情绪和任务框架对自我和预期他人决策时风险偏好的影响

两个实验考察了情绪和任务框架对自我和预期他人决策时风险偏好的影响。结果表明:(1)获益框架下,悲伤情绪比愉悦情绪诱发更强的风险偏好,自我决策比预期他人决策表现出更强的风险偏好;(2)损失框架下,愉悦情绪比悲伤情绪诱发更强的风险偏好,预期他人决策比自我决策表现出更强的风险偏好;(3)在自我决策时,愉悦情绪在损失框架下比在获益框架下诱发了更强的风险偏好,悲伤情绪在获益框架下比在损失框架下诱发了更强的风险偏好;在预期他人决策时,无论是愉悦情绪还是悲伤情绪,损失框架均比获益框架诱发了更强的风险偏好。     

Are intertemporal preferences contagious? Evidence from collaborative decision making

Prior research has provided substantial insight into individuals’ intertemporal preferences (i.e., preferences about delayed rewards). In the present study, we instead investigated the preferences of small groups of individuals asked to express collective intertemporal decisions. The paradigm consisted of three phases. During the precollaboration and postcollaboration phases, participants completed an intertemporal decision task individually. During the collaboration phase, participants completed a similar task in small groups, reaching mutually-agreed-upon decisions. The results suggest that group preferences were systematically related to the mean of the group members’ precollaboration preferences. In addition, collaborative decision making altered the group members’ intertemporal preferences. Specifically, individuals’ postcollaboration preferences converged toward the preferences of their respective groups. Furthermore, we found that individuals’ postcollaboration preferences were independently related to both their precollaboration preferences and the preferences of the other group members, suggesting that individuals’ postcollaboration preferences represented a revision of their precollaboration preferences based on the preferences observed in other group members. In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that similar patterns of results were found whether participants were making matching judgments or binary choices.     

Risk preference and choice stochasticity during decisions for other people

In several contexts, such as finance and politics, people make choices that are relevant for others but irrelevant for oneself. Focusing on decision-making under risk, we compared monetary choices made for one’s own interest with choices made on behalf of an anonymous individual. Consistent with the previous literature, other-interest choices were characterized by an increased gambling propensity. We also investigated choice stochasticity, which captures how much decisions vary in similar conditions. An aspect related to choice stochasticity is how much decisions are tuned to the option values, and we found that this was higher during self-interest than during other-interest choices. This effect was observed only in individuals who reported a motivation to distribute rewards unequally, suggesting that it may (at least partially) depend on a motivation to make accurate decisions for others. Our results indicate that, during decision-making under risk, choices for other people are characterized by a decreased tuning to the values of the options, in addition to enhanced risk seeking.     

Rewards decrease risky decisions for adolescent drivers: Implications for crash prevention

Motor vehicle crashes (MVCs) are a major contributor to adolescent mortality. Adolescent drivers are more likely to make risky decisions in the presence of peers. However, rewards have also been shown to improve decision making in adolescence. Our goal was to determine if peer observation and reward effects on decision-making were dependent upon adolescent driving styles.Twenty-four healthy adolescents played a driving game in a 2 (no peer; peer) × 2 (no rewards; rewards) within-subjects experiment. Driving styles were measured by self-report.Rewards favoring safe choices reduced risky decision making, but this effect was especially robust for adolescents with driving styles that increase risk of MVCs (i.e., dangerous, fast, angry, or distracted styles). Findings suggest that rewards for safe driving can be an effective mechanism for reducing MVCs, especially for the most at-risk drivers, if they can be made appetizing to adolescents.     

