Do the right thing: The assumption of optimality in lay decision theory and causal judgment |
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Affiliation: | 1. Department of Psychology, Yale University, United States;2. Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, United States;1. Department of Psychology, Cognitive and Developmental Psychology, University of Zurich, Switzerland;2. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Leipzig, Germany;3. Anthropological Institute & Museum, University of Zurich, Switzerland;4. School of Psychology & Neuroscience, St Andrews, United Kingdom;1. School of Public Health, 50 University Hall #7360, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA;2. Department of Demography, 2232 Piedmont Ave., University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA;3. Institute for Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala University, Box 514, SE-75120 Uppsala, Sweden |
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Abstract: | Human decision-making is often characterized as irrational and suboptimal. Here we ask whether people nonetheless assume optimal choices from other decision-makers: Are people intuitive classical economists? In seven experiments, we show that an agent’s perceived optimality in choice affects attributions of responsibility and causation for the outcomes of their actions. We use this paradigm to examine several issues in lay decision theory, including how responsibility judgments depend on the efficacy of the agent’s actual and counterfactual choices (Experiments 1–3), individual differences in responsibility assignment strategies (Experiment 4), and how people conceptualize decisions involving trade-offs among multiple goals (Experiments 5–6). We also find similar results using everyday decision problems (Experiment 7). Taken together, these experiments show that attributions of responsibility depend not only on what decision-makers do, but also on the quality of the options they choose not to take. |
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Keywords: | Lay decision theory Causal attribution Rationality Decision-making Theory of mind Behavioral game theory |
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