There is an increased willingness to help identified individuals rather than non-identified, and the effect of identifiability is mainly present when a single individual rather than a group is presented. However, identifiability and singularity effects have thus far not been manipulated orthogonally. The present research uses a joint evaluation approach to examine the relative contribution of identifiability and singularity in moral decision-making reflecting conflicting values between deontology and consequentialism. As in trolley dilemmas subjects could either choose to stay with the default option, i.e., giving a potentially life-saving vaccine to a single child, or to actively choose to deny the single child the vaccine in favor of five other children. Identifiability of the single child and the group of children was varied between-subjects in a 2x2 factorial design. In total 1,232 subjects from Sweden and the United States participated in three separate experiments. Across all treatments, in all three experiments, 32.6% of the subjects chose to stay with the deontological default option instead of actively choosing to maximize benefits. Results show that identifiability does not always have a positive effect on decisions in allocation dilemmas. For single targets, identifiability had a negative or no effect in two out of three experiments, while for the group of targets identifiability had a more stable positive effect on subjects’ willingness to allocate vaccines. When the effect of identifiability was negative, process data showed that this effect was mediated by emotional reactance. Hence, the results show that the influence of identifiability is more complex than it has been previously portrayed in the literature on charitable giving.

We investigated whether the personal importance of objects influences utilitarian decision-making in which damaging property is necessary to produce an overall positive outcome. In Experiment 1, participants judged saving five objects by destroying a sixth object to be less acceptable when the action required destroying the sixth object directly (rather than as a side-effect) and the objects were personally important (rather than unimportant). In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that utilitarian judgments were not influenced by the objects’ monetary worth. Together these findings suggest that personal importance underlies people’s sensitivity to damaging property as a means for utilitarian gains.

Harmful acts are punished more often and more harshly than harmful omissions. This asymmetry has variously been ascribed to differences in how individuals perceive the causal responsibility of acts versus omissions and to social norms that tend to proscribe acts more frequently than omissions. This paper examines both of these hypotheses, in conjunction with a new hypothesis: that acts are punished more than omissions because it is usually more efficient to do so. In typical settings, harms occur as a result of relatively few harmful actions, but many individuals may have had the opportunity to prevent or rectify the harm. Penalising actors therefore requires relatively few punishment events compared to punishing omitters. We employ a novel group paradigm in which harm occurs only if both actors and omitters contribute to the harm. Subjects play a repeated economic game in fixed groups involving a social dilemma (total N = 580): on each round self-interest favours harmful actions (taking from another) and harmful omissions (failing to repair the victim’s loss), but the group payoff is maximized if individuals refrain from these behaviors. In one treatment harm occurs as a result of one action and two omissions; in the other, it is the result of two actions and one omission. In the second treatment, the more efficient strategy to maximize group benefit is to punish omissions. We find that subjects continue to prefer to punish acts rather than omissions, with two important caveats. There is still a substantial level of punishment of omissions, and there is also evidence of some responsiveness to the opportunity to enforce a more efficient rule. Further analysis addresses whether the omission effect is associated with asymmetric norm-based attitudes: a substantial proportion of subjects regard it as equally fair to punish harmful acts and omissions, while another portion endorse an asymmetry; and punishment behavior correlates with these attitudes in both groups.

We examine how adding an Attractive but Unattainable Alternative (AUA) to a set of available but less attractive alternatives influences evaluations of near vs. distant future sets of alternatives. According to Construal Level Theory (Liberman & Trope, 2008) including an AUA would decrease the attractiveness of near future sets, but may increase the attractiveness of distant future sets. In four studies participants imagined a choice situation with three alternatives. For some participants a fourth alternatives was added, which was attractive but unattainable. Half of the participants in each condition imagined making a decision in the near future whereas others imagined making the decision in the distant future. Participants then evaluated the attractiveness of the entire set of alternatives, as well as of each alternative separately. We examined choices between jobs, computers and roommates. The last study examined negotiations with the landlord about an apartment. Consistent with our hypothesis, an AUA increased the evaluation of the distant set and decreased the evaluation of the near set.