Reappraisal and expected value modulate risk taking

Decision making is informed by appraisals of appetitive cues and their associated opportunities for rewards. Such appraisals can be modulated by cognitive regulation strategies in order to promote goal-directed choices. Little is known about how cognitive regulation strategies, especially reappraisal, alter risk taking during decision making. To characterise the effect of reappraisal on risk taking, we systematically varied both the goal of regulation and the value of the decision options. Participants engaged in two reappraisal strategies with opposite goals, to increase (“emphasise”) or decrease (“de-emphasise”) the importance of an upcoming decision, during the presentation of cues signalling monetary decisions. The expected value of taking a risk was systematically varied across decisions such that a risky choice could be beneficial or disadvantageous. Reappraisal strategies increased or decreased risk taking in accordance both with regulation goals and expected value information. These results suggest that reappraisal can be used to flexibly alter behaviour associated with appetitive cues while maintaining value information.     

The gap between medical and monetary choices under risk persists in decisions for others

Decisions under risk in the medical domain have been found to systematically diverge from decisions in the monetary domain. When making choices between monetary options, people commonly rely on a decision strategy that trades off outcomes with their probabilities; when making choices between medical options, people tend to neglect probability information. In two experimental studies, we tested to what extent differences between medical and monetary decisions also emerge when the decision outcomes affect another person. Using a risky choice paradigm for medical and monetary decisions, we compared hypothetical decisions that participants made for themselves to decisions for a socially distant other (Study 1) and to recommendations as financial advisor or doctor (Study 2). In addition, we examined people's information search in a condition in which information about payoff distributions had to be learned from experiential sampling. Formal modeling and analyses of search behavior revealed a similarly pronounced gap between medical and monetary decisions in decisions for others as in decisions for oneself. Our results suggest that when making medical decisions, people try to avoid the worst outcome while neglecting its probability—even when the outcomes affect others rather than themselves.     

Go big or go home: Risk seeking for experiential choices

In decision making under risk, do consumers evaluate intangible, experiential options in a choice set in the same way they evaluate tangible, material options? Prior research on prospect theory, typically using either monetary or material objects as choice options, demonstrates that consumers are risk averse for choices involving gains, with a fairly robust tendency to favor a more certain outcome even when that outcome is less desirable. The present research focuses on decision making under risk for experiential options (from movies to concert tickets to hotel stays)—identifying choices between experiential options as a realm in which prospect theory's pattern of risk aversion is weakened and sometimes reversed. Across six studies, this research demonstrates that consumers are more risk seeking for experiential choices and thus more likely to prefer more desirable options, even options that are less certain. Further, the stronger personal connection fostered by experiential (vs. material) choice options mediates risk‐seeking preferences. This work demonstrates a moderator for prospect theory and investigates the tendency toward increased risk seeking among experiential options, in this paper termed a “go big or go home” strategy. Conversely, consistent risk aversion is evidenced for choices involving material options (from clothing to accessories and furniture).     

How subjective grouping of options influences choice and allocation: diversification bias and the phenomenon of partition dependence

The authors argue that people's tendency to diversify their allocations of money and consumption choices over alternatives gives rise to decisions that vary systematically with the subjective grouping of available options. These subjective groupings are influenced by subtle variations in the presentation of options or elicitation of preferences. Studies 1-4 demonstrate such "partition dependence" in allocations of money to beneficiaries, consumption experiences to future time periods, and choices to a menu of consumption options. Study 5 documents weaker partition dependence among individuals with greater relevant experience discriminating among options, and Study 6 shows that the effect is attenuated among participants with stronger or more accessible intrinsic preferences.     

Cortico-limbic-striatal circuits subserving different forms of cost-benefit decision making

Research on the neural basis that underlies decision making in humans has revealed that these processes are mediated by distributed neural networks that incorporate different regions of the frontal lobes, the amygdala, the ventral striatum, and the dopamine system. In the present article, we review recent studies in rodents investigating the contribution of these systems to different forms of cost-benefit decision making and focus on evaluations related to delays, effort, or risks associated with certain rewards. Anatomically distinct regions of the medial and orbital prefrontal cortex make dissociable contributions to different forms of decision making, although lesions of these regions can induce variable effects, depending on the type of tasks used to assess these functions. The basolateral amygdala and the nucleus accumbens play a more fundamental role in these evaluations, helping an organism overcome different costs to obtain better rewards. Dopamine activity biases behavior toward more costly yet larger rewards, although abnormal increases in dopamine transmission can exert opposing actions on different types of decision making. The fact that similar neural circuits are recruited to solve these types of problems in both humans and animals suggests that animal models of decision making will prove useful in elucidating the mechanisms mediating these processes.     

