Inferences consistent with “recognition-based” decision-making may be drawn for various reasons other than recognition alone. We demonstrate that, for 2-alternative forced-choice decision tasks, less-is-more effects (reduced performance with additional learning) are not restricted to recognition-based inference but can also be seen in circumstances where inference is knowledge-based but item knowledge is limited. One reason why such effects may not be observed more widely is the dependence of the effect on specific values for the validity of recognition and knowledge cues. We show that both recognition and knowledge validity may vary as a function of the number of items recognized. The implications of these findings for the special nature of recognition information, and for the investigation of recognition-based inference, are discussed.

How many judgment and decision making (JDM) researchers have not claimed to be building on Herbert Simon’s work? We identify two of Simon’s goals for JDM research: He sought to understand people’s decision processes—the descriptive goal—and studied whether the same processes lead to good decisions—the prescriptive goal. To investigate how recent JDM research relates to these goals, we analyzed the articles published in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making and in Judgment and Decision Making from 2006 to 2010. Out of 377 articles, 91 cite Simon or we judged them as directly relating to his goals. We asked whether these articles are integrative, in the following sense: For a descriptive article we asked if it contributes to building a theory that reconciles different conceptualizations of cognition such as neural networks and heuristics. For a prescriptive article we asked if it contributes to building a method that combines ideas of other methods such as heuristics and optimization models. Based on our subjective judgments we found that the proportion of integrative articles was 67% of the prescriptive and 52% of the descriptive articles. We offer suggestions for achieving more integration of JDM theories. The article concludes with the thesis that although JDM researchers work under Simon’s spell, no one really knows what that spell is.

The representativeness heuristic (RH) has been proposed to be at the root of several types of biases in judgment. In this project, we ask whether the RH is relevant in two kinds of choices in the context of gambling. Specifically, in a field experiment with naturalistic stimuli and a potentially extremely high monetary pay-out, we give each of our subjects a choice between a lottery ticket with a random-looking number sequence and a ticket with a patterned sequence; we subsequently offer them a small cash bonus if they switch to the other ticket. In the second task, we investigate the gambler’s fallacy, asking subjects what they believe the outcome of a fourth coin toss after a sequence of three identical outcomes will be. We find that most subjects prefer “random” sequences, and that approximately half believe in dependence between subsequent coin tosses. There is no correlation, though, between the initial choice of the lottery ticket and the prediction of the coin toss. Nonetheless, subjects who have a strong preference for certain number combinations (i.e., subjects who are willing to forgo the cash bonus and remain with their initial choice) also tend to predict a specific outcome (in particular a reversal, corresponding to the gambler’s fallacy) in the coin task.

People generally adhere to the norm of reciprocity during both tacit and negotiated exchange. Emotional responses generated from profitable and unprofitable exchange facilitate the formation of motives to settle scores with others. In two studies we examine how exchange incidents trigger positive and negative emotional responses, bargaining behavior, and process. In Study 1, we developed measures of emotional response toward the counterpart that can index the state of relational accounts between parties. In a complex, multi-issue negotiation, The measures show that prior profitable or unprofitable exchange experiences shifted affect and individual social motives, as well as initial bargaining positions. In Study 2, shifts in relational accounts altered the bargaining process and subsequent implementation of agreements. The relational accounting concept represents an important link for understanding how negotiation functions as a sub-process in the wider stream of social exchange.

Previous research in multiple judgment domains has found that nonlinear functionsare typically processed less accurately than linear ones. This empiricalregularity has potential implications for consumer choice, given that nonlinearfunctions (e.g., diminishing returns) are commonplace. In two experimentalstudies we measured precision and bias in consumers’ ability to identifysurpluses when returns to product attributes were nonlinear. We hypothesizedthat nonlinear functions would reduce precision and induce bias towardlinearization of nonlinear relationships. Neither hypothesis was supported formonotonic nonlinearities. However, precision was greatly reduced for productswith nonmonotonic attributes. Moreover, assessments of surplus weresystematically and strongly biased, regardless of the shape of returns anddespite feedback and incentives. The findings imply that consumers use aflexible but coarse mechanism to compare attributes against prices, withimplications for the prevalence of costly mistakes.

