HEURISTICS IN THE CONTEXT OF LONG-FORM SHORT-STORY READING
Christopher William Gamsby
A Dissertation
Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowing Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctorate of Philosophy
May 2019
Committee:
Mary Hare, Advisor
Sheri Beth Wells-Jensen, Graduate Faculty Representative
Richard Anderson
Howard Casey Cromwell ii
ABSTRACT Mary Hare, Advisor
This dissertation examined the operation of cognitive heuristics in short-story reading by incorporating two halo manipulations and two anchoring manipulations into passages of varying length. The main purpose of this dissertation is to test whether participants show anchoring effects or halo effects during long-form short-story reading the same way participants have shown in other cognitive tasks. Three experiments were conducted where participants were given either four 200-word passages (Experiment 1), four 700-word passages (Experiment 2), or a
3000-word short-story (Experiment 3). Each of the 200-word passages in Experiment 1 were expanded to create the passages in Experiment 2. The four passages in Experiment 2 were expanded and combined with a fifth section in Experiment 3. In Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, participants showed anchoring effects and halo effects in the predicted direction for three of the four manipulations. In Experiment 3, there were no observed effects in any of the four manipulations. Although this dissertation was not designed to draw any strong conclusion for not finding significance, the overall results imply that people relied on bottom-up heuristic processing during short passage reading, but decide a priori on a top-down algorithmic strategy for longer short-stories. iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my dissertation committee for all of their hard work and input. iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION...... 1
Dual-Processing Systems……………………………………………………………… 2
System I Memory……………………………………………………………………… 5
System II Memory……………………………………………………………………… 8
Anchoring Heuristics…………………………………………………………………… 10
Halo Heuristic………………………………………………………………………… 13
Psychology of Reading………………………………………………………………… 16
Reading Mitigation……………………………………………………………………… 18
Reading Interpretation………………………………………………………………… 21
Research Considerations……………………………………………………………… 25
Subtlety in Psychological Research…………………………………………………… 28
Specific Aims & Predictions…………………………………………………………… 30
EXPERIMENT 1...... 31
Method………………………………………………………………………………… 31
Participants………………………………………………………………………… 31
Design……………………………………………………………………………… 31
Stimuli……………………………………………………………………………… 32
Procedure………………………………………………………………………… 32
Results………………………………………………………………………………… 35
Discussion……………………………………………………………………………… 38
EXPERIMENT 2...... 39 v
Method………………………………………………………………………………… 39
Participants………………………………………………………………………… 39
Results………………………………………………………………………………… 39
Discussion……………………………………………………………………………… 42
EXPERIMENT 3………………………………………………………………………… 43
Method………………………………………………………………………………… 43
Participants………………………………………………………………………… 43
Design……………………………………………………………………………… 43
Stimuli……………………………………………………………………………… 43
Procedure………………………………………………………………………… 44
Counter-Balancing………………………………………………………………… 44
Results………………………………………………………………………………… 45
Discussion……………………………………………………………………………… 52
GENERAL DISCUSSION...... 53
CONCLUSION...... 59
REFERENCES...... 61
APPENDIX A: EXPERIMENT 1 PASSAGES...... 69
Attractiveness Halo…………………………………………………………………… 69
Expense Anchor………………………………………………………………………… 69
Height Halo…………………………………………………………………………… 70
Drive Time Anchor……………………………………………………………………… 70
APPENDIX B: EXPERIMENT 2 PASSAGES...... 72 vi
Attractiveness Halo…………………………………………………………………… 72
Expense Anchor………………………………………………………………………… 73
Height Halo…………………………………………………………………………… 75
Drive Time Anchor……………………………………………………………………… 76
APPENDIX C: EXPERIMENT 3 SHORT-STORY...... 78
APPENDIX D: EXPERIMENT 1 AND 2 QUESTIONS...... 87
APPENDIX E: EXPERIMENT 3 QUESTIONS...... 89
APPENDIX F: IRB APPROVAL...... 91 vii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page
1 Experimental Flow for Experiments 1 and 2...... 34
2 Expense Anchoring Effect Results for Experiment 1...... 36
3 Attractiveness Halo Effect Results for Experiment 1...... 36
4 Drive Time Anchoring Effect Results for Experiment 1...... 37
5 Height Halo Effect Results for Experiment 1...... 37
6 Expense Anchoring Effect Results for Experiment 2...... 40
7 Attractiveness Halo Effect Results for Experiment 2...... 41
8 Drive Time Anchoring Effect Results for Experiment 2...... 41
9 Height Halo Effect Results for Experiment 2...... 42
10 Expense Anchoring Effect Results for Experiment 3...... 47
11 Attractiveness Halo Effect Results for Experiment 3...... 47
12 Drive Time Anchoring Effect Results for Experiment 3...... 48
13 Height Halo Effect Results for Experiment 3...... 48 viii
LIST OF TABLES Tables
1 Composition of Counter-Balanced Groups ...... 46
2 Self-Reported Views on Short-Story...... 49
3 Correlations between Self-Reported Views and Core Questions...... 49
4 Correlations between Self-Reported Views and Core Questions by Level...... 50 Running head: HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 1
INTRODUCTION Understanding the connection between dual-processing theories of cognition and the reading of fiction could help us learn why some writing engages readers and manipulates their interpretations as the author intends, and other writing falls flat. Cognitive research has, generally, studied the process of reading by studying the physical act of reading (e.g. Rayner et al, 2012), reading speeds, or semantic/phonological decoding of passages and researchers in the humanities tend to study reading as a literary pursuit. This generalization does not include the vast amounts of research where reading is used as a tool to study some other phenomenon. The role of cognitive dual-processing theories in bridging these mechanical aspects of reading with literary interpretation still has much room to be expanded. The present experiments examined this link by assessing whether halo manipulations and anchoring manipulations alter a reader's interpretation of a story in the same way those effects occur with much briefer, simpler psychological materials such as vignettes.
Researchers tend to investigate particular aspects of cognition rather than cognition as a whole.
For example, when researchers study emotion in face recognition, they generally do not try to simultaneously explain what role reading may play in the recognition of faces. Researchers who study emotional facial recognition do not, at the same time, address the effect of depth perception on motor actions. This means reading, like most concepts in psychology, is treated as a special task domain without considering whether people's memory for a long-form fiction text can be manipulated in the same way as our memories are manipulated in factual decisions and interpretations such as anchoring effects in shopping (Wu, Cheng, & Yen, 2012), halo effects in competence assessments (Wilson, 1968), halo effects in trait perception (Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972), default heuristic in selection choice
(Pichert & Katsikopoulos, 2008), recognition heuristics in quality comparisons (Pachur, Todd,
Gigerenzer, Schooler, & Goldstein, 2011), or a bevy of other daily tasks. As such, I planned on testing HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 2
whether the long-term memory of a written piece is subject to the same cognitive biases that affect our working memory as we manipulate currently active information. I tested this link by manipulating several small aspects of an approximately 3000-word narrative short-story.
The following is a breakdown of my dissertation. Firstly, I will give an overview of dual processing systems followed by specific discussions of System I and System II memory. Next, I will give examples of heuristics and discuss the Halo and Anchoring heuristics, which were central to the manipulations in the experiments. I will discuss the psychology of reading and theories of reading interpretation followed by a brief description of the gap in research between the two. The third part of the paper will describe my three experiments. The fourth section will discuss experimental outcomes.
The final section will discuss future directions.
Dual-Processing Systems
The idea of heuristics is closely related to dual-processing theories. As I begin this section, it is essential to define a few key terms. Heuristics are rules which are applied effortlessly in a given context to approximate an acceptable solution to task demands. An algorithm is considered the foil to a heuristic, where an effortful rule is applied in a specific situation to obtain an optimal solution. Dual systems postulate that there is one system for quick, effortless processing (System I/ Type I) and one system responsible for slow, effortful processing (System II/Type II)(Evans & Stanovich. 2013).
Accordingly, heuristics are associated with System I usage and algorithms are used within System II.
According to Smith and DeCoster (2000), every dual systems theory needs three aspects:
• A quick system that makes automatic decisions.
• A slow, rule-based system that uses active, effortful processing of a problem state.
• An explanation of how one system is used over the other system.
An example of a quick system of thinking could be: If I asked whether you wanted chicken parmesan or lasagna for dinner, you would likely make a quick, automatic decision on what you want HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 3 to eat. The slow rule-based system would be used to solve a riddle or complex mathematical problem or to make a difficult life decision. The existence of a slow, effortful system and a quick, effortless system is fairly consistent across dual-processing models. The main difference between theories is how people decide to use one system over the other.
Some theories conceptualize System I memory as an experiential system where exposure to stimuli and situations elicit previously learned reactions (Epstein et al., 1992). In this view, System II is a rational system where people willfully manipulate information to fulfill some goal. System use is dependent on whether a learned association exists.
System I and System II can similarly be conceptualized as relating to bottom-up and top-down thinking respectively (Egeth & Yantis, 1997; Chartrand & Bargh, 1996). System I relies on environmental input activating learned associations and System II relies on specific outcomes to satisfy cognitive goal states.
A final explanation of how cognition differentiates system use is that System I relies on ad hoc associations and System II relies on learned rule usage and application of proper cognitive scripts
(Smith & DeCoster, 2000). System I makes a decision based on the current association between two objects, even when a person hasn't needed to make that direct association previously. System II makes decisions by effortfully applying previously learned scripts to decide which script results in the desired outcome. In all of these conceptualizations, System I is bottom-up and relies on either associations or directly learned scripts and System II uses general cognitive scripts or goal states to process information.
Default interventionist theories postulate that System I is the default system which makes calculations in all decisions, and in cases where more advanced or precise calculations are needed,
System II intervenes and calculates the optimal answer (Evans & Stanovich, 2013). The main theoretic draw to this theory is that this model should always output the optimal solution to any given need. The HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 4 main theoretical drawbacks of default interventionist systems are that there would be little cognitive economy in implementing such a system. In this view, responses from System I and II should take the same amount of time, since the slowest system must decide before a person can act. In behavioral evidence, people tend to make heuristic decisions significantly faster than algorithmic decisions (Todd
& Gigerenzer, 2000).
The received view proposes that one system is automatic and subconscious and one system is controlled (Evans & Stanovich, 2013). In this view, System I dominates during situations where cognitive precision is not required, but System II dominates during times of high cognitive precision. In this case, contextual and goal demands modulate whether System I or System II activate information.
Cognitive-experiential self theory divides the two systems by whether a person has experienced a particular situation or whether the person is in a novel situation (Chartrand & Bargh, 1996). System I activates when a person is in a familiar situation, and the type and quantity of the results are approximately comparable to past experiences. Associations that result in System I activation can be as simple as viewing shadows on an object, or as complicated as using stereotypes in a social setting
(Kruglanski & Gigerenzer, 2011). System II activates during novel situations where a person will need to activate cognitive scripts and schema to derive a solution to current needs.
Although the exact cognitive nature of System I and System II are not relevant to this experiment, the conditions under which system activates is important. Under the four models discussed above, complexity and familiarity play a large roll in which system activates. These experiments tested the effect of heuristics on reading a narrative text, and the nature of current dual-processing theories suggests that the narrative story should reflect a simple, banal storyline to optimize the chance of
System I usage. If the storyline unfolds as participants expect, then participants could rely on System I processing which would maximize the chance of heuristic usage. The results did not reflect this prediction, and possible interpretations will be expanded in the general discussion later. The next HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 5 section will go into more detail on System I and heuristics' general roles in cognition. As Kahneman
(2012) points out in his summary of dual-processing theories, it's important to note that systems are not independent actors or homunculi performing tasks independently of cognitive systems. Writing about dual-systems often leaves the reader with that impression, but it's a complication that arises from concise writing more than scientific reasoning or intention.
System I Memory
System I could be considered the home of heuristic thinking because the fast thinking of System
I is likely the result of heuristics being applied to bottom-up perceptual information. Heuristic use in
System I would result in less cognitive effort and greater cognitive economy (Chaiken, 1980). System I memory could be either considered direct decision choice (e.g. deciding what to eat) or influencing open-ended problems (e.g. how much to pay for something). One example of influences affecting a decision is that the likability of a source mediates how long a person will spend thinking about the information, where the more likable the source, the less time people think on information (Chaiken,
1980).
Social psychologists have studied biases and stereotypes through automatic processes in System
I memory (Bargh & Ferguson, 2000). Something like the chameleon effect could be considered a social cognition of System I memory. The chameleon effect is the phenomenon of how people tend to mimic the behaviors of an interlocutor during a social interaction (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). In this case, people do not willingly mimic the person they interact with, but as an experimental confederate presented a nervous twitch, the participant began performing the same action without awareness of picking up the habit. This suggests that effortless learned associations can result in relatively complex actions and is not necessarily limited to extremely low-level decisions.
Similarly, people's interpretation of another's characteristics can be influenced by priming a specific interpretation (Newman & Uleman, 1990). Participants who were given the phrase “Molly HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 6 never takes no for an answer” characterized Molly as being stubborn when they were previously shown a semantic prime for words associated with stubbornness. Conversely, participants rated her as persistent when shown words related to persistence before reading the short descriptor. This, once again, demonstrated that bottom-up priming of irrelevant stimuli could influence interpretations. This suggests that System I memory is highly susceptible to non-heuristic thinking, or at least cognitive heuristics may have a broader definition than specific scripts.
One view of heuristic use in System I memory is that heuristics work as rules applied to ad-hoc symbolic representations of the world we experience (Smith & DeCoster, 2000). Rules could be operationalized as calculations which result in general trends in behavioral outcomes to stereotyped needs. Rules could be applied to symbolic representation and cause a person to act, or the rules could not be applied to prevent the resulting solution from becoming inadequate (Pennycook, Fugelsang, &
Koehler, 2015). A great example of this type of selective rule use could be the take the best heuristic, which is accepting an alternative in a set of choices that is superior in one aspect over another (Broder,
2003). Given the multifaceted nature of which aspects of different choices could be considered 'best,' it is likely that the take the best heuristic would be a suite of different rules of where only one is applied in the situation. In situations where a take the best heuristic does not arrive at an acceptable answer, the result could be ignored, and a competing heuristic is chosen instead. In a two-choice paradigm with a measurably correct choice, participants using the take the best heuristic correctly picked the optimal choice 58% of the time, which was statistically significant (Rieskamp & Otto, 2006). Take the best heuristic could be a ubiquitous cognitive state instead of a heuristic because a decision could be based on current long-term activation instead of rule application.
The recognition heuristic is another possibly ubiquitous cognitive phenomenon classified as a heuristic. The recognition heuristic is simply choosing the option which a person has prior knowledge of among unfamiliar choices (Pachur & Hertwig, 2006). This option has been referred to as the most HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 7 frugal of heuristics due to the probable low amount of cognitive processing required to make a decision
(Volz et al. 2006). Much like the Take the Best heuristic, activation in a preexisting cognitive representation resulting in a behavioral outcome could be indicative of several specific (or possibly even none) cognitive rules activating at any given moment.