Risking Everything in Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder: An Analogue Decision-Making Study

An experiment examined decision-making processes among nonclinical participants with low or high levels of OCD symptomatology (N?=?303). To better simulate the decision environments that are most likely to be problematic for clients with OCD, we employed decision tasks that incorporated “black swan” options that have a very low probability but involve substantial loss. When faced with a choice between a safer option that involved no risk of loss or a riskier alternative with a very low probability of substantial loss, most participants chose the safer option regardless of OCD symptom level. However, when faced with choices between options that had similar expected values to the previous choices, but where each option had some low risk of a substantial loss, there was a significant shift towards riskier decisions. These effects were stronger when the task involved a contamination based, health-relevant decision task as compared to one with financial outcomes. The results suggest that both low and high symptom OC participants approach decisions involving risk-free options and decisions involving risky alternatives in qualitatively different ways. There was some evidence that measures of impulsivity were better predictors of the shift to risky decision making than OCD symptomatology.

     

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.     

The evolution of decision-making under risk: Framing effects in monkey risk preferences

When making choices between risky options, human decision-makers exhibit a number of framing effects. One of the most prominent framing effects is the tendency for decision makers to evaluate gambles relative to a reference point, and to act risk-seeking when prospects are framed as losses but risk-averse when identical prospects are framed as gains. This tendency for risk-preferences to reverse between loss and gain frames has been termed the reflection effect, and is one of the primary predictions of Prospect Theory. Here, we explore whether non-human primates exhibit a similar reflection effect. Using a token-trading task, we show that capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) exhibit an analogous reversal of risk preferences depending on whether outcomes are presented as gains or losses, suggesting that similar framing effects also influence choice in non-human primates. This finding suggests that the mechanisms that drive framing effects in humans may be evolutionarily ancient, extending broadly across the primate order.     

Affect regulation and temporal discounting: interactions between primed, state, and trait affect

Previous research has largely focused on the influence of experienced affect on decision making; however, other sources of affective information may also shape decisions. In two studies, we examine the interacting influences of affective information, state affect, and personality on temporal discounting rates (i.e., the tendency to choose small rewards today rather than larger rewards in the future). In Study 1, participants were primed with either positive or negative affect adjectives before making reward choices. In Study 2, participants underwent either a positive or negative affect induction before making reward choices. Results in both studies indicate that neuroticism interacts with state unpleasant affect and condition (i.e., positive or negative primes or induction) to predict discounting rates. Moreover, the nature of the interactions depends on the regulatory cues of the affective information available. These results suggest that irrelevant (i.e., primes) and stable (i.e., personality traits) sources of affective information also shape judgments and decision making. Thus, current affect levels are not the only source of affective information that guides individuals when making decisions.     

A generalized distance function for preferential choices

Many cognitive theories of judgement and decision making assume that choice options are evaluated relative to other available options. The extent to which the preference for one option is influenced by other available options will often depend on how similar the options are to each other, where similarity is assumed to be a decreasing function of the distance between options. We examine how the distance between preferential options that are described on multiple attributes can be determined. Previous distance functions do not take into account that attributes differ in their subjective importance, are limited to two attributes, or neglect the preferential relationship between the options. To measure the distance between preferential options it is necessary to take the subjective preferences of the decision maker into account. Accordingly, the multi‐attribute space that defines the relationship between options can be stretched or shrunk relative to the attention or importance that a person gives to different attributes describing the options. Here, we propose a generalized distance function for preferential choices that takes subjective attribute importance into account and allows for individual differences according to such subjective preferences. Using a hands‐on example, we illustrate the application of the function and compare it to previous distance measures. We conclude with a discussion of the suitability and limitations of the proposed distance function.     

