Guilty or Not Guilty? A Look at the “Simulated” Jury Paradigm1

Three experiments examined the effects of real versus hypothetical consequences on juridic decision-making. Real consequences subjects believed their judgments would actually determine what happened to the defendant, while hypothetical consequences subjects believed the study simply dealt with jury decision-making. In Experiment I, the defendant's character attractiveness had no influence on guilt judgments made by real consequences subjects but did so for hypothetical consequences subjects. In addition, character attractiveness affected recommendations of punishment for both real and hypothetical consequences subjects. In Experiment II, the defendant's physical attractiveness influenced neither real nor hypothetical consequences subjects on either the guilt or punishment measures. Experiment III showed that real consequences subjects recalled more situational evidence of the case than did hypothetical consequences subjects. In all three studies, more guilty verdicts occurred in the real consequences condition than in the hypothetical consequences condition. It was concluded that much current research on hypothetical juries may be misleading and that more attention should be given in the future to the variable of real versus hypothetical consequences. Possible mediating factors leading to real and hypothetical consequences differences were explored.     

Experimental manipulations to reduce the negative effects of money

People generally consider money a necessary evil because it invokes dual effects. On one hand, it increases people's productivity and performance, but it also decreases people's sensitivity to others. I conducted three experimental studies with an attempt to reduce the negative effects of money. Results indicated that when money was framed as a social incentive, its negative effect was attenuated and people exerted more helping behavior in both hypothetical and real‐life scenarios. However, when a social incentive was framed in monetary terms, the negative effect of money prevailed in hypothetical but not in real‐life scenarios. Results suggested that money itself is not the root of evil or good, but rather its effects are influenced by our perceptions of its role.     

SHARING THE WEALTH: FACTORS INFLUENCING RESOURCE ALLOCATION IN THE SHARING GAME

Students chose between two allocation options, one that gave the allocator more and another participant still more (the “optimal” choice) and one which gave the allocator less and the other participant still less (the “competitive” choice). In a within‐subjects design, students' behavior patterns were significantly correlated across the two rounds of decision‐making; however, students allocated more optimally when the allocation involved real rather than hypothetical money, suggesting that both motivational context and individuals' personality and/or experience influence preference patterns. The nature of the putative other participant did not affect the allocation: students allocated in a comparable fashion whether the other participant was said to be male, female, or a computer.     

Comparing Risky Decision Making Under Conditions of Real and Hypothetical Consequences

In a series of three experiments, subjects made risky decisions under conditions of hypothetical or real consequences. Task variations across experiments included: (1) type of risk (monetary gambles or investments of time and effort), (2) within-subject and between-subjects manipulations of consequence condition, and (3) single or multiple decisions. The hypothesis of no difference between choices in real and hypothetical consequence conditions was retained in each experiment. Supplemental analyses ruled out various “artifactual” interpretations of the null results. Discussion focused on conditions in which researchers can and cannot infer decision makers’ actual risk preferences from their responses in laboratory tasks.     

Friend or foe: the effect of implicit trustworthiness judgments in social decision-making

The human face appears to play a key role in signaling social intentions and usually people form reliable and strong impressions on the basis of someone's facial appearance. Therefore, facial signals could have a substantial influence on how people evaluate and behave towards another person in a social interaction, such as an interactive risky decision-making game. Indeed, there is a growing body of evidence that demonstrates that social behavior plays a crucial role in human decision-making. Although previous research has demonstrated that explicit social information about one's partner can influence decision-making behavior, such as knowledge about the partner's moral status, much less is known about how implicit facial social cues affect strategic decision-making. One particular social cue that may be especially important in assessing how to interact with a partner is facial trustworthiness, a rapid, implicit assessment of the likelihood that the partner will reciprocate a generous gesture. In this experiment, we tested the hypothesis that implicit processing of trustworthiness is related to the degree to which participants cooperate with previously unknown partners. Participants played a Trust Game with 79 hypothetical partners who were previously rated on subjective trustworthiness. In each game, participants made a decision about how much to trust their partner, as measured by how much money they invested with that partner, with no guarantee of return. As predicted, people invested more money in partners who were subjectively rated as more trustworthy, despite no objective relationship between these factors. Moreover, the relationship between the amount of money offered seemed to be stronger for trustworthy faces as compared to untrustworthy faces. Overall, these data indicate that the perceived trustworthiness is a strong and important social cue that influences decision-making.     

