How Information Availability Interacts with Visual Attention during Judgment and Decision Tasks

Decisions in front of a supermarket shelf probably involve a mix of visually available information and associated memories—and interactions between those two. Several cognitive processes, such as decision making, search, and various judgments, are therefore likely to co‐occur, and each process will influence visual attention. We conducted two eye‐tracking experiments capturing parts of these features by having participants make either judgments or decisions concerning products that had been previously encoded. Half the time, participants made their choices with full information about the available products and half the time with crucial task‐relevant information removed. By comparing participants' use of visual attention during decisions and search‐based and memory‐based judgments, we can better understand how visual attention is differently employed between tasks and how it depends on the visual environment. We found that participants' visual attention during decisions is sensitive to evaluations already made during encoding and strongly characterized by preferential looking to the options later to be chosen. When the task environment is rich enough, participants engage in advanced integrative visual behavior and improve their decision quality. In contrast, visual attention during judgments made on the same products reflects a search‐like behavior when all information is available and a more focused type of visual behavior when information is removed. Our findings contribute not only to the literature on how visual attention is used during decision making but also to methodological questions concerning how to measure and identify task‐specific features of visual attention in ecologically valid ways. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Adult Age Differences in Dual Information Processes: Implications for the Role of Affective and Deliberative Processes in Older Adults' Decision Making

ABSTRACT— Age differences in affective/experiential and deliberative processes have important theoretical implications for judgment and decision theory and important pragmatic implications for older-adult decision making. Age-related declines in the efficiency of deliberative processes predict poorer-quality decisions as we age. However, age-related adaptive processes, including motivated selectivity in the use of deliberative capacity, an increased focus on emotional goals, and greater experience, predict better or worse decisions for older adults depending on the situation. The aim of the current review is to examine adult age differences in affective and deliberative information processes in order to understand their potential impact on judgments and decisions. We review evidence for the role of these dual processes in judgment and decision making and then review two representative life-span perspectives (based on aging-related changes to cognitive or motivational processes) on the interplay between these processes. We present relevant predictions for older-adult decisions and make note of contradictions and gaps that currently exist in the literature. Finally, we review the sparse evidence about age differences in decision making and how theories and findings regarding dual processes could be applied to decision theory and decision aiding. In particular, we focus on prospect theory ( Kahneman & Tversky, 1979 ) and how prospect theory and theories regarding age differences in information processing can inform one another.     

Can cognitive psychological research on reasoning enhance the discussion around moral judgments?

In this article we will demonstrate how cognitive psychological research on reasoning and decision making could enhance discussions and theories of moral judgments. In the first part, we will present recent dual-process models of moral judgments and describe selected studies which support these approaches. However, we will also present data that contradict the model predictions, suggesting that approaches to moral judgment might be more complex. In the second part, we will show how cognitive psychological research on reasoning might be helpful in understanding moral judgments. Specifically, we will highlight approaches addressing the interaction between intuition and reflection. Our data suggest that a sequential model of engaging in deliberation might have to be revised. Therefore, we will present an approach based on Signal Detection Theory and on intuitive conflict detection. We predict that individuals arrive at the moral decisions by comparing potential action outcomes (e.g., harm caused and utilitarian gain) simultaneously. The response criterion can be influenced by intuitive processes, such as heuristic moral value processing, or considerations of harm caused.     

Intertemporal Similarity: Discounting as a Last Resort

Standard models of intertemporal choice assume that individuals discount future payoffs by integrating reward amounts and time delays to generate a discounted value. Alternative models propose that, rather than integrate across them, individuals compare within attributes (amounts and delays) to determine if differences in one attribute outweigh differences in another attribute. For instance, the similarity model 1) compares the two reward amounts to determine whether they are similar, 2) compares the similarity of the two time delays, and then 3) makes a decision based on these similarity judgments. Here, I tested discounting models against attribute‐based models that use similarity judgments to make choices. I collected intertemporal choices and similarity judgments for the reward amounts and time delays from participants in three experiments. All experiments tested the ability of discounting and similarity models to predict intertemporal choices. Model generalization analyses showed that the best predicting models started with similarity judgments and then, if similarity failed to make a prediction, resorted to discounting models. Similarity judgments also matched intertemporal choice data demonstrating both the magnitude and sign effects, thereby accounting for behavioral data that contradict many discounting models. These results highlight the possibility that attribute‐based models such as the similarity models provide alternatives to discounting that may offer insights into the process of making intertemporal choices. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

