Jiaying Zhao

Choice architecture has a profound influence on human decision making, but the underlying cognitive mechanisms remain unclear. We propose that choice architecture guides visual attention to shape decision making. In a pre-registered experiment (N=646), participants were presented with two credit cards under different choice architecture conditions and were asked to choose the better card for themselves given their financial situation. We used a factorial between-subjects design with eight conditions: default (better card vs. worse card was pre-selected) x instructions (pre-selection was described as intentional vs. random) x presentation order (better card vs. worse card was presented on the left). Pre-registered analyses showed that participants paid more attention to the card when it was pre-selected than when not, and more likely to choose the pre-selected card. Participants also paid more attention to the better card and were more likely to choose it when it was presented on the left than on the right. However, instructions about the pre-selection had a limited impact on attention or choice. Exploratory analyses showed that attention mediated the effect of default and presentation order on choice, and choice also mediated the effect of default and presentation order on attention. These findings suggest that choice architecture guides visual attention to shape decision making. The current study provides new insights on the attentional mechanism of choice architecture, with implications for practitioners and policymakers on designing optimal choice architecture to aid decision making for consumers.

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Solutions to environmental and social problems are often framed in dichotomous ways, which can be counterproductive. Instead, multiple solutions are often needed to fully address these problems. Here we examine how framing influences people’s preference for multiple solutions. In a pre-registered experiment, participants (N=1,432) were randomly assigned to one of four framing conditions. In the first three conditions, participants were presented with eight problems, each framed with multiple causes, multiple impacts, or multiple solutions to the problem. The control condition did not present any framing information. Participants indicated their preferred solution, perceived severity and urgency of the problem, and their dichotomous thinking tendency. Pre-registered analyses showed that none of the three frames had a significant impact on preference for multiple solutions, perceived severity, perceived urgency, or dichotomous thinking. However, exploratory analyses showed that perceived severity and urgency of the problem were positively correlated with people’s preference for multiple solutions, while dichotomous thinking was negatively correlated. These findings show a limited impact of framing on multi-solution preference. Future interventions should focus on addressing perceived severity and urgency, or decreasing dichotomous thinking to encourage people to adopt multiple solutions to address complex environmental and social problems.

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Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with products and actions are challenging for people to conceptualize, making personal carbon calculators and carbon labels promising options to aid climate-friendly decision-making. My first study used a pre-registered between-subjects experiment (N = 790) to evaluate the efficacy of a carbon calculator for promoting climate action. Behavioural intentions for 2023 and reported behaviours in 2019 were used to quantify a projected change in carbon footprint—including domains of food, transportation, housing, and material purchases—and I compared how this intended shift in emissions differed between groups. Those provided with feedback about their carbon footprint planned to decrease their personal emissions in the future by 13.02% (M = -1.42 tonnes CO2e) while the control group did not (M = 0.05 tonnes CO2e) and this difference was significant (t(788) = 4.03, p .33, p<.01 labels="" also="" led="" to="" significantly="" more="" accurate="" estimates="" of="" the="" ghg="" emissions="" in="" menu="" items="" relative="" control="" group="" .3158="" p=".006)" and="" mediation="" analysis="" revealed="" that="" knowledge="" explained="" effect="" on="" food="" emissions.="" though="" information="" provision="" alone="" is="" insufficient="" address="" climate="" crisis="" my="" findings="" indicate="" boosting="" about="" greenhouse="" gas="" via="" carbon="" calculators="" can="" help="" individuals="" make="" pro-climate="" choices="" their="" daily="" lives.="">
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Justice negotiations for climate change, as with other multi-generational issues, have been challenging. Parties in these justice negotiations diverge on how to treat unequally distributed legacies, the product of historical actions. Two issues often emerge: 1) how to balance the positive and negative outcomes associated with the legacies, and 2) how to differentiate between actions undertaken with known outcomes vs. unintended outcomes. Although scarce, literature hints that cultural differences exist in the norms of obligation towards positive and negative consequences, and of valuing the intention when judging an action. Exploring these differences is crucial to understanding the underlying causes of disagreements in historical justice negotiations. We conducted a survey in Canada and Japan using an analogy of inheritance and debt. Specifically, we collected data on whether and on what conditions Canadians and Japanese 1) accept inheritance, 2) change their likelihood of inheritance acceptance after learning about means of wealth accumulation, 3) accept debt, 4) change their mind about inheritance acceptance after learning about debt, and 5) settle debt. Our statistical analyses yield several findings. First, Canadians are more likely to accept inheritance than Japanese, and care less about positive and negative externalities. Second, intent does not matter. Third, Japanese are more likely than Canadians to decline inheritance when debts are attached. Fourth, Japanese are more likely to settle greater amount of debt than Canadians regardless of debt type. In addition, our analysis also demonstrated that people are more likely to settle a greater fraction of debt if they are women and non-Judeo-Christian. Finally, participants in our study were less likely to settle debt to environmental causes, compared to the debt to employee, bank, or tax. The findings point to significant differences in the way groups view consequences and obligations in justice negotiations. For negotiations to be successful, countries must come to a shared understanding of intergenerational responsibilities. We hope that this study raises the need for further research and informs the international community of the need of examining and addressing the differences in the perceptions of those charged with dealing with climate justice and similar negotiations.