Revisiting the Effects of Anger on Risk‐Taking: Empirical and Meta‐Analytic Evidence for Differences Between Males and Females

That anger elicited in one situation can carry over to drive risky behavior in another situation has been described since the days of Aristotle. The present studies examine the mechanisms through which and the conditions under which such behavior occurs. Across three experiments, as well as a meta‐analytic synthesis of the data, results reveal that incidental anger is significantly more likely to drive risky decision making among males than among females. Moreover, the experiments document that, under certain circumstances, such risk‐taking pays off financially. Indeed, the present experiments demonstrate that, because the expected‐value‐maximizing strategy in these studies rewarded risk‐taking, angry‐male individuals earned more money than did both neutral‐emotion males and angry females. In sum, these studies found evidence for robust disparities between males and females for anger‐driven risk‐taking. Importantly, although men did not experience more anger than women, they did show a heightened tendency to respond to anger with risk‐taking. Published 2016. This article has been contributed to by US Government employees and their work is in the public domain in the USA.     

Money Doesn’t Stink. Or Does It? The Effect of Immorally Acquiring Money on Its Spending

Building on magical contagion literature, we show that the way in which money is acquired colors the perception of the money itself, and thus affect the way it is spent. In a hypothetical scenario participants who imagined acquiring money immorally (versus morally) experienced more guilt about the way in which they acquired it and spent less of it. Furthermore, in the immoral, but not the moral condition, guilt correlated significantly with spending: the greater the guilt, the less money was spent. We interpret this finding as stemming from individuals?? desire not to handle what they see as ??dirty?? money.     

Expectations and Preferences for Sequences of Health and Money

Three experiments demonstrated that preferences for sequences of money differed from preferences for sequences of health. Undergraduates gave preference ratings for graphs that illustrated how monetary income or health quality might change over time, with total amount of money or health held constant. In Experiment 1, subjects expected to experience health that decreased over a lifetime; they also preferred such a sequence. In contrast, they expected to experience increasing monetary income over their lifetimes and preferred such monetary sequences. Experiment 2 showed that these different preferences for sequences of health and money did not hold true for short, 1-year sequences, where subjects had similar expectations about health and money. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 2 and showed that expectations mediate the effect on preference of decision domain (health or money) and sequence length. These results point to the importance of expectations in forming preferences for sequences.     

Information search and mental representation in risky decision making: The advantages first principle

In three experiments the problem is investigated how people identify early in the decision process those alternatives that are worthwhile to be examined in more detail. We assume that decision makers employ the Advantages first Principle: They first search for information about positive outcomes and then focus their information search (e.g., for negative consequences or for risk defusing operators) on those alternatives that appear attractive after this initial evaluation. In Experiment 1 (120 participants), initial information about consequences was varied for eight alternatives (no information, positive consequences, negative, or mixed for four alternatives). In all conditions, the great majority of participants followed both aspects of the Advantages first Principle. In Experiment 2, 60 participants decided in two quasi‐realistic scenarios with two alternatives each. Initial information was presented so that one alternative had better positive consequences, worse negative consequences, or both. In all conditions, more information was searched for in the initially better alternative. In Experiment 3 (20 participants) the Advantages first Principle was not only confirmed for a scenario but also for choices in traditional gambling tasks with two and eight alternatives, respectively. Participants could win or lose real money. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Within-subject comparison of real and hypothetical money rewards in delay discounting

A within-subject design, using human participants, compared delay discounting functions for real and hypothetical money rewards. Both real and hypothetical rewards were studied across a range that included $10 to $250. For 5 of the 6 participants, no systematic difference in discount rate was observed in response to real and hypothetical choices, suggesting that hypothetical rewards may often serve as a valid proxy for real rewards in delay discounting research. By measuring discounting at an unprecedented range of real rewards, this study has also systematically replicated the robust finding in human delay discounting research that discount rates decrease with increasing magnitude of reward. A hyperbolic decay model described the data better than an exponential model.     

虚拟和真实金钱奖赏幅度对海洛因戒断者风险决策的影响

已有研究表明海洛因成瘾者风险决策能力受损, 但少有研究关注不同幅度金钱奖赏对戒断期海洛因成瘾者风险决策的影响以及这种影响是否会受到金钱奖赏类型的调节。因此, 本研究使用气球模拟风险任务(BART), 通过两个实验探究不同幅度虚拟和真实金钱奖赏对海洛因戒断者风险决策的影响。结果显示, 在虚拟奖赏情景下, 海洛因戒断者未爆破气球按键次数和爆破气球个数均显著大于正常组被试, 以及两组被试在25分奖赏条件下的未爆破气球按键次数和爆破气球个数均显著大于1分奖赏; 而在真实奖赏情景下, 海洛因戒断者未爆破气球按键次数和爆破气球个数均显著小于正常组被试, 以及两组被试在25分奖赏条件下的未爆破气球按键次数和爆破气球个数均显著小于1分奖赏。研究结果表明, 金钱奖赏类型和金钱奖赏幅度会影响被试的风险决策行为。在虚拟奖赏情景下, 两组被试的风险偏好水平随着奖赏幅度的增加显著升高, 但是戒断期海洛因成瘾者的风险偏好水平高于正常组被试; 而在真实奖赏情景下, 两组被试的风险偏好水平随着奖赏幅度的增加显著降低, 同时戒断期海洛因成瘾者的风险偏好水平低于正常组被试。     

