Evidence for Implicit Risk: Delay Facilitates the Processing of Uncertainty

Humans and other animals discount the value of rewards over time. One explanation for this is that delayed rewards may be less certain than immediate rewards, what has been referred to as the implicit risk hypothesis. Although this explanation is widely accepted, little research has directly assessed the validity of the implicit risk hypothesis. In the current study, we present two experiments in which participants made decisions about rewards involving both delay and uncertainty. By manipulating the order in which information was presented, we were able to investigate whether delay information facilitates beliefs about uncertainty and vice versa. It was found that participants were more likely to prefer larger, delayed rewards when information about delay was presented before information about uncertainty than when the information was presented in the opposite order. Additionally, we describe a process model that implements the implicit risk hypothesis and show that it is consistent with the observed patterns of data. These results support the implicit risk hypothesis and suggest that information about delay facilitates the processing of information about uncertainty. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Order effects and memory for evidence in individual versus group decision making in auditing

Sequential processing of evidence may lead to recency effect, a potential bias in judgment. The present research seeks to extend the literature on recency effects by assessing the potential moderating influence of team work: whether group decision making moderates the severity of recency effects predicted by Hogarth and Einhorn (1992), and whether group processing influences the accuracy of, and confidence in memory for evidence. Experienced auditors from a Big‐6 accounting firm made audit judgments, either individually or as groups. They were randomly assigned to one of two levels of evidence presentation order. After performing the judgment task, participants completed two evidence recognition tests. Consistent with prior findings, recency effects on judgments were observed, but only for individuals. Group judgments or audit reports were not affected by recency. Order effects, however, did not translate into different choices of audit reports, and did not persist in memories of either individuals or groups. As expected, group memory was more accurate than individual memory and groups were more confident than individuals. Overall, confidence in accurate memories was greater than in inaccurate ones. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Deep thoughts and shallow frames: on the susceptibility to framing effects

This paper examines the occurrence of framing effects when more thought is given to problems. In Study 1, participants were presented with one of two frames of several decision problems. Participants' Need for Cognition (NC) scores were obtained, and half the participants were asked to justify their choices. Substantial framing effects were observed, but the amount of thought purportedly given to a problem, whether manipulated by justification elicitation or measured by NC scores, did not reduce the incidence of framing effects. In Study 2, participants responded to both frames of problems in a within‐subjects design. Again, NC scores were unrelated to responses on the first frame encountered. However, high‐NC, compared to low‐NC, participants were more consistent across frames of a problem. More thought, as indexed here, does not reduce the proclivity to be framed, but does promote adherence to normative principles when the applicability of those principles is detectable. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Vocational choice: A decision making perspective

We propose a model of vocational choice that can be used for analyzing and guiding the decision processes underlying career and job choices. Our model is based on research in behavioral decision making (BDM), in particular the choice goals framework developed by Bettman, Luce, and Payne (1998). The basic model involves two major processes. First, the selection of a decision strategy according to four choice goals: maximizing decision accuracy, minimizing cognitive effort, minimizing negative emotion, and maximizing justifiability of the decision. Second, the construction of situation-specific preferences, which can reflect irrelevant task and context factors such as the evaluation mode. This basic model is extended to account for social influences and the long decision time typical of most career and job decisions. We review research on vocational choice in light of this model, discuss normative implications for counseling, and outline a research agenda for studying vocational choice from a behavioral decision making perspective.     

Serial position effects in 2-alternative forced choice recognition: Functional equivalence across visual and auditory modalities

Two experiments examined Ward, Avons, and Melling's (2005) proposition that the serial position function is task, rather than modality, dependent. Specifically, they proposed that for backward testing the 2-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) recognition paradigm is characterised by single-item recency irrespective of the modality of the stimulus presentation. In Experiment 1 the same nonword sequences, presented both visually or auditorily, produced qualitatively equivalent serial position functions with 2AFC testing. Forward testing produced a flat serial position function, while backward testing produced two-item recency in the absence of primacy. In order to rule out the possibility that the serial position functions for visual stimuli were the product of sub-vocal rehearsal, Experiment 2 employed articulatory suppression during the presentation phase. Serial position function equivalence was again observed together with a modest impairment in overall recognition rates. Taken together, these data are consistent with the Ward et al. proposition and further support the existence of a visual memory that can facilitate storage of visual-verbal material (e.g. Logie, Della Sella, Wynn, & Baddeley, 2000). However, the observation of two-item recency contradicts the original duplex account of single-item recency traditionally observed for backwards recognition testing of visual stimuli (Phillips & Christie, 1977).     

