Kapur, M., Voiklis, J., & Kinzer, C. (in press). A complexity-grounded model of or the emergence of convergence in CSCL groups. In S. Puntambekar, G. Erkens, & C. Hmelo-Silver (Eds.), Analyzing Interactions in CSCL: Methodologies, Approaches and Issues. Springer.
Voiklis, J. and Nickerson, J.V. (under review). Revisiting “The [Social-Cognitive] Nature Of Salience”: Social-Cognitive Effort Focuses Attention on the "Next Most Obvious" Bargaining Compromise--Equal Shares.
Collaborators often invest unequal resources towards a common good. Without agreement on sharing that good, collaboration might devolve into parallel, possibly competitive, individual efforts. Reaching agreement requires bargaining. Before bargaining, collaborators independently decide how much to demand and how little to accept. These decisions constitute a tacit form of bargaining. When collaborators cannot verify a common construal of fairness, tacit agreement on equal shares offers the next-most obvious (least unfair) compromise between conflicting interests. Across two experiments, we show that reasoning to this conclusion requires more social-cognitive effort than people automatically expend. Participants played a card game with an alleged opponent and shared the resulting prize. Social-cognitive practice prior to tacit bargaining increased egalitarian proposals. Experiment 2 ruled out facilitation through general-cognitive effort or improvements in social-reasoning skills. Instead, we found that cognitive perspective-takers minimize unfairness, while affective perspective-takers seek minimal fairness. We discuss the differing implications of these motivations.Voiklis, J. and Nickerson, J. V. (under review). Tort reform: cognitive perspective taking promotes attributions of “oblique” intent for side effects of intentional action.
A person’s actions often yield positive and/or negative side-effects in addition to directly-intended consequences. Legal opinion on negligence and recklessness attributes “oblique” intent to persons who foresee, but (intentionally) ignore, virtually certain negative side-effects of their actions. The law remains silent on any variety of intentionality for positive side-effects. In three experiments, we show that lay-people in the U.S. and India exhibit a similar asymmetry, attributing oblique intent to negative, but not positive, side-effects. Under most conditions, we show that inferring oblique intent requires increasingly skillful social reasoning. Nevertheless, priming belief-reading (as opposed to emotion-reading or cognitive reflection) can help anyone discriminate between oblique and direct intent. Priming works, we argue, because belief-reading and intention-reading both depend on cognitive (as opposed to empathic) perspective-taking. In sum, we naturalize the concept of oblique intent and socialize the debate over what aspect of individual reasoning—predictive/explanatory or evaluative--best explains mental-state attributions.Voiklis, J. (in preparation). Happy talk: a fast and frugal measure of well-being based on online chatter.
Voiklis, J. (in preparation). Show me what I cannot show myself: deixis improves anomaly detection.
Voiklis, J. (in preparation). Perspective-taking dampens and empathy exacerbates in-group/out-group biases during tacit bargaining.
Voiklis, J. (in preparation). Perspective-taking dampens and empathy exacerbates power asymmetries and disgust during tacit bargaining.
Voiklis, J. (in preparation). Learning from predecessors dampens satisficing and pre-existing biases in discriminating friend from foe.