Possession attachment: Individual differences in the endowment effect

The endowment effect suggests that people become attached to objects that are in their possession, and they demand a higher price to sell an object they own than they would be willing to pay to buy the same object. The results of four experiments support the suggestion that “possession attachment” is related to adult attachment styles in close relationships. Measures of attachment style in close relationships significantly predicted both actual and hypothetical selling prices moderating the endowment effect (Study 1), and significantly correlate with ratings of possession attachment (Study 2). Specifically, attachment anxiety is positively correlated with the selling prices of objects, while attachment avoidance shows no significant relation with object evaluation. The third and fourth experimental studies further demonstrated that attachment anxiety enhances possession evaluation and inhibits trades. The studies used real commodities and real money, and therefore, they have implications for everyday decisions as well as for the development of theories to better understand decisions about trades, negotiations, and choice of goods. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Gambling for Gatorade: risk-sensitive decision making for fluid rewards in humans

Determining how both humans and animals make decisions in risky situations is a central problem in economics, experimental psychology, behavioral economics, and neurobiology. Typically, humans are risk seeking for gains and risk averse for losses, while animals may display a variety of preferences under risk depending on, amongst other factors, internal state. Such differences in behavior may reflect major cognitive and cultural differences or they may reflect differences in the way risk sensitivity is probed in humans and animals. Notably, in most studies humans make one or a few choices amongst hypothetical or real monetary options, while animals make dozens of repeated choices amongst options offering primary rewards like food or drink. To address this issue, we probed risk-sensitive decision making in human participants using a paradigm modeled on animal studies, in which rewards were either small squirts of Gatorade or small amounts of real money. Possible outcomes and their probabilities were not made explicit in either case. We found that individual patterns of decision making were strikingly similar for both juice and for money, both in overall risk preferences and in trial-to-trial effects of reward outcome on choice. Comparison with decisions made by monkeys for juice in a similar task revealed highly similar gambling styles. These results unite known patterns of risk-sensitive decision making in human and nonhuman primates and suggest that factors such as the way a decision is framed or internal state may underlie observed variation in risk preferences between and within species.     

Emotion,Decision, and Risk: Betting on Gambles versus Betting on People

We examined the effects of two emotions, fear and anger, on risk‐taking behavior in two types of tasks: Those in which uncertainty is generated by a randomizing device (“lottery risk”) and those in which it is generated by the uncertain behavior of another person (“person‐based risk”). Participants first completed a writing task to induce fear or anger. They then made choices either between lotteries (Experiment 1) or between actions in risky two‐person decisions (Experiments 2 and 3). The experiments involved substantial real‐money payoffs. Replicating earlier studies (which used hypothetical rewards), Experiment 1 showed that fearful participants were more risk‐averse than angry participants in lottery‐risk tasks. However—the key result of this study—fearful participants were substantially less risk‐averse than angry participants in a two‐person task involving person‐based risk (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 offered options and payoffs identical to those of Experiment 2 but with lottery‐type risk. Risk‐taking returned to the pattern of Experiment 1. The impact of incidental emotions on risk‐taking appears to be contingent on the class of uncertainty involved. For lottery risk, fear increased the frequency of risk‐averse choices and anger reduced it. The reverse pattern was found when uncertainty in the decision was person‐based. Further, the effect was specifically on differences in willingness to take risks rather than on differences in judgments of how much risk was present. The impact of different emotions on risk‐taking or risk‐avoiding behavior is thus contingent on the type, as well as the degree, of uncertainty the decision maker faces. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Abstract construals make the emotional rewards of prosocial behavior more salient

Although previous research has shown that helping others leads to higher happiness than helping oneself, people frequently predict that self-serving behavior will make them happier than prosocial behavior. Here, we explore whether abstract construal – thinking about an event from a higher level, distanced perspective – influences predictions about how rewarding prosocial actions will be for people’s own well-being. In Experiment 1, Hurricane Katrina volunteers who adopted an abstract construal predicted that their efforts would be more rewarding than did volunteers who adopted a concrete construal. Experiment 2 provided a conceptual replication with a hypothetical donation scenario; people who adopted an abstract rather than concrete construal predicted that giving more money would be more rewarding than giving less. These findings suggest that people are more likely to appreciate the emotional benefits of prosocial actions when they adopt high-level construals than when they adopt low-level construals.     