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Generating behaviour change for transformation toward sustainability is a significant challenge of our time. In order to reach local and global sustainability goals, behaviour change at a large scale is not only necessary but crucial. A key question is how to promote pro-environmental behaviour. Multiple factors have been found to influence pro-environmental behaviour, including affect, environmental concerns, and environmental education. To date, the relationship between these factors is still unclear. In this thesis, I conducted a field experiment at University of British Columbia Botanical Garden to determine how a sustainability education program and affect influence pro-environmental behaviour. Of particular interest is the arousal dimension of affect, the state of being physiologically alert and attentive. In the experiment, participants were randomly assigned to spend time in the garden (ground walk condition), spend time in the garden and receive sustainability education (ground walk + education condition), go on a tree-top canopy walk (arousal condition), go on a tree-top canopy walk and receive sustainability education (arousal + education condition), or a control condition where they did not go on any walk or receive education. In the education condition, participants received verbal and interactive education from instructors on the Sustainable Development Goals. I measured participants’ arousal level as well as positive and negative affect at the end of the experiment. In addition, I also measured pro-environmental behaviour, which included donations, signing up to receive newsletters from UBC Botanical Garden, signing up to receive volunteering opportunities from the Garden, and signing four petitions. I found that participants in the canopy walk conditions reported higher levels of arousal than the ground walk conditions, but they did not perform more pro-environmental behaviours. The results indicated no significant effect of either arousal or education on pro-environmental behaviour. The study contributes to the currently limited experimental evidence to understand affect, education, and pro-environmental behaviours, and highlights the complicated relationship between these factors. It calls for further research to better understand how we can leverage affective experiences and design education programs to foster pro-environmental behaviour.

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Designing agricultural systems that balance food production with environmental sustainability will be pivotal in supporting a growing population while living within planetary boundaries. Yet the literature on the demand side of food production rests largely on consumer choices driven by food safety, health, and dietary concerns. Very little work pertains to people’s thinking about food production or the supply end of food systems, with the exception of some work on preferences for organics or GM-free products. The current study thus seeks to explore the fuller set of latent factors underlying consumer evaluation of food products. It seeks, in particular, to explore people’s logics as to how they evaluate foods – be they driven by the perceived health attributes of food versus the quality of production of that food. A study was thus conducted to understand people’s evaluation of food items. We surveyed 319 participants using Amazon Mechanical Turk. Each participant was asked to to judge 14 agrifood products on 19 attributes. These attributes spanned concepts on production, environmental impact of production, preferences, and economic value. An exploratory factor analysis revealed two discrete factors: one factor pertained primarily to the quality of the food items themselves (e.g., organics, nutrition, flavor), and the second primarily addressed the quality of food production regarding agricultural inputs and degree of environmental impact (e.g., pesticide use, biodiversity impact, climate change consequence). From the one-way between subject ANOVAs and regression analyses, we found distinct relationships between demographic variables and perceived food and production qualities. These findings suggest that quality of production figures prominently in food perception, which was not previously considered as a part of consumer food choices, at least not for the average (versus ‘ethical’ or ‘green’) consumer. The understanding that quality of agrifood production is a factor among consumers is a valuable finding with implications for marketing, policy, and consumer decision making. The consideration of sustainable production by consumers has the potential to inform and guide the creation of food policies aimed at improved environmental sustainability, and interventions on consumer decision making regarding commensurate goals.

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A remarkable ability of the cognitive system is to make novel inferences based on prior experiences. What mechanism supports such inference? We propose that statistical learning is a process where transitive inferences of new associations are made between objects that have never been directly associated. After viewing a continuous sequence containing two base pairs (e.g., A-B, B-C), participants automatically inferred a transitive pair (e.g., A-C) where the two objects had never co-occurred before (Experiment 1). This transitive inference occurred in the absence of explicit awareness of the base pairs. However, participants failed to infer the transitive pair from three base pairs (Experiment 2), showing the limits of the transitive inference (Experiment 3). We further demonstrated that this transitive inference can operate across the categorical hierarchy (Experiments 4-7). The findings revealed a novel consequence of statistical learning where new transitive associations between objects are implicitly inferred.