To deliberate or not to deliberate: Interactions between age,task characteristics,and cognitive activity on decision making

The effects of aging and deliberative activities on decision making were examined. In two separate tasks, young, middle‐aged, and older adults were presented with four alternatives and given instructions to choose the best one. Following study, participants were either given additional time to think about their decision or were prevented from doing so. Decision quality did not benefit from additional deliberative activity when the structure of the stimuli facilitated fluent online processing. In contrast, deliberation promoted performance when such processing was more difficult. In addition, those individuals who focused on attribute information relevant to the decision context performed better than those who did not. Age differences in performance were minimal, but older adults with lower levels of education or cognitive ability tended to perform worse than the rest of the sample under conditions where deliberative skills were required to promote performance. The results are inconsistent with recent proposals regarding the benefits of passive deliberation. In addition, the results support the general assertion that the age effects in decision making will be most evident in situations dependent upon deliberative skills. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Adding versus averaging: Evaluability theory applied to job choice decisions

While the unique roles of individual job attributes (e.g., salary and benefits) in job and organizational attraction have received extensive research attention, research examining the mechanisms through which an overall evaluation of a job option is made by combining evaluations of individual attributes is scarce. The current study examined the process through which job choice decisions are made under three conditions: when evaluating a single job offer, when comparing two job offers, and when evaluating more than two job offers. In Study 1, it was found that when a single job offer is evaluated, the average of perceived values of attributes in an offer (e.g., the perceived attractiveness of a salary) drives the choice, whereas the difference between jobs is what matters when two jobs are evaluated simultaneously, potentially leading to a preference reversal between conditions when the same two jobs are evaluated. In Study 2, it was found that average values of attributes across options (e.g., average salary in all job offers received) influence job choice when more than two job offers are evaluated simultaneously. These findings indicate that in all three conditions, job choice decisions are influenced by the evaluability of the choice set, which becomes low when a single job offer is evaluated without any context, or when more than two job offers are evaluated simultaneously, and becomes high when two jobs are compared with each other. When evaluability is low, candidates resort to averaging as the decision rule, whereas adding is used when evaluability is high.     

Social effects on rat spatial choice in an open field task

Pairs of rats foraged in trials either together or separately in an open field apparatus for pellets hidden in discreet locations in a 5 × 5 matrix. Trial duration was either 1 or 4 min. The tendency to choose locations that had earlier been visited by another rat was examined by comparing the choices made in the presence and absence of the other rat. Rats avoided visits to locations that had earlier been visited by the other rat, but only if they had also visited the same location earlier in a short duration trial. This pattern of results is consistent with earlier findings from experiments using the radial arm maze. Furthermore, when rats did visit locations that had earlier been visited by the other rat in a long duration trial, they tended to be locations that had been visited longer ago by the other rat than would be expected. This suggests a forgetting function for social memories. These data provide evidence that the social memory reported in earlier studies using the radial-arm maze can be found in other experimental paradigms and that at least some of its properties are common in the two paradigms.     

A Centipede for Intransitive Preferrers

In the standard money pump, an agent with cyclical preferences can avoid exploitation if he shows foresight and solves his sequential decision problem using backward induction (BI). This way out is foreclosed in a modified money pump, which has been presented in Rabinowicz (2000). There, BI will lead the agent to behave in a self-defeating way. The present paper describes another sequential decision problem of this kind, the Centipede for an Intransitive Preferrer, which in some respects is even more striking than the modified pump. In the new problem, the BI reasoning that implies self-defeating behavior does not rest on the controversial robustness assumption concerning beliefs in one's future rationality. This strengthens the claim that foresight cannot save the intransitive preferrer from a self-defeating course of action.     

Determining preschoolers' preferences for choice-making opportunities: choice of task versus choice of consequence

Individuals may prefer contexts with the option to choose between 2 reinforcing stimuli or between 2 tasks relative to contexts in which others select the same events. We evaluated children's preferences for conditions characterized by (a) the opportunity to choose between tasks and (b) the opportunity to choose between putative reinforcers delivered following the completion of a task relative to no-choice and no-reinforcement control conditions. Three of 4 participants preferred the consequence-choice condition; the task-choice condition was no more preferred than the no-choice condition in any case.     

