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