerance of Lesbian and Gay Individuals
Perceptions of social norms can have downstream consequences for attitudes and behaviors, especially when it comes to the acceptance of marginalized groups. While interventions focusing on social norms may boost tolerance, few studies test whether variations in norm communication affect individuals' perceptions. Thus, in this paper, we test the effectiveness of three communicative aspects-valence framing (Experiments 1-3), point of view (Experime…
Are Covid‐19 conspiracies a threat to public health? Psychological characteristics and health protective behaviours of believers
We tested the link between COVID‐19 conspiracy theories and health protective behaviours in three studies: one at the onset of the pandemic in the United Kingdom (UK), a second just before the first national lockdown, and a third during that lockdown ( N = 302, 404 and 399). We focused on conspiracy theories that did not deny the existence of COVID‐19 and evaluated the extent to which they predicted a range of health protective behaviours, before…
A multi-country test of brief reappraisal interventions on emotions during the Covid-19 pandemic
To which world regions does the valence-dominance model of social perception apply
Over the past 10 years, Oosterhof and Todorov’s valence–dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgements of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear whether these findings apply to other regions. We addressed this question by replicating Oosterhof an…
Situational factors shape moral judgements in the trolley dilemma in Eastern, Southern and Western countries in a culturally diverse sample
Science Communication as a Collective Intelligence Endeavor
Effective science communication is challenging when scientific messages are informed by a continually updating evidence base and must often compete against misinformation. We argue that we need a new program of science communication as collective intelligence—a collaborative approach, supported by technology. This would have four key advantages over the typical model where scientists communicate as individuals: scientific messages would be inform…
Characteristics of quantifiers moderate the framing effect
The attribute framing effect, where people judge a quantity of an item more positively with a positively described attribute (e.g., “75% lean”) than its negative, albeit normatively equivalent description (e.g., “25% fat”), is a robust phenomenon, which may be moderated under certain conditions. In this paper, we investigated the moderating effect of the characteristics of the quantifier term: its format (verbal, e.g., “high,” or numerical, e.g.,…
Effect of information on reducing inappropriate expectations and requests for antibiotics
People often expect antibiotics when they are clinically inappropriate (e.g., for viral infections). This contributes significantly to physicians' decisions to prescribe antibiotics when they are clinically inappropriate, causing harm to the individual and to society. In two pre-registered studies employing UK general population samples (n1 = 402; n2 = 190), we evaluated the relationship between knowledge and beliefs with antibiotic expectations,…
Anxiety‐induced miscalculations, more than differential inhibition of intuition, explain the gender gap in cognitive reflection
The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is among the most common and well‐known instruments for measuring the propensity to engage reflective processing, in the context of the dual‐process theory of high‐level cognition. There is robust evidence that men perform better than women on this test—but we should be wary to conclude that men are more likely to engage in reflective processing than women. We consider several possible loci for the gender diffe…
Decision-makers are resilient in the face of social exclusion
A growing body of evidence suggests that social exclusion impairs people's capacity for active deliberation and logical reasoning. Building on this finding and on the postulate from the dual-process theory that analytical thinking is essential in order to make good judgements and decisions, we hypothesized that social exclusion will alter judgement and choice behaviour. We tested this hypothesis in three experiments in which social exclusion was …
How to improve people's interpretation of probabilities of precipitation
Most research into uncertainty focuses on how people estimate probability magnitude. By contrast, this paper focuses on how people interpret the concept of probability and why they often misinterpret it. In a weather forecast context, we hypothesised that the absence of an explicit reference class and the polysemy of the percentage format are causing incorrect probability interpretations, and test two interventions to help people make better prob…
Health status of cable splicers with low-level exposure to lead
The results of a cross-sectional clinical field survey of 90 telephone cable splicers are presented. Despite the rare occurrence of clinically overt lead poisoning among cable splicers, the observed prevalence of symptoms was 29% for lead-associated central nervous system symptoms and 21% for gastrointestinal symptoms. These two groups of symptoms were directly related to zinc protoporphyrin (ZPP) levels but no relationship was found between them…