The default heuristic also straddles the line between a general cognitive tendency and a heuristic. The default heuristic is the tendency to choose the first option that is presented while needing substantial motivation to select a different option (Pichert & Katsikopoulos, 2008). This has been studied in the field of green energy (clean and renewable sources of electricity). Participants tended to stay with their default option, whether green or gray (electricity that creates pollution) irrespective of their self-reported attitudes toward clean and renewable energy. Those who received green energy as the default needed substantial financial savings to switch to the gray energy source. Conversely, participants were unlikely to switch from gray energy to green energy even when the process was very easy (filling out a short form), not more expensive, and they rated environmental protection as important. Like the last two heuristics discussed, it is unclear as to whether this cognitive inertia is an application of some rule set per se or a general cognitive tendency.
Not only is it unclear whether specific heuristics should be classified as heuristics, but it is also unclear as to the boundaries between different heuristics (Broder, 2003). The exact difference between the representativeness heuristic, anchoring, and the halo effect can be obscure. The representativeness heuristic is when inferences are made about an unknown quantity based on a similar object or class of objects. Anchoring is when a previously heard value affects the interpretation of a later value judgment.
The halo effect is when inferences are made about an object's unknown properties based on correlations to known quantities. A typical anchor effect experiment is set up by either asking a participant if a pen is either worth more than $100 or asking if it is less than $0.10. Participants that are primed with $100 will give a significantly higher value estimate than participants given the ten cent estimate. It is unclear HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 8 whether participants created an anchor point in a value based monetary system and that influenced the interpretation (anchoring). Hearing one hundred dollars could have activated the representation of expensive writing tools and later value approximations were created for the category of expensive writing tools (representativeness heuristic). Participants could also assume that the pen is of high quality based on hearing the proposed $100 which makes the participant believe the pen was high quality and thus assume a higher price was correlated with the high-quality pen (Halo Effect).
The exact degree to which bottom-up processes can be categorized as heuristics and the ontological issues that arise in dual-processing systems are interesting and important to the field as a whole but will not affect the design and implementation of the current studies. The exact predictions made by general heuristic use should be the same for each category of heuristic used since each related heuristic predicts the same outcome (e.g. a high anchor, positive halo, and a high-quality representation all predict a higher value estimation). General cognitive aspects could result in similar results, so these experiments cannot make strong inferences to which specific heuristic influenced reading as much as the idea that general cognitive heuristic use influenced reading.
System II Memory
System II memory relies on top-down, formal, and effortful processing of information to make a decision. System II memory is not a focus of these experiments, but effortful processing of information can have a mitigating effect on heuristic use, which makes it important to at least touch on (Carretti,
Caldarola, Tencati, and Cornoldi, 2014). When participants were trained in meta-cognition to both recognize when using heuristic thinking and strategies to mitigate heuristic use, they showed an increase in reading comprehension. Their memory was not as accurate as a calculation based on an algorithmic interpretation, but they do perform significantly better than untrained peers.
Participants that show greater 'willingness to think' but were not trained in meta-cognitive practices still perform at a higher level than controls (Pennycook, Fugelson, & Koehler, 2015). This HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 9 means that people who engage in active thinking about presented information show less of an effect of heuristic biases. This can also be seen while measuring intra-rater reliability and its influence on the halo effect (Scherer, Yates, Baker, and Valentine, 2017). Raters who assessed known and unknown students with reliable correlations to objective measures demonstrated less halo effect while rating.
Given that the definition of a halo effect is high correlation within a subject, the presence of a halo effect implies lack of consideration to objective measures which is a cyclical way to say that people who use objective measures showed less halo effect.
The conjunction fallacy is a well known and well studied effect in heuristic thinking. The fallacy simply means that someone may sometimes rate the presence of two traits as more likely than the probability of either of the single traits (Scherer, Yates, Baker, & Valentine, 2017). An example of this claim is that if participants were asked to rate the probabilities that a person missed work because they were either: A. Sick, B. Tired, or C. Sick and Tired, participants may rank C as more probable than
A or B. This is fallacious because more people would necessarily be in the superordinate groups of Sick or Tired than the subordinate group of Sick and Tired. People with high attention spans and high numerosity skill tended to show less of those types of conjunction fallacies. Similarly to the amount of cognitive effort people pay to the task, understanding formal logic, and being able to apply it in situations seems to help mitigate heuristic usage. This implies that participants should be influenced to avoid System II usage during the experiment because they will be less likely to use heuristic inferences during deeper processing.
I have devoted the next two sections to discussing anchoring heuristics and the halo heuristics because I manipulated those heuristics during the experiments and this way I can give more attention to factors that directly affect the use of those heuristics. HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 10
Anchoring Heuristics
An anchoring heuristic is the phenomenon of a previously heard value affecting a current value judgment. For example, when a participant hears $65, they might estimate the value of a shirt at $35, and might estimate the shirt's value at $20 after hearing the value of $10. The $20 estimate represented the lower range minimal acceptable value and the $35 estimate represented the higher range maximum acceptable value. The manipulated values can be related to the final value judgment, but do not have to be (Furnham & Boo, 2011). For example, in the t-shirt question above, participants can still show an anchoring effect after they are asked to spin a rigged wheel of fortune that either displays 10 or 65. This demonstrates that anchor points can still exist with irrelevant stimuli.
One explanation for the anchoring heuristic is that anchoring is similar to semantic priming
(Adame, 2016). The value expressed in the original number activated a representation which made related values more likely to activate as a person needed to access a value for the final determination.
Another theory on anchoring is the anchor and adjust theory (Wegener, Petty, Betweiler-Bedell, &
Jarvis, 2001). In this theory, an anchor creates a current representation for the value judgment which is adjusted by the semantic knowledge of the target value. In the shirt example, the number 65 created a current representation of the needed value, but since our representation for shirts suggest that the price must be lower, we alter the numeric estimate until we reach an acceptable value in the range for the price of shirts. The opposite happens in the $10 anchor. The value representation must be increased until a value in the low range is reached and deemed acceptable.
Anchoring heuristics have been shown to affect both laboratory and field studies (Thorsteinson,
Breier, Atwell, Hamilton, & Privette, 2008). Students were given a survey on their professor's performance and asked to rate them on several dimensions relevant to teaching. The survey asked for responses in a 9-point Likert scale and some of the students received the survey with 'one' (low score) selected as the default and some received 'nine' (high score) as the default. Students that received nine HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 11 as the default response scored the professor higher than students that received one as the default response, which matched the results of laboratory studies which employed the same type of design. In the field study, however, students that received the low anchor scored in the expected direction but did not statistically differ from a control group. This implies that anchoring is a fairly ubiquitous experience with high ecological validity, but does not necessarily strongly manifest itself in an experiment. For this reason, it is important to pay attention to which factors can mitigate the anchoring heuristic.
Training has been shown to reduce the anchoring heuristic, but not completely remove the effect (Adame, 2016). When participants were instructed on the existence of the anchoring heuristic and the effect of using the anchoring heuristic, they still estimated results in the same direction of the anchoring heuristic, but estimates were closer to the actual value and less extreme. Similarly, when participants were incentivized to predict a value accurately, they still showed effects of the anchoring heuristic (Todd & Gigerenzer, 2000). Warning participants about anchoring will affect their value judgments but may not significantly influence the estimated values (Wilson, 1996). The seemingly contradictory results imply that simply knowing that a phenomenon exists may not affect its use, but people can be trained not to use it to minimal success.
Negative affect (mood) can mitigate the anchoring heuristic by increasing the effect of anchor values on value judgments (Bodenhausen, Gabriel, & Lineberger, 2000). In laboratory experiments, anchoring effects increased when participants were asked to ruminate on a negative life event before being exposed to a random anchor and asked to evaluate a target value. One explanation for this finding is that participants who experienced negative affect may scrutinize data more closely, which will cause the anchor value to exert a greater influence on their information processing. Since the anchor value is the most recently activated relevant representation, it is incorporated more thoroughly into value assessment. When participants are in a neutral mood, they strictly rely more on established cognitive HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 12 representations for target items and the anchor only works to influence the range on the target value.
Past knowledge can have a strong mitigating influence on anchoring effects (Musswieiler &
Strack, 2000). The more previous experience a person has with a given target, the more accurate their assessment of target values will be regardless of anchoring heuristic usage. In other words, stamp collectors asked to estimate a price on a rare stamp will still say a significantly higher or lower value based on the anchor, but their overall estimation will be more accurate than a non-stamp collector. The range in values between the low and high estimate will also be smaller than controls. This also happens while making assessments about people a participant either knows or does not know well, such as employees (Huber, 1989 (cited in Thorsteinson et al., 2008)). The representation of the stamp's possible value range will be smaller and more accurate in a stamp collector than in a non-collector. Therefore, when a participant activates the upper possible value and has a more precise range representation due to experience, the upper and lower bounds should be closer together. These findings fit well with the conception of anchoring as similar to semantic priming.
Anchor/target coherence modulates anchoring effects (Mussweiler & Strack, 2001). When target and anchor share a common unit of measure, the anchoring effect is strengthened, and when the target and anchor use different units, the anchoring effect is weakened. So, an anchor given in dollars will have a stronger effect when the target is also in dollars than when the anchor is people. Target and anchor relevancy also mitigate anchoring effects, where relevant anchors have a greater effect on estimates than do irrelevant anchors (Thorsteinson et al., 2008). For example, a car dealer would be better off saying to a customer 'Some people would pay $30,000 for a car like this! $10,000 is a steal.' than '30,000 people came to the auto show last week! $10,000 for this car is a steal!'. The first statement of price to price will make the unwitting dupe at the dealership estimate the car's real value higher than the person who heard attendance to price.
Extreme anchors have a diminishing anchoring effect(Chapman & Johnson, 1994). In the pen HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 13 example previously used, an anchor of $30,000 would not have a 3,000 times stronger effect than an anchor of $10 because 30,000 is far outside the normal range of pen costs. An anchor of $300 would likely have a stronger effect than an anchor of $10 despite being outside of the range of normal pen costs, but the effect would not be 30 times as much. This, once again, suggests that anchors interplay with semantic representations because congruence with a probable value aspect in the items semantic representation helps to mitigate an anchor's effect more than simple numeric ratio. The next section of this paper will discuss the halo heuristic in similar detail to this last discussion on anchoring.
Halo Heuristic
The halo heuristic can also be generalized as the human tendency to make inferences regarding a person's unknown traits based on already observed traits (Forgas, 2011). The effect does appear widely applicable in real-life contexts, such as teachers rating students' abilities (Thorndike, 1920).
Attractiveness halo effects are considered to be well established in the field of psychology and social psychology (Zebrowitz & Franklin, 2014). Just as the name implies, the attractiveness halo effect means that people tend to apply positive traits to people who are considered attractive. This effect is more prevalent in younger people but is still measurably present in older people as well. This makes attractiveness an easily manipulable feature in a person that appears effective across people of different ages and genders.
In traditional attractiveness halo studies, participants are shown photographs of people who were rated as either high, moderate, or low attractiveness and then asked to rate other features of the target individuals (Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972). The result of those studies showed a trend where participants rated attractive individuals as happier and possessing more positive social traits. Some, like
Eagly and colleagues (1991), have argued through meta-analysis that the effect of attractiveness on ratings has an inconsistent strength. For example, attractiveness has a low effect on perceived integrity or concern for others. One explanation of this finding is that attractive people might be seen as self- HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 14 centered or conceited.
The attractiveness halo has been presented cross-modally, where participants showed a traditional halo effect with a visually low, medium, or high attractive political candidate paired with a low, medium, or high attractive voice (Surwaski & Ossoff, 2006). In that study, participants were shown 10-second clips of a political candidate paired with a soundbite of political speech. The study found that even though participants showed a higher halo effect for visual attraction, they still showed an effect on auditory attractiveness. This implies that halo heuristics can have wide-ranging effects in different modalities other than relying strictly on visual stimuli.
In socially dependent cases, weight has also shown a similar effect to the attractiveness halo
(Wade & DiMaria, 2003). Based on ratings from photos, a thin white woman was considered more socially successful and happier than an overweight white woman. Conversely, an overweight black woman was considered to be more socially successful and happier than a thinner black woman. This shows that preconceptions of beauty standards about a community could influence how people used a halo heuristic instead of generating a blanket set of rules that were always applicable.
Deeper social and cognitive aspect violations, such as violating social norms, can greatly mitigate the halo effect (Gibson & Gore, 2016). When people greatly violated social norms (i.e. stopped to help a person with their car) others viewed them with less of a positive halo than people who only slightly violated a social norm (i.e. lent a pen). This suggests that even though using attractive qualities such as prettiness or height could be effective halos; those effects might be limited when halos appear in violations of social norms.
Unlike the anchoring effect, positive mood can increase the influence of the halo effect and negative mood can reduce the effect (Forgas, 2011). Participants were asked to recall a happy or sad event and then asked to read a philosophy paper by a young, attractive woman, or an older man.
Similar to how mood modulates anchoring effects, cognitive effort is likely the mitigating factor in HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 15 determining heuristic use. When people are in a positive mood, the reduced cognitive effort results in less scrutiny of the illusory correlation between traits; while in a negative mood, they scrutinize potential links between traits more closely and reject the illusory correlation.
Similarly to an anchoring effect, knowledge in a field can reduce halo heuristic usage
(Kozlowski & Kirsch, 1987). This is likely because experts in a field know objective performance criteria to more consistently rate a target's performance, where non-experts must rely on guessing relative to known dimensions. Conversely, when raters have high knowledge about the individual target person, they show an increased halo effect (Dennis et al. 1996). This may reflect a person's bias toward that individual and lack of objective rating to a known standard.
Seemingly irrelevant stimuli can result in halo effects when there are deep semantic connections between the prime and halo (Wilson, 1968). This can effect trait perception, such as rating a guest lecturer's performance based on manipulating their height. This can also effect trait perception in objects, like participants rating discs with an arbitrary larger value as physically bigger than discs with less arbitrary value that are the same physical size.
A theoretical-operational definition of the halo effect in statistics is when there is zero variance
(perfect correlation) between traits of an object/person (Cooper, 1981). In real experiments, however, variance does not equal zero but can be around values like 29% (Dennis, 2007). The statistical halo effect that Cooper described was different from the cognitive measures tested in this experiment because statistical halos do not necessarily reflect subconscious experiences. Given the large degree of cognitive biases employed by investigators showing halo effects, a short discussion of the possible overlap between statistical halo effects and the cognitive halo effect appears necessary.
According to Cooper (1981), the halo effect could be caused by six different aspects: undersampling, engulfing, insufficient concreteness, insufficient rater knowledge and motivation, cognitive distortions, and correlated true averages. Five of the six are cognitive measures that influence HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 16 a rater's decision while correlated true averages is not a cognitive bias, but an ecological issue where certain traits are often highly correlated. For example, intelligence and test scores are likely highly correlated since intelligent people are probably also good at taking tests. This means that the true values of both traits are likely to be similar regardless of a rater's cognitive bias.
Undersampling means that a rater does not have enough information on the target's normal behavior, so they use the target's known traits to infer the unknown traits. Engulfing is the belief that observed traits co-vary with unknown traits and so the halo trait influences the unknown trait.