People must often perform calculations in order to produce a numeric estimate (e.g., a grocery-store shopper estimating the total price of his or her shopping cart contents). The current studies were designed to test whether estimates based on calculations are influenced by comparisons with irrelevant anchors. Previous research has demonstrated that estimates across a wide range of contexts assimilate toward anchors, but none has examined estimates based on calculations. In two studies, we had participants compare the answers to math problems with anchors. In both studies, participants’ estimates assimilated toward the anchor values. This effect was moderated by time limit such that the anchoring effects were larger when the participants’ ability to engage in calculations was limited by a restrictive time limit.

Which statement conveys greater risk: “100 people die from cancer every day” or “36,500 people die from cancer every year”? In statistics where both frequencies and temporal information are used to convey risk, two theories predict opposite answers to this question.

Construal level theory predicts that “100 people die from cancer every day” will be judged as more risky, while the ratio bias predicts that the equivalent “36,500 people die from cancer every year” will result in higher risk judgments. An experiment investigated which format produces higher risk ratings, and whether ratings are influenced by increasing the salience of the numerical or temporal part of the statistic. Forty-eight participants were randomly assigned to a numerical, temporal or control salience condition, and rated risk framed as number of deaths per day or per year. The year format was found to result in higher perceived risk, indicating that the ratio bias effect is dominant, but there was no effect of salience.

The present article investigates the effectiveness of methods traditionally used to distinguish between the emotions of regret and disappointment and presents a new method — the Regret and Disappointment Scale (RDS) — for assessing the two emotions in decision making research. The validity of the RDS was tested in three studies. Study 1 used two scenarios, one prototypical of regret and the other of disappointment, to test and compare traditional methods (“How much regret do you feel” and “How much disappointment do you feel”) with the RDS. Results showed that only the RDS clearly differentiated between the constructs of regret and disappointment. Study 2 confirmed the validity of the RDS in a real-life scenario, in which both feelings of regret and disappointment could be experienced. Study 2 also demonstrated that the RDS can discriminate between regret and disappointment with results similar to those obtained by using a context-specific scale. Study 3 showed the advantages of the RDS over the traditional methods in gambling situations commonly used in decision making research, and provided evidence for the convergent validity of the RDS.

The economic literature on negotiation shows that strategic concerns can be a barrier to agreement, even when the buyer values the good more than the seller. Yet behavioral research demonstrates that human interaction can overcome these strategic concerns through communication. We show that there is also a downside of this human interaction: cynicism. Across two studies we focus on a seller-buyer interaction in which the buyer has uncertain knowledge about the goods for sale, but has a positive expected payoff from saying “yes” to the available transaction. Study 1 shows that most buyers accept offers made by computers, but that acceptance rates drop significantly when offers are made by human sellers who communicate directly with buyers. Study 2 clarifies that this effect results from allowing human sellers to communicate with buyers, and shows that such communication focuses the buyers’ attention on the seller’s trustworthiness. The mere situation of negotiated interaction increases buyers’ attention to the sellers’ self-serving motives and, consequently, buyers’ cynicism. Unaware of this downside of interaction, sellers actually prefer to have the opportunity to communicate with buyers.

Knowing what event precipitated a client's abnormal behaviors makes the client appear more normal than if the event is not known (Meehl, 1973). Does such knowledge also influence judgments of the need for psychological treatment, and if so, does it matter whether the precipitating event was inside or outside the client's control? We presented undergraduates with cases of hypothetical clients exhibiting abnormal behaviors and manipulated whether they were also told of a precipitating event explaining those behaviors. Knowing the precipitant significantly reduced perceptions of clients’ need for treatment, but only when the precipitating event was outside the client's control. These findings call into question the notion that it need always be beneficial for an outside reasoner to uncover the root cause of a client's psychological problems, particularly when the root cause is still unknown to the client. The rationality of the effect and additional implications for decision-making are discussed.

In forecasting and decision making, people can and often do represent a degree of belief in some proposition. At least two separate constructs capture such degrees of belief: likelihoods capturing evidential balance and support capturing evidential weight. This paper explores the weight or justification that evidence affords propositions, with subjects communicating using a belief function in hypothetical legal situations, where justification is a relevant goal. Subjects evaluated the impact of sets of 1–3 pieces of evidence, varying in complexity, within a hypothetical legal situation. The study demonstrates the potential usefulness of this evidential weight measure as an alternative or complement to the more-studied probability measure. Subjects’ responses indicated that weight and likelihood were distinguished; that subjects’ evidential weight tended toward single elements in a targeted fashion; and, that there were identifiable individual differences in reactions to conflicting evidence. Specifically, most subjects reacted to conflicting evidence that supported disjoint sets of suspects with continued support in the implicated sets, although an identifiable minority reacted by pulling back their support, expressing indecisiveness. Such individuals would likely require a greater amount of evidence than the others to counteract this tendency in support. Thus, the study identifies the value of understanding evidential weight as distinct from likelihood, informs our understanding of the psychology of individuals’ judgments of evidential weight, and furthers the application and meaningfulness of belief functions as a communication language.

