Papers by Norbert Schwarz
COGNITION, AGING, AND SELF-REPORTS, 1976
Journal of Marketing Research, 1999
Review of embodied cognition research and its implications for the construction of attitudes.
Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2017
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Our commentators explore the operation of grounded procedures across all levels of analysis in th... more Our commentators explore the operation of grounded procedures across all levels of analysis in the behavioral sciences, from mental to social, developmental, and evolutionary/functional. Building on them, we offer two integrative principles for systematic effects of grounded procedures to occur. We discuss theoretical topics at each level of analysis, address methodological recommendations, and highlight further extensions of grounded procedures.
Evaluation researchers frequently obtain self-reports of behaviors, asking program participants t... more Evaluation researchers frequently obtain self-reports of behaviors, asking program participants to report on process and outcome-relevant behaviors. Unfortunately, reporting on one’s behavior poses a difficult cognitive task, and participants’ reports can be profoundly influenced by question wording, format, and context. We review the steps involved in answering a question about one’s behavior and highlight the underlying cognitive and communicative processes. We alert researchers to what can go wrong and provide theoretically grounded recommendations for pilot testing and questionnaire construction.
Instructional manipulation checks (IMCs) are frequently included in unsupervised online surveys a... more Instructional manipulation checks (IMCs) are frequently included in unsupervised online surveys and experiments to assess whether participants pay close attention to the questions. However, IMCs are more than mere measures of attention – they also change how participants approach subsequent tasks, increasing attention and systematic reasoning. We test whether these previously documented changes in information processing moderate the emergence of response effects in surveys by presenting an IMC either before or after questions known to produce classic survey context effects. When the items precede an IMC, familiar satisficing as well as conversational effects replicate. More important, their pattern and size does not change when the items follow an IMC, in contrast to experiments with reasoning tasks. Given a power of 82% to 98% to detect an effect of d = .3, we conclude that prior exposure to an IMC is unlikely to increase or attenuate these types of context effects in surveys.
Journal of Official Statistics, 2007
Secondary analyses of survey data and two laboratory experiments demonstrate that question order ... more Secondary analyses of survey data and two laboratory experiments demonstrate that question order effects decrease with respondents’ increasing age. Presumably, the content of preceding questions is less likely to remain accessible for older respondents, thus attenuating or eliminating their impact on answers to subsequent questions. Supporting this assumption, question order effects were obtained for older respondents with high working memory, but not for older respondents with low working memory. This age-sensitivity of question order effects can compromise comparisons across age groups, even to the extent of reversing the ordinal placement of cohorts along the attitude dimension. Theoretical and methodological implications are discussed.
Six Degrees of Social Influence, 2012
Social Psychology, 2014
While direct replications such as the “Many Labs” project are extremely valuable in testing the r... more While direct replications such as the “Many Labs” project are extremely valuable in testing the reliability of published findings across laboratories, they reflect the common reliance in psychology on single vignettes or stimuli, which limits the scope of the conclusions that can be reached. New experimental tools and statistical techniques make it easier to routinely sample stimuli, and to appropriately treat them as random factors. We encourage researchers to get into the habit of including multiple versions of the content (e.g., stimuli or vignettes) in their designs, to increase confidence in cross-stimulus generalization and to yield more realistic estimates of effect size. We call on editors to be aware of the challenges inherent in such stimulus sampling, to expect and tolerate unexplained variability in observed effect size between stimuli, and to encourage stimulus sampling instead of the deceptively cleaner picture offered by the current reliance on single stimuli.
Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2004
Human reasoning is accompanied by metacognitive experiences, most notably the ease or difficulty ... more Human reasoning is accompanied by metacognitive experiences, most notably the ease or difficulty of recall and thought generation and the fluency with which new information can be processed. These experiences are informative in their own right. They can serve as a basis of judgment in addition to, or at the expense of, declarative information and can qualify the conclusions drawn from recalled content. What exactly people conclude from a given metacognitive experience depends on the naive theory of mental processes they bring to bear, rendering the outcomes highly variable. The obtained judgments cannot be predicted on the basis of accessible declarative information alone; we cannot understand human judgment without taking into account the interplay of declarative and experiential information.
