Cognitive biases and decision making in gambling

Heuristics and cognitive biases can occur in reasoning and decision making. Some of them are very common in gamblers (illusion of control, representativeness, availability, etc.). Structural characteristics and functioning of games of chance favor the appearance of these biases. Two experiments were conducted with nonpathological gamblers. The first experiment was a game of dice with wagers. In the second experiment, the participants played two bingo games. Specific rules of the games favored the appearance of cognitive bias (illusion of control) and heuristics (representativeness and availability) and influence on the bets. Results and implications for gambling are discussed.     

Neurobiological and memory models of risky decision making in adolescents versus young adults

Predictions of fuzzy-trace theory and neurobiological approaches are examined regarding risk taking in a classic decision-making task--the framing task--as well as in the context of real-life risk taking. We report the 1st study of framing effects in adolescents versus adults, varying risk and reward, and relate choices to individual differences, sexual behavior, and behavioral intentions. As predicted by fuzzy-trace theory, adolescents modulated risk taking according to risk and reward. Adults showed standard framing, reflecting greater emphasis on gist-based (qualitative) reasoning, but adolescents displayed reverse framing when potential gains for risk taking were high, reflecting greater emphasis on verbatim-based (quantitative) reasoning. Reverse framing signals a different way of thinking compared with standard framing (reverse framing also differs from simply choosing the risky option). Measures of verbatim- and gist-based reasoning about risk, sensation seeking, behavioral activation, and inhibition were used to extract dimensions of risk proneness: Sensation seeking increased and then decreased, whereas inhibition increased from early adolescence to young adulthood, predicted by neurobiological theories. Two additional dimensions, verbatim- and gist-based reasoning about risk, loaded separately and predicted unique variance in risk taking. Importantly, framing responses predicted real-life risk taking. Reasoning was the most consistent predictor of real-life risk taking: (a) Intentions to have sex, sexual behavior, and number of partners decreased when gist-based reasoning was triggered by retrieval cues in questions about perceived risk, whereas (b) intentions to have sex and number of partners increased when verbatim-based reasoning was triggered by different retrieval cues in questions about perceived risk.     

Obtaining informed consent for HIV antibody testing: the decision making process

All patients referring themselves for HIV antibody testing must receive pre-test counselling and must give their informed consent before testing can proceed. All patients being referred by their doctors for HIV antibody testing must also receive pre-test counselling and must give their informed consent before testing can proceed, except in very unusual circumstances. This paper is written primarily for medical and nursing staff who are considering referring a patient for testing and it is particularly relevant to those staff working in the field of mental health. This paper draws on professional guidelines and suggests that staff use a two-part decision making process. In the first part die referrer decides whether there are substantial clinical grounds for needing the test result immediately. If there are, the referral is made for pre-test counselling and testing, for example at the local Genito-Urinary Medicine (GU) clinic. In the second part experienced AIDS counsellors try to enable the patient to decide whether or not to proceed. If the patient is not able to understand or make a decision the AIDS counsellors, in consultation with other staff, will decide whether to proceed. Whatever the decision, it should be respected by professional staff.     

Performance and process in collective and individual memory: the role of social decision schemes and memory bias in collective memory

To assess performance and processes in collective and individual memory, participants watched two job candidates on video. Beforehand, half the participants were told they would be tested on their memory of the interviews, and the other half were asked to make a decision to hire one of the candidates. Afterwards, participants completed a recognition memory task in either a group or individual condition. Groups had better recognition memory than individuals. Individuals made more false positives than false negatives and groups exaggerated this. Post-hoc analysis found that groups only exaggerated the tendency towards false positives on items that reflected negatively on the job candidate. There was no significant difference between instruction conditions. When reaching consensus on the recognition task, groups tended to choose the correct answer if at least two members had the correct answer. This method of consensus is discussed as a factor in groups' superior memory performance.     

Triadic decision making in lexical memory

Word and category recognition was investigated in the context of other stimuli, where the semantic distance relationships among the stimuli were derived from multidimensional scaling. On each trial, three horizontal strings of letters were presented. In the word condition, a positive response was required when the three strings formed three words; in the category condition, a positive response was required when the three strings formed words belonging to the same category. The results indicated that: (a) category decisions take about 150-200 msec longer than do word decisions, (b) word decisions are facilitated by a common categorical membership but semantic distances within the category are relatively unimportant, and (c)within-category semantic distances systematically altered response time for the category condition. It was hypothesized that semantic distance relationships may be sensitized for categorical decisions, but that only large semantic distances function effectively for word decisions.     

