In 2020, most countries around the world adopted various measures aimed at combating the coronavirus (i.e., COVID-19), or reducing risky behavior which may spread the virus. In the current study (N = 215), we examined compliance with COVID-19 prevention guidelines using a risk-taking perspective, differentiating active from passive risk taking. In the corona context active risk taking involves actions that may cause disease contraction, such as shaking hands, while passive risk taking involves the acceptance of risk brought on by inaction, as in not using an alco-gel disinfectant. We found that personal tendencies for passive and active risk taking predicted passive and active corona related risk taking, respectively. Furthermore, compliance with COVID-19 prevention measures was also related to differences in self-control, with low Initiation self-control predicting passive corona risk taking and low levels of Inhibition self-control predicting active corona risk taking. Thus, while not complying with Covid-19 prevention measures put people at risk, differentiating between active and passive risks is helpful for accurate prediction of each type of risk behavior.

A widely used measure of individual propensity to utilize analytic processing is the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), a set of math problems with intuitively compelling but incorrect answers. Here, we ask whether scores on this measure are temporally stable. We aggregate data from 11 studies run on Amazon Mechanical Turk in which the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) was administered and identify N = 3,302 unique individuals who completed the CRT two or more times. We find a strong correlation between an individual’s first and last CRT performance, r = .806. This remains true even when constraining to data points separated by over 2 years, r = .755. Furthermore, we find that CRT scores from one timepoint correlated negatively with belief in God and social conservatism from the other timepoint (and to a similar extent as scores gathered at the same timepoint). These results show that CRT scores are stable over time, and – given the stable relationship between CRT and religious belief and ideology – provide some evidence for the stability of analytic cognitive style more generally.

Much research in cognitive psychology has focused on the tendency to conserve limited cognitive resources. The CRT is the predominant measure of such miserly information processing, and also predicts a number of frequently studied decision-making traits (such as belief bias and need for cognition). However, many subjects from common subject populations have already been exposed to the questions, which might add considerable noise to data. Moreover, the CRT has been shown to be confounded with numeracy. To increase the pool of available questions and to try to address numeracy confounds, we developed and tested the CRT-2. CRT-2 questions appear to rely less on numeracy than the original CRT but appear to measure closely related constructs in other respects. Crucially, substantially fewer subjects from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk have been previously exposed to CRT-2 questions. Though our primary purpose was investigating the CRT-2, we also found that belief bias questions appear suitable as an additional source of new items. Implications and remaining measurement challenges are discussed.

The advantage of models that do not use flexible parameters is that one can precisely show to what degree they predict behavior, and in what situations. In three issues of this journal, the recognition heuristic has been examined carefully from many points of view. We comment here on four themes, the use of optimization models to understand the rationality of heuristics, the generalization of the recognition input beyond a binary judgment, new conditions for less-is-more effects, and the importance of specifying boundary conditions for cognitive heuristics.

The COVID-19 crisis has forced healthcare professionals to make tragic decisions concerning which patients to save. Furthermore, The COVID-19 crisis has foregrounded the influence of self-serving bias in debates on how to allocate scarce resources. A utilitarian principle favors allocating scarce resources such as ventilators toward younger patients, as this is expected to save more years of life. Some view this as ageist, instead favoring age-neutral principles, such as “first come, first served”. Which approach is fairer? The “veil of ignorance” is a moral reasoning device designed to promote impartial decision-making by reducing decision-makers’ use of potentially biasing information about who will benefit most or least from the available options. Veil-of-ignorance reasoning was originally applied by philosophers and economists to foundational questions concerning the overall organization of society. Here we apply veil-of-ignorance reasoning to the COVID-19 ventilator dilemma, asking participants which policy they would prefer if they did not know whether they were younger or older. Two studies (pre-registered; online samples; Study 1, N=414; Study 2 replication, N=1,276) show that veil-of-ignorance reasoning shifts preferences toward saving younger patients. The effect on older participants is dramatic, reversing their opposition toward favoring the young, thereby eliminating self-serving bias. These findings provide guidance on how to remove self-serving biases to healthcare policymakers and frontline personnel charged with allocating scarce medical resources during times of crisis.