People frequently underestimate the time needed to complete tasks and we examined a strategy – known as backward planning – that may counteract this optimistic bias. Backward planning involves starting a plan at the end goal and then working through required steps in reverse-chronological order, and is commonly advocated by practitioners as a tool for developing realistic plans and projections. We conducted four experiments to test effects on completion time predictions and related cognitive processes. Participants planned for a task in one of three directions (backward, forward, or unspecified) and predicted when it would be finished. As hypothesized, predicted completion times were longer (Studies 1–4) and thus less biased (Study 4) in the backward condition than in the forward and unspecified conditions. Process measures suggested that backward planning may increase attention to situational factors that delay progress (e.g., obstacles, interruptions, competing demands), elicit novel planning insights, and alter the conceptualization of time.

A four-fold classification of emotions with respect to their functions in decision making is proposed. It is argued that emotions are not homogenous concerning their role in decision making, but that four distinct functions can be distinguished concerning emotional phenomena. One function is to provide information about pleasure and pain for preference construction, a second function is to enable rapid choices under time pressure, a third function is to focus attention on relevant aspects of a decision problem, and a fourth function is to generate commitment concerning morally and socially significant decisions. The pertinent literature on the relationship between emotion and decision making is reviewed, and it is concluded that most approaches fit into the proposed framework. We argue that a precise conceptualization of emotional phenomena is required to advance our understanding of the complex role of emotions in decision making.

This study was designed to assess sex-related differences in the selection of an appropriate strategy when facing novelty. A simple visuo-spatial task was used to investigate exploratory behavior as a specific response to novelty. The exploration task was followed by a visual discrimination task, and the responses were analyzed using signal detection theory.

During exploration women selected a local searching strategy in which the metric distance between what is already known and what is unknown was reduced, whereas men adopted a global strategy based on an approximately uniform distribution of choices. Women’s exploratory behavior gives rise to a notion of a secure base warranting a sense of safety while men’s behavior does not appear to be influenced by risk. This sex-related difference was interpreted as a difference in beliefs concerning the likelihood of uncertain events influencing risk evaluation.

A growing body of research indicates that forecasting skill is a unique and stable trait: forecasters with a track record of high accuracy tend to maintain this record. But how does one identify skilled forecasters effectively? We address this question using data collected during two seasons of a longitudinal geopolitical forecasting tournament. Our first analysis, which compares psychometric traits assessed prior to forecasting, indicates intelligence consistently predicts accuracy. Next, using methods adapted from classical test theory and item response theory, we model latent forecasting skill based on the forecasters’ past accuracy, while accounting for the timing of their forecasts relative to question resolution. Our results suggest these methods perform better at assessing forecasting skill than simpler methods employed by many previous studies. By parsing the data at different time points during the competitions, we assess the relative importance of each information source over time. When past performance information is limited, psychometric traits are useful predictors of future performance, but, as more information becomes available, past performance becomes the stronger predictor of future accuracy. Finally, we demonstrate the predictive validity of these results on out-of-sample data, and their utility in producing performance weights for wisdom-of-crowds aggregations.

Most decision-making models describing individual differences in heuristics and biases tasks build on the assumption that reasoners produce a first incorrect answer in a quick, automatic way which they may or may not override later and that the advantage of high capacity reasoners arises from this late correction mechanism. To investigate this assumption, we developed a mouse-tracking analysis technique to capture individuals’ first answers and subsequent thinking dynamics. Across two denominator neglect task experiments, we observed that individuals initially move the mouse cursor towards the correct answer option in a substantial number of cases suggesting that reasoners may not always produce an incorrect answer first. Furthermore, we observed that, compared to low capacity reasoners, high capacity individuals revise their first answer more frequently if it is incorrect and make fewer changes if it is correct. However, we did not find evidence that high capacity individuals produce correct initial answers more frequently. Consistent with the predictions of previous decision-making models, these results suggest that in the denominator neglect task the capacity-normativity relationship arises after the initial response is formulated. The present work demonstrates how the analysis of mouse trajectories can be utilized to investigate individual differences in decision-making and help us better apprehend the dynamics of thinking behind decision biases.

