A central question in the study of moral psychology is how immediate intuition interacts with more thoughtful deliberation in the generation of moral judgments. The present study sheds additional light on this question by comparing adults' judgments of moral permissibility with their judgments of physical possibility-a form of judgment that also involves the coordination of intuition and deliberation (Shtulman, Cognitive Development 24:293-309, 2009). Participants (N = 146) were asked to judge the permissibility of 16 extraordinary actions (e.g., Is it ever morally permissible for an 80-year-old woman to have sex with a 20-year-old man?) and the possibility of 16 extraordinary events (e.g., Will it ever be physically possible for humans to bring an extinct species back to life?). Their tendency to judge the extraordinary events as possible was predictive of their tendency to judge the extraordinary actions as permissible, even when controlling for disgust sensitivity. Moreover, participants' justification and response latency patterns were correlated across domains. Taken together, these findings suggest that modal judgment and moral judgment may be linked by a common inference strategy, with some individuals focusing on why actions/events that do not occur cannot occur, and others focusing on how those same actions/events could occur.

The growth of the internet has spawned new “attention markets,” in which people devote increasing amounts of time to consuming online content, but the neurobehavioral mechanisms that drive engagement in these markets have yet to be elucidated. We used functional MRI (FMRI) to examine whether individuals’ neural responses to videos could predict their choices to start and stop watching videos as well as whether group brain activity could forecast aggregate video view frequency and duration out of sample on the internet (i.e., onyoutube.com). Brain activity during video onset predicted individual choice in several regions (i.e., increased activity in the nucleus accumbens [NAcc] and medial prefrontal cortex [MPFC] as well as decreased activity in the anterior insula [AIns]). Group activity during video onset in only a subset of these regions, however, forecasted both aggregate view frequency and duration (i.e., increased NAcc and decreased AIns)—and did so above and beyond conventional measures. These findings extend neuroforecasting theory and tools by revealing that activity in brain regions implicated in anticipatory affect at the onset of video viewing (but not initial choice) can forecast time allocation out of sample in an internet attention market.

People often demand a greater price when selling goods that they own than they would pay to purchase the same goods-a wellknown economic bias called the endowment effect. The endowment effect has been found to be muted among experienced traders, but little is known about how trading experience reduces the endowment effect. We show that when selling, experienced traders exhibit lower right anterior insula activity, but no differences in nucleus accumbens or orbitofrontal activation, compared with inexperienced traders. Furthermore, insula activation mediates the effect of experience on the endowment effect. Similar results are obtained for inexperienced traders who are incentivized to gain trading experience. This finding indicates that frequent trading likely mitigates the endowment effect indirectly by modifying negative affective responses in the context of selling.training | neuroeconomics | loss aversion | decision-making T he most fundamental assumptions in economics revolve around individual preferences. The most basic of these is the independence assumption: that one's economic valuation does not depend on current entitlements. In a normative sense, this assumption is used in most theoretical and applied economic models to assess the operation of markets. In a positive sense, the assumption underlies benefit-cost analysis, estimates of damages in court, and more generally any interpretation of indifference curves.However, substantial evidence has mounted that illustrates the importance of entitlements: people ask greater prices for goods that they own than they are willing to pay for identical goods that they do not own, a well-known behavioral anomaly called the endowment effect (1). Importantly, behavioral research demonstrates that trading experience reduces the gap between buying and selling prices (2-4). Nevertheless, little is known about the mechanisms that underlie how experience attenuates the endowment effect. Understanding the mechanisms at work will critically shape how we view the observed violations in inexperienced traders: Are such behavioral patterns errors that violate closely held economic theory, or do they have basic explanations that permit us to retain the standard model with necessary adjustments?We focus on two possible reasons that frequent trading reduces the endowment effect. First, trading may decrease loss aversion (5), or relatively greater anticipated pain of losing goods than excitement about gaining goods. For example, experienced traders may learn to change their mindset so that they do not view selling an object as a loss (6). Second, owning an object may enhance the object's attractiveness (7, 8), but experienced traders may learn to valuate goods more consistently.Distinct neuroanatomical circuits are activated during product preference and loss aversion (9). Specifically, the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) have been related to product preference and predict buying decisions (10-13). In contrast, right anterior insula activation has been impli...

It is well-established that native speakers perceive nonnative speakers with strong foreign accents, compared to those with a more nativelike accent, as less intelligent and competent, less ambitious and dependable as co-workers, and less comfortable around native speakers. But little is known about how nonnative speakers themselves are affected when communication hiccups-often due to incorrect or accented pronunciations-occur in their conversations with native speakers. In this experiment, mispronunciations of an English word were elicited from native Chinese speakers in phone conversations via the Internet with an American English speaker, who then either asked for clarification of the word or showed no confusion about the word but asked about something else. Chinese speakers' reactions were measured using a combination of self-reports, facial affective coding, and skin conductance responses.When the American asked for clarification-compared to when he did not-Chinese speakers were left feeling more anxious, embarrassed, and unsure of their English abilities, as well as feeling less positive about the American, finding him less attractive socially and their conversation with him less enjoyable.

No abstract