We conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate whether the rebate and matching subsidy schemes cause crowding-out or crowding-in effects (reductions or increases in amount donated) on individual net donations. We find that when the rebate subsidy scheme is implemented, it does not result in crowding-out or crowding-in effects on individual net donations. However, when the matching subsidy scheme is implemented, it encourages individuals to donate more and generates crowding-in effects on individual net donations.

A positive test result for BRCA1/2 gene mutation is a substantial risk factor for breast and ovarian cancer. However, testing is not always covered by insurance, even for high risk women. Variables affecting willingness to pay (WTP) have implications for clinic-based and direct-to-consumer testing. The relative impact of objective and subjective numeracy on WTP, in the context of worry, perceived risk (of having the mutation and developing breast cancer) and family history, was examined in 299 high-risk women, not previously tested for BRCA1/2. Objective and subjective numeracy correlated positively with one another, yet only subjective numeracy correlated (positively) with WTP. This could not be explained by educational level or worry. In line with the numeracy result, other objective factors including family history, age, and Ashkenazi descent were not correlated with WTP. Perceived risk of having a mutation was also correlated with WTP, though perceived risk of developing breast cancer was not, perhaps because it lacks direct connection with testing. Thus, subjective confidence in the ability to interpret test results and perceived risk of a positive test result are more important drivers in paying for BRCA1/2 testing than factors more objective and/or further removed from the testing itself (e.g., perceived risk of developing cancer, family history). Findings underscore the need for genetic counselling that makes probabilistic information accessible and intelligible, so as to build confidence and promote accurate perception of mutation risk and ultimately better decision-making.

Although bullshit is common in everyday life and has attracted attention from philosophers, its reception (critical or ingenuous) has not, to our knowledge, been subject to empirical investigation. Here we focus on pseudo-profound bullshit, which consists of seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous. We presented participants with bullshit statements consisting of buzzwords randomly organized into statements with syntactic structure but no discernible meaning (e.g., “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena”). Across multiple studies, the propensity to judge bullshit statements as profound was associated with a variety of conceptually relevant variables (e.g., intuitive cognitive style, supernatural belief). Parallel associations were less evident among profundity judgments for more conventionally profound (e.g., “A wet person does not fear the rain”) or mundane (e.g., “Newborn babies require constant attention”) statements. These results support the idea that some people are more receptive to this type of bullshit and that detecting it is not merely a matter of indiscriminate skepticism but rather a discernment of deceptive vagueness in otherwise impressive sounding claims. Our results also suggest that a bias toward accepting statements as true may be an important component of pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity.

We focus on the everyday decision making challenges faced by high functioning adults across the Autism Spectrum using both between- and within-group comparisons. We used Mturk, backed by a combination of recruiting and screening procedures, to recruit large samples using an online survey. The main differences between groups were: greater relationship problems at home, school and work for the ASD group compared to the control group; greater difficulty in a variety of everyday decisions and the negative consequences of their decisions; greater aversion to social risks; lower levels of Rational Ability; and greater personal endorsement of socially undesirable acts. Poorer decision outcomes within the ASD group were predicted by lower levels of Rational Ability and higher personal endorsement of socially undesirable acts. Some of the same predictor-outcome relations were found within the Control group. These results illustrate how the study of unique groups can increase our overall understanding of individual differences in decision making within the general population, and the need to include both between-group and within-group analyses.

Recent studies have identified the uncertainty effect (UE), whereby risky prospects (e.g., a binary lottery that offers either a $50 or $100 gift certificate) are valued less than their worst possible outcome (a $50 certificate). This effect has been proposed to result from “direct risk-aversion” which posits that the mere uncertainty of a lottery directly decreases its value. However, this effect may also be driven by the potential disappointment inherent in not receiving the better of the two outcomes (disappointment aversion), or the mere fact that the risky prospect is referred to as a “lottery”. The results of two experiments do not support either of these two alternatives. Specifically, the results of Experiment 1 indicate that the UE is observed even when the values of the two lottery outcomes are similar, or even identical. Experiment 2 further replicates the UE in a context in which the word “lottery” is never used (a company promotional). These results are consistent with a direct risk-aversion mechanism (Gneezy et al., 2006; Simonsohn, 2009) and suggest that the UE obtains across a number of different contexts.

