Research
Overview
My research is centred around applying the decision by sampling (DbS: Stewart, Chater & Brown, 2006) cognitive model of judgement and decision making to social comparisons in a variety of contexts but mainly health-related judgements. The model proposes that judgements are made through a number of binary, ordinal comparisons of a target item to other similar items in a mental sample leading to a judgement in terms of the item's relative ranked position within the sample. This sample is constructed of both items from the immediate context and previously encountered items from memory. For example, if you are at a coffee shop trying to judge how expensive their latte is you will compare its price to the other coffees and drinks on offer and to what you have paid for coffee in the past. If the price of the latte ranks high within this sample you may judge it to be expensive, if it ranks low then you may think it is quite cheap. This may ultimately affect your purchasing behaviour; if the latte ranks highly you may decide that you don't want to pay the price and chose to go elsewhere for a cheaper alternative or pick a cheaper drink from the coffee shop.
DbS offers a simple, process-level account of how judgements are made; it relies only on people being able to a) sample items from memory and b) judge if a target item is smaller or larger than the items sampled. This evaluation of the target item assumes that comparisons are ordinal in nature (i.e. 'less than', 'equal to' or 'more than' only) which is consistent with research suggesting that people are much better at discriminating between stimuli than they are at assessing their magnitude (Miller, 1956; Stewart, Brown & Chater, 2005). It is also assumed that people are able to encode, manipulate, and recall frequencies with relative ease, which has long been assumed in humans and animals (Sedlmeier & Betsch, 2002), as calculation of the target item's rank within the sample can only be derived from keeping track of the number of comparisons that favour and do not favour the target.
Research Aims
Previous research applying DbS has shown relative rank effects in a range of contextual judgements, for example, in wage satisfaction (Brown, Gardner, Oswald, & Qian, 2008), life satisfaction (Boyce, Brown, & Moore, 2010), gratitude (Wood, Brown, & Maltby, 2011), riskiness of alcohol consumption (Wood, Brown, & Maltby, 2012), personality (Wood, Brown, Maltby, & Watkinson, 2012) and depression and anxiety symptom severity (Melrose, Brown, & Wood, 2013).
During the course of my PhD I will extend this research through investigating whether the model can explain how people compare to others when using social comparison to make judgements. In doing so I will also be investigating the extent to which social comparison is used when making specific judgements such as how well a person is in general, how severe symptoms are, whether help should be sought for symptoms and whether symptoms are clinically significant. The main aims of my research are as follows:
- To investigate the extent to which people compare to others when making health-related judgements and the cognitive mechanisms used in this process,
- To develop and improve the methodologies used to investigate relative rank effects,
- To investigate whether relative rank effects can explain current gaps in the literature (for example, the relationship between received and perceived support),
- To compare decision by sampling with other competing models such as range-frequency theory (Parducci, 1963) and adaptation-level theory (Helson, 1964), and
- To work towards intervention development: can a person's relative rank within a specific context predict related behaviour(s)? Can providing a person with information about their relative rank change related behaviour(s)?
For more information on the specific topics I am researching please use the links below or at the top of this page.
Symptom Severity
Social Support
References
Boyce, C. J., Brown, G. D. A., & Moore, S. C. (2010). Money and happiness: Rank of income, not income, affects life satisfaction. Psychological Science, 21, 471–475. DOI: 10.1177/0956797610362671
Brown, G. D. A., Gardner, J., Oswald, A. J., & Qian, J. (2008). Does wage rank affect employees’ well being? Industrial Relations, 47, 355–389. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-232X.2008.00525.x
Helson, H. (1964). Adaptation-level theory. New York, NY: Harper & Row.
Melrose, K. L., Brown, G. D. A., & Wood, A. M. (in press). Am I abnormal? Relative rank and social norm effects in judgments of anxiety and depression symptom severity. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. DOI: 10.1002/bdm.1754 
Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for information processing. Psychological Review, 63, 81–97. DOI: 10.1037/h0043158
Parducci, A. (1963). The range-frequency compromise in judgment. Psychological Monographs, 77, 565.
Sedlmeier, P., & Betsch, T. (2002). Frequency processing and cognition. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Stewart, N., Brown, G. D. A., & Chater, N. (2005). Absolute identification by relative judgment. Psychological Review, 11, 881–911. DOI: 10.1037/0033-295X.112.4.881
Stewart, N., Chater, N., & Brown, G. D. A. (2006). Decision by sampling. Cognitive Psychology, 53, 1–26. DOI: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2005.10.003
Wood, A. M., Brown, G. D. A., & Maltby, J. (2011). Thanks, but I’m used to better: a relative rank model of gratitude. Emotion, 11, 175–180. DOI: 10.1037/a0021553
Wood, A. M., Brown, G. D. A., & Maltby, J. (2012). Social norm influences on evaluations of the risks associated with alcohol consumption: Applying the rank based decision by samplingmodel to health judgments. Alcohol and Alcoholism, 47, 57–62. DOI: 10.1093/alcalc/agr146
Wood, A. M., Brown, G. D. A., Maltby, J., & Watkinson, P. (2012). How are personality judgments made? A cognitive model of reference group effects, personality scale responses, and behavioral reactions. Journal of Personality. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6494.2012.00763.x
Main Supervisor:
g dot d dot a dot brown at warwick dot ac dot uk
Co-supervisor:
Neil dot Stewart at warwick dot ac dot uk
Mentors:
alex dot wood at stir dot ac dot uk