The current study tested the boundary conditions of ethical decision-making by increasing cognitive load. This manipulation is believed to hinder deliberation, and, as we argue, reduces the cognitive capacity needed for a self-serving bias to occur. As telling a lie is believed to be more cognitively taxing than telling the truth, we hypothesized that participants would be more honest under high cognitive load than low cognitive load. 173 participants anonymously rolled a die three times and reported their outcomes — of which one of the rolls would be paid out — while either under high or low cognitive load. For the roll that determined pay, participants under low cognitive load, but not under high cognitive load, reported die rolls that were significantly different from a uniform (honest) distribution. The reported outcome of this roll was also significantly higher in the low load condition than in the high load condition, suggesting that participants in the low load condition lied to get higher pay. This pattern was not observed for the second and third roll where participants knew the rolls were not going to be paid out and where therefore lying would not serve self-interest. Results thus indicate that having limited cognitive capacity will unveil a tendency to be honest in a situation where having more cognitive capacity would have enabled one to serve self-interest by lying.

Danziger, Levav and Avnaim-Pesso (2011) analyzed legal rulings of Israeli parole boards concerning the effect of serial order in which cases are presented within ruling sessions. They found that the probability of a favorable decision drops from about 65% to almost 0% from the first ruling to the last ruling within each session and that the rate of favorable rulings returns to 65% in a session following a food break. The authors argue that these findings provide support for extraneous factors influencing judicial decisions and cautiously speculate that the effect might be driven by mental depletion. A simulation shows that the observed influence of order can be alternatively explained by a statistical artifact resulting from favorable rulings taking longer than unfavorable ones. An effect of similar magnitude would be produced by a (hypothetical) rational judge who plans ahead minimally and ends a session instead of starting cases that he or she assumes will take longer directly before the break. One methodological detail further increased the magnitude of the artifact and generates it even without assuming any foresight concerning the upcoming case. Implications for this article are discussed and the increased application of simulations to identify nonobvious rational explanations is recommended.

How often and for how long a certain object was encountered are two distinct questions, requiring two distinct answers. But when humans judge an object to have been presented often, they usually also judge it to have been presented for a long duration. Under certain conditions the reverse is also true: When an object has been presented for a long time, humans think it has been presented often. These mutual influences hint at a single underlying dimension on which judgments of frequency and duration are based. But the judgments also differ in certain respects, which instead speaks for two independent dimensions. In this article, from a novel formal perspective, we revisit arguments for and against unidimensional and two-dimensional models. To determine which of these models is supported empirically, we analyzed all available studies and tested an overlooked but critical condition that would allow us to draw a definitive conclusion. Our evidence speaks against a unidimensional model in all variants.

Prior studies have found that subjects prefer an improving sequence of incomeover a constant sequence, even if the constant sequence offers a largerpresent-discounted value. However, little is known about how these preferencesvary with the size of the wage payments. In each of four studies, we find apositive relationship between the preference for increasing payments and thesize of the payments. We find no evidence that our measure of the decreasingmarginal utility of money is associated with this relationship. Additionally, wefind weak evidence in support of a theoretical prediction that the differencebetween the preference for increasing wage payments and the preference forincreasing nonwage payments will be largest for intermediate amounts. We do notfind a relationship between the preference for increasing payments and thepreference for improving nonmonetary sequences. Finally, the relationshipbetween the preference for increasing payments and the size of the payments doesnot appear to be sensitive to the precise specification of the increases.

This article presents a theory of reasoning about moral propositions that is based on four fundamental principles. First, no simple criterion picks out propositions about morality from within the larger set of deontic propositions concerning what is permissible and impermissible in social relations, the law, games, and manners. Second, the mechanisms underlying emotions and deontic evaluations are independent and operate in parallel, and so some scenarios elicit emotions prior to moral evaluations, some elicit moral evaluations prior to emotions, and some elicit them at the same time. Third, deontic evaluations depend on inferences, either unconscious intuitions or conscious reasoning. Fourth, human beliefs about what is, and isn’t, moral are neither complete nor consistent. The article marshals the evidence, which includes new studies, corroborating these principles, and discusses the relations between them and other current theories of moral reasoning.

