Taking a Disagreeing Perspective Improves the Accuracy of People's Quantitative Estimates. Psychological science Many decisions rest on people's ability to make estimates of unknown quantities. In these judgments, the aggregate estimate of a crowd of individuals is often more accurate than most individual estimates. Remarkably, similar principles apply when multiple estimates from the same person are aggregated, and a key challenge is to identify strategies that improve the accuracy of people's aggregate estimates. Here, we present the following strategy: Combine people's first estimate with their second estimate, made from the perspective of someone they often disagree with. In five preregistered experiments ( = 6,425 adults; = 53,086 estimates) with populations from the United States and United Kingdom, we found that such a strategy produced accurate estimates (compared with situations in which people made a second guess or when second estimates were made from the perspective of someone they often agree with). These results suggest that disagreement, often highlighted for its negative impact, is a powerful tool in producing accurate judgments. 10.1177/09567976211061321

The Games We Play: Prosocial Choices Under Time Pressure Reflect Context-Sensitive Information Priorities. Psychological science Time pressure is a powerful experimental manipulation frequently used to arbitrate between competing dual-process models of prosocial decision-making, which typically assume that automatic responses yield to deliberation over time. However, the use of time pressure has led to conflicting conclusions about the psychological dynamics of prosociality. Here, we proposed that flexible, context-sensitive information search, rather than automatic responses, underlies these divergent effects of time pressure on prosociality. We demonstrated in two preregistered studies ( = 304 adults from the United States and Canada; Prolific Academic) that different prosocial contexts (i.e., pure altruism vs. cooperation) have distinct effects on information search, driving people to prioritize information differently, particularly under time pressure. Furthermore, these information priorities subsequently influence prosocial choices, accounting for the different effects of time pressure in altruistic and cooperative contexts. These findings help explain existing inconsistencies in the field by emphasizing the role of dynamic context-sensitive information search during social decision-making, particularly under time pressure. 10.1177/09567976221094782