Recent work has derived the optimal policy for two-alternative value-baseddecisions, in which decision-makers compare the subjective expected reward oftwo alternatives. Under specific task assumptions — such as linearutility, linear cost of time and constant processing noise — the optimalpolicy is implemented by a diffusion process in which parallel decisionthresholds collapse over time as a function of prior knowledge about averagereward across trials. This policy predicts that the decision dynamics of eachtrial are dominated by the difference in value between alternatives and areinsensitive to the magnitude of the alternatives (i.e., their summed values).This prediction clashes with empirical evidence showing magnitude-sensitivityeven in the case of equal alternatives, and with ecologically plausible accountsof decision making. Previous work has shown that relaxing assumptions aboutlinear utility or linear time cost can give rise to optimal magnitude-sensitivepolicies. Here we question the assumption of constant processing noise, infavour of input-dependent noise. The neurally plausible assumption ofinput-dependent noise during evidence accumulation has received strong supportfrom previous experimental and modelling work. We show that includinginput-dependent noise in the evidence accumulation process results in amagnitude-sensitive optimal policy for value-based decision-making, even in thecase of a linear utility function and a linear cost of time, for both single(i.e., isolated) choices and sequences of choices in which decision-makersmaximise reward rate. Compared to explanations that rely on non-linear utilityfunctions and/or non-linear cost of time, our proposed account ofmagnitude-sensitive optimal decision-making provides a parsimonious explanationthat bridges the gap between various task assumptions and between various typesof decision making.

Participants decided whom of two patients to prioritize for surgery in three studies. The factual quantitative information about the patients (e.g., probability of surviving surgery) was given in vignette form with case descriptions on Visual Analogue Scales — VAS’s. Differentiation and Consolidation theory predicts that not only the attractiveness of facts but also the mental representations of objective facts themselves will be restructured in post-decision processes in support of a decision (Svenson, 2003). After the decision, participants were asked to reproduce the objective facts about the patients. The results showed that distortions of objective facts were used to consolidate a prior decision. The consolidation process relied on facts initially favoring the non-chosen alternative and on facts rated as less, rather than more important.

Krupka and Weber (2013) introduce an incentive-compatible coordination game as an alternative method for elicitation of normative judgments. I show, however, that people provide virtually the same responses in incentivized and non-incentivized versions of the Krupka-Weber game. Besides ratings of social appropriateness, I also elicit ratings of fairness of all possible offers in an ultimatum game. Ratings of social appropriateness and fairness are similar for low offers (below or equal to the equal split), but not for high offers which are judged to be more appropriate than fair.

We examined how the goal of a decision task influences the perceived positive, negative valence of the alternatives and thereby the likelihood and direction of framing effects. In Study 1 we manipulated the goal to increase, decrease or maintain the commodity in question and found that when the goal of the task was to increase the commodity, a framing effect consistent with those typically observed in the literature was found. When the goal was to decrease, a framing effect opposite to the typical findings was observed whereas when the goal was to maintain, no framing effect was found. When we examined the decisions of the entire population, we did not observe a framing effect. In Study 2, we provided participants with a similar decision task except in this situation the goal was ambiguous, allowing us to observe participants' self-imposed goals and how they influenced choice preferences. The findings from Study 2 demonstrated individual variability in imposed goal and provided a conceptual replication of Study 1.

One of the largest reasons decision-makers make bad decisions (act imprudently)is that the world is full of uncertainty, we feel uncertain about theconsequences of our actions. Participants played a repeated game in whichdecisions were made under various types of uncertainty (either no uncertainty,uncertainty about the present consequences of behaviors, uncertainty about thefuture consequences of behavior, or both types of uncertainty). The gamerequired prudent decision making for success. While playing the game one ofthree types of feedback was placed between trials, either no feedback,behavioral feedback, or behavioral plus outcome feedback. Prudentdecision-making decreased when both types of uncertainty were added. Further,the addition of feedback increased prudent decision-making when futureuncertainty was present. The increase in prudent decisions appears to be fromfeedback’s ability to allow us to create probabilities associated withbehaviors and their consequences, implying that anything that reduces theuncertainty people feel in a world full of uncertainty will increase theirability to make prudent decisions.