Standard preference models in consumer research assume that people weigh and add all attributes of the available options to derive a decision, while there is growing evidence for the use of simplifying heuristics. Recently, a greedoid algorithm has been developed (Yee, Dahan, Hauser & Orlin, 2007; Kohli & Jedidi, 2007) to model lexicographic heuristics from preference data. We compare predictive accuracies of the greedoid approach and standard conjoint analysis in an online study with a rating and a ranking task. The lexicographic model derived from the greedoid algorithm was better at predicting ranking compared to rating data, but overall, it achieved lower predictive accuracy for hold-out data than the compensatory model estimated by conjoint analysis. However, a considerable minority of participants was better predicted by lexicographic strategies. We conclude that the new algorithm will not replace standard tools for analyzing preferences, but can boost the study of situational and individual differences in preferential choice processes.

According to recent dual-process theories, interpersonal trust is influenced by both impulsive and deliberative processes. The present research explores the determinants of deliberative trust, investigating how trust decisions are affected by the availability of cognitive resources. We test the interaction of two relevant factors: self-control (the ability to exert mental control over one’s behavior) and the default response (a preselected option that requires minimal or no effort). Past research has shown that self-control has extensive effects on social behavior and decision making. Here, we report that the effect of self-control on trust depends on the default. Across two studies, we find no direct link between self-control and trust. Instead, self-control affects trust indirectly by influencing the level of effort in decision making. Poor self-control (due to experimental depletion or trait-based differences) predicts adherence to the default—the response that requires the least effort.

Recently, Scholten and Read (2014) found new violations of dominance in intertemporal choice. Although adding a small receipt before a delayed payment or adding a small delayed receipt after an immediate receipt makes the prospect objectively better, it decreases the preference for that prospect (better is worse). Conversely, although adding a small payment before a delayed receipt or adding a small delayed payment after an immediate payment makes the prospect objectively worse, it increases the preference for that prospect (worse is better). Scholten and Read explained these violations in terms of a preference for improvement. However, to produce violations such as these, we find that the temporal sequences need not be constructed as Scholten and Read suggested. In this study, adding a small receipt before a dated receipt (thus constructed as improving) or adding a receipt after a dated payment (thus constructed as improving) decreases preferences for those prospects. Conversely, adding a small payment after a dated receipt (thus constructed as deteriorating) or adding a small payment before a delayed payment (thus constructed as deteriorating) increases preferences for those prospects.

When making decisions that involve tradeoffs between the quality and timing of desirable outcomes, people consistently discount the value of future outcomes. A puzzling finding regarding such decisions is the extremely high rate at which people discount future monetary outcomes. Most economists would argue that decision-makers should turn down only rates of return that are lower than those available to them elsewhere. Yet the vast majority of studies find discount rates that are significantly higher than market interest rates (Frederick et al., 2002). Here we ask whether a lack of knowledge about the normative strategy can explain high discount rates. In an initial experiment, nearly half of subjects did not spontaneously cite elements of the normative strategy when asked how people should make intertemporal monetary decisions. In two follow-up experiments, after subjects read a “financial guide” detailing the normative strategy, discount rates declined by up to 85%, but were still higher than market interest rates. This decline persisted, though attenuated, for at least one month. In a final experiment, peer-generated advice influenced discount rates in a similar manner to “expert” advice, and arguments focusing on normative considerations were at least as effective as others. These studies show that part of the explanation for high discount rates is a lack of knowledge regarding the normative strategy, and they quantify how much discount rates are reduced in response to normative arguments. Given the high level of discounting that remains, however, there are other contributing factors to high discount rates that remain to be quantified.

This paper proposes a revised version of the original Domain-Specific Risk-Taking(DOSPERT) scale developed by Weber, Blais, and Betz (2002) that is shorter andapplicable to a {broader range of ages, cultures, and educational levels}. Italso provides a French translation of the revised scale. Using multilevelmodeling, we investigated the risk-return relationship between apparent risktaking and risk perception in 5 risk domains. The results replicate previouslynoted differences in reported degree of risk taking and risk perception at themean level of analysis. The multilevel modeling shows, more interestingly, thatwithin-participants variation in risk taking across the 5 content domains of thescale was about 7 times as large as between-participants variation. We discussthe implications of our findings in terms of the person-situation debate relatedto risk attitude as a stable trait.

