Previous research has demonstrated that consistency between people’s behavior and their dispositions has predictive validity for judgments of regret. Research has also shown that differences in the personality variable of action orientation can influence ability to regulate negative affect. The present set of studies was designed to investigate how both consistency factors and action-state personality orientation influence judgments of regret. In Study 1, we used a recalled life event to provide a situation in which the person had experienced either an action or inaction. Individuals with an action orientation experienced more regret for situations involving inaction (staying home) than situations involving action (going out). State-oriented individuals, however, maintained high levels of regret and did not differ in their regret ratings across either the action or inaction situations. In Study 2, participants made realistic choices involving either an action or inaction. Our findings revealed the same pattern of results: action-oriented individuals who chose an option that involved not acting (inaction) had more regret that individuals who chose an option that involved acting (action). State-oriented individuals experienced high levels of regret regardless of whether they chose to act or not to act.

Our previous research suggests that people reporting a stronger desire to maximize obtain worse life outcomes (Bruine de Bruin et al., 2007). Here, we examine whether this finding may be explained by the decision-making styles of self-reported maximizers. Expanding on Schwartz et al. (2002), we find that self-reported maximizers are more likely to show problematic decision-making styles, as evidenced by self-reports of less behavioral coping, greater dependence on others when making decisions, more avoidance of decision making, and greater tendency to experience regret. Contrary to predictions, self-reported maximizers were more likely to report spontaneous decision making. However, the relationship between self-reported maximizing and worse life outcomes is largely unaffected by controls for measures of other decision-making styles, decision-making competence, and demographic variables.

People have been shown to delay decision making to wait for missing noninstrumental attribute information — information that would not have altered their decision if known at the outset — with this delay originally attributed to uncertainty obscuring one’s true preference (Bastardi & Shafir, 1998). To test this account, relative to an alternative that delay arises from low confidence in one’s preference (Tykocinski & Ruffle, 2003), we manipulated information certainty and the magnitude of a penalty for delay, the latter intended to reduce the influence of easily resolved sources of delay and to magnify any influence of uncertainty. Contrary to expectations, the results were largely inconsistent with the uncertainty account in that, under a low penalty, delay did not depend on information certainty; and, under a high penalty, delay rate was actually much lower when information was uncertain. To explain the latter, we propose that people use a strategy for resolving choice under uncertainty that does not require establishing a confident preference for each value of the missing information. These findings are related to others in which choice difficulty has been found to be a major source of delay.

Patients suffering from the behavioral variant of Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD-b) often exaggerate their abilities. Are those errors in judgment limited to domains in which patients under-perform, or do FTD-b patients overestimate their abilities in other domains? Is overconfidence in FTD-b patients domain-specific or domain-general? To address this question, we asked patients at early stages of FTD-b to judge their performance in two domains (attention, perception) in which they exhibit relatively spared abilities. In both domains, FTD-b patients overestimated their performance relative to patients with Dementia of Alzheimer Type (DAT) and healthy elderly subjects. Results are consistent with a domain-general deficit in metacognitive judgment. We discuss these findings in relation to “regression to the mean” accounts of overconfidence and the role of emotions in metacognitive judgments.

We propose that people weight fluent, or easy to process, information more heavily than disfluent information when making judgments. Cue fluency was manipulated independent of objective cue validity in three studies, the findings from which support our hypothesis. In Experiment 1, participants weighted a consumer review more heavily when it was written in a clear font than in a less clear font. In Experiment 2, participants placed more weight on information when it was in focus than when it was blurry. In Experiment 3, participants placed more weight on financial information from brokerage firms with easy to pronounce names than those with hard to pronounce names. These studies demonstrate that fluency affects cue weighting independent of objective cue validity.

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.

Ambiguity aversion has been widely observed in individuals’ judgments. Using scenarios that are typical in decision analysis, we investigate ambiguity aversion for pairs of individuals. We examine risky and cautious shifts from individuals’ original judgments to their judgments when they are paired up in dyads.

In our experiment the participants were first asked to specify individually their willingness-to-pay for six monetary gambles. They were then paired at random into dyads, and were asked to specify their willingness-to-pay amount for the same gambles. The dyad’s willingness-to-pay amount was to be shared equally by the two individuals. Of the six gambles in our experiment, one involved no ambiguity and the remaining five involved different degrees of ambiguity. We found that dyads exhibited risk aversion as well as ambiguity aversion. The majority of the dyads exhibited a cautious shift in the face of ambiguity, stating a smaller willingness-to-pay than the two individuals’ average. Our study thus confirms the persistence of ambiguity aversion in a group setting and demonstrates the predominance of cautious shifts for dyads.