Three studies presented scenarios to lay people to investigate their willingness to restrict imports. Greater restriction was preferred when similar goods were made at home, when the owners of the foreign businesses made very good profits, and, less consistently, when the goods came from a low wage country. Particular reluctance to import from a low-wage country did not vary with whether a home firm was likely to lose business or the level of understanding of comparative advantage, but was related to the profits made by foreign business owners. The results show that lay people views are based on concern for people in other countries as well as in their own.

We report an experiment exploring sequential context effects on strategy choices in one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) game. Rapoport and Chammah (1965) have shown that some PDs are cooperative and lead to high cooperation rate, whereas others are uncooperative. Participants played very cooperative and very uncooperative games, against anonymous partners. The order in which these games were played affected their cooperation rate by producing perceptual contrast, which appeared only between the trials, but not between two separate sequences of games. These findings suggest that people may not have stable perceptions of absolute cooperativeness. Instead, they judge the cooperativeness of each fresh game only in relation to the previous game. The observed effects suggest that the principles underlying judgments about highly abstract magnitudes such as cooperativeness may be similar to principles governing the perception of sensory magnitudes.

A study using a high school and college sample (age 18–26) was conducted to validate the Slovak version of the Adult Decision-Making Competence. The results were similar to findings reported by Bruine de Bruin, Parker, and Fischhoff (2007) on the adult population in America. The internal consistency of component subscales and whole measure was confirmed as well as the factor structure. Gender differences in two of the six subscales were found. The results highlight the usefulness of A-DMC in assessing decision-making competence in Slovak language, but non-student samples are needed to enhance the generalisability of findings.

We present the Maximization Inventory, which consists of three separate scales: decision difficulty, alternative search, and satisficing. We show that the items of the Maximization Inventory have much better psychometric properties when compared to the original Maximization Scale (Schwartz et al., 2002). The satisficing scale is a new addition to the study of maximization behavior, and we demonstrate that this scale is positively correlated with positive adaptation, whereas the decision difficulty and alternative search scales are positively correlated with nonproductive decisional behavior. The Maximization Inventory was then compared to previous maximization scales and, while the decision difficulty and alternative search scales are positively correlated with similar previous constructs, the satisficing scale offers a dimension entirely different from maximization.

Governments use taxes to discourage undesired behaviors and encourage desired ones. One target of such interventions is reckless behavior, such as texting while driving, which in most cases is harmless but sometimes leads to catastrophic outcomes. Past research has demonstrated how interventions can backfire when the tax on one reckless behavior is set too high whereas other less attractive reckless actions remain untaxed. In the context of experience-based decisions, this undesirable outcome arises from people behaving as if they underweighted rare events, which according to a popular theoretical account can result from basing decisions on a small, random sample of past experiences. Here, we reevaluate the adverse effect of overtaxation using an alternative account focused on recency. We show that a reinforcement-learning model that weights recently observed outcomes more strongly than than those observed in the past can provide an equally good account of people’s behavior. Furthermore, we show that there exist two groups of individuals who show qualitatively distinct patterns of behavior in response to the experience of catastrophic outcomes. We conclude that targeted interventions tailored for a small group of myopic individuals who disregard catastrophic outcomes soon after they have been experienced can be nearly as effective as an omnibus intervention based on taxation that affects everyone.

Should a Catholic hospital abort a life-threatening pregnancy or let a pregnant woman die? Should a religious employer allow his employees access to contraceptives or break with healthcare legislation? People and organizations of faith often face moral decisions that have significant consequences. Research in psychology found that religion is typically associated with deontological judgment. Yet deontology consists of many principles, which may, at times, conflict. In three studies, we design a conflict between moral principles and find that the relationship between moral judgment and religiosity is more nuanced than currently assumed. Studies 1 and 2 show that, while religious U.S. Christians and Israeli Jews are more likely to form deontological judgments, they divide between the deontological principles of inaction and indirectness. Using textual analysis, we reveal that specific beliefs regarding divine responsibility and human responsibility distinguish inaction from indirectness deontologists. Study 3 exploits natural differences in religious saliency across days of the week to provide causal evidence that religion raises deontological tendencies on Sundays and selectively increases the appeal of inaction deontology for those who believe in an interventionist and responsible God.

