Journal of Behavioral Decision Making最新文献

This series of five studies examines a bias in moral judgment where harm inflicted on a single individual is perceived as more morally wrong than similar harm experienced by multiple individuals. To explain this bias, we introduce the “Why Me?” Model (WMM), which suggests that people tend to interpret harm directed at a single individual as personally targeted. This perception intensifies the judgment that the harm is more severe and morally egregious. Studies 1 and 2 explored how the victim's perception of personal targeting mediates this bias, whereas Studies 3–5 investigated specific boundary conditions of the WMM. Consistent with our predictions, the bias disappeared when participants were given explicit reasons for the harm (Study 3) or when they could directly compare scenarios involving one versus multiple victims (Study 4). Finally, Study 5 demonstrated that this bias arises from a tendency to perceive an act as more harmful when it is personally targeted at an individual, compared to when it affects several individuals, even when there is no difference in the perceived unfairness or general intentionality of these two conditions.

Paying more than one could have paid to obtain the same outcome is wasteful. In four experiments, we show that waste aversion can lead people to prefer a more wasteful outcome over a more frugal outcome, as long as it eliminates the feeling of wastefulness. In Study 1, we measured participants' satisfaction with lottery outcomes to find that they are less satisfied with their obtained outcome relative to an inferior, dominated, outcome—if they are aware of a counter-factual in which they could have paid less to achieve the dominant outcome. Study 2 revealed that responsibility for the decision that led to the outcome does not intensify the effect, suggesting that wastefulness is a more prominent explanation for the effect than regret. Study 3 extended the results from outcome satisfaction to decisions. Participants altered their choice of whether to continue or terminate searching for an apartment based on their awareness of a counterfactual that renders the process leading to the outcome as wasteful or not. Waste aversion leads participants to extend their search beyond what they would do based purely on their preferences and expectations. Study 4 replicated these findings with payoff-relevant decisions. Taken together, these four studies establish that waste aversion leads to higher satisfaction with dominated outcomes in real-world experiences. The effect does not rely on decision regret, and may lead to suboptimal decisions.

Ratios are an instrumental component of the communication of probabilities such as COVID incidence rates, side effects of medical drugs, or political decision-making; hence, they are a critical component of an individual's statistical decision-making. Research on the ratio bias has shown inconsistent results based on six major shortcomings which we surmount by replicating an identical experiment with students in Germany, Turkey, and Italy, with a physical, textual, and graphical depiction, and accounting for different levels of exposure to probabilities. In six studies (N = 1338), we show that lower exposure to probabilities leads to significantly more ratio bias–conform choices. The results also suggest that higher levels of statistical numeracy and risk literacy reduce ratio bias–conform choices. Our contribution helps to better understand the ratio bias concerning different populations and highlights different baselines for ratio bias–conform choices among subgroups in the population.

For every $100 spent on retail industry, consumers on average return $14.50 value of products to retailers, and they receive the amount they originally paid as a refund. The refund money is fungible, and it can be freely spent on other items or be saved. This research examines consumers' propensity to spend return refunds and the types of products they purchase with return refunds. Across 10 studies (N = 2710), I show that people are more likely to make a purchase and to purchase hedonic products when they are spending return refunds versus money typically used for purchases. Examining the psychological mechanism underlying this effect, I show that consumers are more likely to spend return refunds because they perceive a lower psychological loss and experience less pain of paying when spending refund money than when spending other regularly available monetary sources. Hence, receiving return refunds has a stronger effect on the spending behavior of people who chronically experience an intense pain of paying (i.e., “tightwads”) than those who experience less pain (i.e., “spendthrifts”). Moreover, this research shows that neither payment depreciation nor the perception of a return refund as a windfall fully explain how people choose to spend it. In sum, individuals have a different psychological experience when they spend return refunds versus other conventional monetary sources.

Sambol, S., Suleyman, E., & Ball, M. (2024). The assessment of affective decision-making: Exploring alternative scoring methods for the Balloon Analog Risk Task and Columbia Card Task. J Behav Dec Making, 37: e2367. https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.2367.

The textual descriptions of these correlations in the manuscript are already accurate and reflect the intended relationships, so they do not require any changes. However, the table itself needs updating to reflect the corrected information.

We apologize for this error.

Learning the probabilities of multiple events from the environment is an important core competency of any organism. In our within-participant experiment, participants experienced samples from two distributions, or prospects, each comprised of two to four events, and were required to provide simultaneous, rather than sequential, judgment of the likelihood of the complete set of observed events. Empirical calibration curves that map experienced probabilities to subjective probabilities reveal that the degree of underextremity (overestimation of low likelihood events and underestimation of high likelihood events) is strongly conditional on the number of judged events. We uncover two regularities conditional on the number of events that modify (a) the crossover points of the calibration curves with the identity line and (b) the gradient or sensitivity of probability judgments. We present a process model of elicited (subjective) probabilities that captures these empirical regularities. Experienced events recalled from memory may be erroneously attributed to the wrong events based on the similarity of event outcomes. We conclude that the observed miscalibration of probability judgments can be attributed to the noisy retrieval component of a rational process-based decision model. We discuss the implications of our model for the conflicting empirical findings of overweighting and underweighting in the decisions from experience literature. Finally, we show that reliance on small samples can be an ecologically rational strategy for a bounded rational decision-maker (subject to noisy recall), as aggregated subjective probabilities are closer to the ecological probabilities than the experienced (or sampled) probabilities are.