People are more likely to endorse statements of the form "A is more than B" than those of the form "B is less than A", even though the ordinal relationship being described is identical in both cases -– a result I dub the "more-credible" effect. This paper reports 9 experiments (total N = 5643) that probe the generality and basis for this effect. Studies 1–4 replicate the effect for comparative statements relating to environmental change and sustainable behaviours, finding that it is robust to changes in participant population, experimental design, response formats and data analysis strategy. However, it does not generalize to all stimulus sets. Studies 5–9 test the proposition that the effect is based on the greater ease of processing "more than" statements. I find no meaningful effect of warning people not to base their judgments on the fluency of the sentences (Studies 5 and 6), but do find associations between comparative language, credibility, and processing time: when the more-credible effect manifests, the more-than statements are read more quickly than the less-than statements, and this difference partly mediates the effect of comparative on agreement with the statements; in contrast, for a set of comparisons for which changes in the more/less framing did not affect truth judgments, there was no meaningful difference in the time taken to read the more- and less-than versions of the statements. Taken together, these results highlight the importance of comparative language in shaping the credibility of important socio-political messages, and provide some limited support for the idea that the effect of language choice is partly due to differences in how easily the statements can be processed -– although other mechanisms are also likely to be at work.

In this paper I investigate the impact of numerological superstitions and discounts’ effect on the buyers’ behavior in the apartment market using actual sales data. Based on the dataset from Moscow primary real estate market, which includes 40 buildings, we test the apartments buyers’ demand on lucky 7th floor and unlucky 13th floor in comparison to neighboring floors and its response to developers’ discount policy for the apartments on the 13th floor. Results of the random-effects model for the preference towards 7th floor show that that “good luck” effect is present at the 90% confidence interval. Results of the mixed-effects model for the preference towards the 13th floor’s apartments show that in case of discount moderation, the “bad luck” effect of the 13th floor is mitigated, while in case of “no discount” buildings we find the clear negative effect of the 13th floor.

The present study investigates how group-cooperation heuristics boost voluntary contributions in a repeated public goods game. We manipulate two separate factors in a two-person public goods game: i) group composition (Selfish Subjects vs. Conditional Cooperators) and ii) common knowledge about group composition (Information vs. No Information). In addition, we let the subjects signal expectations of the other’s contributions in the experiment’s second phase. Common knowledge of Selfish type alone slightly dampens contributions but dramatically increases contributions when signaling of expectations is allowed. The results suggest that group-cooperation heuristics are triggered when two factors are jointly salient to the agent: (i) that there is no one to free-ride on; and (ii) that the other wants to cooperate because of (i). We highlight the potential effectiveness of group-cooperation heuristics and propose solution thinking as the schema of reasoning underlying the heuristics. The high correlation between expectations and actual contributions is compatible with the existence of default preference to satisfy others’ expectations (or to avoid disappointing them), but the stark end-game effect suggests that group-cooperation heuristics, at least among selfish players, function ultimately to benefit material self-interest rather than to just please others.

According to the recognition heuristic (RH) theory, decisions follow the recognition principle: Given a high validity of the recognition cue, people should prefer recognized choice options compared to unrecognized ones. Assuming that the memory strength of choice options is strongly correlated with both the choice criterion and recognition judgments, the RH is a reasonable strategy that approximates optimal decisions with a minimum of cognitive effort (Davis-Stober, Dana, & Budescu, 2010). However, theories of recognition memory are not generally compatible with this assumption. For example, some threshold models of recognition presume that recognition judgments can arise from two types of cognitive states: (1) certainty states in which judgments are almost perfectly correlated with memory strength and (2) uncertainty states in which recognition judgments reflect guessing rather than differences in memory strength. We report an experiment designed to test the prediction that the RH applies to certainty states only. Our results show that memory states rather than recognition judgments affect use of recognition information in binary decisions.

Scott, Inbar and Rozin (2016) reported an association between greater disgust sensitivity (DS) and more negative attitudes towards genetically modified (GM) food. Royzman, Cusimano and Leeman (2017) replicated this association but argued that fear, not disgust, is the primary emotion associated with negative GM food attitudes. We believe that this conclusion is premature, because the “high-granularity” disgust scale variants on which it is based are theoretically and statistically questionable. We explain the issues with these disgust scale variants and report direct evidence showing that people respond to GM food with disgust more than fear.