认知闭合需要、框架效应与决策偏好

在带有模糊性的决策情境中,决策者个人的认知特征会对其判断决策产生重要影响。通过实验的方法,考察了认知闭合需要和特征框架效应对个体决策偏好的影响。93名工商管理硕士（MBA）参与了实验,研究的结果支持了本研究的3个假设,即认知闭合需要与特征框架效应不仅对被试的决策偏好存在显著的影响,而且二者还存在显著的交互作用。具体来说,研究发现,在模糊情境中：高认知闭合需要的被试偏好于立刻做出决策,而低认知闭合需要的被试偏好于暂缓做出决策;接收到正向框架信息的被试偏好于立刻做出决策,而接收到负向框架信息的被试偏好于暂缓做出决策;认知闭合需要与特征框架对被试的决策偏好还存在显著的交互作用。研究结论为根据个体认知闭合需要的水平来选拔决策者、利用框架效应来影响个体的信息加工方式进而提高决策质量提供了理论依据     

Doc, what would you do if you were me? On self-other discrepancies in medical decision making

Doctors often make decisions for their patients and predict their patients' preferences and decisions to customize advice to their particular situation. We investigated how doctors make decisions about medical treatments for their patients and themselves and how they predict their patients' decisions. We also studied whether these decisions and predictions coincide with the decisions that the patients make for themselves. We document 3 important findings. First, doctors made more conservative decisions for their patients than for themselves (i.e., they more often selected a safer medical treatment). Second, doctors did so even if they accurately predicted that their patients would want a riskier treatment than the one they selected. Doctors, therefore, showed substantial self-other discrepancies in medical decision making and did not make decisions that accurately reflected their patients' preferences. Finally, patients were not aware of these discrepancies and thought that the decisions their doctors made for themselves would be similar to the decisions they made for their patients. We explain these results in light of 2 current theories of self-other discrepancies in judgment and decision making: the risk-as-feelings hypothesis and the cognitive hypothesis. Our results have important implications for research on expert decision making and for medical practice, and shed some light on the process underlying self-other discrepancies in decision making.     

The role of moral utility in decision making: An interdisciplinary framework

What decisions should we make? Moral values, rules, and virtues provide standards for morally acceptable decisions, without prescribing how we should reach them. However, moral theories do assume that we are, at least in principle, capable of making the right decisions. Consequently, an empirical investigation of the methods and resources we use for making moral decisions becomes relevant. We consider theoretical parallels of economic decision theory and moral utilitarianism and suggest that moral decision making may tap into mechanisms and processes that have originally evolved for nonmoral decision making. For example, the computation of reward value occurs through the combination of probability and magnitude; similar computation might also be used for determining utilitarian moral value. Both nonmoral and moral decisions may resort to intuitions and heuristics. Learning mechanisms implicated in the assignment of reward value to stimuli, actions, and outcomes may also enable us to determine moral value and assign it to stimuli, actions, and outcomes. In conclusion, we suggest that moral capabilities can employ and benefit from a variety of nonmoral decision-making and learning mechanisms.     

Nameless + harmless = blameless: When seemingly irrelevant factors influence judgment of (un)ethical behavior

People often make judgments about the ethicality of others’ behaviors and then decide how harshly to punish such behaviors. When they make these judgments and decisions, sometimes the victims of the unethical behavior are identifiable, and sometimes they are not. In addition, in our uncertain world, sometimes an unethical action causes harm, and sometimes it does not. We argue that a rational assessment of ethicality should not depend on the identifiability of the victim of wrongdoing or the actual harm caused if the judge and the decision maker have the same information. Yet in five laboratory studies, we show that these factors have a systematic effect on how people judge the ethicality of the perpetrator of an unethical action. Our studies show that people judge behavior as more unethical when: (1) identifiable vs. unidentifiable victims are involved and (2) the behavior leads to a negative rather than a positive outcome. We also find that people’s willingness to punish wrongdoers is consistent with their judgments, and we offer preliminary evidence on how to reduce these biases.     