Health status of cable splicers with low-level exposure to lead
The results of a cross-sectional clinical field survey of 90 telephone cable splicers are presented. Despite the rare occurrence of clinically overt lead poisoning among cable splicers, the observed prevalence of symptoms was 29% for lead-associated central nervous system symptoms and 21% for gastrointestinal symptoms. These two groups of symptoms were directly related to zinc protoporphyrin (ZPP) levels but no relationship was found between them…
How to improve people's interpretation of probabilities of precipitation
Most research into uncertainty focuses on how people estimate probability magnitude. By contrast, this paper focuses on how people interpret the concept of probability and why they often misinterpret it. In a weather forecast context, we hypothesised that the absence of an explicit reference class and the polysemy of the percentage format are causing incorrect probability interpretations, and test two interventions to help people make better prob…
Cognitive Reflection Predicts Real‐Life Decision Outcomes, but Not Over and Above Personality and Decision‐Making Styles
The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), designed to assess the ability to inhibit intuition to process a problem analytically, predicts people's performance in many normative judgement and decision‐making tasks (e.g., Bayesian reasoning, conjunction fallacy and ratio bias). However, how the CRT predicts normative decision‐making performance is unclear, and little is known about the extent to which the CRT predicts real‐life decision outcomes. We inv…
The Psychological Science Accelerator
Concerns about the veracity of psychological research have been growing. Many findings in psychological science are based on studies with insufficient statistical power and nonrepresentative samples, or may otherwise be limited to specific, ungeneralizable settings or populations. Crowdsourced research, a type of large-scale collaboration in which one or more research projects are conducted across multiple lab sites, offers a pragmatic solution t…
The polite wiggle‐room effect in charity donation decisions
We extend research on charity donations by exploring an everyday tactic for increasing compliance: asking politely. We consider three possible effects of politeness on charity donations: a positive effect, a negative effect, and a wiggle‐room effect where the perception of the request is adjusted to decline donating without feeling selfish. Results from six experiments systematically supported the polite wiggle‐room effect. In hypothetical donati…
Decision-makers are resilient in the face of social exclusion
A growing body of evidence suggests that social exclusion impairs people's capacity for active deliberation and logical reasoning. Building on this finding and on the postulate from the dual-process theory that analytical thinking is essential in order to make good judgements and decisions, we hypothesized that social exclusion will alter judgement and choice behaviour. We tested this hypothesis in three experiments in which social exclusion was …
Verbal Uncertainty
When communicating uncertain facts, about risky outcomes or about the likelihood of future prospects, one may use numerical probabilities (e.g. there is a 20% probability) or verbal probabilities (e.g. there is a small chance). The present chapter provides an overview of the research into verbal probabilities; a survey of the methods used to tackle the meaning of verbal probabilities and unveil their usage; and an overview of the key findings in …
Climate Scientists’ Wide Prediction Intervals May Be More Likely but Are Perceived to Be Less Certain
The use of interval forecasts allows climate scientists to issue predictions with high levels of certainty even for areas fraught with uncertainty, since wide intervals are objectively more likely to capture the truth than narrow intervals. However, wide intervals are also less informative about what the outcome will be than narrow intervals, implying a lack of knowledge or subjective uncertainty in the forecaster. In six experiments, we investig…
Adaptive cooperation in the face of social exclusion
Focus to an attribute with verbal or numerical quantifiers affects the attribute framing effect
Anxiety‐induced miscalculations, more than differential inhibition of intuition, explain the gender gap in cognitive reflection
The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is among the most common and well‐known instruments for measuring the propensity to engage reflective processing, in the context of the dual‐process theory of high‐level cognition. There is robust evidence that men perform better than women on this test—but we should be wary to conclude that men are more likely to engage in reflective processing than women. We consider several possible loci for the gender diffe…
Measuring cognitive reflection without maths
The cognitive reflection test (CRT) became popular for its impressive power to predict how well people reason and make decisions. Despite the popularity of the CRT, a major issue complicates its interpretation: The numerical nature of the CRT confounds reflection ability with mathematical ability. We have addressed this issue by developing the verbal CRT (CRT‐V), a novel 10‐item measure of cognitive reflection ( https://osf.io/xehbv/ ), using non…
