How Affect Shapes Risky Choice: Distorted Probability Weighting Versus Probability Neglect

People's choices between prospects with relatively affect‐rich outcomes (e.g., medical side effects) can diverge markedly from their choices between prospects with relatively affect‐poor outcomes (e.g., monetary losses). We investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying this “affect gap” in risky choice. One possibility is that affect‐rich prospects give rise to more distortion in probability weighting. Another is that they lead to the neglect of probabilities. To pit these two possibilities against each other, we fitted cumulative prospect theory (CPT) to the choices of individual participants, separately for choices between options with affect‐rich outcomes (adverse medical side effects) and options with affect‐poor outcomes (monetary losses); additionally, we tested a simple model of probability neglect, the minimax rule. The results indicated a qualitative difference in cognitive mechanisms between the affect‐rich and affect‐poor problems. Specifically, in affect‐poor problems, the large majority of participants were best described by CPT; in affect‐rich problems, the proportion of participants best described by the minimax rule was substantially higher. The affect gap persisted even when affect‐rich outcomes were supplemented by numerical information, thus providing no support for the thesis that choices in affect‐rich and affect‐poor problems diverge because the information provided in the former is nonnumerical. Our findings suggest that the traditional expectation‐based framework for modeling risky decision making may not readily generalize to affect‐rich choices. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sex in the City: The ambiguity of female mating strategies

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the limitations of evolutionary explanations of female mating strategies, and to present an alternative theory that accounts for the ambiguity of mating strategies throughout a woman's life. While mating strategies are considered to be discrete entities, it is clear that women's decision making in everyday life is based on mutually fused, ambiguous courses of actions. The current perspective addresses the commonality of female mating experiences while highlighting the uniqueness of each woman's mating strategy and outlines a multi-level perspective on strategies of women's reproductive decision making.     

Dudas sobre la duda razonable

Resumen

El intento legal de control de los sesgos en la toma de decisiones por parte de jurados viene de la mano de las instrucciones judiciales sobre la carga de la prueba. Este trabajo analiza los efectos del criterio “duda razonable” sobre la decisión de los jurados. Los resultados contradicen las predicciones apareciend diferencias en la cuantificación de este estándar de culpabilidad mediadas por la interacción del tipo d caso (p.e., violación, robo, fuga d divisas y negligencia médica) y algunas variables psicosociales (i.e., género, locus de control, autoposicionamiento político, dogmatismo, actitudes hacia la delincuencia juvenil, conservadurismo). Finalmente se discuten los resultados con vistas a formar jurados que ejecuten de un modo eficaz.