In considering moral dilemmas, people often judge the acceptability of exchanging individuals’ interests, rights, and even lives. Here we investigate the related, but often overlooked, question of how people decide who to sacrifice in a moral dilemma. In three experiments (total N = 558), we provide evidence that these decisions often depend on the feeling that certain people are fungible and interchangeable with one another, and that one factor that leads people to be viewed this way is shared nationality. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants read vignettes in which three individuals’ lives could be saved by sacrificing another person. When the individuals were characterized by their nationalities, participants chose to save the three endangered people by sacrificing someone who shared their nationality, rather than sacrificing someone from a different nationality. Participants do not show similar preferences, though, when individuals were characterized by their age or month of birth. In Experiment 3, we replicated the effect of nationality on participant’s decisions about who to sacrifice, and also found that they did not show a comparable preference in a closely matched vignette in which lives were not exchanged. This suggests that the effect of nationality on decisions of who to sacrifice may be specific to judgments about exchanges of lives.

Slowing climate change will almost certainly require a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, but agreement on who should reduce emissions by how much is difficult, in part because of the self-serving bias—the tendency to believe that what is beneficial to oneself is also fair. Conducting surveys among college students in the United States and China, we show that each of these groups displays a nationalistic self-serving bias in judgments of a fair distribution of economic burdens resulting from mitigation. Yet, we also show, by disguising the problem and the identity of the parties, that it is possible to elicit perceptions of fairness that are not influenced by national interests. Our research reveals that the self-serving bias plays a major role in the difficulty of obtaining agreement on how to implement emissions reductions. That is, the disagreement over what constitutes fair climate policy does not appear to be due to cross-national differences in what constitutes a fair distribution of burdens. Interventions to mitigate the self-serving bias may facilitate agreement.

We study whether probability weighting is observed when individuals are presented with a series of choices between lotteries consisting of real non-monetary adverse outcomes, electric shocks. Our estimation of the parameters of the probability weighting function proposed by Tversky and Kahneman (1992) are similar to those obtained in previous studies of lottery choice for negative monetary payoffs and negative hypothetical payoffs. In addition, common ratio violations in choice behavior are widespread. Our results provide evidence that probability weighting is a general phenomenon, independent of the source of disutility.

Due to the information overload in today’s digital age, people maysometimes feel pressured to process and judge information especially fast. Inthree experiments, we examined whether time pressure increases therepetition-based truth effect — the tendency to judge repeatedlyencountered statements more likely as “true” than novelstatements. Based on the Heuristic-Systematic Model, a dual-process model in thefield of persuasion research, we expected that time pressure would boost thetruth effect by increasing reliance on processing fluency as a presumablyheuristic cue for truth, and by decreasing knowledge retrieval as a presumablyslow and systematic process that determines truth judgments. However, contraryto our expectation, time pressure did not moderate the truth effect.Importantly, this was the case for difficult statements, for which most peoplelack prior knowledge, as well as for easy statements, for which most people holdrelevant knowledge. Overall, the findings clearly speak against the conceptionof fast, fluency-based truth judgments versus slow, knowledge-based truthjudgments. In contrast, the results are compatible with a referential theory ofthe truth effect that does not distinguish between different types of truthjudgments. Instead, it assumes that truth judgments rely on the coherence oflocalized networks in people’s semantic memory, formed by both repetitionand prior knowledge.

This paper tests whether logically equivalent risk formats can lead to different health state utilities elicited by means of the traditional standard gamble (SG) method and a modified version of the method that we call “double lottery.” We compare utilities for health states elicited when probabilities are framed in terms of frequencies with respect to 100 people in the population (i.e., X out of 100 who follow a medical treatment will die) with SG utilities elicited for frequencies with respect to 1,000 people in the population (i.e., Y out of 1,000 who follow a medical treatment will die). We found that people accepted a lower risk of death when success and failure probabilities were framed as frequencies type “Y deaths out of 1,000” rather than as frequencies type “X deaths out of 100” and hence the utilities for health outcomes were higher when the denominator was 1000 than when it was 100. This framing effect, known as Ratio Bias, may have important consequences in resource allocation decisions.