We perform an experimental investigation using a dictator game in which individuals must make a moral decision — to give or not to give an amount of money to poor people in the Third World. A questionnaire in which the subjects are asked about the reasons for their decision shows that, at least in this case, moral motivations carry a heavy weight in the decision: the majority of dictators give the money for reasons of a consequentialist nature. Based on the results presented here and of other analogous experiments, we conclude that dicator behavior can be understood in terms of moral distance rather than social distance and that it systematically deviates from the egoism assumption in economic models and game theory.

We investigated whether people’s risk taking tendency established in one domain (gains or losses) carries over to the other domain. Participants played a game in which they made repeated decisions between a fixed payoff and a risky option, where the outcome of the risky option depended on whether they had responded correctly on a difficult perceptual-memory task. In some trials, participants played to gain points; on others, they played to avoid losing points. In two studies, we observed the following pattern of results. 1) Participants risked less on gain trials than on loss trials. 2) This difference in risk taking persisted (carried over) when the domain changed from gains to losses and vice versa (with the effect of experiencing losses first being stronger than the effect of experiencing gains first). 3) There was no analogous carryover effect on responses to a delay discounting measure, but there was a carryover effect on responses on a risk attitude measure. We compare these results with those from other recent studies and discuss various ways of explaining them.

The concept of “passive risk taking”, which refers to the risk brought on or magnified by inaction, has recently appeared in the literature on risk taking. Keinan and Bereby-Meyer (2012) have developed a scale to measure the personal tendency for passive risk taking (PRT); the scale has criterion validity and high test-retest reliability; it correlates with reported passive risk taking in everyday life and with the DOSPERT scale. Furthermore, it presents divergent validity from classic risk-taking constructs such as sensation seeking, and convergent validity with procrastination and avoidance. In this paper we propose a validation of the PRT scale in Italian. We performed the linguistic adaptation to Italian via the five steps suggested by Guillemin and colleagues (1993) and Beaton and colleagues (2000); we then submitted the derived questionnaire to a 297-adult sample. Results show that two out of three factors from the original scale were confirmed. However the third factor, originally composed of 6 items, was not consistent. We present the scale derived from such results, and discuss the differences with the original scale.

Genetic screening for BRCA1 and BRCA2 gives women the opportunity for early detection, surveillance, and intervention. One key feature of genetic testing and counseling is the provision of personal lifetime risk. However, little attention has been paid to how women interpret lifetime risk information, despite the fact that they base screening, treatment and family planning decisions on such information. To study this vital issue, we set out to test the ability of women to choose the most appropriate interpretation of National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) message about lifetime risk of developing cancer for a woman with altered BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. Participants included 277 women who had not undergone genetic testing or had cancer and 207 women who had undergone genetic testing or had cancer. Over 50% of the women who had not undergone genetic testing or had cancer and 40% of those who had undergone genetic testing or had cancer misunderstood NCI’s information. Furthermore, in line with a growing body of research, we found that high numeracy level (objective or subjective) is positively associated with a woman’s ability to correctly interpret NCI’s message.

Researchers frequently argue that within-subjects designs should be avoided because they result in research hypotheses that are transparent to the subjects in the study. This conjecture was empirically tested by replicating several classic between-subjects experiments as within-subjects designs. In two additional experiments, psychology students were given the within-subjects versions of these studies and asked to guess what the researcher was hoping to find (i.e. the research hypothesis), and members of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) were asked to predict how well students would perform this task. On the whole, students were unable to identify the research hypothesis when provided with the within-subjects version of the experiments. Furthermore, SJDM members were largely inaccurate in their predictions of the transparency of a within-subjects design.