Rational Inference: The Lowest Bounds

A surge of empirical research demonstrating flexible cognition in animals and young infants has raised interest in the possibility of rational decision‐making in the absence of language. A venerable position, which I here call “Classical Inferentialism”, holds that nonlinguistic agents are incapable of rational inferences. Against this position, I defend a model of nonlinguistic inferences that shows how they could be practically rational. This model vindicates the Lockean idea that we can intuitively grasp rational connections between thoughts by developing the Davidsonian idea that practical inferences are at bottom categorization judgments. From this perspective, we can see how similarity‐based categorization processes widely studied in human and animal psychology might count as practically rational. The solution involves a novel hybrid of internalism and externalism: intuitive inferences are psychologically rational (in the explanatory sense) given the intensional sensitivity of the similarity assessment to the internal structure of the agent's reasons for acting, but epistemically rational (in the justificatory sense) given an ecological fit between the features matched by that assessment and the structure of the agent's environment. The essay concludes by exploring empirical results that show how nonlinguistic agents can be sensitive to these similarity assessments in a way that grants them control over their opaque judgments.     

How readers experience characters’ decisions

When people read narratives, they have ample opportunities to encode mental preferences about characters’ decisions. In our present project, we examined how readers’ preferences for characters’ decisions structure their experiences of story outcomes. In Experiment 1, participants read brief stories and explicitly rated which of two potential decisions they thought the characters should make. The actual decision that each character made was either preferred or nonpreferred by readers. By the end of each story, readers learned whether there was a positive or negative outcome to these decisions. Decisions and outcomes either matched (e.g., a preferred decision followed by a positive outcome) or did not match (e.g., a nonpreferred decision followed by a negative outcome). Participants took longer to read outcome sentences when there was a mismatch. In Experiment 2, we replicated this finding with a task that allowed more natural reading. These results provide converging evidence that readers encode responses to characters’ decisions and that these responses affect the time course with which they assimilate story outcomes.     

Framing of comparisons in research and practice

We discuss important ways in which the framing of a question or a decision can have significant effects on responses. Several areas of research and theory that indicate the scope and importance of these effects are presented. The major discussion, however, is limited to how respnses to comparative judgments and constrained by the other or sequence in which the direction of comparison occurs. Direction of comparison is first discussed with respect to similarity judgments, in which a model taking direction of comparison into account is used to explain both degrees of perceived similarity and asymmetries in judgment. A feature-matching model of comparison is then developed and is used to analyze preference judgments, judgments of change, and self-relevant judgments involving comparisons of the self with other people, with counterfactual alternatives to reality, and with the self at a different point in time. This model is employed to account for predecisional conflict and difficulty, the preference that one makes, and the degree of satisfaction or regret that one feels subsequent to making a comparison. Finally, the potential for applying this framework to areas of consumer behavior, political decision making, and psychotherapy is explored. Techniques for taking advantage of direction of comparison effects as well as methods for eliminating the biases associated with these effects are discussed.     

The similarity heuristic

Decision makers often make snap judgments using fast‐and‐frugal decision rules called cognitive heuristics. Research into cognitive heuristics has been divided into two camps. One camp has emphasized the limitations and biases produced by the heuristics; another has focused on the accuracy of heuristics and their ecological validity. In this paper we investigate a heuristic proposed by the first camp, using the methods of the second. We investigate a subset of the representativeness heuristic we call the “similarity” heuristic, whereby decision makers who use it judge the likelihood that an instance is a member of one category rather than another by the degree to which it is similar to others in that category. We provide a mathematical model of the heuristic and test it experimentally in a trinomial environment. In this environment, the similarity heuristic turns out to be a reliable and accurate choice rule and both choice and response time data suggest it is also how choices are made. We conclude with a theoretical discussion of how our work fits in the broader “fast‐and‐frugal” heuristics program, and of the boundary conditions for the similarity heuristic. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Robustness and idealization in models of cognitive labor

Scientific research is almost always conducted by communities of scientists of varying size and complexity. Such communities are effective, in part, because they divide their cognitive labor: not every scientist works on the same project. Philip Kitcher and Michael Strevens have pioneered efforts to understand this division of cognitive labor by proposing models of how scientists make decisions about which project to work on. For such models to be useful, they must be simple enough for us to understand their dynamics, but faithful enough to reality that we can use them to analyze real scientific communities. To satisfy the first requirement, we must employ idealizations to simplify the model. The second requirement demands that these idealizations not be so extreme that we lose the ability to describe real-world phenomena. This paper investigates the status of the assumptions that Kitcher and Strevens make in their models, by first inquiring whether they are reasonable representations of reality, and then by checking the models’ robustness against weakenings of these assumptions. To do this, we first argue against the reality of the assumptions, and then develop a series of agent-based simulations to systematically test their effects on model outcomes. We find that the models are not robust against weakenings of these idealizations. In fact we find that under certain conditions, this can lead to the model predicting outcomes that are qualitatively opposite of the original model outcomes.     