The goal of obtaining information to improve classification accuracy can strongly conflict with the goal of obtaining information for improving payoffs. Two environments with such a conflict were identified through computer optimization. Three subsequent experiments investigated people’s search behavior in these environments. Experiments 1 and 2 used a multiple-cue probabilistic category-learning task to convey environmental probabilities. In a subsequent search task subjects could query only a single feature before making a classification decision. The crucial manipulation concerned the search-task reward structure. The payoffs corresponded either to accuracy, with equal rewards associated with the two categories, or to an asymmetric payoff function, with different rewards associated with each category. In Experiment 1, in which learning-task feedback corresponded to the true category, people later preferentially searched the accuracy-maximizing feature, whether or not this would improve monetary rewards. In Experiment 2, an asymmetric reward structure was used during learning. Subjects searched the reward-maximizing feature when asymmetric payoffs were preserved in the search task. However, if search-task payoffs corresponded to accuracy, subjects preferentially searched a feature that was suboptimal for reward and accuracy alike. Importantly, this feature would have been most useful, under the learning-task payoff structure. Experiment 3 found that, if words and numbers are used to convey environmental probabilities, neither reward nor accuracy consistently predicts search. These findings emphasize the necessity of taking into account people’s goals and search-and-decision processes during learning, thereby challenging current models of information search.

The current study looks at the role working memory plays in risky-choice framing. Eighty-six participants took the Automatic OSPAN, a measurement of working memory; this was followed by a risky-choice framing task. Participants with high working memory capacities demonstrated well pronounced framing effects, while those with low working memory capacities did not. This pattern suggests that, in a typical risky-choice decision task, elaborative encoding of task information by those with high working memory capacity may lead them to a more biased decision compared to those with low working memory.

Two experiments explored how the context of recently experiencing an abundance of positive or negative outcomes within a series of choices influences risk preferences. In each experiment, choices were made between a series of pairs of hypothetical 50/50 two-outcome gambles. Participants experienced a control set of mixed outcome gamble pairs intermingled with a randomly assigned set of (a) all-gain, (b) all-loss, or (c) a mixture of all-gain and all-loss gamble pairs. In both experiments, a positive experience led to reduced risk taking in the control set and a negative experience led to increased risk taking. These patterns persisted even after the all-gain and all-loss gamble pairs were no longer present. In addition, we showed that the good luck attributed to positive experiences was associated with decreased, rather than increased, risk taking. These results ran counter to the house money effect, and could not readily be accounted for by changes in assets. We suggest that the goals associated with the predominant valence are likely to be assimilated and applied to other choices within a given situation. We also discuss the need to learn more about the characteristics of choice bracketing and mental accounting that influence which aspects of situational context will be included or excluded from consideration when making each choice.

The construction of social preferences often requires one to reconcile various social motives, such as concern with unfavorable inequality and maximization of social welfare. We propose a novel theory whereby people’s level of agency influences the relative intensities of their social motives, and thus their social preferences. Agency in this context refers to decision makers’ active involvement in the processes that produce social outcomes. Nonagentic decision makers are not involved in creating the outcomes. Therefore, the comparison between self and others is highly informative for them and they shun settings in which their outcome appears to be inferior. Conversely, agentic decision makers, who take action to influence social outcomes, care more about others’ outcomes and are more inclined to promote social welfare. We report five studies testing the agency hypothesis. Participants were presented with realistic scenarios involving outcomes for themselves and another person. In each scenario, the outcome for oneself was fixed, while the outcome for the other person varied. The participants’ task was to indicate their satisfaction with the other person obtaining either the same outcome as their own or a better one. We found that participants who were involved in creating the outcomes (agentic condition) were more satisfied with the other getting the better option than were participants who were not involved (nonagentic condition). Even low levels of influence on the outcomes were sufficient for a strong agency effect to occur. We discuss the agency hypothesis in relation to theories of social preference, the effects of voicing and participation in decision processes, and trade-offs in public policy.

