Choice‐making,Expectations, and Treatment Positivity: How and When Choosing Shapes Aversive Experiences

Every day we use products and treatments with unknown but expected effects, such as using medication to manage pain. In many cases, we have a choice over which products or treatments to use; however, in other cases, people choose for us or choices are unavailable. Does choosing (versus not choosing) have implications for how a product or treatment is experienced? The current experiments examined the role of choice‐making in facilitating so‐called expectation assimilation effects—or situations in which a person's experiences (e.g., discomfort and pain) are evaluated in a manner consistent with their expectations. In Experiment 1, participants were initially exposed to a baseline set of aversive stimuli (i.e., sounds). Next, some participants were given expectations for two “treatments” (i.e., changes in screen display) that could ostensibly reduce discomfort. Critically, participants were either given a choice or not about which of the two treatments they preferred. Participants in a control condition were not provided with treatment expectations. Results revealed that discomfort experiences assimilated to expectations only when participants were provided with choice. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and provided evidence against the idea that demand characteristics and choice‐making unrelated to the core task (i.e., choices without associated expectations) could account for the results. Further, Experiment 2 showed that choosing reduced discomfort because of increased positivity about the treatment. Results are discussed in the context of extant research on choice‐making and expectation effects. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Extreme Outcomes Sway Risky Decisions from Experience

Whether buying stocks or playing the slots, people making real‐world risky decisions often rely on their experiences with the risks and rewards. These decisions, however, do not occur in isolation but are embedded in a rich context of other decisions, outcomes, and experiences. In this paper, we systematically evaluate how the local context of other rewarding outcomes alters risk preferences. Through a series of four experiments on decisions from experience, we provide evidence for an extreme‐outcome rule, whereby people overweight the most extreme outcomes (highest and lowest) in a given context. As a result, people should be more risk seeking for gains than losses, even with equally likely outcomes. Across the experiments, the decision context was varied so that the same outcomes served as the high extreme, low extreme, or neither. As predicted, people were more risk seeking for relative gains, but only when the risky option potentially led to the high‐extreme outcome. Similarly, people were more risk averse for relative losses, but only when the risky option potentially led to the low‐extreme outcome. We conclude that in risky decisions from experience, the biggest wins and the biggest losses seem to matter more than they should. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Altering the Shape of Punishment Distributions Affects Decision Making in a Modified Iowa Gambling Task

Neuroeconomics research has shown that preference for gambling is altered by the statistical moments (mean, variance, and skew) of reward and punishment distributions. Although it has been shown that altered means can affect feedback‐based decision making tasks, little is known if the variance and skew will have an effect on these tasks. To investigate, we systematically controlled the variance (high, medium, and low) and skew (negative, zero, and positive) of the punishment distributions in a modified version of the Iowa Gambling Task. The Iowa Gambling Task has been used extensively in both academic and clinical domains to understand decision making and diagnose decision making impairments. Our results show that decision making can be altered by an interaction of variance and skew. We found a significant decrease over trials in choices from the decks with high variance and asymmetrically skewed punishments and from the decks with low variance and zero skew punishments. These results indicate that punishment distribution shape alone can change human perception of what is optimal (i.e., mean expected outcome) and may help explain what guides our day‐to‐day decisions. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Police Overestimation of Criminal Career Homogeneity

Police presumptions about criminal career trajectories have been little studied. The exploratory study reported here involved 42 police staff of varying rank and experience. Participants were asked to complete a questionnaire that asked them to predict the type of offence that an individual with a specified prior record would most probably commit next. Participating police personnel substantially overstated the homogeneity of criminal careers, that is, the nature of prior offences determined their prediction of their next offence more than available official data would deem reasonable. An incidental finding was that officers who rated the probability of further offending highest were also those who thought criminal careers most specialised. The implications for operational police decision‐making were discussed and held to be profound. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A neural cognitive model of argumentation with application to legal inference and decision making

Formal models of argumentation have been investigated in several areas, from multi-agent systems and artificial intelligence (AI) to decision making, philosophy and law. In artificial intelligence, logic-based models have been the standard for the representation of argumentative reasoning. More recently, the standard logic-based models have been shown equivalent to standard connectionist models. This has created a new line of research where (i) neural networks can be used as a parallel computational model for argumentation and (ii) neural networks can be used to combine argumentation, quantitative reasoning and statistical learning. At the same time, non-standard logic models of argumentation started to emerge. In this paper, we propose a connectionist cognitive model of argumentation that accounts for both standard and non-standard forms of argumentation. The model is shown to be an adequate framework for dealing with standard and non-standard argumentation, including joint-attacks, argument support, ordered attacks, disjunctive attacks, meta-level attacks, self-defeating attacks, argument accrual and uncertainty. We show that the neural cognitive approach offers an adequate way of modelling all of these different aspects of argumentation. We have applied the framework to the modelling of a public prosecution charging decision as part of a real legal decision making case study containing many of the above aspects of argumentation. The results show that the model can be a useful tool in the analysis of legal decision making, including the analysis of what-if questions and the analysis of alternative conclusions. The approach opens up two new perspectives in the short-term: the use of neural networks for computing prevailing arguments efficiently through the propagation in parallel of neuronal activations, and the use of the same networks to evolve the structure of the argumentation network through learning (e.g. to learn the strength of arguments from data).     