The effects of statistical training on choice heuristics in choice under uncertainty

Kahneman and Tversky (1984) proposed that decision makers perceive choice uncertainty in two ways: (1) as a distribution of possible outcomes or (2) as a single uncertain outcome. Using statistical training as a factor that influences these perceptions, and thus the type of decision approach individuals use, we found that individuals with different levels of experience displayed differences in the decisions they made and in the choice heuristics used to make those decisions. Statistically naive individuals were more likely to prefer loss-minimizing alternatives, use a more non-compensatory heuristic, and spend more time on loss-related information than their statistically experienced counterparts. When a distributional cue, indicating the distributional nature of choice outcomes, was presented to both experience groups, the naive group was found to use a decision approach similar to the experienced group and to make similar decisions. The results are discussed in terms of the need to include factors that alter individuals' approaches to uncertainty in future behavioral models of uncertain choice.     

An examination of graduate students' statistical judgments: statistical and fuzzy set approaches

The present study examined how statistical significance levels are treated and interpreted by graduate students who use hypothesis-testing in their scientific investigation. To test underlying psychological aspects of hypothesis-testing, the idea of fuzzy set theory was employed to identify the uncertain points in judgments. 34 graduate students in a psychology department made judgments about hypothetical statistical decisions. The results indicated that (1) the majority of these students treated significance levels on a continuum and rated them according to the magnitude of statistical significance; (2) the subjects shifted their decisions based on the types of hypothetical scenarios but not by the sample sizes; instead, they interpreted a smaller sample size as being less reliable. (3) The subjects frequently chose formally used statistical terms, e.g., Significant and Not Significant, more than graduated verbal expressions, e.g., Marginally Significant and Borderline Significant; and (4) the Fuzziness (degree of confidence in decision-making) was dependent on individuals and existed more in the critical points of transition where judgments are most difficult. The Fuzziness Index illustrated the subtle shifts of human decision-making patterns in statistical judgments. Underlying decision uncertainties and difficulties can be illustrated by functions generated from fuzzy set theory, which may more closely resemble human psychological mechanism. This integrative study of fuzzy set theory and behavioral measurements appears to provide a technique that is more natural for examining and understanding imprecise boundaries of human decisions.     

The causal psycho-logic of choice

Choices do not merely identify one option among a set of possibilities; choosing is an intervention, an action that changes the world. As a result, good decision making generally requires a model specifying how actions are causally related to outcomes. Interventions license different inferences than observations because an event whose state has been determined by intervention is not diagnostic of the normal causes of that event. We integrate these ideas into a causal framework for decision making based on causal Bayes nets theory, and suggest that deliberate decision making is based on simplified causal models and imaginary interventions. The framework is consistent with what we know so far about how people make decisions.     

Outcome effects: The impact of decision process and outcome controllability

An ‘outcome effect’ refers to the phenomenon whereby performance evaluations of decision makers are affected by the outcomes of those decisions. Although some consider such an effect to be a judgmental error, judgment by outcomes may not be dysfunctional when the evaluator does not know how the decision maker chose his or her action. In such situations, outcomes may provide some noisy information about decision quality. We test whether an outcome effect will still occur when the decision methodology and quality are more explicitly identified. Further, we test whether outcome controllability, a previously unexplored moderator variable, will have an impact on the outcome effect. Our first experiment, using undergraduates as subjects, shows that decision quality and controllability have an impact on performance evaluations but that the ubiquitous outcome effect still obtains. These results were replicated with experienced business people, except that controllability only affected their judgments in the case of negative outcomes. Implications of these results are discussed. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Social Values Analysis of Self–Other Differences in Decision Making Involving Risk

Three experiments tested our social values analysis of self–other differences in decision making under risk. In Experiment 1, we showed that people make riskier decisions for others in domains where risk taking is valued but not in those where risk is not valued. Experiment 2 documented that it is considered more inappropriate to make a risk-averse decision for another person than for oneself in situations where risk is valued. Experiment 3 showed that self–other differences in decision making occur even when there are no self–other differences in prediction and for decisions made for a typical student as well as for a friend. We use these results to argue that decision making for others is based predominantly on the perceived value placed on risk, leading to a norm for how to decide for others in situations where such a social value exists.