People typically overestimate how much others are prepared to pay for consumer goods and services. We investigated the extent to which latent beliefs about others’ affluence contribute to this overestimation. In Studies 1, 2a, and 2b we found that participants, on average, judge the other people taking part in the study to “have more money” and “have more disposable income” than themselves. The extent of these beliefs positively correlated with the overestimation of willingness to pay (WTP). Study 3 shows that the link between income-beliefs and WTP is causal, and Studies 4, 5a, and 5b show that it holds in a between-group design with a real financial transaction and is unaffected by accuracy incentives. Study 6 examines estimates of others’ income in more detail and, in conjunction with the earlier studies, indicates that participants’ reported beliefs about others’ affluence depend upon the framing of the question. Together, the data indicate that individual differences in the overestimation effect are partly due to differing affluence-beliefs, and that an overall affluence-estimation bias may contribute to the net tendency to overestimate other people’s willingness to pay.

Decision research in psychology has traditionally been influenced by the homo oeconomicus metaphor with its emphasis on normative models and deviations from the predictions of those models. In contrast, the principal metaphor of cognitive psychology conceptualizes humans as ‘information processors’, employing processes of perception, memory, categorization, problem solving and so on. Many of the processes described in cognitive theories are similar to those involved in decision making, and thus increasing cross-fertilization between the two areas is an important endeavour. A wide range of models and metaphors has been proposed to explain and describe ‘information processing’ and many models have been applied to decision making in ingenious ways. This special issue encourages cross-fertilization between cognitive psychology and decision research by providing an overview of current perspectives in one area that continues to highlight the benefits of the synergistic approach: cognitive modeling of multi-attribute decision making. In this introduction we discuss aspects of the cognitive system that need to be considered when modeling multi-attribute decision making (e.g., automatic versus controlled processing, learning and memory constraints, metacognition) and illustrate how such aspects are incorporated into the approaches proposed by contributors to the special issue. We end by discussing the challenges posed by the contrasting and sometimes incompatible assumptions of the models and metaphors.

Above-and-below-average effects are well-known phenomena that arise whencomparing oneself to others. Kruger (1999) found that people rate themselves asabove average for easy abilities and below average for difficult abilities. Weconducted a successful pre-registered replication of Kruger’s (1999)Study 1, the first demonstration of the core phenomenon (N =756, US MTurk workers). Extending the replication to also include abetween-subject design, we added two conditions manipulating easy and difficultinterpretations of the original ability domains, and with an additionaldependent variable measuring perceived difficulty. We observed anabove-average-effect in the easy extension and below-average-effect in thedifficult extension, compared to the neutral replication condition. Bothextension conditions were perceived as less ambiguous than the original neutralcondition. Overall, we conclude strong empirical support for Kruger’sabove-and-below-average effects, with boundary conditions laid out in theextensions expanding both generalizability and robustness of the phenomenon.

Disgust is a cross-culturally recognized emotion that is characterized by avoidant or cautious tendencies. Accordingly, greater sensitivity to disgust may be related to less willingness to take risks. Relatively little research has examined the association between disgust sensitivity and risk-taking propensity. Further, no research to date has taken a domain specific approach to understanding the association between these constructs. Across two studies (N1=98, N2=390) and a mini-meta analysis utilizing two additional datasets (total N=1981), we assessed the extent to which domain specific disgust sensitivity (i.e., Pathogen, Sexual, and Moral) were related to domain specific risk-taking propensity (i.e., Social, Recreational, Health/Safety, Ethical, and Financial). We conducted two cross-sectional studies, with a community and a student sample. Participants completed surveys that included measures of disgust sensitivity and risk-taking propensity. Bivariate correlations across the two studies indicated that greater disgust sensitivity was related to lower risk-taking propensity across almost all domains. However, when controlling for covariance among the disgust sensitivity domains, regression analyses suggested variability in the association between disgust sensitivity and risk-taking propensity depending on domains. Based on mini meta-analysis, sexual disgust sensitivity had the strongest relationships with social risk-taking propensity and health/safety risk-taking propensity, and moral disgust sensitivity had the strongest relationship with ethical risk-taking propensity. These findings suggest the presence of domain specific relations between disgust sensitivity and risk-taking propensity. The domain specific focus may help in utilizing disgust as a factor to decrease certain risky behaviors (e.g., moral disgust for decreasing plagiarism).