It Was a Most Unusual Time: How Memory Bias Engenders Nostalgic Preferences

Nostalgic preferences are widespread—people believe past movies, music, television shows, places, and periods of life to have been better than their present counterparts. Three experiments explored the cognitive underpinnings of nostalgic preferences. Participants rated past experiences to have been superior to similar present and recent experiences. These nostalgic preferences appeared to be due to the belief that the atypically positive experiences that participants recalled at the time of judgment were more representative of their past experiences than of their present experiences. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Tactile Ranschburg effects: facilitation and inhibitory repetition effects analogous to verbal memory

The present paper examines the effect of within-sequence item repetitions in tactile order memory. Employing an immediate serial recall procedure, participants reconstructed a six-item sequence tapped upon their fingers by moving those fingers in the order of original stimulation. In Experiment 1a, within-sequence repetition of an item separated by two-intervening items resulted in a significant reduction in recall accuracy for that repeated item (i.e., the Ranschburg effect). In Experiment 1b, within-sequence repetition of an adjacent item resulted in significant recall facilitation for that repeated item. These effects mirror those reported for verbal stimuli (e.g., Henson, 1998a Henson, R. N. A. (1998a). Item repetition in short-term memory: Ranschburg repeated. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24(5), 1162–1181. doi:doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.24.5.1162[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. Item repetition in short-term memory: Ranschburg repeated. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24(5), 1162–1181. doi:doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.24.5.1162). These data are the first to demonstrate the Ranschburg effect with non-verbal stimuli and suggest further cross-modal similarities in order memory.     

Serial position effects in visual short-term memory for words and abstract spatial patterns

Two experiments tested the effects of list postion, and retention-interval in recognition for two distinct stimulus categories in young adults. Stimulus categories were spatial abstract patterns and words presented on a computer screen. At short delay intervals recency effects predominates and at longer delay intervals a primacy effect predominates in both experiments, indicating similar basic memory processes producing the serial position functions for the two different categories of visual stimuli, but as length of retention-interval increases, memory for first list items improves for words and remains constant for abstract patterns. Recency functions are similar for both stimulus categories tested.     

When it's not easy to do the right thing: Developmental changes in understanding cost drive evaluations of moral praiseworthiness

Recent work identified a shift in judgments of moral praiseworthiness that occurs late in development: adults recognize the virtue of moral actions that involve resolving an inner conflict between moral desires and selfish desires. Children, in contrast, praise agents who do the right thing in the absence of inner conflict. This finding stands in contrast with other work showing that children incorporate notions of cost and effort into their social reasoning. Using a modified version of Starmans and Bloom's (2016) vignettes, we show that understanding the virtue of costly moral action precedes understanding the virtue of resolving inner conflict. In two studies (N = 192 children, range = 4.00–9.95 years; and N = 193 adults), we contrasted a character who paid a personal cost (psychological in Study 1, physical in Study 2) to perform a moral action with another who acted morally without paying a cost. We found a developmental progression; 8- and 9-year-old children and adults recognized the praiseworthiness of moral actions that are psychologically or physically costly. Six- and 7-year-old children only recognized the praiseworthiness of moral actions that are physically costly, but not actions that are psychologically costly. Moreover, neither adults nor children inferred that paying a cost to act morally required having a moral desire or resolving inner conflict. These results suggest that both adults and children conceptualize obligation as a direct motivational force on actions. They further suggest that costly choice—a hallmark of moral agency—is implicated in judgments of praiseworthiness early in development.     

Serial murderers' spatial decisions: factors that influence crime location choice

The outcome of German serial murderer spatial decision making was measured as the straight‐line distance (km) between murderer home locations and each crime location (i.e. body recovery location). Geographic and series development data, as well as information on age, intelligence, motive, marital status, employment status, and mode of transportation of 53 German serial murderers was collected from police and prosecution service files and judicial verdict records. Potential effects of the aforementioned factors on spatial decisions were assessed. Results showed that 63% of the murderers lived within 10 km of their crime locations. Home‐to‐crime distance was negatively correlated with murderer age and positively correlated with murderer IQ score. Results also showed that the mode of transportation used by murderers had an effect on their spatial decisions. Results are discussed in terms of understanding serial murderer spatial decision‐making and implications for police investigations. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Choosing what to choose from: Preference for inclusion over exclusion when constructing consideration sets from large choice sets