Differences between decisions made using verbal or numerical quantifiers
Past research suggests that people process verbal quantifiers differently from numerical ones, but this suggestion has yet to be formally tested. Drawing from traditional correlates of dual-process theories, we investigated whether people process verbal quantifiers faster, less accurately, and with less subjective effort than numerical quantifiers. In two pre-registered experiments, participants decided whether a quantity (either verbal or numeri…
Disfluent fonts do not help people to solve math and non-math problems regardless of their numeracy
Prior research has suggested that perceptual disfluency activates analytical processing and increases the solution rate of mathematical problems with appealing but incorrect answers (i.e., the Cognitive Reflection Test, hereafter CRT). However, a recent meta-analysis does not support such a conclusion. We tested here whether insufficient numerical ability can account for this discrepancy. We found strong evidence against the disfluency effect on …
Characteristics of quantifiers moderate the framing effect
The attribute framing effect, where people judge a quantity of an item more positively with a positively described attribute (e.g., “75% lean”) than its negative, albeit normatively equivalent description (e.g., “25% fat”), is a robust phenomenon, which may be moderated under certain conditions. In this paper, we investigated the moderating effect of the characteristics of the quantifier term: its format (verbal, e.g., “high,” or numerical, e.g.,…
Are Covid‐19 conspiracies a threat to public health? Psychological characteristics and health protective behaviours of believers
We tested the link between COVID‐19 conspiracy theories and health protective behaviours in three studies: one at the onset of the pandemic in the United Kingdom (UK), a second just before the first national lockdown, and a third during that lockdown ( N = 302, 404 and 399). We focused on conspiracy theories that did not deny the existence of COVID‐19 and evaluated the extent to which they predicted a range of health protective behaviours, before…
Effect of information on reducing inappropriate expectations and requests for antibiotics
People often expect antibiotics when they are clinically inappropriate (e.g., for viral infections). This contributes significantly to physicians' decisions to prescribe antibiotics when they are clinically inappropriate, causing harm to the individual and to society. In two pre-registered studies employing UK general population samples (n1 = 402; n2 = 190), we evaluated the relationship between knowledge and beliefs with antibiotic expectations,…
A multi-country test of brief reappraisal interventions on emotions during the Covid-19 pandemic
To which world regions does the valence-dominance model of social perception apply
Over the past 10 years, Oosterhof and Todorov’s valence–dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgements of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear whether these findings apply to other regions. We addressed this question by replicating Oosterhof an…
The factor structure of cognitive reflection, numeracy, and fluid intelligence
The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is one of the most popular measures of individual differences in rational thought and decision making. To overcome the issue of overlap with numeracy, a novel measure of cognitive reflection less related to numeracy and math anxiety than Numerical CRT was developed—Verbal CRT. The present research had two main aims: first to investigate the generalizability of Verbal CRT in cultural contexts outside the United …
Author Correction
Situational factors shape moral judgements in the trolley dilemma in Eastern, Southern and Western countries in a culturally diverse sample
Science Communication as a Collective Intelligence Endeavor
Effective science communication is challenging when scientific messages are informed by a continually updating evidence base and must often compete against misinformation. We argue that we need a new program of science communication as collective intelligence—a collaborative approach, supported by technology. This would have four key advantages over the typical model where scientists communicate as individuals: scientific messages would be inform…
We must harness the power of social and behavioural science against the growing pandemic of antimicrobial resistance
Framing Effects, Social Norm Perception, and Tolerance of Lesbian and Gay Individuals
Perceptions of social norms can have downstream consequences for attitudes and behaviors, especially when it comes to the acceptance of marginalized groups. While interventions focusing on social norms may boost tolerance, few studies test whether variations in norm communication affect individuals' perceptions. Thus, in this paper, we test the effectiveness of three communicative aspects-valence framing (Experiments 1-3), point of view (Experime…
Psychology (23 obras) · Social Psychology (14 obras) · Cognitive psychology (12 obras) · Computer Science (11 obras) · Cognition (10 obras) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics (10 obras) · Perception (7 obras) · Social Psychology (7 obras) · Behavioral Health and Interventions (6 obras) · Developmental psychology (6 obras)