Jonathan J. Rolison's research while affiliated with University of Essex and other places

Who should decide how limited resources are prioritized? We ask this question in a healthcare context where patients must be prioritized according to their need and where advances in autonomous artificial intelligence-based technology offer a compelling alternative to decisions by humans. Qualitative (Study 1a; N = 50) and quantitative (Study 1b; N = 800) analysis identified agency , emotional experience , bias-free , and error-free as four main qualities describing people’s perceptions of autonomous computer programs (ACPs) and human staff members (HSMs). Yet, the qualities were not perceived to be possessed equally by HSMs and ACPs. HSMs were endorsed with human qualities of agency and emotional experience, whereas ACPs were perceived as more capable than HSMs of bias- and error-free decision-making. Consequently, better than average (Study 2; N = 371), or relatively better (Studies 3, N = 181; & 4, N = 378), ACP performance, especially on qualities characteristic of ACPs, was sufficient to reverse preferences to favor ACPs over HSMs as the decision makers for how limited healthcare resources should be prioritized. Our findings serve a practical purpose regarding potential barriers to public acceptance of technology, and have theoretical value for our understanding of perceptions of autonomous technologies.

Why are some people more willing than others to take risks? While behavioral tasks (e.g., monetary lotteries) are often regarded as a gold standard for capturing a person’s risk preference, recent studies have found stated preferences (e.g., responses to hypothetical scenarios) to exhibit higher reliability, convergent validity, and test–retest stability. Yet, little is known about the psychological drivers of stated preferences. Central to the stated preference approach, the psychological risk-return model conceptualizes a person’s propensity to engage in an activity or behavior as a tradeoff between their risk perceptions and expected benefits. To cast a light on the psychological drivers of risk preference within the psychological risk-return framework, in a series of studies participants reported how they evaluated the risks and benefits of activities and their propensity to engage. Individual differences in analytic and intuitive thinking dispositions were also measured. Some participants referred explicitly to risks and rewards of activities when deriving their risk propensity, which was associated with sensitivity to their risk perception and expected benefit ratings. Associations with thinking dispositions indicated that participants who considered risks and rewards were more disposed to analytic thinking. Participants’ reports also revealed a broad repertoire of psychological drivers (e.g., intuition, imagination, and feeling) of their evaluations of activities. These were stable over time, associated with thinking dispositions, and influenced their risk preference. The findings provide support for the psychological risk-return model of risk preference. A multifaceted model of preference is urged by the findings to acknowledge the multiple co-occurring psychological drivers of risk preference.

Do older adults construct more emotionally gratifying social environments than younger adults? According to socioemotional selectivity theory (SST), older adults actively construct their social environments to satisfy emotional goals, drawing closer to gratifying close others and pruning less rewarding persons. Yet, there is a scarcity of direct evidence showing that older adults indeed construct more gratifying social environments by pruning negative persons and by drawing closer to positive persons. We employed a novel social network decision task to study age-related differences in the emotional composition of social environments that people construct and associations with emotional experience. In three studies, participants spanning the adult age range constructed hypothetical social environments, choosing among players according to their performance on word search puzzles and valenced feedback provided by the players about the participants’ own performance. Positive valence players always provided positive feedback, whereas negative valence players always provided negative feedback. Our findings partially support SST but draw a theoretically important distinction between pruning existing social environments and constructing new social environments. When pruning an existing social environment, older adults maintained more positive as well as more negative valence players. Conversely, when required to include players to construct their social environment, older adults produced more positive social environments by excluding negative valence players. The social environment participants constructed was associated with their emotional experience, but our findings suggest that emotion drives gratifying social choices rather than vice versa. Implications for lifespan theory of motivation are discussed.

Retirement is an eagerly awaited life transition for many older workers, but some may anticipate their exit from the workforce will result in loss of meaningful work-based activities and social interactions. For older workers more committed to their organization, retirement might represent a threat to maintaining a consistent, positive identity. Across three pre-registered studies of US adults aged 49 to 75, we investigated the relationship between organizational commitment and anticipated identity changes in retirement. Studies 1 and 2 ( N = 1059) found that older workers largely anticipated positive changes to their identity in retirement. In Study 2, we divided older workers into two conditions and used a framing manipulation to present retirement as either a ‘role exit’ or a ‘role entry’. In the ‘role exit’ condition, older workers less committed to their organization anticipated more positive changes when they held more group memberships compared to those with fewer group memberships. Those in the ‘role entry’ condition anticipated significantly more positive changes to their identity in retirement than those in the ‘role exit’ condition, but did not anticipate more positive changes based on organizational commitment or group memberships. More group memberships, but not lower organizational commitment, was associated with more positive anticipation of identity changes in retirement. Study 3 ( N = 215) surveyed older adults after they had retired, finding that identity changes experienced post-retirement were less positive than those anticipated by older workers. We discuss the theoretical and applied implications of these findings for older workers’ retirement decisions and wellbeing.