Insufficient Concreteness is the idea that poorly defined descriptions of a subject's trait cause raters to assume the described values are the same as target values, even when experiments intend them to be different. Insufficient motivation is when raters use known information to infer unknown traits because they do not want to reason out that known information is different from unknown information. Since participants are not actively thinking during the experiment, they overly rely on primed information to complete the task. Cognitive distortions are when a rater uses previous information and biases to infer missing information. Racist/sexist/classist stereotypes may influence rating an unknown trait. All of these traits are similar in that they are caused by a lack of concrete information. This implies that leaving information directly relating to the desired trait vague will help facilitate the halo effect.
The last two sections will be necessary for creating the conditions optimal to stimulate the desired cognitive biases. The next section, psychology of reading, will discuss the physical and mental process of reading, which is necessary for establishing why normal cognition could affect long-form reading.
Psychology of Reading
Psychology commonly uses reading as a tool for studying other cognitive effects, such as when logically or illogically structured statements assess a participant's trust of those statements (Canter,
Grieve, Nicol, & Benneworth, 2003). However, it is difficult to make post-hoc inferences about reading HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 17 fiction in experiments that use reading as a tool when the experimental structure did not account for literary effects a priori. Frequently in these experiments, participants are instructed (or the experimental design implies) that passages are to be considered factual and not fictional. Due to those considerations,
I will focus on models that explicitly address reading interpretation and not experiments that incidentally used reading as a tool. Literature interpretation and psychology of reading have different goals and use different methods to study these outcomes. Therefore, this section will focus on modern psychological theories of reading which focus on the mechanical act of reading and not the esoteric interpretation of literature.
The two main types of psychological reading models can be classified as either cognitive models or social-interactive models. Cognitive models describe reading as an interpretation of reading based on using scripts and schema to construct meaning from text. Social-interactive models understand reading communication between an author and reader and how those differing points of view interact to create meaning in a text. Individual models can either be generally classified as bottom-up or top-down. Bottom-up models focus on the pathways from visual word recognition to sentence and paragraph interpretation. Top-down models focus on how a reader's goals, cognitive scripts, context, and experiences affect word recognition and interpretation. It is important to note that although I will speak in generalities about whether a model or process is bottom-up or top-down; no cognitive function can strictly be in one direction, but bottom-up and top-down interact to various degrees.
One theory of reading is that we only have a finite amount of working memory resources which are used for reading (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980). This means that the scope and depth of information we can remember about any given passage is limited by the natural size of working memory capacity.
Similarly, top-down working memory must monitor current reading representation for conflicting information and unexpected turns in reading content (Osaka, Nishizaki, Komori, & Osaka, 2002). This HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 18 monitoring modulates activation of long-term memory stores by working memory (Foroughi, Barragan,
& Boehm-Davis, 2016). This modulation and activation creates the current state of information/representation for the read content. This is a bottom-up representation model because received information and system limitations modulate the determining factor in memory usage and current representation.
In the situation model, a mental representation of read materials is created and then updated based on new information (Bailey, Kurby, Sargent, & Zacks, 2017). Similarly to the generic principles described above, new information is incorporated into the current situational representation by working memory activating long-term representations of new information and inhibiting old, no longer relevant information. Top-down contextual information, such as determining major boundaries between old and new situations, determines how much information needs to be updated. The main boundaries are based on shifts in time, character, location, and narrative. Time shifts indicate that new information takes place during a distinct time from the previous information. Character information means that a different character is acting in the text, signaling an update to the previous situation. Location refers to changing the setting of narrative text. Narrative refers to a change in essential plot details, like a revelation in a story's over-arching plot. The situation model will receive more attention later.
Reading Mitigation
Understanding cognitive factors that affect how people approach reading a particular piece of literature, short-story, or encyclopedia entry will help us determine what type of short-story will maximize the likelihood of heuristic use for this experiment. A person's involvement in reading a piece can switch their thinking mode from heuristic to algorithmic (Kruglanski & Gigerenzer, 2011). The more attention and effort a person devotes, the more their behavioral outcomes appear to line up with algorithmic thinking than heuristic thinking. Listening comprehension, oral language proficiency, and grammatical understanding help mitigate the amount of effort a person requires to read. That means, HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 19 indirectly, reading skill and text difficulty will affect heuristic use on reading. Previous knowledge on a topic also affects the ease at which a person can read a text.
People with a high amount of previous knowledge on a particular topic more efficiently, accurately, and thoroughly create a scaffolding to manipulate the representation of text meaning
(McNamara & Kendeou, 2011). The knowledge encompasses not only semantic knowledge of specific words but also incorporates procedural and situational knowledge (Meloth, 1990). This means that as you read, the semantic information of given words helps create a scaffolding, but your knowledge of how to accomplish activities contributes to the scaffolding and the connotations of a word help color the actively manipulated representation. Increasing a reader's meta-cognitive knowledge of reading can improve understanding and speed (Duffy et al., 1987). Participants who are trained on how to read a passage successfully will read the passage more accurately and quickly.
Reading effort and speed affect a person's depth of processing, which is relevant because those who expend more effort while reading are more likely to use System II. Reading ability and effort can be measured based on tracking eye movements while reading (Rayner et al., 2012). Larger saccades with fewer regressions suggest that a person is more accurately predicting upcoming text. People use parafoveal vision to assess the number of letters in the upcoming word and then saccade to the next relevant keyword. Skilled readers saccade toward the center of the next keyword and then move on to the next word. Unskilled readers will saccade to the beginning of the next keyword and then back-track to the previous word, spend a long time reading the word section, or require multiple saccades within the same word. These constant starts, backtracking, and shorter saccade distances result in longer reading times for passages, and thus reading speed is an indirect measure of reading skill and effort.
Working memory control does not appear to have a significant effect on reading comprehension
(Stothard & Home, 1992). Working memory control is the ability to direct working memory to various tasks and efficiently stay on those tasks. Working memory capacity seems to modulate reading HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 20 comprehension and speed. Working memory capacity is the amount of information a person can temporarily store during a task. Lower working memory capacity individuals make inferences more quickly than high working memory individuals while reading difficult text (Whitney, Ritchie, &
Clarke, 1991). This could be due to lower working memory capacity individuals not retaining as much extraneous information during reading when compared to high working memory individuals. Lower working memory capacity individuals, however, have a more difficult time recovering from interruption during reading than higher working memory capacity individuals (Foroughi, Barragan, &
Boehm-Davis, 2016). This finding suggest that lower working memory capacity people must reestablish previously held information before continuing to read again. Higher memory capacity people could still have the previous information active in working memory as well as the distractor information. In this study, these findings are essential because to ensure anchor and target information are in working memory simultaneously for both low and high capacity individuals, the information should be as close as possible within the text.
Working memory has a more complex role in reading than strictly remembering information involved in a narrative. People who were asked to attend to different aspects of a story segmented the story differently based on their previously established orientation (Bailey, Kurby, Sargent, & Zacks,
2017). When participants were asked to focus on the protagonist, they segmented the story based on which characters were active. When participants focused on spatial aspects, they segmented the story based on each scene's location. The contents of working memory could be determined based on primed orientation and thus completely changed the story's segments. This means that both target and anchor should be the focus of a part of a text to maximize inclusion in working memory.
Skills ancillary to reading can affect metacognitive awareness and reading skill. For example, children who were trained in listening comprehension improved reading speed and comprehension
(Palladino, Cornoldi, DeBeni, & Pazzaglia, 2001). Those children did not improve as much as children HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 21 who were explicitly taught to improve reading comprehension. This shows that reading comprehension could reflect a more general ability to segment and decode language instead of a specific visual skill, but learning the visual skill dramatically improved the mechanical aspects of reading and reading comprehension more than just learning listening skills. This also suggests that while making stimuli, participant's reading times should be measured to make sure they fall within an average reading time span to control for heuristic use.
Meloth (1990) studied third-grade children over the course of an academic year and found that students trained in meta-cognitive reading strategies to improve comprehension performed better than peers who did not receive training. People who more effortfully focus on reading during the task will increase comprehension. The general trend shown in reading comprehension during cognitive tests is that the more effort people use during reading, the better the comprehension and the more likely the reader will rely on System II-type processing. The next section will focus on models of reading interpretation which come from non-cognitive fields of study.
Reading Interpretation
Cognitivists tend to focus on quantitatively measurable aspects of reading, such as having participants correctly answer content questions, reading speed, eye movements, and the other aspects I wrote about in the last section. Reading interpretation can be harder to quantitatively measure than comprehension because interpretation is inherently subjective and there is no correct or incorrect interpretation. This means that, for the most part, research in literature, sociology, and other fields concerned with reading tend to focus on the frequency of possible interpretations of particular pieces or focus on a long-form justification of their interpretation of a work. For this dissertation, the possible methods by which a person interprets a short-story is more important than concentrating on any specific symbolic meaning or interpretation. To that end, I will discuss different models to how participants approach a work instead of possible symbolic representations inherent in reading a piece of HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 22 fiction.
Readers tend to keep multiple possible interpretations open and decide on a final interpretation near the end of the writing (Kurtz & Schoeber, 2001). This means that readers may not encode related segments in stories without a logical structure. Conversely, a highly regimented story may result in less carry-over effects caused by ambiguous relationships within the text. A story should avoid either of those extremes to maximize heuristic usage.
Reading interpretation models can fall into three categories: translation model, transactional model, and transmission model (Schraw & Bruning, 1996). A translation model is author-centric and states that a text's meaning is derived from the text's content independent of a reader's intent while reading. A transactional model states almost the opposite, where a reader's interpretation is based on the reader's goals and biases regardless of authorial intent while writing. A transmission model bridges the gap between a transactional model and a translation model and states that a writing is an author's attempt to transmit meaning to the reader who interprets the message.
These three models do not speak of the specifics of how reading is accomplished, but more comment on the general ways in which readers interpret specific works. For example, a reader today
(2018) that read a novel from 2006 about a movement started on social media in regards to police violence, the reader might interpret the piece as a statement about the Black Lives Matter movement even though in 2006 the author could not possibly have known about the movement. This would be an example of the reader using a transactional model, where the authorial intent is independent of the reader's interpretation. Conversely, people tend to read objective works, like a textbook or encyclopedia, through a translational model where the author's intent on teaching using the writing is more important than their interpretation (Linderholm & van Broek, 2014). I predicted that writing a short-story that pushed readers toward using a transactional or transmission model would be most likely to induce heuristic thinking because the readers will be less likely to focus on the factual nature HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 23 of the writing. In the general discussion, I will explain why this assumption appeared incorrect based on my results. Next, I will write about a model which describes a theory on the general way in which people encode information from a story.
A situation model predicts that when reading a piece of fiction, people create a current representation of a situation as they read and then update the information based on the story (Schraw,
2000). This idea coincides with general cognitive frameworks which predict that mental representations in working memory update as new information is added (Kendeo, van den Broek, Helder, & Karlsson,
2014). To support this idea, background knowledge appears to play an essential role in situation models
(van Dijik & Kinstch, 1983 (cited in Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998)). The more people know about a given topic, the more robust the mental representation they can make, and the more stereotyped the representation they will make. This means that people may be more likely to rely on heuristic thinking while a story closely follows easily predictable typical experiences than a story which takes wild, unpredictable turns.
A change in situational markers results in more attention to the narrative (Bailey, Kurby,
Sargent, & Zacks, 2017). Since people can pay attention to different aspects of a piece of writing, the attended to changes can result in longer or shorter reading times (Therriault, Rinck, and Zwaan, 2006).
For example, temporal and protagonist changes result in longer reading times than changes in other aspects of the current situation. This is likely because the majority of information in working memory needs to be updated when new characters are introduced or after major shifts in time when many aspects also need to be updated. Since people can be directed to focus on specific aspects of a narrative, the composition of the narrative can give us some information on the nature of the situation model
(Bower & Rinck, 2001). When attending to spatial differences, the amount of reading time increases based on the length of the spatial distance change. A reader will take less time to read a scene change that moves from one room to the adjacent room than read a scene change from one country to another HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 24 country. Minimizing narrative space changes between the anchor/halo and the target should result in stronger heuristic effects when compared to major shifts in narrative space. Scene changes that separate primes and targets should result in weaker heuristic effects even when the amount of text space is held constant.
Again, these narrative changes can be seen as a cue to increase text scrutiny and possibly result in categorical changes to information in the situation model (Zacks et al., 2009). Smaller alterations can elucidate featural changes within the situation model, and more substantial content could elucidate categorical changes. This essentially means that small-scale differences represent just a quantitative change in a feature of the current active representation, but large-scale differences represent a qualitative change requiring an update to a new representation. In a situation model which relies on top-down goal-driven states to determine where attention should be focused, the goal states may be more likely to be satisfied with large-scale changes than with small-scale changes. The system uses foregrounding, keeping a representation active to maintain recall performance, to help people remember the vast amounts of information. These representations act as access points to networked information and help readers create more complex representations. In small-scale alterations, irrelevant halo/anchor information should remain more active than during large-scale alterations which require inhibition of previous information for large-scale changes to take place. This higher activation will effect encoding of new information, increasing in the predicted direction.
An event-indexing model is similar to the situation model in that it relies on continuously updating a representation as new information is available, but the event indexing model formalizes events as the boundaries between old and new segments (Radvansky & Zwaan, 1998). As protagonist and subject actions update, a reader updates their representations of the current event's situation, and readers remember old representations based on associated actions within the narrative and not based on other aspects, such as location or time. This nuance should not affect experimental results in most HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 25 situations except when there are no large-scale narrative shifts but small-scale shifts in the subject.
Based on the event indexing model, we could predict less heuristic/priming effects than we would predict using the situation model.
The next section will briefly discuss links between the previous sections and areas of research that are wide open for direct empirical study.
Research Considerations
Reading's benefits to cognition have been studied for a long time without much regard to how heuristic thinking fits into the act of reading itself. For example, reading literature helps foster theory of mind (Kidd & Castano, 2013). Those who read literary fiction (fiction considered to have a deeper meaning) have a temporarily enhanced theory of mind compared to people who read non-fiction or did not read at all. Texts are considered literary by consensus of researchers in the field of literary experts
(McCarthy, Myers, Briner, Gaesser, & McNamara, 2009). This implies that actively processing the motivations and actions of fictitious people helped readers interpret others motivation. This in-and-of- itself does not seem to be important, but it supports the idea that reading could not be wholly divorced from cognition used during everyday tasks, but must rely on similar functions to accomplish reading comprehension. This also suggests that reading literary works will increase System II usage.
Reading fiction has also been shown to increase creative thinking (Djikic, Oatley, &
Moldoveanu, 2013). A possible interpretation for this finding is that reading fiction decreases the need for cognitive closure and thus increases cognitive flexibility. Before reading literature, participants would approach a given problem looking for the only possible solution, but after reading literature, they were primed not to accept the idea that only one solution could work. This allowed readers to consider a broader range of possibilities that could work and that, in turn, lead readers to find the optimal creative solution.
