Uncertainty Avoidance Influences Choices for Potential Gains but not Losses

Uncertainty of outcomes is a primary dimension underlying human judgment and decision making, and is a defining feature of risk. Even though uncertainty almost always exists in decision making contexts, individuals and cultures vary in their preference for avoiding uncertainty. This study examines how uncertainty avoidance influences judgments involving uncertain and risky alternatives. Participants were presented with problems that involve potential gains or losses and contain options reflecting uncertain or certain outcomes. Greater uncertainty avoidance predicted choices for uncertain outcomes that involved gains, which tend to promote risk aversion, but not for uncertain outcomes that led to losses, which tend to promote risk seeking. These results demonstrate that culturally-relevant dispositions such as uncertain avoidance can have complex effects on judgment.     

Citizens' Sense of Justice and the Legal System

When an actor commits a wrong action, citizens have perceptions of the kind of responsibility the actor incurs, the degree to which the act was mitigated or justified, and the appropriate punishment for the actor. The legislatively mandated law of criminal courts, statutes, and criminal codes deals with the same issues. Experimental evidence shows that there are important discrepancies between the principles that people and legal codes use to assign responsibility. That is, the moral retributive-justice principles that people use are sometimes in conflict with the directions in which modern code drafters are taking criminal law. These discrepancies may cause citizens to feel alienated from authority, and to reduce their voluntary compliance with legal codes.     

Thinking about complex decisions: How sleep and time-of-day influence complex choices

In this study, we systematically manipulate a person’s state of sleep; Sleep-deprived and Well-rested along with Matching or Mismatching the decision time-of-day to their circadian preferred time-of-day. We assessed how these conditions influenced performance on an incentivized complex decision task. In the overall analysis of these variables no differences emerged. However, a comparison of the more cognitively depleting Sleep-deprivation/Circadian-mismatch condition to the cognitively enhancing Well-rested/Circadian-match condition showed improved performance in the Well-rested/Circadian matched group for one complex decision task but not for the other. These findings build upon the existing literature on sleep and circadian rhythm effects while uniquely observing the combined effects of these variables on complex decision making.     

The integration of multidimensional scaling and multivariate analysis with optimal transformations

The recent history of multidimensional data analysis suggests two distinct traditions that have developed along quite different lines. In multidimensional scaling (MDS), the available data typically describe the relationships among a set of objects in terms of similarity/dissimilarity (or (pseudo-)distances). In multivariate analysis (MVA), data usually result from observation on a collection of variables over a common set of objects. This paper starts from a very general multidimensional scaling task, defined on distances between objects derived from one or more sets of multivariate data. Particular special cases of the general problem, following familiar notions from MVA, will be discussed that encompass a variety of analysis techniques, including the possible use of optimal variable transformation. Throughout, it will be noted how certain data analysis approaches are equivalent to familiar MVA solutions when particular problem specifications are combined with particular distance approximations.This research was supported by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). An earlier version of this paper was written during a stay at McGill University in Montréal; this visit was supported by a travel grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). I am grateful to Jim Ramsay and Willem Heiser for their encouragement and helpful suggestions, and to the Editor and referees for their constructive comments.     

Assessment and choice: an operant simulation of foraging in patches

Pigeons were presented with an operant simulation of two prey patches using concurrent random-ratio schedules of reinforcement. An unstable patch offered a higher initial reinforcement probability, which then declined unpredictably to a zero reinforcement probability in each session. A stable patch offered a low but unvarying reinforcement probability. When the reinforcement probability declined to zero in a single step, the birds displayed shorter giving-up times in the unstable patch when the ratio between the initial reinforcement probabilities in the unstable and stable patches was greater and when the combined magnitude of the reinforcement probabilities in the two patches was greater. When the unstable patch declined in two steps, the birds behaved as if their giving-up times were influenced heavily by events encountered during the most recent step of the double-step change. This effect was observed, however, only when the reinforcement probability in that step was .04, not when it was .06. All of these data agree with the predictions of a capture-probability model based on a comparison of the estimated probability of receiving a reinforcer in the current patch with that in alternative patches.     

Numeracy in the jury box: Numerical ability,meaningful anchors,and damage award decision making

This project employs an experimental design to test theoretical predictions regarding how numeracy can assist jurors in determining damage awards to compensate a plaintiff for pain and suffering and how the use of meaningful numerical anchors may produce similar benefits. Mock jurors (N = 345) reviewed a legal case and were asked to give a dollar award to compensate the plaintiff for pain and suffering. The presence and nature of a numerical anchor and the duration of pain and suffering were manipulated. Participants' numeracy was measured. Results provided support for predictions. Jurors higher in numeracy gave awards that more appropriately reflected the duration of pain and suffering and showed less variability in awards. Similar benefits were obtained by exposing jurors to meaningful numerical anchors to help them contextualize dollar amounts. Thus, introducing meaningful anchors to jurors may provide similar benefits to numeracy, without the drawbacks associated with selecting only numerate jurors.     

Pratiquer l’analyse interprétative phénoménologique : intérêts et illustration dans le cadre de l’enquête psychosociale par entretiens de recherche

Introduction

Interpretative phenomenological analysis is a qualitative discourse analysis method that has sprung up much research in psychology over the past 20 years. Grounded in phenomenology, idiography and hermeneutics, this research strategy strongly suits the understanding of individuals lived experience and their sense making of life events.

A Negotiation Approach to Intake and Treatment Choice

Treatment choice is the decision process whereby the psychotherapeutic methods and the psychotherapist are determined when psychotherapy is recommended for a specific client. In this article the problem of treatment choice is situated within an integrative view of psychotherapy. A review of the literature confirms the usefulness of the following concepts for treatment choice: client preferences, client control of the situation of choice, and the mutual acceptability of differing views of therapists and clients. These research findings reveal the importance of four elements in the psychotherapeutic intake strategy: exploration of the client's perspective, informing the client, negotiation as a process of confrontation between the client's and the clinician's perspective, and the client's ultimate choice between alternative treatment proposals.     

Physician-Assisted Suicide in the United States: Confronting Legal and Medical Reasoning – Part Two

In the United States, judicialrulings that unrealistically addressed the complexityof cases and demonstrated limited understanding ofprinciples, helped to create a legal quagmire whichlegislatures had to confront. Moreover, thelegislative response was often slow and inadequate interms of both the scope and clarity of the laws. However, since the 1970s, progress has been made onmany fronts, particularly in regard to advancedirectives dealing with end-of-life decisions. Thedebate over physician-assisted suicide has spawned arepetition of moral and legal arguments. Thoseagainst legalization have failed to make a realisticappraisal of the dilemmas facing patients and theirfamilies in an age of technological medicine deliveredin the context of the marketplace. The underlyingproblem is a system in dire need of reform that willno longer treat health care as a commodity of themarketplace and provide universal health care. Terminal care as an integral part of health care willsubstantially benefit from such reforms because amajor obstacle to comprehensive palliative care is thecondition of the present system.     

Potential Effects of Faking on the NEO-PI-R: Willingness and Ability to Fake Changes Who Gets Hired in Simulated Selection Decisions

The impact of response distortion (faking) on selection decisions was investigated. Participants (N = 224) completed the NEO-PI-R under instructions to “make the most favorable impression” and/or “answer honestly.” Those instructed to fake were often over-represented at the top of the score distributions as instructions to fake resulted in higher scores both between and within groups in a test–retest situation. There was significantly lower correspondence between participants’ honest scores and their faked scores as well as multiple instances where participants with unfavorable honest scores subsequently produced the most favorable scores when faking. Response distortion may remain a serious threat to the use of personality test scores in selection.