The willingness to take a risk is shaped by temperaments and cognitive abilities, both of which develop rapidly during childhood. In the adult developmental literature, a distinction is drawn between description-based tasks, that provide explicit choice-reward information, and experience-based tasks, that require decisions from past experience, each emphasizing different cognitive demands. Although developmental trends have been investigated for both types of decision, few studies have compared description- and experience-based decision making in the same sample of children. In the present study, children (N = 112; ages 5-9 years) completed both description-based and experience-based decision tasks tailored for use with young children. Child temperament was reported by the child’s primary teacher. Behavioral measures suggested that the willingness to take a risk in a description-based task increased with age, whereas it decreased in an experience-based task. However, computational modelling alongside further inspection of the behavioral data suggested that these opposite developmental trends across the two types of task were both associated with related capacities: older (vs. younger) children’s higher sensitivity to experienced losses and higher outcome sensitivity to described rewards and losses. From the temperamental characteristics, higher attentional focussing was linked with a higher learning rate on the experience-based task and a bias to accept gambles in the gain domain on the description-based task. Our findings demonstrate the importance of comparing children’s behavior across qualitatively different tasks, rather than studying a single behavior in isolation.

Abstract Background Public support for the implementation of personalised medicine policies (PMPs) within routine care is important owing to the high financial costs involved and the potential for redirection of resources from other services. Aims We aimed to determine the attributes of a PMP most likely to elicit public support for implementation. We also aimed to determine whether such support differed between a depression PMP and one for cystic fibrosis. Method In a discrete-choice experiment, paired vignettes illustrating both the current model of care (CMoC) and a hypothetical PMP for either depression or cystic fibrosis were presented to a representative sample of the UK public (n = 2804). Each vignette integrated varying attributes, including anticipated therapeutic benefit over CMoC, and the annual cost to the taxpayer. Respondents were invited to express their preference for either the PMP or CMoC within each pair. Results The financial cost was the most important attribute influencing public support for PMPs. Respondents favoured PMP implementation where it benefited a higher proportion of patients or was anticipated to be more effective than CMoC. A reduction in services for non-eligible patients reduced the likelihood of support for PMPs. Respondents were more willing to fund PMPs for cystic fibrosis than for depression. Conclusions Cost is a significant factor in the public's support for PMPs, but essential caveats, such as protection for services available to PMP-ineligible patients, may also apply. Further research should explore the factors contributing to condition-specific nuances in public support for PMPs.

This research examined the influence of cognitive interdependence—a mental state reflecting a collective representation of the self-in-relationship—on the anticipation for and experiences with the transition into retirement. Among soon-to-be retirees (Study 1), greater cognitive interdependence was associated with seeing partners as more instrumental to one’s goals both pre- and post-retirement, anticipating greater goal alignment post-retirement, and having directly involved partners in retirement planning to a greater extent than those relatively lower in cognitive interdependence. Among recent retirees (Study 2), retrospective cognitive interdependence was associated with post-retirement goal alignment and goal instrumentality, and the extent to which they believed they had directly involved their partners in retirement planning. However, it was post-retirement goal alignment that was associated with greater ease of retirement and subjective well-being. Finally, soon-to-be retirees relatively high in cognitive interdependence responded to concerns about their retirement (i.e., goal discordance and high retirement ambivalence) by wanting to involve their partners in their retirement plans to a greater extent (Study 3). These studies highlight the importance of romantic partners across the lifespan, and how partners might influence retirement planning, the transition to retirement, and well-being among recent retirees.

The present research was motivated by a prior study, where several wallets, each containing a photo of either a baby, a puppy, a family, or an elderly couple, were scattered across a city in the United Kingdom (Wiseman, 2009). Most of the wallets containing a photo of a baby were returned compared to less than a third of wallets containing a photo of an elderly couple. To investigate further, in a series of three studies we examined, using a pseudo online version of the dictator game, possible subtle cues supporting prosocial behaviour by manipulating the type of avatar used by the recipient of the donation made by the ‘dictator’. Overall, it emerged that participants showed significantly higher levels of generosity towards babies, and older people, supporting the notion that perceptions of vulnerability and need drive prosocial behaviour.