Text orientation is the degree to which a reader assumes their interpretation of the text is vital HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 26 for understanding the text and could affect the interpretation of the narrative used in these experiments
(Dixon, Bortolussi, Twilley, & Leung, 1993). If a story is reader-oriented (too literary), the participants may attribute too much interpretation to the text, and their responses may not reflect manipulations, but rather only reflect their prejudices. If a story is too text-oriented, participants may, instead, become too detail oriented and use algorithm thinking while digesting the narrative instead of quickly and easily reading in a heuristic manner. Essentially, this means that a reader who believes their interpretation is fundamental to the reading experience will likely not process parts of a writing that do not fit the narrative structure they have created. Conversely, participants who do not believe their interpretation matters at all, may overly focus on the text content and actively try to recognize that the manipulated anchors/halos are not related to the targets due to over-thinking/using a System II heavy approach. For this reason, the narrative was created to be thematic, but easily digestible and only utilize mildly rhetorical writing instead of deep prose or pseudo-esoteric language.
Text orientation affects thematic orientation similarly to how the level of processing effects memorization of a piece (Kurtz & Shober, 2001). Writers can manipulate a reader's orientation by using discourse evaluations, telling evaluations, or story evaluations. Discourse evaluations are when a writer uses a metaphor, simile, hyperbole, or some other type of literary device and a reader increases scrutiny of the text. Story evaluations happen during unexpected shifts in an event, setting, or character. These are the types of shifts discussed earlier in the situation model as changes in the narrative that result in large-scale updates to current situational representation. Telling evaluations occur merely when an author mentions something for the first time. The effect is strengthened when the author mentions the novel information at an unusual or unexpected time. All three text orientations affect reading model updating which suggests that to minimize scrutiny applied to experimental manipulations in the text and optimize heuristic usage, experimental manipulations should not be inserted during narrative shifts, near metaphors and similes, or in unexpected locations. This is not to say that text orientation is HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 27 completely possible to manipulate in readers, but efforts should be used to minimize their effects.
Readers' past knowledge and expertise can affect the interpretation of a piece of writing
(Peskin, 1998). A person who is an expert in a field will have a greater appreciation for the nuance a writer portrays, and more experience with a type of writing will result in more information gleaned while reading. In other words, someone who reads poetry will take away a deeper understanding of any individual poem compared to a novice poem reader. They will also find meaning more quickly than someone who is less experienced, even for an extensive reader of other materials such as an engineer who reads technical journals all day. To optimize the chance of heuristic use, a story should be written straightforwardly and familiar to what most readers would have come across in daily life.
Readers will need to read through the story to have a chance of showing heuristic effects which means they must find the story compelling in some way. The suspense, coherence, and thematic complexity of a story account for 54% of a reader's interest in the story (McCarthy, 2015). Vividness also accounts for a small percentage, but not nearly as much as the other three aspects. When creating a story, I will have to focus on something that has minor suspense and thematic complexity to maintain enough interest so that participants read the text without skimming through. The type of text also determines how quickly a participant will read. Participants will read a nonfiction text faster than a fiction text. The likely reason is that participants expect a much more coherent non-fiction writing and can anticipate the text more accurately.
One final consideration was more pragmatic than theoretical, and that was to decide how long to make the writing. Previous research has used single paragraphs around the size of 100 to 250 words
(Kurtz & Schober, 2001). Smaller short-stories have been around 870 words (Schraw, 1997), with longer short-stories being a little smaller than 1500 words (Zacks et al., 2009). Since there seems to be an empty niche for longer short-stories that can still be read in one sitting, I used a short-story around
3000 words. I will discuss the short-story in more detail in the methods section. HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 28
Subtlety in Psychological Research
A serious methodological concern for this type of experiment was whether changing four words in a 3,000-word short-story would be a strong enough manipulation to result in an observable effect. In this section, I will briefly discuss studies in heuristics and reading that use either weak manipulations or small sample sizes that still have observable effects.
Volz et al. (2006), studied the recognition heuristic by presenting participants with a choice of 2 cities, asking them to rank which city had more of a specific dimension (closeness, size, age) and using fMRI to measure brain activity. Despite being shown the stimuli for only half a second, the participants showed typical effects of using the recognition heuristic (choosing the recognized choice). This study used a sample of 18 people in Experiment 1 and 14 people in Experiment 2 and found significant results. This is an example of the robustness of heuristic effects that small sample size studies can still show results.
In longer reading studies, Therriault, Rinck, and Zwaan (2006) used a sample of 112 people to show that readers took longer to read a sentence after crossing a narrative boundary. Readers were presented a 58 to 85 sentence (the example passage was 700 words) long passage one sentence at a time. Researches measured reading times for each sentence. Participants spent longer reading sentences that started a new narrative boundary than sentences that continued in the current narrative sentence.
The authors used four passages which each participant read in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, the participants read 14 total passages including eight experimental passages. If each of the passages were the same length as the included example, participants read over 11,000 words of passages. This shows that even in extensive experiments participants could maintain focus well enough to show measurable effects.
Rumiati and Roncato (1985) presented 12 participants with 96 sentences written in different tenses. They found that participants were significantly faster at responding to questions when the tense HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 29 of the presented sentence matched the tense of the presented question. Similar semantic meaning existed between sentences of different conditions, and the experiment had a small sample size. Once again, the effects were robust enough to show significant effects. Participants can even conduct verbal tasks while highly distracted. For example, Tuholski et al. (2001), had participants memorize words while reciting math problems out loud. Even splitting attention, participants were able to remember words.
Wilson (1968) showed that participants who were semantically primed to believe one coin was worth more than a similar coin of the same physical size reliably stated that the more valuable coin was larger. This shows that participants were subconsciously primed to generalize a difference that was not relevant to the determination they made, and they were not instructed to make this connection.
Irrelevant and subtly implemented changes showed significant differences. In ecological studies, participants have shown more pro-social behavior in the presence of a picture of human eyes (Bateson et al., 2013). When a picture of human eyes was placed near the handlebars of a bicycle, riders were less likely to litter while riding. This again shows that subtle stimuli in the environment can have a demonstrable effect on human behavior even when that stimulus is irrelevant to task demands.
To account for possible weak effects of my planned stimuli, I will use four manipulations to increase the chance that participants attend to and process manipulations and decrease the chance of missing a single manipulation. If participants processed the stimuli, results should show an effect since heuristic thinking has been shown to be a robust phenomenon. Experiment 1 used 200-word paragraphs to maximize the chance of showing heuristic effects. Experiment 2 added considerable complexity to the passages by increasing the passages to between 500 and 700 words. Experiment 3 added more complexity by increasing the total passage length and thematically connecting all smaller passages into one large short-story. This complexity gradient should help overcome the weak effects of changing a HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 30 limited number of words in a large body of text while supporting or refuting the ecological validity of heuristics in narrative text reading.
Specific Aims & Predictions
Aim 1 is to measure the halo effect based on a positive or negatively perceived trait in 200- word passages, 500 to 700-word passages, and a 3000-word short-story. The halo effect will be measured in emotionally neutral situations (Manipulation 1: prettiness to meanness while getting ready in the morning. Manipulation 2: height to skill while bargaining for a car). In previous research, participants have shown a halo effect based on a guest lecturer's perceived height. Attractiveness is used as the prototypical trait that elicits a halo effect in lab experiments. My prediction was that those who were primed with positive halos (pretty or tall) would have significantly higher ratings for the target trait (kindness or competence) than people who were primed with negative halos (ugly or short).
Aim 2 is to measure the anchoring effect of two low or high anchors in 200-word passages, 500 to 700-word passages, and a 3000-word short-story. One anchor will be in an emotionally neutral setting (watching the news), and one will be in a slightly emotionally negative situation (waiting at a hospital). I predicted that people who were primed with low anchors would have significantly lower target value predictions than people who were primed with high anchors.
This experiment ultimately tested whether cognitive rule active during cognitive processing of life events and decisions were also active during narrative interpretation and recall. I predicted that the effects would be most robust in Experiment 1, weaker in Experiment 2, and weakest in Experiment 3. HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 31
EXPERIMENT 1 Method
Participants. Two hundred thirty seven participants recruited through Amazon Mechanical
Turk. Sixteen participants were removed from the final analysis for spending less than three or more than 20 minutes to complete the experimental task (n =220). Four participants were removed from the
Expense anchor condition for providing outlier responses. Participants were selected as English native speakers from the United States. Participants were compensated $1.50 for successful completion of the experiment.
Design. There were four independent variables: Attractiveness Halo, Expense Anchor, Height
Halo, and Drive Time Anchor. Each independent variable had two levels that varied between subjects.
The levels for the halo manipulations were positive or negative valance and the levels for the anchor manipulations were high or low magnitude. There was no factorial designs between independent variables due to the variables having different measured scales. The dependent measures for each halo manipulation was a behavioral assessment based on a 10-point Likhert scale. The dependent measures for each anchor manipulation was a value estimate for an unknown quantity.
The attractiveness halo manipulation's two levels were the protagonist was described as pretty or ugly. The condition where the protagonist was described as pretty was the positive attractiveness halo condition and the condition where the protagonist was described as ugly is the negative attractiveness halo condition. The dependent variable was the participant's belief of how meanly the protagonist yelled at her children. One corresponds to being very kind and ten corresponds to being very mean.
The expense anchor manipulation's two levels were a described amount of damage as being
$35,000 or $150. The $35,000 description was the high expense anchor condition and the $150 HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 32 description was the low expense anchor condition. The dependent variable was the participant's estimation of how many children attended an Easter egg hunt.
The height halo manipulation's two levels were a man described as either short or tall. The condition where the man was described as tall was the positive height halo condition and the condition where he was described as short was the negative height halo condition. The dependent variable was the participant's belief in the man's competence in negotiating. A response of 'one' corresponded to very incompetent and a score of 'ten' corresponded to very competent.
The drive time anchor manipulation's two levels were a couple driving for either 15 minutes or
90 minutes. The condition where the couple drove for 15 minutes was the low drive time anchor condition, and the condition where the couple drove for 90 minutes was the high drive time anchor condition. The dependent variable was the participant's estimation of how long the couple waited at a hospital counter.
Stimuli. I presented participants four approximately 200-word (150 to 250 words) passages
(full passages listed in Appendix A).Each passage had a single word altered to differentiate the levels of the independent variable of that passage's associated heuristic. The passage order and levels of manipulation were randomized.
Procedure. Participants were advised in the job request on M-Turk that they would be required to read short passages and answer questions. Participants were instructed in the informed consent and job post that they would not receive a satisfactory completion if they did not correctly answer three of the 4 manipulation check questions. After completing the informed consent, participants read a single
150 to 250 word passage. The participants recieved a random passage from from one of the four passages containing a manipulation (height halo, attractiveness halo, drive time anchor, and expense anchor) at a random level. Before each passage, participants were given instructions that read “Please carefully read the following passage.” After completing the passage, participants hit a 'next' arrow and HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 33
Were asked to “Please answer the following questions.” A manipulation check multiple-choice question and a core question relating to that manipulation's independent variable were presented one at a time in a random order. After the second question, participants read another passage (see appendix D for questions). The participant then received a random passage from the three passages they did not read at a random level. The participants completed a total of four passages.
The example flow in Figure 1 demonstrates a hypothetical participant who received the height halo manipulation with the positive condition as the first passage they read. After hitting the 'next' arrow, the participant was randomly assigned that passage's manipulation check question followed by the core question. The participant was next randomly assigned the expense anchor manipulation in the low condition. After reading the passage, the participant was randomly assigned that passage's core question followed by the manipulation check. After the participant hit the next arrow, the attractiveness halo manipulation's passage in the low condition served as the third passage. The participant first answered passage's core question followed by the manipulation check. Finally, the participant received the drive time anchor in the high condition and answered the manipulation check followed by the core question. At that point the experiment would be over. HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 34
Figure 1: Experimental Flow for Experiments 1 and 2. Participants first read one of the passages containing one of the four experimental manipulations and then answered the manipulation check and core questions presented one at a time until finishing all 4 passages. HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 35
Results Due to participants being randomly assigned to conditions, there is a small discrepancy between sample sizes for each condition. I performed a series of four one-tailed between subjects T-Tests. The
T-Tests compared the two conditions in each of the manipulations. One-tailed t-Tests were used because the anchoring heuristics and halo heuristics have shown a clear consistency in the past, where it can be predicted that high anchors should result in higher estimates than low anchors and positive halos should result in positive perception of unknown traits compared to negative halos. Based on the theoretical framework presented in this dissertation, finding the opposite results would be uninterpretable. Participants were significantly more likely to estimate a higher value for the cost of an
Easter egg hunt in the high expense anchor condition (M= $8247, n=118) than when reading the low expense anchor condition (M = $2228, n=98); t(214) =4.65, p<.01. These results are shown in Figure 2.
Participants rated Linda as less mean in the positive attractiveness halo condition (M =6.55, n=117) than in the negative attractiveness halo condition (M = 7.00, n=103); t(218) = 1.743, p=.04. These results are shown in Figure 3. Participants estimated the wait time at a hospital counter as shorter in the low drive time anchor condition (M = 10.33, n=127) than in the high drive time anchor condition (M =
18.73, n=93); t(218) = 3.12, p<.01. These results are shown in Figure 4. There was no significant difference in competency rating in the negative height halo condition (M = 8.41, n=109) or the positive height halo condition (M = 8.55, n=111); t(218) = -.713, p=.16. These results are shown in Figure 5. HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 36
10000
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0 High EA Low EA Figure 2: Expense Anchoring Effect Results for Experiment 1. EA: Expense Anchor. Average estimation of Easter egg hunt cost in the expense anchor manipulation for Experiment 1. Participants who read a lower amount of damage (low expense anchor) estimated the cost of an Easter egg hunt as less expensive than participants who read a high amount of damage (high expense anchor) t(213) =4.65, p<.01. These are standard error bars. 7.3
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Figure 3: Attractiveness Halo Effect Results for Experiment 1. AH: Attractiveness Halo. Average rating of meanness in the attractiveness halo manipulation for Experiment 1. Participants who read Linda as being pretty (positive attractiveness halo) rated her as less mean than participants who read her as ugly (negative attractiveness halo) t(218) = 1.743, p=.04. These are standard error bars. HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 37
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0 High DTA Low DTA Figure 4: Drive Time Anchoring Effect Results for Experiment 1. DTA: Drive Time Anchor. Average estimation of wait time (in minutes) for each group in the drive time anchor manipulation for Experiment 1. Participants who read the drive time as 90 minutes (high drive time anchor) estimated the waiting time as longer than participants who read a 15 minute drive time (low drive time anchor), t(218) = 3.12, p<.01. These are standard error bars. 9
8.9
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8 HH Negative HH Positive Figure 5: Height Halo Effect Results for Experiment 1. HH: Height Halo. Average rating of competence for each group in the height halo manipulation for Experiment 1. There was no difference found between the negative and positive conditions, t(218) = -.713, p=.16. These are standard error bars. HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 38
Discussion This experiment successfully replicated past heuristics studies in three of the four manipulations(every manipulation except for height halo). The differences were significant and fell in expected directions. If optimal height is only moderately tall, then having a person described as surprisingly tall could cause a social norm violation and violating social norms have been shown to mitigate halo effects (Gibson & Gore, 2016). Describing a man as tall could also be less emotionally salient than describing a woman as pretty, which could result in people not noticing or encoding that information about Luke.