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Resource scarcity poses challenging demands on the cognitive system. Budgeting with limited resources induces an attentional focus on the problem at hand, but it also comes with a cost. Specifically, scarcity causes a failure to notice beneficial information in the environment, or remember to execute actions in the future, that help alleviate the condition of scarcity. This neglect may arise as a result of attentional narrowing. Attentional trade-offs under scarcity can further determine memory encoding. In seven experiments, we demonstrated that participants under scarcity prioritized price information but neglected a useful discount when ordering food from a menu (Experiment 1); they showed better recall for information relevant to the focal task at a subsequent surprise memory test (Experiments 2 and 3); they performed more efficiently on the focal task but neglect a useful cue in the environment that could save them resources (Experiments 4-6); and they failed to remember the previous instructions to execute future actions that could save them resources (Experiment 7). These results collectively demonstrate that scarcity fundamentally shapes the way people process information in the environment, by directing attention to the most urgent task, while inducing a neglect of other information that can be beneficial. The attentional neglect and memory failures may lead to suboptimal behaviors that further aggravate the condition of scarcity. The results provide new insights on the behaviors of the poor, and also important implications for public policy and the design of welfare services and programs for low-income individuals.

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The environment is inherently noisy, with regularities and randomness. Therefore, the challenge for the cognitive system is to detect signals from noise. This extraction of regularities forms the basis of many learning processes, such as conditioning and language acquisition. However, people often have erroneous beliefs about randomness. One pervasive bias in people’s conception of randomness is that they expect random sequences to exhibit greater alternations than typically produced by random devices (i.e., the over-alternation bias). To explain the causes of this bias, in the thesis, I examined the cognitive and neural mechanisms of randomness perception. In six experiments, I found that the over-alternation bias was present regardless of the feature dimensions, sensory modalities, and probing methods (Experiment 1); alternations in a binary sequence were harder to encode and are under-represented compared with repetitions (Experiments 2-5); and hippocampal neurogenesis was a critical neural mechanism for the detection of alternating patterns but not for repeating patterns (Experiment 6). These findings provide new insights on the mechanisms of randomness cognition; specifically, we revealed different mechanisms involved in representing alternating patterns versus repeating patterns.

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The visual system is remarkably efficient at extracting summary statistics from the environment. Yet at any given time, the environment consists of many groups of objects distributed over space. Thus, the challenge for the visual system is to summarize over multiple sets distributed across space. My thesis work investigates the capacity constraints and computational efficiency of ensemble perception, in the context of perceiving multiple spatially intermixed groups of objects. First, in three experiments, participants viewed an array of 1 to 8 intermixed sets of circles. Each set contained four circles in the same colors but with different sizes. Participants estimated the mean size of a probed set. Which set would be probed was either known before onset of the array (pre-cue), or after that (post-cue). Fitting a uniform-normal mixture model to the error distribution, I found participants could reliably estimate mean sizes for maximally four sets (Experiment 1). Importantly, their performance was unlikely to be driven by a subsampling strategy (Experiment 2). Allowing longer exposure to the stimulus array did not increase the capacity, suggesting ensemble perception was limited by an internal resource constraint, rather than an information encoding rate (Experiment 3). Second, in two experiments, I showed that the visual system could hold up to four ensemble representations, or up to four individual items (Experiment 4), and an ensemble representation had an information uncertainty (entropy) level similar to that of an individual representation (Experiment 5). Taken together, ensemble perception provides a compact and efficient way of information processing.

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There are 199 species at risk in British Columbia (B.C.). To elicit public support to conserve biodiversity, it is important to understand people’s attitudes and preferences toward species at risk. Here we examine how people perceive endangered species in B.C., how message framing shapes the attitudes toward the species, and whether implicit or explicit preferences determine willingness to pay for conservation. In Study 1 reported in Chapter 2, we presented three messages about sea otters to 623 residents in B.C., and measured the change in their attitudes toward sea otters using Kellert’s typology of basic attitudes toward wildlife. The messages were framed as either positive (as a keystone species), negative (resource conflict with First Nations’ fishermen in the West Coast of Vancouver Island), or neutral (biological facts). We found that the negative message promoted acceptance for managing sea otters and their habitats for use values (utilitarian-consumption, utilitarian-habitat), and for exerting control over sea otters (dominionistic). This shift in attitudes occurred even though the negative message was perceived as less convincing and believable than the positive or neutral messages. The positive message, on the other hand, decreased utilitarian-consumption attitudes. In Study 2 reported in Chapter 3, we evaluated people’s implicit and explicit preferences for four species at risk in B.C. (sea otter, American badger, caribou, and yellow-breasted chat). We found that explicit rather than implicit preference predicts willingness to pay for conservation of each species, and findings suggest that people apply the affect heuristic when judging species—species that are less liked may be perceived as riskier, and vice versa—. This finding holds for both residents in B.C. (n=55) and outside of B.C. (n=463). The results from the two studies highlight the importance of attitudes, messaging, and preference when designing conservation campaigns and efforts.

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