得失不对称：跨期选择中自我-他人决策差异

采用跨期选择任务范式,考察得失情境下自我–他人决策差异。结果发现：（1）为自己决策比为他人决策更偏好于选择即刻选项;（2）损失情境比获益情境下更偏好于选择即刻选项;（3）获益情境下为自己决策与为他人决策在选择即刻选项上不存在显著差异,而损失情境下为自己决策比为他人决策更偏好于选择即刻选项,表明得失情境下自我–他人决策差异存在不对称性。     

Decision-making quality of younger and older adults in familiar and unfamiliar domains

Age-related differences in purchasing decisions were examined as a function of age and familiarity. On each trial, participants received purchasing options which varied in quality but ultimately cost the same amount of money. On half the trials, participants made decisions about items familiar to younger adults and on the other half of the trials, participants made decisions about products familiar to older adults. The participants’ task was to choose the option that provided the best value for the money. We were particularly interested in participants’ performance when inferencing was required to select the optimal option from the two choices. Younger adults outperformed older adults in unfamiliar but not familiar domains. It appeared that both younger and older adults used inferencing and elaborative processing to make the best decision in familiar domains but that only younger adults used inferencing and elaborative processing in unfamiliar domains.     

What a Feeling: The Role of Immediate and Anticipated Emotions in Risky Decisions

The risk‐as‐feelings hypothesis argues that many risky decisions are not only predicted by anticipated emotions, as most consequentialistic decision making theories would presume, but also by immediate emotions. Immediate emotions refer to the “hot” visceral feelings people feel as they contemplate a specific decision option at the cusp of making a decision, whereas anticipated emotions are those emotions that people forecast that they will feel once they experience possible consequences of that decision. Four studies focused on the role of both types of emotions in decisions under risk and uncertainty. Decisions were substantively predicted by immediate emotional states beyond anticipated emotions or the subjective probability attached to outcomes. Thus, risky choices may be prompted, in part, by how people feel about the “riskless” portion of the decision—specifically, the various decision options they are contemplating—rather than the potential outcomes those options may produce. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ravens (Corvus corax) are indifferent to the gains of conspecific recipients or human partners in experimental tasks

Although cooperative behaviours are common in animals, the cognitive processes underpinning such behaviours are very likely to differ between species. In humans, other-regarding preferences have been proposed to sustain long-term cooperation between individuals. The extent to which such psychological capacities exist in other animals is still under investigation. Five hand-reared ravens were first tested in an experiment where they could provide food to a conspecific at no cost to themselves. We offered them two behavioural options that provided identical amounts of food to the actor and where one of the two options additionally delivered a reward to a recipient. Subsequently, we made the ravens play a no-cost cooperation game with an experimenter. The experimenter had the same options as the animals and matched the ravens’ choices, making the prosocial choice the more profitable option. In both conditions, ravens were indifferent to the effects of their choices and hence failed to help conspecifics and to cooperate with the experimenter. While our negative results should be interpreted with care, overall, our findings suggest that the ravens had no understanding of the consequences of their actions for a potential recipient. This study adds to several others that have used a similar set-up and have reported negative results on other-regarding preferences in animals.     

Neural correlates of adaptive decision making for risky gains and losses

Do decisions about potential gains and potential losses require different neural structures for advantageous choices? In a lesion study, we used a new measure of adaptive decision making under risk to examine whether damage to neural structures subserving emotion affects an individual's ability to make adaptive decisions differentially for gains and losses. We found that individuals with lesions to the amygdala, an area responsible for processing emotional responses, displayed impaired decision making when considering potential gains, but not when considering potential losses. In contrast, patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area responsible for integrating cognitive and emotional information, showed deficits in both domains. We argue that this dissociation provides evidence that adaptive decision making for risks involving potential losses may be more difficult to disrupt than adaptive decision making for risks involving potential gains. This research further demonstrates the role of emotion in decision competence.