Publication
Highlights
1
The contemporary art world is conservatively estimated to be a $65 billion USD market that employs millions of human artists, sellers, and collectors globally. Recent attention paid to AI-made art in prestigious galleries, museums, and popular media has provoked debate around how these statistics will change. Unanswered questions fuel growing anxieties. Are AI-made and human-made art evaluated in the same ways? How will growing exposure to AI-made art impact evaluations of human creativity? Our research uses a psychological lens to explore these questions in the realm of visual art. We find that people devalue art labeled as AI-made across a variety of dimensions, even when they report it is indistinguishable from human-made art, and even when they believe it was produced collaboratively with a human. We also find that comparing images labeled as human-made to images labeled as AI-made increases perceptions of human creativity, an effect that can be leveraged to increase the value of human effort. Results are robust across six experiments (N = 2965) using a range of human-made and AI-made stimuli and incorporating representative samples of the US population. Finally, we highlight conditions that strengthen effects as well as dimensions where AI-devaluation effects are more pronounced.
Horton Jr, C.B., White, M.W. & Iyengar, S.S. Bias against AI art can enhance perceptions of human creativity. Sci Rep 13, 19001 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-45202-3
2
With the rapidly growing availability of scalable psychological assessments, personality science holds great promise for the scientific study and applied use of customized behavior-change interventions. To facilitate this development, we propose a classification system that divides psychological targeting into two approaches that differ in the process by which interventions are designed: audience-to-content matching or content-to-audience matching. This system is both integrative and generative: It allows us to (a) integrate existing research on personalized interventions from different psychological subdisciplines (e.g., political, educational, organizational, consumer, and clinical and health psychology) and to (b) articulate open questions that generate promising new avenues for future research. Our objective is to infuse personality science into intervention research and encourage cross-disciplinary collaborations within and outside of psychology. To ensure the development of personality-customized interventions aligns with the broader interests of individuals (and society at large), we also address important ethical considerations for the use of psychological targeting (e.g., privacy, self-determination, and equity) and offer concrete guidelines for researchers and practitioners.
Matz, S. C., Beck, E., Atherton, O., White, M., Kim, M., Rauthmann, J., Mrozcek, D. & Bogg, T. (2023). The Promise of Personality Science in the Digital Age: How Psychological Targeting Can Be Used to Personalize Behavior Change Interventions at Scale. Perspectives on Psychological Science.
3
We present a global experience-sampling method (ESM) study aimed at describing, predicting, and understanding individual differences in well-being during times of crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This international ESM study is a collaborative effort of over 60 interdisciplinary researchers from around the world in the “Coping with Corona” (CoCo) project. The study comprises trait-, state-, and daily-level data of 7490 participants from over 20 countries (total ESM measurements = 207,263; total daily measurements = 73,295) collected between October 2021 and August 2022. We provide a brief overview of the theoretical background and aims of the study, present the applied methods (including a description of the study design, data collection procedures, data cleaning, and final sample), and discuss exemplary research questions to which these data can be applied. We end by inviting collaborations on the CoCo dataset.
Schabert, J. et al. (2023). A Global ESM Study of Well-Being During Times of Crises: The CoCo Project. Social and Personality Psychology Compass.
4
Technology startups play an essential role in the economy—with seven of the ten largest companies rooted in technology, and venture capital investments totaling approximately $300B annually. Yet, important startup outcomes (e.g., whether a startup raises venture capital or gets acquired) remain difficult to forecast—particularly during the early stages of venture formation. Here, we examine the impact of an essential, yet underexplored, factor that can be observed from the moment of startup creation: founder personality. We predict psychological traits from digital footprints to explore how founder personality is associated with critical startup milestones. Observing 10,541 founder–startup dyads, we provide large-scale, ecologically valid evidence that founder personality is associated with outcomes across all phases of a venture’s life (i.e., from raising the earliest funding round to exiting via acquisition or initial public offering). We find that openness and agreeableness are positively related to the likelihood of raising an initial round of funding (but unrelated to all subsequent conditional outcomes). Neuroticism is negatively related to all outcomes, highlighting the importance of founders’ resilience. Finally, conscientiousness is positively related to early-stage investment, but negatively related to exit conditional on funding. While prior work has painted conscientiousness as a major benefactor of performance, our findings highlight a potential boundary condition: The fast-moving world of technology startups affords founders with lower or moderate levels of conscientiousness a competitive advantage when it comes to monetizing their business via acquisition or IPO.
Freiberg, B. & Matz, S. C. (2023). Founder personality and entrepreneurial success: A large-scale field study of technology startups. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
5
New technologies are often considered direct competitors to humans in the realm of decision-making. This paper explores a novel approach to augmenting human decision-making through technology. Specifically, drawing on the brain's unique ability to learn from sensory experiences, we introduce sensory substitution, the encoding of information in an alternative sensory modality, as a method to improve decision-making. In a within-subject design (N = 48), we show that translating numerical information into sensory experiences (i.e., tactile stimulation administered to a person's body) results in higher decision accuracy in a multiple-cue learning task. Response time analyses, participants' self-reports, and cognitive modeling all suggest that the benefits afforded by sensory substitution are the result of a shift from explicit rule abstraction to configural learning. That is, rather than deliberately inferring decision rules, participants develop intuitive, perceptual strategies to accurately predict outcomes. Together, our findings suggest that sensory substitution could enhance decision-making by training “gut instincts” rather than deliberate decision-making skills.
Peters, H., Matz, S. C. & Cerf, M. (2023). Sensory Substitution Can Improve Decision-Making. Computers in Human Behavior.