The sunk cost fallacy is the tendency to continue an endeavour once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made. We studied how people’s chronic orientation to cope with failing projects (i.e., action vs. state orientation) influences the occurrence of this sunk cost effect. We found that people with a state orientation, who have a tendency to ruminate about past events and have a hard time to let go of them, were especially prone to fall in the sunk cost trap. People with an action orientation, who more easily let go of past events, were not susceptible to the sunk cost effect. We discuss the implications of these results for the sunk cost fallacy literature.

Evidence, anecdotal and scientific, suggests that people treat (or are affected by) products of prestigious sources differently than those of less prestigious, or of anonymous, sources. The “products” which are the focus of the present study are poems, and the “sources” are the poets. We explore the manner in which the poet’s name affects the experience of reading a poem. Study 1 establishes the effect we wish to address: a poet’s reputation enhances the evaluation of a poem. Study 2 asks whether it is only the reported evaluation of the poem that is enhanced by the poet’s name (as was the case for The Emperor’s New Clothes) or the enhancement is genuine and unaware. Finding for the latter, Study 3 explores whether the poet’s name changes the reader’s experience of it, so that in a sense one is reading a “different” poem. We conclude that it is not so much that the attributed poem really differs from the unattributed poem, as that it is just ineffably better. The name of a highly regarded poet seems to prime quality, and the poem becomes somehow better. This is a more subtle bias than the deliberate one rejected in Study 2, but it is a bias nonetheless. Ethical implications of this kind of effect are discussed.

There is a lively debate about the effect of maximizing and satisficing tendencies on well-being. The question is, whether maximizing and satisficing have an adaptive or maladaptive effect on well-being. There are also issues regarding the conceptualization and measurement of maximizing and satisficing tendencies. In a sample of 514 subjects from the general population in Slovakia, a two-component model of maximizing was examined. Satisficing tendency was measured as a separate construct. The results show the usefulness of a two-component model (maximizing as a strategy and maximizing as a goal) in measuring maximizing tendency. Maximizing as a strategy (measured as alternative search) turned out to be maladaptive (positively related to depression and negatively related to happiness), whereas maximizing as a goal (measured as high standards) had no maladaptive effect (no relation with well-being). In addition, the two components were differently associated with personality factors, which strengthens the need to distinguish between them. However, the satisficing tendency measured separately from maximizing tendency was not related to anything which raises a question about the conceptualization and validity of this tendency. The results of the current study, therefore, indicate that the (mal)adaptive effect of these tendencies depends on their conceptualization as well as on how these tendencies are measured, and also on their different relationship with personality factors. However, results also point to the importance of considering the cultural context that may have an effect on the relationship between maximizing and well-being. Therefore, the results may vary due to different cultures.

Existing evidence from laboratory experiments finds that a match is likely to increase charitable donations by more than a theoretically equivalent rebate. A number of explanations have been proposed for this in the literature. One idea, which has never been tested, is that people consider a match to be more generous, because unlike the rebate, there is no reward for making a donation in the match setting. We design a survey to determine whether people do consider matches more generous than rebates, and probe the reasons subjects give for their answers. We find that a significant number of people do consider rebates less generous because of the reward associated with donations in such a setting.

In many situations people behave ethically, while elsewhere dishonesty reigns. Studies of the determinants of unethical behavior often use random assignment of participants in various conditions to identify contextual or psychological factors influencing dishonesty. However, in many real-world contexts, people deliberately choose or avoid specific environments. In three experiments (total N = 2,124) enabling self-selection of participants in two similar tasks, one of which allowed for cheating, we found that participants who chose the task where they could lie for financial gain reported a higher number of correct predictions than those who were assigned it at random. Introduction of financial costs for entering the cheating-allowing task led to a decrease in interest in the task; however, it also led to more intense cheating. An intervention aimed to discourage participants from choosing the cheating-enabling environment based on social norm information did not have the expected effect; on the contrary, it backfired. In summary, the results suggest that people low in moral character are likely to eventually dominate cheating-enabling environments, where they then cheat extensively. Interventions trying to limit the preference of this environment may not have the expected effect as they could lead to the selection of the worst fraudsters.