Decision making is a two‐stage process, consisting of, first, consideration set construction and then final choice. Decision makers can form a consideration set from a choice set using one of two strategies: including the options they wish to further consider or excluding those they do not wish to further consider. The authors propose that decision makers have a relative preference for an inclusion (vs. exclusion) strategy when choosing from large choice sets and that this preference is driven primarily by a lay belief that inclusion requires less effort than exclusion, particularly in large choice sets. Study 1 demonstrates that decision makers prefer using an inclusion (vs. exclusion) strategy when faced with large choice sets. Study 2 replicates the effect of choice set size on preference for consideration set construction strategy and demonstrates that the belief that exclusion is more effortful mediates the relative preference for inclusion in large choice sets. Studies 3 and 4 further support the importance of perceived effort, demonstrating a greater preference for inclusion in large choice sets when decision makers are primed to think about effort (vs. accuracy; Study 3) and when the choice set is perceived as requiring more effort because of more information being presented about each alternative (vs. more alternatives in the choice set; Study 4). Finally, Study 5 manipulates consideration set construction strategy, showing that using inclusion (vs. exclusion) in large choice sets leads to smaller consideration sets, greater confidence in the decision process, and a higher quality consideration set.     

Multicriteria approval: application of approval voting concepts to MCDM problems

Multicriteria decision making (MCDM) methods generally require information that is difficult and expensive to obtain. It is shown in this paper that given an ordering of criteria by importance, and whether each alternative is above the average evaluation of the alternatives for each criterion, considerable information can be extracted concerning the overall rankings of the alternatives. This is done by recognizing the similarity between criteria in MCDM, and voters in social choice theory. Multicriteria approval, proposed in this paper, is an MCDM adaptation of approval voting which can be used to classify decisions into one of several categories, depending on whether, and the manner in which, a superior alternative can be identified. An exhaustive examination of all possible decision situations of tractable size is made to measure the applicability of multicriteria approval, and the approach is demonstrated in an industrial procurement case. In addition to requiring minimal information from a decision maker, multicriteria approval satisfies several desirable criteria for MCDM techniques. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The excess choice effect: The role of outcome valence and counterfactual thinking

Contrary to economic theory, psychological research has demonstrated increased choice can undermine satisfaction. When and why this ‘excess choice effect’ (ECE) occurs remains unclear. Building on theories of counterfactual thinking we argue the ECE is more likely to occur when people experience counterfactual thought or emotion and that a key trigger is a negative versus positive task outcome. Participants either selected a drink (Experiment 1) or chocolate (Experiment 2) from a limited (6) versus extensive (24) selection (Experiment 1) or were given no choice versus extensive (24) choice (Experiment 2). In both experiments, however, the choice was illusory: Half the participants tasted a ‘good’ flavour, half a ‘bad’ flavour. As predicted, extensive choice was only detrimental to satisfaction when participants tasted the ‘bad’ drink or chocolate, and this was mediated by the experience of counterfactual thought (Experiment 1) or emotion (Experiment 2). When outcomes were positive, participants were similarly satisfied with limited versus extensive and no choice versus extensive choice. Implications for our theoretical understanding of the ECE and for the construction of choice architectures aimed at promoting individual satisfaction and well‐being are discussed.     

The Effect of Decision Strategy on Deciding to Defer Choice

Recent research has examined consumer decision making when the option of not choosing any of the alternatives is also provided. The findings from this research suggest that the decision to defer choice is sensitive to the uncertainty of choosing the most preferred option from the set of alternatives provided. Building on this research, the author tests whether the decision to defer choice is also influenced by task variables that influence decision uncertainty. In the first experiment, this proposition is tested for choice problems in which information on three relatively equally attractive alternatives is presented either sequentially or simultaneously. As predicted, the preference for the defer-choice option was greater when the three alternatives were presented simultaneously. A second study forced subjects into using one of four decision strategies in order to choose between two non-dominated alternatives. The preference for the no-choice option was found to be higher when the rule required explicit attribute tradeoffs and lower when it simplified choice. These results suggest that choice uncertainty is influenced by the decision strategy used to determine the preference among alternatives. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the results for marketers' communication strategies.     

Magnitude effect contributes to the domain specificity in delay discounting

Discounting is a useful framework for understanding temporal choices. A person who prefers $50 immediately over $100 in 1 month exhibits a higher discount rate than a person deciding to wait for the higher payoff. Although previous research shows that discount rates are domain-specific, we propose an alternative to the domain specificity account. We suggest that differences in discounting alternatives across various domains may result not so much from the domains' nature per se but from differences in perceived attractiveness of the discounted alternatives. We replicated that an illustrative study evidencing domain specificity in discounting (Experiment 1) showed that people's subjective values of the payoffs in domains discounted in this experiment were different (Experiment 2) and used a novel method to match the attractiveness of the available alternatives across domains (Experiment 3). Finally, Experiment 4 showed that when matching was applied, the domain effect disappeared. We conclude that a magnitude effect can, at least partially, explain domain specificity in delay discounting.