Possible reasons that the Height Halo failed to reach significance were not tested further in this dissertation, but as stated earlier, this dissertation's focus was whether increasing a passages' complexity would interfere with heuristic usage in encoding and remembering passage content. HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 39
EXPERIMENT 2
Experiment 2 was designed identically to experiment 1 except that the writing segments were expanded to be an average of approximately 550 words (370 words to 770 words). The whole passages are presented in Appendix B. Participants were compensated $2.00 for successful completion of the experiment.
Method
Participants. Two hundred forty one participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical
Turk. Twenty three participants were removed from the final analysis for spending less than six or more than 40 minutes to complete the experimental task (n =218). Four participants were removed from the expense anchor manipulation and three were removed from the drive time anchor manipulation for providing outlier responses. Participants were selected as English native speakers from the United
States.
Results
Due to participants being randomly assigned to conditions, there is a small discrepancy between sample sizes for each condition. I performed a series of four one-tailed between subjects T-Tests. The
T-Tests compared the two conditions in each of the manipulations. Participants were significantly more likely to estimate a higher value for the cost of an Easter egg hunt in the high expense anchor condition
(M= $9376, n=104) than when reading the low expense anchor condition (M = $2998, n=110) t(212)
=4.077, p<.01. These results are shown in Figure 6. Participants rated Linda as less mean in the positive attractiveness halo condition (M =5.47, n=117) than in the negative attractiveness halo condition (M =
6.09, n=101); t(216) = 2.154, p=.02. These results are shown in Figure 7. Participants estimated the wait time at a hospital counter as shorter in the low drive time anchor condition (M = 9.23, n=122) than in the high drive time anchor condition (M = 17.14, n=93); t(213) = -3.29, p<.01. These results are HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 40 shown in Figure 8. There was no significant difference in competency rating in the negative height halo condition (M = 8.00, n=107) or the positive height halo condition (M = 8.10, n=111); t(216) = -.40, p=.39. These results are shown in Figure 9.
12000 ) s r 10000 a l l o D (
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f o
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0 High EA Low EA Figure 6: Expense Anchoring Effect Results for Experiment 2. EA: Expense Anchor. Average estimation of Easter egg hunt cost in the expense anchor manipulation for Experiment 2. Participants who read a lower amount of damage (low expense anchor) estimated the cost of an Easter egg hunt as less expensive than participants who read a high amount of damage (high expense anchor) t(212) =4.077, p<.01. These are standard error bars. HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 41
6.4
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5 Negative AH Positive AH Figure 7: Attractiveness Halo Effect Results for Experiment 2. AH: Attractiveness Halo. Average rating of meanness in the attractiveness halo manipulation for Experiment 2. Participants who read Linda as being pretty (positive attractiveness halo) rated her as less mean than participants who read her as ugly (negative attractiveness halo) t(216) = 2.154, p=.02. These are standard error bars.
20
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0 High DTA Low DTA Figure 8: Drive Time Anchoring Effect Results for Experiment 2. DTA: Drive Time Anchor. Average estimation of wait time (in minutes) for each group in the drive time anchor manipulation for Experiment 2. Participants who read the drive time as 90 minutes (high drive time anchor) estimated the waiting time as longer than participants who read a 15 minute drive time (low drive time anchor), t(213) = -3.29, p<.01. These are standard error bars. HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 42
8.5
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7.5 Negative HH Positive HH Figure 9: Height Halo Effect Results for Experiment 2, HH: Height Halo. Average rating of competence for each group in the height halo manipulation for Experiment 2. There was no significant difference found between the negative height halo and positive height halo conditions, t(216) = -.40, p=.39. These are standard error bars.
Discussion
These results suggest that increasing a passage's complexity and length up to as much as 800 words did not effect people's interpretation of the passage or their heuristic usage while reading the passages. Again, significant results were found in three of the four manipulations (all manipulations except for height halo) in the expected directions. The next experiment tested whether combining the passages to create a whole narrative effected heuristic usage. HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 43
EXPERIMENT 3 Method Participants. Two hundred fifty one participants recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Thirty three participants were removed from the final analysis for spending less than eight or more than
40 minutes to complete the experimental task (n =218). Six participants were removed from the expense anchor manipulation and three from the drive time anchor manipulation for providing outlier responses. Participants were selected as English native speakers from the United States. Participants were compensated $2.00 for successful completion of the experiment.
Design. The independent and dependent variables were the same as Experiment 1 and
Experiment 2. Participants were also given a questionnaire at the end of the experiment to asses subjective ratings of interest in story, ease of reading, expectations, and passage complexity.
Stimuli. I presented participants an approximately 3000-word short-story (full story listed in
Appendix C) written in a direct format with a shallow theme of how unplanned disruptions to a routine ends up being unfortunate and the protagonist's realization that she may want to disrupt that routine in a positive way herself. The story was presented in five segments. The final story contained the passages used in Experiment 2 with expanded transitions between those passages. One scene was added to the four presented passages from Experiment 2 where the protagonist went food shopping. This scene linked the four other scenes (she went shopping to show off her haircut from the expense anchor scene, bought food identical to food from the attractiveness halo scene, got a call from Luke about car shopping (height halo scene), and established that her children were staying at school, which was where James became sick prior the drive time anchor scene). There were only four single word text changes varying between participants. These manipulations were the same ones explained in
Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, except the manipulations were presented in a fixed order due to them belonging to an over-arching story. HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 44
The story was relatively straightforward to prevent participants from taking longer to read due to complexity (Fiechter & Benjamin, 2016). The average reading rate is approximately 250 words per minute, even though some readers can read at over 700 words per minute (Acklin & Papesh, 2017).
This means that an average reader should read the 3,000-word short-story in about 12 minutes. This also means that some readers who spent significantly longer or shorter than 12 minutes were excluded from analysis due to either skimming or possible difficulties reading (under eight minutes or over 40 minutes).
Procedure. After consenting to participate in the experiment, participants were presented with the attractiveness halo scene. After completing reading the scene, participants hit next to move to the expense anchor scene. They next read the newly added scene described above, followed by the height halo scene, and participants finished with the drive time anchor scene. After finishing the drive time anchor scene, participants answered four core questions one at a time, presented in a random order.
After answering the forth core question, participants answered four manipulation check questions one at a time presented in a random order. Finally, participants were given a series of questions about their experience reading the passage (Appindex E).
Participants were tested on aspects of the story right after completion of reading to facilitate recall performance. Given that in previous recall studies there has not been a significant difference in recall performance between participants who were tested one minute or ten minutes after reviewing information, I predicted minimal recall performance degradation during the final questioning (Fietcher
& Benjamin, 2016).
Counter-Balancing. There was a chance that the initial description of Linda could affect the entire interpretation of the story. If, for example, most participants who read Linda as pretty also read
Luke as short, there could be a carry-over effect which dilutes the effect of the second halo manipulation. Groups were counterbalanced to minimize carry-over effects from early descriptions of HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 45 the protagonist and minimize sample size imbalance due to randomness. Table 1 shows all possible orders of presentation which were counterbalanced.
Results
Due to an unexpectedly large number of people that failed the manipulation check and people that previously completed the experiment, the counterbalancing lost effectiveness. This is why the groups' sample sizes vary. I performed a series of four one-tailed between subjects T-Tests. Participants were not significantly more likely to estimate a higher value for the cost of an Easter egg hunt in the high expense anchor condition (M= $6648, n=123) than the low expense anchor condition (M = $4368, n=91); t(210) =1.3, p=.085. These results are shown in Figure 10. Participants rated Linda equally as mean in the positive attractiveness halo condition (M =5.06, n=124) and in the negative attractiveness halo condition (M = 5.02, n=96); t(216) = 0.14, p=.44. These results are shown in Figure 11.
Participants estimated the wait time at a hospital counter as the same in the low drive time anchor condition (M = 9.8, n=103) and in the high drive time anchor condition (M = 10.7, n=115); t(214) =
-.30, p=.32. These results are shown in Figure 12. There was no significant difference in competency rating in the negative height halo condition (M = 7.77, n=97) or in the positive height halo condition
(M = 7.99, n=123), t(216) = -.55, p=.29. These results are shown in Figure 13. HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 46
Table 1 Composition of Counter-Balanced Groups.
Group Number Attractiveness Expense Anchor Height Halo Drive-Time Halo Anchor 1 P H P H 2 P H P L 3 P H N H 4 P L P H 5 N H P H 6 P H N L 7 P L P L 8 N H P L 9 P L N H 10 N H N H 11 N L P H 12 P L N L 13 N L N H 14 N L P L 15 N H N L 16 N L N L
Note: N = Negative Halo, P = Positive Halo, L = Low Anchor, H = High Anchor. This table shows the composition of proposed groups that are counterbalanced in order to control for possible order effects. HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 47
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0 High EA Low EA Figure 10: Expense Anchoring Effect Results for Experiment 3. EA: Expense Anchor. Average estimation of Easter egg hunt cost in the expense anchor manipulation for Experiment 3. Participants who read a lower amount of damage (low expense anchor) estimated the cost of an Easter egg hunt as the same as participants who read a high amount of damage (high expense anchor); t(210) =1.3, p=.085. Note: Although this difference did not reach significance, it did approach significance in the expected direction. These are standard error bars. 5.3
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4.6 Negative AH Positive AH Figure 11: Attractiveness Halo Effect Results for Experiment 3. AH: Attractiveness Halo. Average rating of meanness in the attractiveness halo manipulation for Experiment 3. Participants who read Linda as being pretty (positive attractiveness halo) did not rate her as less mean than participants who read her as ugly (negative attractiveness halo) t(216) = 0.14, p=.44. These are standard error bars. HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 48
14
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0 High DTA Low DTA Figure 12: Drive Time Anchoring Effect Results for Experiment 3. DTA: Drive Time Anchor. Average estimation of wait time (in minutes) for each group in the drive time anchor manipulation for Experiment 3. Participants who read the drive time as 90 minutes (high drive time anchor) did not estimate the waiting time as longer than participants who read a 15 minute drive time (low drive time anchor), t(212) = -.30, p =.32. These are standard error bars. 8.5
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7.5 Negative HH Positive HH Figure 13: Height Halo Effect Results for Experiment 3. HH: Height Halo. Average rating of competence for each group in the height halo manipulation for Experiment 3. There was no difference found between the negative height halo condition and positive height halo condition; t(216) = -.55, p=.29. These are standard error bars. HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 49
Table 2 Self-Reported Views on Short-Story Manipulation Average Std. Deviation Difficulty 3.22 1.8 Duration 18.36 7.08 Interest 3.85 1.74 Complexity 3.67 1.67 Expectation 3.08 1.25
Note: This table shows the self reported ratings of respondents for ease of the reading passage, interest for the passage, complexity of the passage, and how closely the passage met expectations on a 7-point likhert scale. Duration is the amount of time a participant spent taking the survey. An average, uninterrupted reader would take 12 minutes to read a 3000 word short-story at 250 wpm. Assuming participants had an expected reading distribution, participants spent an average of six minutes on the informed consent form and answering questions. Expectation is reverse scored where a low score means the contents of the story match participants' expectations.
Table 3 Correlations between Self-Reported Views and Core Questions Manipulation Difficulty Duration Interest Complexity Expectation Attractiveness Halo .095 .03 -.045 .071 .071 Expense Anchor -.043 -.065 -.056 -.075 -.018 Height Halo -.021 .076 -.007 .020 -.033 Drive Time Anchor .057 -.055 -.094 -.071 .169*
Note: * p<.05. This table shows Pearson correlations between self reported ease, interest, complexity, and expectation by participants' responses in each of the four conditions. The table also shows the correlation between the amount of time in minutes respondents required to complete the experiment (duration) and their responses. Only the correlation between drive time anchor and expectation was significant when not corrected (p=.012). The relationship is not significant when a Bonferoni correction is used (ɑ =.0025). HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 50
Table 4 Correlations between Self-Reported Views and Core Questions by Level Manipulation Duration Difficulty Interest Complexity Expectation Attractiveness Halo -.032 -.083 .085 .016 .253*† Negative Attractiveness Halo .012 .217*† -.155† .114 -.036 Positive Expense Anchor Low -.153ˁ -.155ˁ -.117 -.100 -.088 Expense Anchor High -.116 .023 -.005 -.056 .043 Height Halo Positive .012 -.006 -.129 .011 -.063 Height Halo Negative .184† -.027 -.027 .01 -.004 Drive Time Anchor Low -.143ˁ .065 -.058 .164† .167† Drive Time Anchor High -.043 .081 -.144ˁ -.015 .162ˁ Note: * p<.05 two tailed correlation, † p<.05 in the expected direction(one tailed), ˁ p < .05 or approaches significance in the unexpected direction (one tailed). This table shows the Pearson correlations between self reported difficulty, interest, complexity, and expectation by participants responses in each of the four manipulations separated into each level. The table also shows the correlation between the amount of time in minutes respondents required to complete the experiment (duration) and their responses. Only the correlations between negative attractiveness halo by expectation (p=.012) and difficulty by positive attractiveness halo (p=.016) were significant in a two tailed t-test. No relationships were significant when a Bonferoni correction is applied (ɑ =.00125).
Table 2 shows the averages of each participant's subjective rating of the short-story. Table 3 shows the correlation of those subjective ratings to the four manipulations in Experiment 3. Only the drive time anchor correlates with expectations, where the less participants expected the story, the longer they estimated the couple waited at the hospital reception counter. This correlation is no longer significant when a bonferoni correction is used to adjust the alpha (ɑ =.0025). The correlations do not significantly change while groups are divided into high/low anchors and positive/negative halos (Table
4). Only two of the correlations were significant with two-tailed p-values. If quicker, easier reading promoted heuristic usage, then we'd expect to see a negative correlation between duration and estimates with high anchors and a positive correlation between reading times and estimates with low anchors. A similar prediction could be made in each category of rating with each estimate, but we do not see this HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 51 pattern in the data. Six of the 40 correlations were significant with one-tailed p-values in the expected direction. Three more are significant with one-tailed tests (two more approaching significance, totaling five) in the unexpected direction. Since there were almost the same amount of correlations in both expected and unexpected directions (with similar correlation coefficients), it seems likely that the effects are random and the significant p-values were caused by the high statistical power of having over
200 participants. This implies that ease of processing and lower cognitive effort did not effect heuristic usage as previously hypothesized.
In order to check if there was a significant difference between the findings in Experiment 3 when compared to Experiment 2, I ran four between-subjects ANOVAs. The dependent variable was the participants' response and the fixed factors were the levels of the manipulation and the experiment in which it appeared. There was a significant difference between participants' responses in the attractiveness halo manipulation, f(3,435)= 5.916, p<.01. There was a main effect of experiment, f(1,
438) = 13.88, p<.01, but no main effect of condition f(1,438) = 2.64, p=.11 and no interaction of experience by condition f(3, 435) = 1.53, p. =.22.