According to the recognition heuristic (RH), for decision domains where recognition is a valid predictor of a choice criterion, recognition alone is used to make inferences whenever one object is recognized and the other is not, irrespective of further knowledge. Erdfelder, Küpper-Tetzel, and Mattern (2011) questioned whether the recognition judgment itself affects decisions or rather the memory strength underlying it. Specifically, they proposed to extend the RH to the memory state heuristic (MSH), which assumes a third memory state of uncertainty in addition to recognition certainty and rejection certainty. While the MSH already gathered significant support, one of its basic and more counterintuitive predictions has not been tested so far: In guessing pairs (none of the objects recognized), the object more slowly judged as unrecognized should be preferred, since it is more likely to be in a higher memory state. In this paper, we test this prediction along with other recognition latency predictions of the MSH, thereby adding to the body of research supporting the MSH.

Redundant or excessive information can sometimes lead people to lean on it unnecessarily. Certain experimental designs can sometimes bias results in the researcher’s favor. And, sometimes, interesting effects are too small to be studied, practically, or are simply zero. We believe a confluence of these factors led to a recent paper (Isaac & Brough, 2014, JCR). This initial paper proposed a new means by which probability judgments can be led astray: the category size bias, by which an individual event coming from a large category is judged more likely to occur than an event coming from a small one. Our work shows that this effect may be due to instructional and mechanical confounds, rather than interesting psychology. We present eleven studies with over ten times the sample size of the original in support of our conclusion: We replicate three of the five original studies and reduce or eliminate the effect by resolving these methodological issues, even significantly reversing the bias in one case (Study 6). Studies 7–8c suggest the remaining two studies are false positives. We conclude with a discussion of the subtleties of instruction wording, the difficulties of correcting the record, and the importance of replication and open science.

I raise a methodological concern regarding the study performed by Pennycook, Cheyne, Barr, Koehler & Fugelsang (2015), in which they used randomly generated, but syntactically correct, statements that were rated for profundity by subjects unaware of the source of the statements. The assessment of each statement’s profundity was not based on its impact on the subject but was already predetermined to be “bullshit” based on its random generation by a computer. The statements could nonetheless have been subjectively profound and could have provided glimpses of insight and wisdom to the subjects.

When people donate, they rarely give to the charities that do the most good perdollar. Why is this? One possibility is that they do not know how to giveeffectively. Another possibility is that they are not motivated to do so. Acrosssix tasks (Studies 1a, 1b), we found support for both explanations. Among laydonors, we observed multiple misconceptions—regarding disaster relief,overhead costs, donation splitting, and the relative effectiveness of local andforeign charities—that reduced the effectiveness of their giving.Similarly, we found that they were unfamiliar with the most effective charities(Studies 2a, 2b). Debunking these misconceptions and informing people abouteffectiveness boosted effective donations; however, a portion of lay donorscontinued to give ineffectively to satisfy their personal preferences. Bycontrast, a sample of self-identified effective altruists gave effectivelyacross all tasks. They exhibited none of the misconceptions that we observedamong lay donors and overwhelmingly favored the most effective option in theirchoice set (Study 3). Taken together, our studies imply that donors need to beboth informed and motivated to give effectively on a consistent basis.

The personal pattern of coping with the stress associated with making decisions characterizes the way an individual makes choices and judgments. The Melbourne Decision Making Questionnaire (MDMQ) analyses these personal patterns and has been used across various cultures in order to assess four main strategies: vigilance, buck-passing, procrastination, and hypervigilance. We sought to adapt and validate a Portuguese version of the MDMQ. Our study was conducted with a sample of 523 Portuguese people aged 18 or older. The questionnaire retained the original four scales, which represent four different decisional patterns, showing good reliability and validity – concurrent as well as predictive – and invariance for gender and age. The coping pattern with the highest mean was vigilance, while procrastination had the lowest mean. In contrast to other studies of the MDMQ, our sample had a more diversified distribution of age. Young adults were less capable than older adults of managing stress when making decisions, due to their higher levels of buck-passing, hypervigilance, and procrastination. Vigilance showed stronger correlations to positive affect, satisfaction with life, and better decisional self-esteem, while the remaining scales were related to negative affect, reduced decisional self-esteem, and lower satisfaction with life. These decision-making styles are chosen depending on time constraints, pressure, or other contextual characteristics. These results suggest that individuals resort to more convenient patterns according to their situation, and that these patterns of decision-making can be trained, developed, and improved.