判断与决策研究纵观:基于模糊痕迹理论的视角(英文)

模糊痕迹理论是用于解释记忆、判断与决策的综合性理论,该理论的提出和发展主要基于对信息存储、表征、提取和加工过程的研究。本文首先介绍了模糊痕迹理论的基本原则,在此基础上重点讨论了其要义(gist)如何发挥核心作用,使得模糊痕迹理论有别于其他传统的决策模型。该理论将高级直觉与原始冲动性进行了区分,并且预测决策误差来源于判断与决策的各种不同成分,如背景知识、信息表征、提取和加工过程等。模糊痕迹理论不仅可以解释诸如框架效应、合取谬误等传统决策与判断文献中常讨论的误差现象,同时基于该理论的研究还得到了一些与传统决策理论相悖的新发现。此外,对脑与行为如何发育性变化的研究为我们了解成人的认知过程提供了至关重要的新视角,这些对脑与行为的发育性研究和对特殊人群的研究结果也都支持了模糊痕迹理论对要义加工依赖的预测。     

Preferences for suicide prevention strategies among university students in Japan: a cross-sectional study using full-profile conjoint analysis

In Japan, implementation of suicide prevention policies is mainly supported by public funds. However, it is unclear what kinds of suicide prevention strategies people prefer. We conducted a survey to clarify people’s preferences regarding suicide prevention strategies adopted in Japan. This was a cross-sectional self-administered questionnaire survey. Participants were recruited through a lecture held by the first author at their university. We distributed questionnaires to 324 people present at the lecture; 249 completed questionnaires were included in the final analysis. We estimated suicide prevention strategy preferences using full profile conjoint analysis. For all six prevention strategies, the inclusion of each strategy in the policy profile was statistically significantly related to the positive evaluation of the overall policy profile. Marginal Willingness to Pay (MWTP) for restriction of access to means showed the highest value of the six suicide prevention strategies. MWTP was the lowest for public awareness activities. Preferred suicide prevention strategies in Japan are restriction of access to means and enhancement of psychiatric services. The results of this study indicate the strategies that are preferred have a high level of evidence of suicide prevention and do not directly intervene in a person’s free will to die by suicide.     

Be green and clearly be seen: How consumer values and attitudes affect adoption of bicycle sharing

Environmental concerns have propelled public and private entities to search for ways to increase usage of public bicycle sharing systems. However, usage rates in many cities remain below expectations. Using the theory of perceived value to motivate our hypotheses, this paper evaluates the impact of perceived value on consumer adoption intentions, and assesses the moderating effects of social and personal attitudes towards environmental behavior, on perceived value-adoption intention relationships. Our findings suggest that public bicycle sharing adoption intention is significantly influenced by its perceived functional, conditional, green and social values. Moreover, personal and social attitudes towards “greenness” and bicycle sharing, respectively, are found to moderate the relationship between perceived values and adoption intentions. This research contributes to theory-building in bicycle sharing adoption, and informs business and government leaders on how to promote adoption.     

群际接触减少偏见的机制：一项整合的研究

以321名少数民族大学生为被试,考察了民族接触（与汉族）、交往态度、民族认同、民族本质论、民族刻板印象和群际焦虑等变量,以整合的视角探讨了民族接触促进民族交往的机制问题。研究结果表明：民族接触通过降低群际焦虑和民族认同、减弱消极刻板印象和民族本质论而间接促进了民族交往,民族认同在民族接触和民族本质论之间、消极刻板印象在民族接触和群际焦虑之间存在中介作用。这项整合的研究理论上丰富了群际接触减少偏见的机制研究,发现了新的中介变量,对促进民族交往的实践具有指导意义。     

Did They Earn It? Observing Unearned Luxury Consumption Decreases Brand Attitude When Observers Value Fairness

People frequently observe others’ consumption, making inferences about both the consumer and the consumed brands. Although these observations are often beneficial for brands, this research demonstrates that observing luxury brand consumers whose consumption arose from unearned (vs. earned) financial resources reduces observers’ brand attitudes when observers place a high value on fairness. When fairness values are high, observers do not perceive luxury brand consumers who use unearned (vs. earned) consumption resources as prestigious, and in turn, lower prestige perceptions adversely affect observers’ brand evaluations for luxury brands. Consistent with our theorizing regarding the signaling of prestige, the joint effect of consumers’ consumption resources and observers’ fairness values on observers’ brand attitudes does not hold for nonluxury brands, which are not associated with prestige and thereby are not denigrated when the consumer is not perceived as prestigious. This research sheds light on the role of moral values in marketplace judgments of luxury consumption and brand attitude by considering the influence of consumption resources on observers’ judgments.