In two studies, we tested the power of revenge as a justification mechanism thatenables people to cheat with a clear conscience. Specifically, we explored theeffects of prior dishonesty and unfairness towards participants on theirsubsequent moral behavior, as well as the physiological arousal associated withit. To this end, we employed a two-phase procedure. In the first phase,participants played one round of a bargaining game (the Ultimatum game in Study1 and the Dictator game in Study 2) in which we manipulated whether the playershad been treated (un)fairly and (dis)honestly by their opponent. In the secondphase, they did a perceptual task that allowed them to cheat for monetary gainat the expense of their opponent from the first phase. In Study 1, participantsalso took a lie detector test to assess whether their dishonesty in the secondphase could be detected. The behavioral results in both studies indicated thatthe opponent’s dishonesty was a stronger driver than theopponent’s unfairness for cheating as a form of retaliation. However, thephysiological arousal results suggest that feeling mistreated in general (andnot just cheated) allowed the participants to get revenge by cheating theoffender while dismissing their associated guilt feelings.

Recent evidence suggests that Americans’ beliefs about upward mobility are overly optimistic. Davidai & Gilovich (2015a), Kraus & Tan (2015), and Kraus (2015) all found that people overestimate the likelihood that a person might rise up the economic ladder, and underestimate the likelihood that they might fail to do so. However, using a different methodology, Chambers, Swan and Heesacker (2015) reported that Americans’ beliefs about mobility are much more pessimistic. Swan, Chambers, Heesacker and Nero (2017) provide a much-needed summary of these conflicting findings and question the utility of measuring population-level biases in judgments of inequality and mobility. We value their summary but argue that their conclusion is premature. By focusing on measures that best tap how laypeople naturally think about the distribution of income, we believe that researchers can draw meaningful conclusions about the public’s perceptions of economic mobility. When more ecologically representative measures are used, the consistent finding is that Americans overestimate the extent of upward mobility in the United States. To explain the divergent findings in the literature, we provide evidence that the methods used by Chambers et al. (2015) inadvertently primed participants to think about immobility rather than mobility. Finally, using a novel method to examine beliefs about economic mobility, we show that Americans indeed overestimate the degree of mobility in the United States.

Emotions can shape decision processes by altering valuation signals, risk perception, and strategic orientation. Although multiple theories posit a role for affective processes in mediating the influence of frames on decision making, empirical studies have yet to demonstrate that manipulated affect modulates framing phenomena. The present study asked whether induced affective states alter gambling propensity and the influence of frames on decision making. In a between-subjects design, we induced mood (happy, sad, or neutral) in subjects (N=91) via films that were interleaved with the framing task. Happy mood induction increased gambling and apparently accentuated framing effects compared to sad mood induction, although the effect on framing could have resulted from the fact that the increased tendency to gamble made the framing measure more sensitive. Happy mood induction increased gambling, but not framing magnitude, compared to neutral mood induction. Subjects experiencing a sad mood induction did not exhibit behavioral differences from those experiencing a neutral mood. For those subjects who experienced the happy mood induction, both gambling propensity and framing magnitude were positively correlated with the magnitude of the change in their mood valence. We discuss the broader implications of mood effects on real-world economic decisions.

Heuristic decision-making models, like Take-the-best, rely on environmental regularities. They conduct a limited search, and ignore available information, by assuming there is structure in the decision-making environment. Take-the-best relies on at least two regularities: diminishing returns, which says that information found earlier in search is more important than information found later; and correlated information, which says that information found early in search is predictive of information found later. We develop new approaches to determining search orders, and to measuring cue discriminability, that make the reliance of Take-the-best on these regularities clear, and open to manipulation. We then demonstrate, in the well-studied German cities environment, and three new city environments, when and how these regularities support Take-the-best. To do this, we focus not on the accuracy of Take-the-best, as most previous studies have, but on a measure of its coherence as a decision-making process. In particular, we consider whether Take-the-best decisions, based on a single piece of information, can be justified because an exhaustive search for information is unlikely to yield a different decision. Using this measure, we show that when the two environmental regularities are present, the decisions made by limited search are unlikely to have changed after exhaustive search, but that both regularities are often necessary.