Experiencing Nature: Embodying Animals in Immersive Virtual Environments Increases Inclusion of Nature in Self and Involvement With Nature : EMBODYING ANIMALS IN IMMERSIVE VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS

When people have access to information sources such as newspaper weather forecasts, drug-package inserts, and mutual-fund brochures, all of which provide convenient descriptions of risky prospects, they can make decisions from description. When people must decide whether to back up their computer's hard drive, cross a busy street, or go out on a date, however, they typically do not have any summary description of the possible outcomes or their likelihoods. For such decisions, people can call only on their own encounters with such prospects, making decisions from experience. Decisions from experience and decisions from description can lead to dramatically different choice behavior. In the case of decisions from description, people make choices as if they overweight the probability of rare events, as described by prospect theory. We found that in the case of decisions from experience, in contrast, people make choices as if they underweight the probability of rare events, and we explored the impact of two possible causes of this underweighting--reliance on relatively small samples of information and overweighting of recently sampled information. We conclude with a call for two different theories of risky choice.

Important features of the self-concept can be located outside of the individual and inside close or related others. The authors use this insight to reinterpret data previously said to support the empathy-altruism model of helping, which asserts that empathic concern for another results in selflessness and true altruism. That is, they argue that the conditions that lead to empathic concern also lead to a greater sense of self-other overlap, raising the possibility that helping under these conditions is not selfless but is also directed toward the self. In 3 studies, the impact of empathic concern on willingness to help was eliminated when oneness--a measure of perceived self-other overlap--was considered. Path analyses revealed further that empathic concern increased helping only through its relation to perceived oneness, thereby throwing the empathy-altruism model into question. The authors suggest that empathic concern affects helping primarily as an emotional signal of oneness.

Psychologists increasingly recommend experimental analysis of mediation. This is a step in the right direction because mediation analyses based on nonexperimental data are likely to be biased and because experiments, in principle, provide a sound basis for causal inference. But even experiments cannot overcome certain threats to inference that arise chiefly or exclusively in the context of mediation analysis-threats that have received little attention in psychology. The authors describe 3 of these threats and suggest ways to improve the exposition and design of mediation tests. Their conclusion is that inference about mediators is far more difficult than previous research suggests and is best tackled by an experimental research program that is specifically designed to address the challenges of mediation analysis.