There was a significant difference between participants' responses in the drive time anchor manipulation, f(3, 427) = 5.536, p<.01. Main effects of experiment approached significance, f(1, 430) =
3.67, p=.06. There was a Main effect of condition, f(1, 430) = 8.58, p<.01 and an interaction between condition and experiment, f(3, 427) = 5.67, p=.02.
There was no significant difference between participant's responses in the height halo manipulation, f(3,432)=.336, p=.799.There was no main effect of experiment, f(1,435)=.412, p=.52.
There was no main effect of condition, f(1,435)=.559, p=.46. There was no interaction of experiment by condition, f(3,432)=.106, p=.75.
There was a significant difference between participants' responses in the expense anchor manipulation, f(3, 424)=4.28, p=.01. There was a main effect of condition, f(1,427)=9.884, p<.01. HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 52
There was no main effect of experiment, f(1,427)=.029,p=.865. There was no interaction of experiment by condition, f(3,424)=2.72, p=.10.
Discussion
Participants failed to show a significant difference between conditions of all four manipulations in Experiment 3. This implies that heuristic effects were greatly attenuated or possibly even absent during encoding and recall of target information. Based on the ANOVAs presented above, participants estimated significantly different values in the attractiveness halo manipulation (drive time anchor approached significance). The difference in meanness ratings of Linda in the attractiveness halo manipulation could have been effected by participants gaining more insight into the protagonist and thus having a fuller representation of her in the 3,000 word short story. Since heuristic use is mitigated by lack of knowledge, increasing knowledge could have effected a participants estimation more than strict heuristic effects in the attractiveness halo manipulation. Anchors in the drive time anchor and expense anchor conditions in Experiment 2 pulled participants to use an estimation that is within an acceptable range and did not alter the predictive range. HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 53
GENERAL DISCUSSION The answer to main theoretical question, 'are heuristic effects found in cognitive research present in the encoding and remembering of short story reading,' was found to be no. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants showed heuristic effects of anchoring and halo manipulations in the expected directions but the effects were absent in Experiment 3. Heuristic effects were both strong and present in Experiment 1 but didn't weaken in Experiment 2, and the effects almost completely disappeared in
Experiment 3. Three potential direct explanations could account for this dissertation's findings. A direct explanation based on heuristic usage, could be that as more information is added to the representation, the heuristic effects are diminished, but information is encoded essentially the same. Another explanation is that a non-heuristic factor could result in the diminished effect, such as reading time or visibility/noticeabilty of the changes. Based on dual-processing theories' framework another direct explanation is that readers could process a short-story using System II (algorithmic) thinking while using System I (heuristic thinking) in reading short passages.
This dissertation was not designed to draw a definitive conclusion about what literary or cognitive aspects could account for a lack of significance in Experiment 3, however this general discussion will outline how the three experiments can be compared to either support or refute the three explanations I just presented. In the general discussion, I started by moderately supporting the hypothesis that cognitive system use attenuated heuristic use, followed by moderately refuting the idea that factors outside of reading attenuated heuristic usage and finish by discussing the idea that increased information/complexity caused attenuated heuristic effects.
Reading passages in the form of a long short-story could cause participants to approach the encoding of the story as a System II task which would attenuate heuristic effects. Top-down influences of task demands could have caused participants to utilize a deliberate and effortful processing of the HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 54 story (Egeth & Yantis, 1997; Chartrand & Bargh, 1996). The participants may also have learned cognitive scripts for interpreting stories where they rely on novel aspects of passages to encode stories
(Smith & DeCoster, 2000).
The experimental results (specifically finding heuristic effects in Experiment 1 & 2 but none in
Experiment 3) fit well into the received view or cognitive-experiential theories, but does not fit well into a default interventionist framework (Chartrand & Bargh, 1996; Evans & Stanovich, 2013). In the default interventionist view, reading a short-story or a passage should result in the same initial processing of the information but change based on the final questions. If this were the case, we'd expect to see heuristic effects in all three experiments because it should be encoded the same way, since it is mostly the same text with the exact same questions. Conversely, the received view and the cognitive- experiential theory would predict that top-down goals would dictate whether information was initially processed using a System I or System II approach, which fall in line nicely with the results.
Another possible explanation is that since participants did not know a priori that the reading passage would be predictable and only mildly rhetorical, participants still activated cognitive scripts to monitor for conflict and unexpected turns in the story (Osaka, Nishizaki, Komori, & Osaka, 2002). It is theorized that during System II processing (executive controlled processing) that the extent of exerted attentional control determines the influence of automatic processing (Egeth & Yantis, 1997). When participants chose to focus on large scale changes in the short-story instead of all aspects in the smaller passages, suppression effects prevent spreading activation of information incongruent with top-down goals (Feldman-Barret, Tugade, & Engle, 2004). Since these participants complete surveys regularly, they might also have an above average willingness to think, which would result in less heuristic activation during the experimental task (Pennycook, Fugelson, & Koehler, 2015). This monitoring would activate long-term memory representations for related ideas and that higher level of activation could interfere with bottom up associations created by the proximal anchoring and halo effects HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 55
(Foroughi, Barragan, & Boehm-Davis, 2016). Participants have also been shown to change their reading focus based on pre-reading instructions which supports the idea that they may choose specific strategies before reading begins (Rayner et al., 2012). If participants expected a longer short-story to be reader-centric, then they would likely focus more on their interpretation than on the written contents
(Schraw, Bruning, 1999). This could have made readers adopt an orientation that is more reader oriented when compared to the shorter passages which may have been a more author-centric interpretation (Bailey, Kurby, Sargent, & Zacks, 2017).
If working memory interacts with long-term memory to remember information, then the expectation of needing to remember a longer story's worth of content could influence memory coding
(Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995). It's possible that shorter narrative passages result in a top-down expectation where smaller details are important, and so arbitrary information, such as Linda's looks or the cost of damage, is encoded in short-term memory for long-term retrieval. This heightened activation of unrelated cognitive structures caused the unrelated information to influence recall of target information. In the case of longer stories, although the representations for the irrelevant information was activated during the reading process, no short-term recall encodings were produced. This could result in less target interference and priming effects during recall of targets.
Reading narrative shifts within a story cue readers into reading a text with more scrutiny (Zacks et al., 2009). It's possible that participants changed from a fundamentally System-I interpretation of reading shown in Experiment 1 and 2 to a System-II esq interpretation due to expected scene change cues between sections. This change would be required to help participants transition from encoding featural changes in scenes to encoding categorical changes between scenes. A decrease in cognitive closure resulting from reading fiction could have caused participants to read the short-story in a holistic manner that largely didn't encode details, resulting in less heuristic interference when compared to a
1000-word passage (Djikic, Oatley, & Moldoveanu, 2013). This dissertation did not attempt to HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 56 differentiate which aspect of a short-story would cause a reader to approach the story using System II, but many inferences can be made about external factors.
The length of the passage alone seems unlikely to be an ad hoc reason for participants to not encode anchor/halo information while reading. In the short-story, there is one manipulation per 762 words in the story. In experiment two, the Attractiveness Halo passage (769 words) and the Expense
Anchor passage (722 words) both showed significant results despite being approximately the same length. Considering that the height halo did not show an effect in any condition, the short-story could be arguably considered to have three changes instead of four which makes the average 1015 words. The
25% increase in change length between the two conditions in Experiment 2 and Experiment 3 might have resulted in attenuation of heuristic effects. Based on models of reading such as the Situation
Model, conceptual encoding of reading representations should be divided based on large changes in spacial/temporal/character characteristics of the story. Since the passages occurring between scene changes are almost the same in Experiment 2 and Experiment 3, the amount of information during the act of reading itself seems insufficient for explaining heuristic differences.
Another mitigating factor in this experiment could be the noticability of changes within the passages. The Expense Anchor showed consistently strong effects in Experiment 1 and 2 and also almost reached significance in the expected direction in Experiment Three. One possible explanation is that the Expense Anchor could have stood out in the passage more than the other types of manipulations. A five-digit number would stand out in a wall of text more than one word. Even the two-digit number of the Drive Time Anchor would mostly blend into the text. This explanation is not wholly satisfying because the actual text presented at any given time was controlled during the experiments.
In Experiment 3, the short-story was presented in five sections, each presented section was approximately the same size as the presented passages in Experiment 2. Since the short-story was HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 57 presented in five parts, the Attractiveness Halo (949 vs 769 words), Expense Anchor (722 vs 722 words), Height Halo (379 vs 379 words), and Drive Time Anchor (403 vs 396 words) were presented in passages with approximately the same length across both Experiment 3 and Experiment 2. The
Attractiveness Halo had the largest difference with about 23% increase, but the Expense Anchor and
Drive Time Anchor had virtually the same passages presented on the screen. The results of Experiment
2, once again, suggest that this can't be a sufficient explanation because all three of the significant manipulations would be equally obscure in the passages between experiments. This suggests that the differences were not caused by differing visual presentation.
Increased reading time appears to also be insufficient for explaining no longer seeing significant differences in Experiment 3 over Experiment 2. Increased reading time could be the result of increased reading difficulty or could cause people to forget over time. There was not a correlation found between reading time and estimates given for the targets. If failing to see heuristic effects were a result of forgetting, quicker readers should show stronger heuristic effects. Since there is a rough correlation between reading times and reading ease, we could expect that people who read the story more quickly also expended less effort in reading (Rayner et al., 2012). There was also no correlation in self-reported measures of ease and estimations. Since cognitive effort has been correlated with heuristic usage
(Forgas, 2011), this suggests that anticipated cognitive effort likely has a larger influence than ad hoc cognitive effort.
If increased time between reading in Experiment 2 and Experiment 3 caused a degradation of the halo and anchoring effects, then we would likely still see an anchoring effect in the drive time anchor since it was presented in the story just before participants answered core questions. This means, assuming degradation over time caused significant changes, to the drive time anchor should have still shown an effect despite effects of the expense anchor and the attractiveness halo diminishing, but it did not. We'd also expect there to be a correlation between the amount of time a participant spent doing the HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 58 experiment and dependent measure responses if memory degradation over time was the main factor for no halo/anchoring effects in Experiment 3. Those who spent less time during the experiment should show heuristic effects, but that was not the case.
The findings for this experiment remain problematic for a serially updating model such as the situation model. The situation model does not create a clear delineation between why readers should fundamentally encode short reading passages differently than long reading passages. This means we could predict that updating could be influenced by external information in the same way that decisions are influenced by previously heard information. The model itself doesn't preclude that idea, though it doesn't require it either. In that sense, the concept needed to be tested and experimental results could have been explained by the model as long as the findings were consistent. In this case, the findings were inconsistent and there was no clear extra-reading factor (e.g. reading times) that could account for why effects seen in individual passages did not also present themselves when the passages were combined. If memory of a story's representation were constructed the same, even as older information were forgotten, we'd expect to see the polarizing influences of the anchors on initial representation encoding. In this case, we did not even with the drive time anchor which occurred at the end of the story.
One interesting implication of this study's findings is that the results could be interpreted that situation model-like encoding is used during shorter passages where readers expect low cognitive effort and event-indexing model-like encoding could be used during times of expected high cognitive work.
This means that in low-effort situations, readers can incorporate new information as it is received and the current representations update based on that information. In times of high effort, participants encode information predicted to be relevant to understanding ongoing events and segmented based on those assumptions. This dissertation did not seek to directly test this link, and so future experiments will be needed to support or refute this possibility. HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 59
CONCLUSION The main take-away from this experiment are as follows:
1. Readers used System I-like processing while reading short passages and System II-like processing while reading the longer short-story
2. Heuristic use while reading a short-story did not appear to be influenced by reading ease, time spent reading, interest, expectations, or complexity. This implies heuristic use was determined before reading the story.
3. bottom-up dual-processing theories do not adequately explain different system use in reading short- stories, but top-down dual-processing theories can explain the shift
4. serial updating reading models do not adequately explain the differences in encoding effect during a 3000 word short-story and passages under 1000 words.
Going forward, research in cognitive interpretation of short-stories should concentrate on manipulating cognitive system use or qualitative aspects of short-stories to test heuristic usage in longer short-stories. The main reason is that story length is inextricably linked to the amount of information within the story. The qualitative nature of the information can be manipulated, but the quantitative nature is linked by word count. This dissertation created several new inroads for further study in reading in both the context of the situation model and dual-processing theory. Several of these possible directions include:
1. including algorithm-esq information to a short-story and measure whether people answer questions similarly to those presented with that information in isolation
2. incrementally increase the length of presented passages to test at what length people switch from heuristic interpretations to no longer showing influences from heuristics HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 60
3. present 3000-word short-stories that do not result in scene/character/temporal changes to measure whether complexity or length play a larger role in heuristic usage
4. test whether other heuristics show a similar pattern to this dissertation's results
5. replicate these findings with a different short-story
6. give participants a set of stories with different unknown lengths to see whether reading strategy will change interpretation
7. try to influence a priori cognitive effort by removing manipulation check questions (increase ecological validity for less internal validity). HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 61
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APPENDIX A: EXPERIMENT 1 PASSAGES *Areas that are highlighted are words exchanged for the high and low conditions.
Attractiveness Halo: She guessed her children laid about watching cartoons. Joseph likely sprawled along a white couch with floral patterns embroidered along the crest while his little brother James curled up on their father's brown leather recliner.
Linda's life hadn't always been so predictable. In fact, during college, she joined protests for the abolishment of nuclear weapons and rallied to bring attention to social issues and change. Every day swept her to a new city, state, or university. She was just as likely to wake up in the back of a friend's car in Boise, Toronto, or New York as her bed in the dorms. Even when she worked as a bank teller after college, life changed from moment to moment in her off hours. Sometimes, she'd peruse the latest art exhibit, strolled through a park at twilight, or dance away the nights in local clubs and bars. Although she mostly faded into the background now, once in her life, she was so pretty/ugly that everyone turned their eyes on her when she entered the room.
“Get upstairs and get dressed! Now!”
Joseph scurried from the couch, and James fell out of the recliner. The pair bolted up the stairs and footfalls bounded to their bedrooms.
Expense Anchor: A made-up woman in a bright red dress sat next to a balding man in a gray suit at a dark blue counter with a golden '7' affixed to the table's side facing the camera. She spoke through a forced smile as the picture dissolved from the studio to the local town hall.
“Bill, looks like someone had an eventful evening!”
Bits of plaster cracked and flaked from the building's facade as a uniformed officer poked at the damage.
“Why do you say that, Brenda?”
The camera panned out from the fractured facade to a red sedan with matching damage.
“Well, Ben Constantinople of Park City parked at the local town hall to avoid paying meters but backed into the building as he departed. You can now see the damage on screen. I guess that turned out to be one expensive drink!” HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 70 “What do you mean?”
“Mr. Constantinople stopped for a drink before leaving, and now he has to pay $35,000/$150 in damage. Ha ha ha.”