Unrealistic optimism about future life events: a cautionary note

A robust finding in social psychology is that people judge negative events as less likely to happen to themselves than to the average person, a behavior interpreted as showing that people are "unrealistically optimistic" in their judgments of risk concerning future life events. However, we demonstrate how unbiased responses can result in data patterns commonly interpreted as indicative of optimism for purely statistical reasons. Specifically, we show how extant data from unrealistic optimism studies investigating people's comparative risk judgments are plagued by the statistical consequences of sampling constraints and the response scales used, in combination with the comparative rarity of truly negative events. We conclude that the presence of such statistical artifacts raises questions over the very existence of an optimistic bias about risk and implies that to the extent that such a bias exists, we know considerably less about its magnitude, mechanisms, and moderators than previously assumed.     

Framing decisions: Hypothetical and real

This paper addresses the general issue of whether the practice of investigating human decision making in hypothetical choice situations is at all warranted, or under what conditions. A particularly relevant factor that affects the match between real decisions and hypothetical decisions is the importance of a decision’s consequences. In the literature experimental gambles tend to confound the reality of the decision situation with the size of the payoffs: hypothetical decisions tend to offer large payoffs, and real decisions tend to offer only small payoffs. Using the well-known framing effect (a tendency of risk-aversion for gains and of risk-seeking for losses) we find that the framing effect depends on payoff size but hypothetical choices match real choices for small as well as large payoffs. These results appear paradoxical unless size of incentive is clearly distinguished from the reality status of decision (real versus hypothetical). Since the field lacks a general theory of when hypothetical decisions match real decisions, the discussion presents an outline for developing such a theory.     

The Effects of Sample Characteristics and Experience with Infidelity on Romantic Jealousy

Past research has suggested that men are more upset by imagined sexual than emotional infidelity, and women are more upset by imagined emotional infidelity than sexual infidelity. However, experience with infidelity, methodology, and age and gender of the sample may help to explain inconsistent results. Two hundred ninety-four English-speaking undergraduate students and 325 non-college adults in a large mid-Atlantic urban area of the U.S. completed forced-choice or continuous-scale anonymous questionnaires regarding jealousy over a mate??s hypothetical infidelity. Chi-square and MANOVA analyses replicated previous findings of the expected gender difference in all hypothetical forced-choice scenarios. However, results for those participants who reported experience with actual infidelity demonstrated little support for the traditional evolutionary model, as there were no gender differences in which aspect of hypothetical infidelity was reported to be more distressing, and no gender differences at the college level in terms of which aspect of infidelity received the greatest focus. These findings, extrapolated from both undergraduates and adults and accounting for the impact of actual, primed memory of experience of infidelity on hypothetical jealousy scenarios, raise important questions about the validity of hypothetical scenarios of jealousy as proxies for real reactions to actual infidelity. The results of the present study suggest that the lack of a consistent, replicable gender difference across the lifespan may be explained by two related factors: age and actual experience with infidelity.     

Masculine Gender-Role Stress, Anger, and Male Intimate Abusiveness: Implications for Men's Relationships

Many men who are strongly committed to the traditional male role experience masculine gender-role stress (MGRS) when faced with situations they perceive as posing a threat to their masculine identity. Men who experience high levels of MGRS often turn to substance abuse as a means of managing insecurities regarding male role expectations, which may increase their risk of engaging in verbally and physically abusive behavior. In the present investigation, we examined the association between MGRS, anger, and intimately abusive behavior among substance-abusing men. Our sample consisted of 57% White and 43% African American male substance abusers. Approximately 72% of participants reported earning less than $20,000; about 19% earned between $20,000 and $39,999; 4% earned between $40,000 and $59,999; 5% earned between $60,000 and $79,999, and less than 1% reported earning over $80,000. It was hypothesized that, compared with low-MGRS substance-abusing men, high-MGRS substance-abusing men would report higher levels of anger and would be more likely to report engaging in verbally and physically abusive behavior directed at their female partners. In general, support was found for these hypotheses. Our results indicate that high-MGRS substance-abusing men experience higher levels of anger and that they were more likely to have engaged in abusive behavior in the context of their intimate relationships with female partners.