Impulsive decision making and working memory

Decision making that favors short-term over long-term consequences of action, defined as impulsive or temporally myopic, may be related to individual differences in the executive functions of working memory (WM). In the first 2 experiments, participants made delay discounting (DD) judgments under different WM load conditions. In a 3rd experiment, participants high or low on standardized measures of imupulsiveness and dysexecutive function were asked to make DD judgments. A final experiment examined WM load effects on DD when monetary rewards were real rather than hypothetical. The results showed that higher WM load led to greater discounting of delayed monetary rewards. Further, a strong direct relation was found between measures of impulsiveness, dysexecutive function,and discounting of delayed rewards. Thus, limits on WM function, either intrinsic or extrinsic, are predictive of a more impulsive decision-making style.     

Group decision process and incrementalism in organizational decision making

In two studies examining resource allocation, support is found for the notion that group decisions are affected in systematic ways depending on whether or not there was individual consideration of the problem before meeting as a group. Specifically, compared to no prior consideration groups, prior consideration groups (1) escalate their commitment more in progress (i.e., ongoing) decisions, and (2) are less willing to concentrate resources on a single project in adoption (i.e., resource utilization) decisions. The findings challenge the blanket assertion that promoting divergent views in a group decision context is always related to better decisions.     

Implicit emotional biases in decision making: the case of the Iowa Gambling Task

Many authors have endorsed the hypothesis that previous emotional experiences may exert a covert influence on behavior, but some findings and replications of the original studies challenged this view. We investigated this topic by carrying out an experiment with the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), where a dissociation procedure was adopted to successfully isolate possible implicit components. After a typical interaction with the IGT, participants performed a "blind" card selection phase without receiving any feedback. Half of them were instructed to continue choosing as they did before, the other half was told that good card decks turned bad, and vice versa, so that explicit knowledge was necessary to overcome the previously learned deck-outcome associations. The results confirmed the existence of early acquired implicit biases, confirming that previously experienced emotional events may covertly affect subsequent behavior.     

Psychological models of professional decision making

People are often expected to make decisions based on allof the relevant information, weighted and combined appropriately. Under manyconditions, however, people use heuristic strategies that depart from thisideal. I tested the ability of two models to predict bail decisions made byjudges in two courts. In both courts, a simple heuristic proved to be abetter predictor of judicial decisions than a more complex model thatinstantiated the principles of due process. Specifically, judges were"passing the buck" because they relied on decisions madeby the police, prosecution, and previous bench. Problematically, theseearlier decisions were not significantly related to case characteristics.These findings have implications for the types of models researchers use tocapture professional decision-making policies.     

A comparison of attentional biases and memory biases in women with social phobia and major depression

Cognitive processes play an important role in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety and depression. Current theories differ, however, in their predictions regarding the occurrence of attentional biases and memory biases in depression and anxiety. To allow for a systematic comparison of disorders and cognitive processes, 117 women (35 with generalized social phobia, 27 with major depression, and 55 healthy controls) participated in a test of visual attention (visual search), an explicit memory test (free recall), and an implicit memory test (anagram solving). Both clinical groups exhibited attentional biases for disorder-related words, whereas only depressed participants showed clear evidence of explicit and implicit memory biases. The implications of these results for competing theories are discussed.     

Optimal decision making in neural inhibition models

In their influential Psychological Review article, Bogacz, Brown, Moehlis, Holmes, and Cohen (2006) discussed optimal decision making as accomplished by the drift diffusion model (DDM). The authors showed that neural inhibition models, such as the leaky competing accumulator model (LCA) and the feedforward inhibition model (FFI), can mimic the DDM and accomplish optimal decision making. Here we show that these conclusions depend on how the models handle negative activation values and (for the LCA) across-trial variability in response conservativeness. Negative neural activations are undesirable for both neurophysiological and mathematical reasons. However, when negative activations are truncated to 0, the equivalence to the DDM is lost. Simulations show that this concern has practical ramifications: the DDM generally outperforms truncated versions of the LCA and the FFI, and the parameter estimates from the neural models can no longer be mapped onto those of the DDM in a simple fashion. We show that for both models, truncation may be avoided by assuming a baseline activity for each accumulator. This solution allows the LCA to approximate the DDM and the FFI to be identical to the DDM.     