“Ha ha ha. On a lighter note, Brenda, the annual Easter egg hunt happened last Sunday. This year the egg Hunt has been the most expensive recorded in the last decade! But, as you can tell, the results have been worth every penny.”
The television showed B-roll of children reaching down to pick up pastel eggs from lush, well-maintained grass. Red, blue, and green sundresses furled in the spring breeze on the girls. Boys in black, blue, and gray dress pants with white shirts fought over who arrived at eggs first.
Height Halo: Linda met her husband, Luke, while working at the bank after college. They were both relatively young back then, and sparks flew. They married after a whirlwind romance, which only lasted a few months. He worked as a middle-manager at a local factory where he had just enough responsibility to worry about mistakes, but not enough power to be free of responsibility for day to day mishaps. He remained good-natured despite his obvious stress. His only unusual feature was that he was extraordinarily tall/short, which often surprised people who had only seen his picture.
Some people enjoyed competitive sports or challenging themselves to complete challenging puzzles or pieces of art, but Luke enjoyed to haggle. Whenever they purchased a major appliance, car, or house, he studied similar products, sales predictions, prices, and all relevant information to better negotiate a favorable price. He honed his skills for just this opportunity to negotiate at a car dealership.
“$15,000.”
An exacerbated salesman rolled his eyes in disgust at the realization that his easy sale evaporated into tense negotiations.
Drive Time Anchor: They drove on for another 15/90 minutes before reaching the hospital. After arriving, Linda stood at the hospital check-in desk tapping her finger on the counter. A nurse dressed in pink scrubs read a patient's chart while Luke and Linda waited. Linda lost her patience.
“Could you just...”
The nurse put up one finger to hush Linda, and she puckered. The nurse saw this scenario HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 71 on a nightly basis and became cold to a family's worry. The nurse finished examining a chart and turned her attention to the young couple.
“How may I help you?”
Linda burst in, unsure of proper hospital etiquette.
“My son was sent here from school. Is he all right?”
“Oh, you are James's parents? He is fine. Just minor food poisoning. There was a recent E-coli scare with some bran cereals. We believe that may be the cause. It looked much more serious than it actually was.” HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 72
APPENDIX B: EXPERIMENT 2 PASSAGES *Areas that are highlighted are words exchanged for the high and low conditions.
Attractiveness Halo: Linda flung her comforter with a low grunt. Spring's crisp air poured over her body, and goosebumps crawled up her exposed limbs. Linda managed to pull her legs off the side of a king-sized bed that she shared with her husband. He commuted to work hours ago, which left her to deal with their small children. First, however, she needed to shower and dress.
Linda rifled through a cherry oak colored build-it-yourself armoire for something to wear. At times, she felt a pang to replace the cheap furniture that sat in the room's corner for more than a decade with something more adult, but life and routine have always gotten in the way. Faded blue jeans and a sky-blue hoodie would suffice for running errands. She brought the outfit with underwear and an undershirt into the master suite's bathroom. The clean clothing plopped next to the rightmost sink on the counter of a Jack and Jill vanity.
Linda dropped a pair of shorts and t-shirt she used as pajamas into a pile. She approached a shower and pulled a steel handle to the exact spot she used every morning. Water streamed through an art deco spout and splashed into the tub's basin. Her hand slid into the falling water. It gradually warmed as the pipe's cold, settled water cleared way to a pleasant luke-warm temperature. Linda pulled a nob on the spout's end and water shot from a showerhead. Linda hid herself from the outside world with a robin egg blue shower current, tentatively stepped into the waterfall, and relaxed as she acclimated.
Water fluctuated as Linda washed her face. The little house her family shared's woefully outdated plumbing couldn't maintain constant pressure which lead to predictable shifts in intensity. The water beat her face as she rinsed suds from her eyes but gently gilded off her back as she washed her shoulders. The dance continued, but she'd lived in the house so long that she didn't even notice the odd changes. She probably wouldn't even have known about the problem, except once a year, or so, she visited her in-laws, and their shower felt off. The water jerked to a halt. Linda exited the shower and dried off with a nearby towel.
A ceiling fan diligently whisked moisture from the air. The fan's rhythmic swishing droned on as Linda dressed. The noise further blended into the background as Linda headed for the stairs to descend into the living room on her way to the kitchen. She guessed her children laid about watching cartoons. Joseph likely sprawled along a white couch with floral patterns embroidered along the crest while his little brother James curled up on their father's brown leather recliner.
Linda's life hadn't always been so predictable. In fact, during college, she joined protests for the abolishment of nuclear weapons and rallied to bring attention to social issues and HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 73 change. Every day swept her to a new city, state, or university. She was just as likely to wake up in the back of a friend's car in Boise, Toronto, or New York as her bed in the dorms. Even when she worked as a bank teller after college, life changed from moment to moment in her off hours. Sometimes, she'd peruse the latest art exhibit, strolled through a park at twilight, or dance away the nights in local clubs and bars. Although she mostly faded into the background now, once in her life, she was so pretty/ugly that everyone turned their eyes on her when she entered the room.
“Get upstairs and get dressed! Now!”
Joseph scurried from the couch, and James fell out of the recliner. The pair bolted up the stairs and footfalls bounded to their bedrooms. Linda smirked and continued into the kitchen. She pressed a coffee pot's power button, and it awoke with a hissing suck from the main water reserve. Linda sauntered to the fridge and lifted off a box of cereal. Her attention turned back to her morning brew. The machine drizzled water through grounds and coffee dripped through the filter into the pot below. She watched the liquid splash into a glass carafe. Her hands numbly found a stack of bowls sitting nearby as she transfixed on the drops. She flipped three and poured cereal. The coffee dripped faster, but still barely filled the container. She blindly poured milk in bowls and fished spoons from a drawer at her hip. The light drip transitioned into a controlled stream.
Linda sighed and watched toward the doorway. A crash echoed from the second floor. Linda shook her head and paced toward the staircase.
Expense Anchor: Every Tuesday, Linda stopped at a local salon after dropping her kids off at school. One time a month, she'd restyle her hair and get a touch-up on the other weeks. Today, she prepared for a restyling. The salon regulars joined her every week. They may have just followed out habits like her and happened to come at that time each week, purposely adjusted their schedules to gather and gossip, or maybe they just never left. Linda wasn't sure, but these women were the closest people she had to friends, and she genuinely welcomed the company. She sat next to Beatrice at the hair dryers.
Beatrice's son went to the same school as James, and she had him much younger than when Linda had Joseph, so Beatrice was at least ten years younger. Linda pretended she could hear Beatrice go on about some kind of drama with the school, her son, and the principal, but the hair dryers were too loud to follow the conversation. Instead, she read subtitles of a lunchtime news hour on a small television hanging in the salon's corner.
A made-up woman in a bright red dress sat next to a balding man in a gray suit at a dark blue counter with a golden '7' affixed to the table's side facing the camera. She spoke through a forced smile as the picture dissolved from the studio to the local town hall.
“Bill, looks like someone had an eventful evening!” HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 74
Bits of plaster cracked and flaked from the building's facade as a uniformed officer poked at the damage.
“Why do you say that, Brenda?”
The camera panned out from the fractured facade to a red sedan with matching damage.
“Well, Ben Constantinople of Park City parked at the local town hall to avoid paying meters but backed into the building as he departed. You can now see the damage on screen. I guess that turned out to be one expensive drink!”
“What do you mean?”
“Mr. Constantinople stopped for a drink before leaving, and now he has to pay $35,000/$150 in damage. Ha ha ha.”
“Ha ha ha. On a lighter note, Brenda, the annual Easter egg hunt happened last Sunday. This year the egg Hunt has been the most expensive recorded in the last decade! But, as you can tell, the results have been worth every penny.”
The television showed B-roll of children reaching down to pick up pastel eggs from lush, well-maintained grass. Red, blue, and green sundresses furled in the spring breeze on the girls. Boys in black, blue, and gray dress pants with white shirts fought over who arrived at eggs first.
“This year, the week's beautiful weather held out all weekend and into Sunday, making this one of the largest egg hunts in the past several years!”
“Oh my, look at all those smiling faces! I'm glad to see the Easter egg hunt committee's hard work paid off.”
The feed switched back to the studio and showed Bill nodding in agreement.
“After this short break, we'll have the 5-day forecast with Blowing Brian Blizzard! Stay tuned to find out if you need an umbrella, suntan lotion, or maybe even if it's too early to put away that winter coat!”
Linda's hair dryer shut off and Beatrice's words drifted back into focus.
“So what do you think?”
Linda thought back to Beatrice's conversation, but could only remember something about the school. HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 75 “That's so terrible!”
Beatrice puckered, cocked her head a touch, and eyed Linda.
“What's so terrible about the Caribbean?”
Linda watched her friend slackjawed, released an audible 'uhhhh,' and nervously laughed.
“Sorry, I couldn't really hear you because of the hair dryer.”
“All I said is that my family is going to the Bahamas after the school semester ends. I just wanted to know what you think.”
“Oh... I mean it looks like it'd be nice. I've never been, though. Maybe there are other things I'd like to do with the money.”
“Like what?”
“The house could use some new plumbing, or we could pay down the car we need to buy.”
“That's so... boring. If you had extra money to spend, that's what you'd do? do not you want to try something different for a change?”
Linda wondered about change, but couldn't decide in the moment if 'new' was worth the hassle.
Height Halo: Linda met her husband, Luke, while working at the bank after college. They were both relatively young back then, and sparks flew. They married after a whirlwind romance, which only lasted a few months. He worked as a middle-manager at a local factory where he had just enough responsibility to worry about mistakes, but not enough power to be free of responsibility for day to day mishaps. He remained good-natured despite his obvious stress. His only unusual feature was that he was extraordinarily tall/short, which often surprised people who had only seen his picture.
Some people enjoyed competitive sports or challenging themselves to complete challenging puzzles or pieces of art, but Luke enjoyed to haggle. Whenever they purchased a major appliance, car, or house, he studied similar products, sales predictions, prices, and all relevant information to better negotiate a favorable price. He honed his skills for just this opportunity to negotiate at a car dealership.
“$15,000.”
An exacerbated salesman rolled his eyes in disgust at the realization that his easy sale HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 76 evaporated into tense negotiations.
“I'm sorry, but that's too low.”
Luke paced the car and examined the tire tread.
“Ten years ago, I purchased a car like this it was only $10,000! $15,000 seems fair.”
The car almost perfectly matched the one they currently drove, a tan American-made sedan with cloth seats. Every aspect seemed familiar, and Linda might have suggested to just keep the old one if it weren't falling apart. The salesman snapped out a stupor caused by intense concentration.
“This car line has greatly improved since then! A new aerodynamic finish greatly reduces drag and increases your gas mileage. The large engine increases acceleration, but fuel use is mitigated by a computer controlled fuel injection system. This car is worth at least $24,000, but I'll sell it for $20,000.”
“I've read that the newer model doesn't have much better acceleration or fuel economy, but is much cheaper to produce than it was ten years ago. If anything, it's worthless, relative to inflation. How does $16,000 sound?”
“The actual cost of parts may be down, but other expenses have skyrocketed...”
Linda's phone rang as she mindlessly thought about how the family could spend the weekend. She fumbled for the handset in her purse and answered.
“Hello?”
Drive Time Anchor: Linda and Luke sped down an unfamiliar backwoods road toward Lincoln Memorial Hospital. Trees overhung the street, darkening their path even more than the moonless night. The car wound around a blind turn when a baby deer bounded into the road, and Luke slammed the breaks. Wheels screeched and the car skid toward the hapless fawn. The sedan completely stopped several feet from the confused animal. Luke flashed the high beams, and the fawn safely rambled off after two blinks. The couple sighed in deep and came to the realization that hurting themselves on the way to the hospital to check on their son would only make the situation worse.
The tan sedan straightened and Luke accelerated through unknown bends and turns. The couple passed by houses they've never visited and through woods they've never hiked. Ghosts and goblins danced just out of sight as Linda imagined the worst in the situation. This is the first time one of her children have been seriously injured, and she didn't know HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 77 what to do.
- - -
They drove on for another 15/90 minutes before reaching the hospital. After arriving, Linda stood at the hospital check-in desk tapping her finger on the counter. A nurse dressed in pink scrubs read a patient's chart while Luke and Linda waited. Linda lost her patience.
“Could you just...”
The nurse put up one finger to hush Linda, and she puckered. The nurse saw this scenario on a nightly basis and became cold to a family's worry. The nurse finished examining a chart and turned her attention to the young couple.
“How may I help you?”
Linda burst in, unsure of proper hospital etiquette.
“My son was sent here from school. Is he all right?”
“Oh, you are James's parents? He is fine. Just minor food poisoning. There was a recent E-coli scare with some bran cereals. We believe that may be the cause. It looked much more serious than it actually was.”
Linda and Luke breathed a sigh of relief. Linda couldn't believe the same breakfast they ate every day could lead to one of the family getting sick. She wondered if such a minor problem felt so drastic because their routine was all they knew.
Linda and Luke walked to the seating area to wait for their son to be released from the hospital's care. Linda mindlessly looked to Luke. HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 78
APPENDIX C: EXPERIMENT 3 SHORT-STORY * Areas that are highlighted are words exchanged for the high and low conditions.
Beep Beep Beep
A pulsating alarm snapped Linda from slumber. Her arm flung from under a sky blue blanket and smacked the snooze button. She dug her face into a cloud white pillow, closed her eyes and drifted back to sleep.
Beep Beep Beep
Linda dragged herself conscious enough to reach the clock and press snooze.
Beep Beep Beep
She mumbled her displeasure as she reached for the alarm again, but habit stayed her hand. Every day the noise interrupted her sleep, and every day she hit the snooze button twice. She pressed the power button and rolled onto her back, facing the ceiling. She contemplated staying in bed instead of preparing for the day. During the morning, the sun-battered her windows intensely enough to project light and shadow through sheer burgundy curtains. Red recreated a bland mosaic of the outside world.
Tree branches and leaves formed the bulk of the darkest shadows, and a power line connecting her house to the main grid etched a line through the center. The ceiling's red dulled, as clouds drifted through the atmosphere.
Linda flung her comforter with a low grunt. Spring's crisp air poured over her body, and goosebumps crawled up her exposed limbs. Linda managed to pull her legs off the side of a king-sized bed that she shared with her husband. He commuted to work hours ago, which left her to deal with their small children. First, however, she needed to shower and dress.
Linda rifled through a cherry oak colored build-it-yourself armoire for something to wear. At times, she felt a pang to replace the cheap furniture that sat in the room's corner for more than a decade with something more adult, but life and routine have always gotten in the way. Faded blue jeans and a sky-blue hoodie would suffice for running errands. She brought the outfit with underwear and an undershirt into the master suite's bathroom. The clean clothing plopped next to the rightmost sink on the counter of a Jack and Jill vanity.