The tempting fate effect is that the probability of a fateful outcome is deemed higher following an action that “tempts” the outcome than in the absence of such an action. In this paper we evaluate the hypothesis that the effect is due to an illusion of control induced by a causal framing of the situation. Causal frames require that the action make a difference to an outcome and that the action precedes the outcome. If an illusion of control modulates the reluctance to tempt fate, then actions that make a difference to well-being and that occur prior to the outcome should tempt fate most strongly. In Experiments 1–3 we varied whether the action makes a difference and the temporal order of action and outcome. In Experiment 4 we tested whether an action can tempt fate if all outcomes are negative. The results of all four experiments supported our hypothesis that the tempting fate effect depends on a causal construal that gives rise to a false sense of control.

Davidai and Gilovich (2018) contend that (a) Americans tend to think about their nation’s income distribution in terms of quintiles (fifths), and (b) when Americans’ perceptions of socio-economic mobility rates are measured properly (e.g., by asking online survey respondents to guess upward-mobility rates across quintiles), a trend of overestimation (too much optimism concerning the number of people who manage to transcend poverty) will emerge. In this reply, we hail Davidai and Gilovich’s new data as novel, important, and relevant to the former (a), but we doubt that they can support the latter (b) claim about population-level (in)accuracy. Namely, we note that even if mobility-rate perceptions could be measured perfectly, inferences about the accuracy of those perceptions still depend on a particular comparator—a point-estimate of the "true" rate of upward social mobility in the U.S. against which survey respondents’ guesses are evaluated—that is itself an error-prone estimate. Applying different established comparators to survey respondents’ guesses changes both the direction and magnitude of previously observed overestimation effects. We conclude with a challenge: researchers who wish to compute the average distance between socio-economic perceptions and socio-economic reality must first select and justify a fair comparator.

This paper develops tests of independence and stationarity in choice data collected with small samples. The method builds on the approach of Smith and Batchelder (2008). The technique is intended to distinguish cases where a person is systematically changing “true” preferences (from one group of trials to another) from cases in which a person is following a random preference mixture model with independently and identically distributed sampling in each trial. Preference reversals are counted between all pairs of repetitions. The variance of these preference reversals between all pairs of repetitions is then calculated. The distribution of this statistic is simulated by a Monte Carlo procedure in which the data are randomly permuted and the statistic is recalculated in each simulated sample. A second test computes the correlation between the mean number of preference reversals and the difference between replicates, which is also simulated by Monte Carlo. Data of Regenwetter, Dana, and Davis-Stober (2011) are reanalyzed by this method. Eight of 18 subjects showed significant deviations from the independence assumptions by one or both of these tests, which is significantly more than expected by chance.

We compare experts’ judgments of the appropriateness of a treatment (interferon treatment for melanoma) on the basis of important attributes of this disease (thickness, ulceration, lymph node involvement and type of metastases) to a decision analytic model in which the probabilities of deterioration are derived from the medical literature and from epidemiological studies. The comparison is based on what we call the linearity test, which examines whether appropriateness judgments are a linear function of the epidemiological value of p2, the probability of deterioration of the patient condition if he would have received the treatment. This comparison allows for the assessment of the validity of the experts’ judgments under the assumption that the decision analytic model is valid, or alternatively, the assessment of the validity of the decision analytic model under the assumption that the experts’ judgments are valid. Under the former assumption the results indicate that appropriateness judgments are by and large accurate. Under the latter assumption the results support the idea of a constant treatment effect, the idea that efficacy of a treatment is constant over various levels of severity of the disease. Our results also support the idea that experts’ aggregate judgments far exceed individuals’ judgments.

This paper explored how frames influence people’s evaluation of others’ probabilistic predictions in light of the outcomes of binary events. Most probabilistic predictions (e.g., “there is a 75% chance that Denver will win the Super Bowl”) can be partitioned into two components: A qualitative component that describes the predicted outcome (“Denver will win the Super Bowl”), and a quantitative component that represents the chance of the outcome occurring (“75% chance”). Various logically equivalent variations of a single prediction can be created through different combinations of these components and their logical or numerical complements (e.g., “25% chance that Denver will lose the Super Bowl”, “75% chance that Seattle will lose the Super Bowl”). Based on the outcome of the predicted event, these logically equivalent predictions can be categorized into two classes: Congruently framed predictions, in which the qualitative component matches the outcome, and incongruently framed predictions, in which it does not. Although the two classes of predictions are logically equivalent, we hypothesize that people would judge congruently framed predictions to be more accurate. The paper tested this hypothesis in seven experiments and found supporting evidence across a number of domains and experimental manipulations, and even when the congruently framed prediction was logically inferior. It also found that this effect held even for subjects who saw both congruently framed and incongruently framed versions of a prediction and judged the two to be logically equivalent.