When comparing a pair of attribute values, English speakers can use a “larger” comparative (“A is larger/longer/higher/more than B”) or a “smaller” comparative (“B is smaller/shorter/lower/less than A”). This choice matters because it affects people’s inferences about the absolute magnitudes of the compared items, and influences the perceived truthfulness of the comparative sentence itself. In 4 studies (total N = 2335), we investigated the language that people use to describe ordinal relations between attributes. Specifically, we examined whether demography, emotion, and personality predict the tendency to use “larger” comparatives rather than “smaller” ones. Participants viewed pairs of items differing in a single attribute and indicated the word they would use to describe the relationship between them; they also completed a series of self-report measures. Replicating previous work, we found a robust tendency to use “larger” comparatives, both when people chose between two adjectives and when they freely produced their own words in a sentence completion task. We also found that this tendency was more pronounced in older participants, those with positive mood or outlook, and among people high in agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability. However, these effects were very small, with meta-analytic effect sizes indicating they explain less than 1% of the variance. We conclude that, although people’s use of comparative adjectives is influenced by properties of the items that are being compared, the way that people describe magnitude relations is relatively stable across variation in a range of important traits and dispositions, protecting decision-makers from a potentially undesirable source of bias in their inferences and representations of described options.

The letter of the law is its literal meaning. Here, the spirit of the law is its perceived intention. We tested the hypothesis that violating the spirit of the law accounts for culpability above and beyond breaking the mere letter. We find that one can incur culpability even when the letter of the law is not technically broken. We examine this effect across various legal contexts and discuss the implications for future research directions.

We demonstrate the usefulness of cognitive models for combining human estimates of probabilities in two experiments. The first experiment involves people’s estimates of probabilities for general knowledge questions such as “What percentage of the world’s population speaks English as a first language?” The second experiment involves people’s estimates of probabilities in football (soccer) games, such as “What is the probability a team leading 1–0 at half time will win the game?”, with ground truths based on analysis of large corpus of games played in the past decade. In both experiments, we collect people’s probability estimates, and develop a cognitive model of the estimation process, including assumptions about the calibration of probabilities and individual differences. We show that the cognitive model approach outperforms standard statistical aggregation methods like the mean and the median for both experiments and, unlike most previous related work, is able to make good predictions in a fully unsupervised setting. We also show that the parameters inferred as part of the cognitive modeling, involving calibration and expertise, provide useful measures of the cognitive characteristics of individuals. We argue that the cognitive approach has the advantage of aggregating over latent human knowledge rather than observed estimates, and emphasize that it can be applied in predictive settings where answers are not yet available.

Assessing how managers discount and evaluate risks is crucial in designing effective managerial policies. In this work, we examine whether risk preferences (RP; both in the domains of gain and loss) and time preferences (TP) are related to managers’ cognitive reflection (CR). To achieve this, the current study focuses on the responses of 601 corporate decision-makers, such as CEO and CFO, of 200 non-financial firms listed at the Pakistan Stock Exchange. Using the three-item of Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; Frederick, 2005) as a measure of CR, we observe that males perform better on this test than females. Correlation analysis reveals that individuals’ RP in the gain domain are positively associated with their TP, implying that risk-taking individuals are more patient. Our evidence further shows that higher CR is associated with a higher likelihood of increased patience and a lower likelihood of willingness to take risks in the domain of loss. Greater CR is also linked to a higher likelihood of risk-taking in the domain of gain. These findings have important implications regarding the ability of managers to make financial decisions that involve uncertainty and delayed rewards but maximize firm value.

In two studies, people were reluctant to trade items they own, but glad to accept upgrades with identical end states. The framing of the transaction makes a difference. A mediational analysis suggests that the relationship between the frame of the transaction and measures of value (willingness to accept, WTA) depends on perceived losses. Losses are perceived as greater when the transaction is a trade than as an upgrade. We manipulated perceptions of loss across descriptions of transactions and found that, when the difference in perceptions of losses with trades versus upgrades was large, framing effects were strong. But when the difference was small, framing effects disappeared. These framing effects with identical end states influence WTA because trades are associated with perceived losses, while upgrades are associated with perceived costs.