Ninety-eight Australian students participated in a functional replication of a study published by Dijksterhuis et al. (2006). The results indicated that unconscious thought does not necessarily lead to better normative decision making performance than conscious thought, which is contrary to the results found in Dijksterhuis et al. Since other studies showed a positive, though statistically not significant, effect for unconscious thought, a meta-analysis comprising a total of 17 experiments was conducted. It suggests that there is little evidence for an advantage to normative decision making using unconscious thought. However, a discussion of potential moderators shows that further study would help to identify situations in which unconscious thought is truly helpful and those in which it is not.

Previous tests of cumulative prospect theory (CPT) and of the priority heuristic (PH) found evidence contradicting these two models of risky decision making. However, those tests were criticized because they had characteristics that might “trigger” use of other heuristics. This paper presents new tests that avoid those characteristics. Expected values of the gambles are nearly equal in each choice. In addition, if a person followed expected value (EV), expected utility (EU), CPT, or PH in these tests, she would shift her preferences in the same direction as shifts in EV or EU. In contrast, the transfer of attention exchange model (TAX) and a similarity model predict that people will reverse preferences in the opposite direction. Results contradict the PH, even when PH is modified to include a preliminary similarity evaluation using the PH parameters. New tests of probability-consequence interaction were also conducted. Strong interactions were observed, contrary to PH. These results add to the growing bodies of evidence showing that neither CPT nor PH is an accurate description of risky decision making.

We compare and critique two measures of risk perception. We suggest that a single question — “How risky is the situation?” — captures the concept of risk perception more accurately than the multiple-item measure used by Sitkin and Weingart (1995). In fact, this latter measure inadvertently captures notions of attractiveness or expected return, rather than risk perception. We further propose that the error underlying the construction of Sitkin and Weingart’s measure is explained in terms of a top-down model of risk perception, in which perceived risk and perceived return are consequences, rather than determinants, of attractiveness. Two studies compare the validity of the two alternative measures.

This is a first study on attachment to national and sacred land and land as a protected value. A measure of attachment to the land of Israel is developed and administered to two groups, Jewish college students in Israel and the United States. Levels of land attachment are high and not significantly different in the two groups, with a great deal of variation. Land may become more important through being inhabited by a group over centuries. This is a positive contagion effect, and is opposed in some cases by negative contagion produced when the “enemies” live on the land for some period of time. We demonstrate a significant correlation of positive contagion sensitivity with attachment to the land of Israel. Unlike many other cases of the interaction of positive and negative contagion, negative contagion does not overwhelm positive contagion in the domain of land attachment. We also present evidence for linkages between political positions, religiosity, importance of Israel, Arab aversion, and vulnerability of Israel with attachment to land, but these do not fully account for the contagion effects. A number of significant differences between Israelis and Americans are described.

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 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.

I introduce the notion of “neglect defaulting,” which labels the propensity to neglect possibilities which are ordinarily sensibly neglected. In familiar contexts we are well-tuned to recognize when to override the default. But outside the range of familiar experience — here in the artificial context of puzzles — these ordinarily benign defaults can make it difficult for even sophisticated subjects, such as readers of this note, to avoid responses which on reflection will be seen as obviously mistaken. A detail of particular importance is that, although subjects are easily prompted to take one step in the direction of reaching a sound response, the tendency to then neglect to consider that another step may be needed is remarkably strong. In each of the five examples the needed but usually neglected second step is quite trivial. Concluding remarks point to consequences for larger questions outside the range of familiar experience, in politics and other contexts out of scale with everyday experience.