Linda dropped a pair of shorts and t-shirt she used as pajamas into a pile. She approached a shower and pulled a steel handle to the exact spot she used every morning. Water streamed through an art deco spout and splashed into the tub's basin. Her hand slid into HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 79 the falling water. It gradually warmed as the pipe's cold, settled water cleared way to a pleasant luke-warm temperature. Linda pulled a nob on the spout's end and water shot from a showerhead. Linda hid herself from the outside world with a robin egg blue shower current, tentatively stepped into the waterfall, and relaxed as she acclimated.
Water fluctuated as Linda washed her face. The little house her family shared's woefully outdated plumbing couldn't maintain constant pressure which lead to predictable shifts in intensity. The water beat her face as she rinsed suds from her eyes but gently gilded off her back as she washed her shoulders. The dance continued, but she'd lived in the house so long that she didn't even notice the odd changes. She probably wouldn't even have known about the problem, except once a year, or so, she visited her in-laws, and their shower felt off. The water jerked to a halt. Linda exited the shower and dried off with a nearby towel.
A ceiling fan diligently whisked moisture from the air. The fan's rhythmic swishing droned on as Linda dressed. The noise further blended into the background as Linda headed for the stairs to descend into the living room on her way to the kitchen. She guessed her children laid about watching cartoons. Joseph likely sprawled along a white couch with floral patterns embroidered along the crest while his little brother James curled up on their father's brown leather recliner.
Linda's life hadn't always been so predictable. In fact, during college, she joined protests for the abolishment of nuclear weapons and rallied to bring attention to social issues and change. Every day swept her to a new city, state, or university. She was just as likely to wake up in the back of a friend's car in Boise, Toronto, or New York as her bed in the dorms. Even when she worked as a bank teller after college, life changed from moment to moment in her off hours. Sometimes, she'd peruse the latest art exhibit, strolled through a park at twilight, or dance away the nights in local clubs and bars. Although she mostly faded into the background now, once in her life, she was so pretty/ugly that everyone turned their eyes on her when she entered the room.
“Get upstairs and get dressed! Now!”
Joseph scurried from the couch, and James fell out of the recliner. The pair bolted up the stairs and footfalls bounded to their bedrooms. Linda smirked and continued into the kitchen. She pressed a coffee pot's power button, and it awoke with a hissing suck from the main water reserve. Linda sauntered to the fridge and lifted off a box of cereal. Her attention turned back to her morning brew. The machine drizzled water through grounds and coffee dripped through the filter into the pot below. She watched the liquid splash into a glass carafe. Her hands numbly found a stack of bowls sitting nearby as she transfixed on the drops. She flipped three and poured cereal. The coffee dripped faster, but still barely filled the container. She blindly poured milk in bowls and fished spoons from a drawer at her hip. The light drip transitioned into a controlled stream. HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 80
Linda sighed and watched toward the doorway. A crash echoed from the second floor. Linda shook her head and paced toward the staircase.
- - -
Every Tuesday, Linda stopped at a local salon after dropping her kids off at school. One time a month, she'd restyle her hair and get a touch-up on the other weeks. Today, she prepared for a restyling. The salon regulars joined her every week. They may have just followed out habits like her and happened to come at that time each week, purposely adjusted their schedules to gather and gossip, or maybe they just never left. Linda wasn't sure, but these women were the closest people she had to friends, and she genuinely welcomed the company. She sat next to Beatrice at the hair dryers.
Beatrice's son went to the same school as James, and she had him much younger than when Linda had Joseph, so Beatrice was at least ten years younger. Linda pretended she could hear Beatrice go on about some kind of drama with the school, her son, and the principal, but the hair dryers were too loud to follow the conversation. Instead, she read subtitles of a lunchtime news hour on a small television hanging in the salon's corner.
A made-up woman in a bright red dress sat next to a balding man in a gray suit at a dark blue counter with a golden '7' affixed to the table's side facing the camera. She spoke through a forced smile as the picture dissolved from the studio to the local town hall.
“Bill, looks like someone had an eventful evening!”
Bits of plaster cracked and flaked from the building's facade as a uniformed officer poked at the damage.
“Why do you say that, Brenda?”
The camera panned out from the fractured facade to a red sedan with matching damage.
“Well, Ben Constantinople of Park City parked at the local town hall to avoid paying meters but backed into the building as he departed. You can now see the damage on screen. I guess that turned out to be one expensive drink!”
“What do you mean?”
“Mr. Constantinople stopped for a drink before leaving, and now he has to pay $35,000/$150 in damage. Ha ha ha.” HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 81
“Ha ha ha. On a lighter note, Brenda, the annual Easter egg hunt happened last Sunday. This year the egg Hunt has been the most expensive recorded in the last decade! But, as you can tell, the results have been worth every penny.”
The television showed B-roll of children reaching down to pick up pastel eggs from lush, well-maintained grass. Red, blue, and green sundresses furled in the spring breeze on the girls. Boys in black, blue, and gray dress pants with white shirts fought over who arrived at eggs first.
“This year, the week's beautiful weather held out all weekend and into Sunday, making this one of the largest egg hunts in the past several years!”
“Oh my, look at all those smiling faces! I'm glad to see the Easter egg hunt committee's hard work paid off.”
The feed switched back to the studio and showed Bill nodding in agreement.
“After this short break, we'll have the 5-day forecast with Blowing Brian Blizzard! Stay tuned to find out if you need an umbrella, suntan lotion, or maybe even if it's too early to put away that winter coat!”
Linda's hair dryer shut off and Beatrice's words drifted back into focus.
“So what do you think?”
Linda thought back to Beatrice's conversation, but could only remember something about the school.
“That's so terrible!”
Beatrice puckered, cocked her head a touch, and eyed Linda.
“What's so terrible about the Caribbean?”
Linda watched her friend slackjawed, released an audible 'uhhhh,' and nervously laughed.
“Sorry, I couldn't really hear you because of the hair dryer.”
“All I said is that my family is going to the Bahamas after the school semester ends. I just wanted to know what you think.”
“Oh... I mean it looks like it'd be nice. I've never been, though. Maybe there are other things I'd like to do with the money.” HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 82
“Like what?”
“The house could use some new plumbing, or we could pay down the car we need to buy.”
“That's so... boring. If you had extra money to spend, that's what you'd do? do not you want to try something different for a change?”
Linda wondered about change, but couldn't decide in the moment if 'new' was worth the hassle.
- - -
A shopping cart's wheel squeaked as Linda passed an intricately arrayed pyramid of soup cans. That same squeak followed her through the store, but the longer she trudged the trolley along, the less she noticed the grating sound. She stopped and visually searched the stack for a sign that indicated the sale price. 99¢. Linda scooped up a dozen cans and dropped them into the cart. Her husband ate a can like that every day for lunch, so she stocked up even though she didn't think they needed that many at once. In fact, she didn't even feel like shopping, but she went every Tuesday after the salon, partially because it was nearby and partially because she wanted to show off her new hairstyle.
The rhythmic squeaking followed Linda past the breads and bakery pastries to the deli counter where she inspected lunch meats. A local college student worked as the clerk. She smiled to Linda, and Linda returned the gesture. Despite her friendly demeanor and cheerful words, the young woman's eyes betrayed that she wanted to be anywhere else.
“The usual?”
“Excuse me?”
“1 lb of roast beef. 1 lb of turkey. 1/2 pound of colby jack cheese. You get that every week... I'm not sure I've ever seen you get anything else.”
Linda thought about the order and tried to decide what she might want instead, but nothing came to mind.
“Yes, please. That sounds good.” HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 83
“By the way, cute haircut! It's hard to believe it's already the first Tuesday of the month!”
The young woman smiled as she worked, contented with paying a loyal customer a compliment, though the words seemed oddly sad to Linda.
“Yeah, thanks.”
After a few minutes, the deli worker handed Linda three packages, and she returned to shopping. Linda mindlessly perused the cereal aisle. She passed sugary marshmallow filled food her children would beg her for if they tagged along and reached bran flakes mixed with semi-sweet raisins. Although not as healthy as bran or as enjoyable as candy, she felt the mix struck a nice balance between what they should eat and what they want to eat. She dropped the largest box into the cart without bothering to check the price. She moseyed to the third cash register from the exit, which was still close to leaving, yet always seemed empty.
Another smiling face greeted her as she walked to the scanner.
“I can't seem to go shopping without forgetting at least ten things, but each week, you come like clockwork and get everything you need.”
“I guess the key is to know what you need beforehand.”
The gray-haired woman nodded as she scanned each item through the register. Linda's cell phone rang out from her purse, which sat in the cart's small child basket. She moved away pouches of tissues, snacks, vitamins, and other parental necessities. The phone's ringtone sounded like the jingle of an ice cream truck, and she grabbed the handset which somehow found its way to the bottom. She swiped the green telephone icon.
“Excuse me.”
The old woman at the register nodded as she continued to scan.
“Yes, honey?”
“Hey, babe. I just wanted to remind you that we are going to the car dealership when I get home from work in a little bit. When did you need to pick the kids up from school?”
“James will be done with track practice around 7:00, and Joseph will be done with his tutor at around 7:30. We'll just pick them both up around then.”
- - - HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 84
Linda met her husband, Luke, while working at the bank after college. They were both relatively young back then, and sparks flew. They married after a whirlwind romance, which only lasted a few months. He worked as a middle-manager at a local factory where he had just enough responsibility to worry about mistakes, but not enough power to be free of responsibility for day to day mishaps. He remained good-natured despite his obvious stress. His only unusual feature was that he was extraordinarily tall/short, which often surprised people who had only seen his picture.
Some people enjoyed competitive sports or challenging themselves to complete challenging puzzles or pieces of art, but Luke enjoyed to haggle. Whenever they purchased a major appliance, car, or house, he studied similar products, sales predictions, prices, and all relevant information to better negotiate a favorable price. He honed his skills for just this opportunity to negotiate at a car dealership.
“$15,000.”
An exacerbated salesman rolled his eyes in disgust at the realization that his easy sale evaporated into tense negotiations.
“I'm sorry, but that's too low.”
Luke paced the car and examined the tire tread.
“Ten years ago, I purchased a car like this it was only $10,000! $15,000 seems fair.”
The car almost perfectly matched the one they currently drove, a tan American-made sedan with cloth seats. Every aspect seemed familiar, and Linda might have suggested to just keep the old one if it weren't falling apart. The salesman snapped out a stupor caused by intense concentration.
“This car line has greatly improved since then! A new aerodynamic finish greatly reduces drag and increases your gas mileage. The large engine increases acceleration, but fuel use is mitigated by a computer controlled fuel injection system. This car is worth at least $24,000, but I'll sell it for $20,000.”
“I've read that the newer model doesn't have much better acceleration or fuel economy, but is much cheaper to produce than it was ten years ago. If anything, it's worthless, relative to inflation. How does $16,000 sound?”
“The actual cost of parts may be down, but other expenses have skyrocketed...”
Linda's phone rang as she mindlessly thought about how the family could spend the weekend. She fumbled for the handset in her purse and answered. HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 85
“Hello?”
- - -
Linda and Luke sped down an unfamiliar backwoods road toward Lincoln Memorial Hospital. Trees overhung the street, darkening their path even more than the moonless night. The car wound around a blind turn when a baby deer bounded into the road, and Luke slammed the breaks. Wheels screeched and the car skid toward the hapless fawn. The sedan completely stopped several feet from the confused animal. Luke flashed the high beams, and the fawn safely rambled off after two blinks. The couple sighed in deep and came to the realization that hurting themselves on the way to the hospital to check on their son would only make the situation worse.
The tan sedan straightened and Luke accelerated through unknown bends and turns. The couple passed by houses they've never visited and through woods they've never hiked. Ghosts and goblins danced just out of sight as Linda imagined the worst in the situation. This is the first time one of her children have been seriously injured, and she didn't know what to do.
- - -
They drove on for another 15/90 minutes before reaching the hospital. After arriving, Linda stood at the hospital check-in desk tapping her finger on the counter. A nurse dressed in pink scrubs read a patient's chart while Luke and Linda waited. Linda lost her patience.
“Could you just...”
The nurse put up one finger to hush Linda, and she puckered. The nurse saw this scenario on a nightly basis and became cold to a family's worry. The nurse finished examining a chart and turned her attention to the young couple.
“How may I help you?”
Linda burst in, unsure of proper hospital etiquette.
“My son was sent here from school. Is he all right?” HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 86
“Oh, you are James's parents? He is fine. Just minor food poisoning. There was a recent E-coli scare with some bran cereals. We believe that may be the cause. It looked much more serious than it actually was.”
Linda and Luke breathed a sigh of relief. Linda couldn't believe the same breakfast they ate every day could lead to one of the family getting sick. She wondered if such a minor problem felt so drastic because their routine was all they knew.
Linda and Luke walked to the seating area to wait for their son to be released from the hospital's care. Linda mindlessly looked to Luke.
“So, Beatrice was talking about this trip...” HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 87
APPENDIX D: EXPERIMENT 1 AND 2 QUESTIONS Attractiveness Halo Questions:
Core Question:
How meanly did Linda yell at her children? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Very Kindly Asked Very Meanly yelled
Manipulation Check Question:
What were Linda's children doing when she descended the stairs? A. Watching Television B. Eating Breakfast C. Fighting D. Getting Dressed
Expense Anchor Questions:
Core Question:
How expensive was the local Easter egg hunt? _$______
Manipulation Check Question:
Who was discussing the Easter egg hunt?
A. Two people in a hair salon. B. News Broadcasters C. Children playing in the park D. Parents at a PTA meeting
Height Halo Questions:
Core Question:
How Competent of a negotiator is Luke? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Very Incompetent Very Competent HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 88 What did Luke negotiate for? A. Jetski B. Refrigerator C. A house D. A Car
Drive Time Questions:
Core Question:
How long did Linda and Luke wait at the hospital's reception counter? ______Minutes_____
Who did the couple talk to? A. A Nurse B. A doctor C. A police officer D. Another set of parents HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 89
APPENDIX E: EXPERIMENT 3 QUESTIONS Core Questions:
How expensive was the local Easter egg hunt? _$______
How long did Linda and Luke wait at the hospital's reception counter? ______Minutes_____
How forceful of a negotiator is Luke? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Very Passive Very Forceful
How meanly did Linda yell at her children? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Very Kindly Asked Very Meanly Yelled
Manipulation Checks:
What did Linda do immediately after getting her hair styled?
1. Went food shopping 2. Went Car shopping 3. Talked to a travel agent 4. Got into a car accident
Why did Joseph go to the hospital? 1. Hit by a car on the walk home from school 2. Broke leg during track practice 3. Food Poisoning from bran flakes 4. Choked on a chicken wing
How often does Linda get her hair cut? 1. Every week 2. Every other week 3. Once every 2 months 4. Never
What did Linda work as after college? 1. Factory Worker 2. Librarian 3. Nurse 4. Banker HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 90
Ancillary Questions
How interesting did you find the story? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Very Uninteresting Very Interesting
How complex was the story? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Very Simple Very Complex
How easy was the story to follow? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Very Easy Very Difficult
How often did something unexpected happen in the story? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Never All the time
What is the main theme of the story?
Any other comments, questions, or concerns about this story or experiment? HEURISTICS IN LONG-FORM STORY READING 91
APPENDIX F: IRB APPROVAL