Prototype matching: a strategy for social decision making

College students responded to a series of questionnaires while they were in the process of selecting housing from a choice of seven available options for the coming fall. Questionnaires concerned their self-concepts, their housing prototypes, their preferences in housing, and their goals in housing selection. Overall analyses of the self-to-prototype matching strategy suggest that most students indeed prefer the type of housing for which their prototype of the "representative" resident most closely matches their self-perceptions. More important, we obtained individual differences in attention to self-fit in situations. Of individuals who reported that they had interpersonal goals in the housing selection task, those who reported that many personality characteristics (both positive and negative) were untrue of self were more systematic in their use of the self-to-prototype matching rule, this was also true of low self-monitors. Neither pattern of individual differences obtained for students with practical goals in the housing decision.     

Social motives and strategic misrepresentation in social decision making

In 4 experiments, the authors studied the influence of social motives on deception and strategic misrepresentation. In a newly developed information provision game, individuals faced a decision maker whose decision would affect both own and other's outcomes. By withholding information or by giving (in)accurate information about payoffs, participants could try to influence other's decision making. Less accurate and more inaccurate information was given when the decision maker was competitive rather than cooperative (Experiment 1), especially when participants had a prosocial rather than selfish value orientation (Experiments 3 and 4). Accurate information was withheld because of fear of exploitation and greed, and inaccurate information was given because of greed (Experiment 2). Finally, participants engaged in strategic misrepresentation that may trick competitive others into damaging their own and increasing the participant's outcomes.     

Components of working memory and somatic markers in decision making

According to Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis, affective reactions ordinarily guide and simplify decision making. In an earlier study, we used a modified version of the gambling task developed by Bechara and colleagues so that we could explore the relations among decision making, working memory (WM) load, and formation of somatic markers. This prior work found that an increased WM load produced by secondary tasks interfered with the development of somatic markers and led to poorer gambling task performance. In the present study, we tested whether secondary tasks affect the executive functions of WM, verbal buffering, or both. Our findings indicate that verbal buffering alone does not interfere with gambling task performance or the development of somatic markers. Interference with the executive functions of WM is necessary to disrupt gambling performance and somatic markers.     

The evil eye: Eye gaze and competitiveness in social decision making

We demonstrate that a person's eye gaze and his/her competitiveness are closely intertwined in social decision making. In an exploratory examination of this relationship, Study 1 uses field data from a high‐stakes TV game show to demonstrate that the frequency by which contestants gaze at their opponent's eyes predicts their defection in a variant on the prisoner's dilemma. Studies 2 and 3 use experiments to examine the underlying causality and demonstrate that the relationship between gazing and competitive behavior is bi‐directional. In Study 2, fixation on the eyes, compared to the face, increases competitive behavior toward the target in an ultimatum game. In Study 3, we manipulate the framing of a negotiation (cooperative vs. competitive) and use an eye tracker to measure fixation number and time spent fixating on the counterpart's eyes. We find that a competitive negotiation elicits more gazing, which in turn leads to more competitive behavior.     

Somatic markers,working memory,and decision making

The somatic marker hypothesis formulated by Damasio (e.g., 1994; Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 1991) argues that affective reactions ordinarily guide and simplify decision making. Although originally intended to explain decision-making deficits in people with specific frontal lobe damage, the hypothesis also applies to decision-making problems in populations without brain injury. Subsequently, the gambling task was developed by Bechara (Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, & Anderson, 1994) as a diagnostic test of decision-making deficit in neurological populations. More recently, the gambling task has been used to explore implications of the somatic marker hypothesis, as well as to study suboptimal decision making in a variety of domains. We examined relations among gambling task decision making, working memory (WM) load, and somatic markers in a modified version of the gambling task. Increased WM load produced by secondary tasks led to poorer gambling performance. Declines in gambling performance were associated with the absence of the affective reactions that anticipate choice outcomes and guide future decision making. Our experiments provide evidence that WM processes contribute to the development of somatic markers. If WM functioning is taxed, somatic markers may not develop, and decision making may thereby suffer.     

Primary and secondary memory: multistore versus process models of memory

Healy, et al. recently distinguished between recency and "penultimate" effects when contrasting recall performance. They argued that the penultimate effect was significantly different from the typical recency effect, which point was taken as support for distinguishing between primary and secondary memory systems. The current study adapted the Healy, et al. methodology to control for the occurrence of intentional learning strategies. 40 participants were asked to recall the names of 42 U.S. Presidents by their term in office (secondary memory) or in a pseudorandom order (primary memory); the recency and penultimate effects were observed for each condition. With intentional learning controlled for, contrast analyses yielded a pattern of performance similar to that observed by Healy, et al.