… of the Society …, 2008
SCP 2008 Winter Conference February 21-23, 2008 Page 337 IF IT'S DIFFICULT-TO-PRONOUNCE, IT ... more SCP 2008 Winter Conference February 21-23, 2008 Page 337 IF IT'S DIFFICULT-TO-PRONOUNCE, IT MUST BE RISKY: PROCESSING FLUENCY AND RISK PERCEPTION Hyunjin Song, University of Michigan Norbert Schwarz, University of Michigan ...
American Psychologist, 1999
Self-reports of behaviors and attitudes are strongly influenced by features of the research instr... more Self-reports of behaviors and attitudes are strongly influenced by features of the research instrument, including question wording, format, and context. Recent research has addressed the underlying cognitive and communicative processes, which are systematic and increasingly wellunderstood. I review what has been learned, focusing on issues of question comprehension, behavioral frequency reports, and the emergence of context effects in attitude measurement. The accumulating knowledge about the processes underlying self-reports promises to improve questionnaire design and data quality. S elf-reports are a primary source of data in psychology and the social sciences. From laboratory experiments to public opinion surveys, researchers rely on the answers that research participants provide to learn about individuals' thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and to monitor societal trends, from the nation's unemployment rate to the development of crime. Unfortunately, selfreports are a fallible source of data, and minor changes in question wording, question format, or question context can result in major changes in the obtained results, as a few examples may illustrate: • When asked what they consider "the most important thing for children to prepare them for life," 61.5% of a representative sample chose the alternative "To think for themselves" when this alternative was offered on a list. Yet, only 4.6% volunteered an answer that could be assigned to this category when no list was presented (Schuman & Presser, 1981). • When asked how successful they have been in life, 34% of a representative sample reported high success when the numeric values of the rating scale ranged from-5 to 5, whereas only 13% did so when the numeric values ranged from 0 to 10 (Schwarz, Knauper, Hippler, Noelle-Neumann, & Clark, 1991). • When asked how often they experience a variety of physical symptoms, 62% of a sample of psychosomatic patients reported symptom frequencies of more than twice a month when the response scale ranged from "twice a month or less" to "several times a day." Yet, only 39% reported frequencies of more than twice a month when the scale ranged from "never" to "more than twice a month" (Schwarz & Scheming, 1992). • Whether we conclude that marital satisfaction is a major or a minor contributor to general life-satisfaction depends on the order in which both questions are asked, with correlations ranging from .18 to .67 as a function of question order and introduction (Schwarz, Strack, & Mai, 1991).
Journal of Happiness Studies, 2013
Duration-based measures of happiness from retrospectively constructed daily diaries are gaining i... more Duration-based measures of happiness from retrospectively constructed daily diaries are gaining in popularity in population-based studies of the hedonic experience. Yet experimental evidence suggests that perceptions of duration-how long an event lasts-are influenced by individuals' emotional experiences during the event. An important remaining question is whether observational measures of duration outside the laboratory setting, where the events under study are engaged in voluntarily, may be similarly affected, and if so, for which emotions are duration biases a potential concern. This study assesses how duration and emotions co-vary using retrospective, 24-hour diaries from a national sample of older couples. Data are from the Disability and Use of Time (DUST) supplement to the nationally representative U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We find that experienced wellbeing (positive, negative emotion) and activity duration are inversely associated. Specific positive emotions (happy, calm) are not associated with duration, but all measures of negative wellbeing considered here (frustrated, worried, sad, tired, and pain) have positive correlations (ranging from 0.04 to 0.08; p<.05). However, only frustration remains correlated with duration after controlling for respondent, activity and day-related characteristics (0.06, p<.01). The correlation translates into a potentially upward biased estimate of duration of up to 10 minutes (20%) for very frustrating activities. We conclude that estimates of time spent feeling happy yesterday generated from diary data are unlikely to be biased but more research is needed on the link between duration estimation and feelings of frustration.
Uploads
Papers by Norbert Schwarz