Journal of Behavioral Decision Making最新文献

People are increasingly worried about untruthfulness in news reporting. We distinguish between two types of untruthfulness: apparent untruthfulness (containing false information) and consequential untruthfulness (giving readers a wrong impression of the truth). Consequential untruthfulness can be caused by both the presence of false information and cherry-picking (reporting only parts of the truth). Despite this, we find that people's perception of untruthfulness depends largely on apparent untruthfulness. Consequently, they treat news that cherry-picks information less negatively (e.g., less likely to criticize it and more likely to share it with others) than they treat news that contains false information, when the former is more consequentially untruthful than the latter. We dub this phenomenon as cherry-picking tolerance. We also find that prompting people to think about the consequence of the news report (i.e., the impressions people form after they read the news reports) will mitigate the cherry-picking tolerance. This research draws attention to the widespread practice of cherry-picking in news reporting and calls for a new look at what constitutes fake news.

We investigated whether prescribing agreement improves the quality of judgments and decisions. Participants were first asked to provide judgments or decisions individually. Then, they either revised their initial judgments and decisions based on a partners' response, or they provided a joint judgment agreed upon with their partner. In the latter condition, we allowed for a minimal communication protocol restricted to acceptance and rejection responses to each other's proposals. In the Agreement condition, participants improved both in a cognitive (Experiment 1a) and a perceptual decision task (Experiment 1b). The cognitive task agreement allowed participants to improve above the level of accuracy achieved with revision. Surprisingly, the prescribing agreement improved the quality of the initial independent decisions. In a judgment task (Experiment 2), the prescribing agreement led to more accurate judgments because partners weighed each other's judgments more equally than in the Revision condition where they gave higher weight to their own judgments. We conclude that prescribing agreement reduces egocentric discounting bias and motivates individuals to be more accurate. These results not only demonstrate that collective benefits in judgment and decision making can be accrued without verbal communication but also suggest potential limitations of this approach.

Diffusion of responsibility is typically defined as the effect by which people feel less responsible for outcomes of their actions when they act as a member of a group than when they act individually. The research reported here extends the concept of diffusion of responsibility to contexts in which the actor has received advice. Responsibility when using advice and when acting contrary to advice are compared to each other, as well as to responsibility when acting alone or as part of a group. To provide a more complete picture, this research consolidates disparate concepts from previous work on diffusion of responsibility, including felt, judged, and anticipated responsibility assessments; distributive and case-based models of responsibility; and positive and negative outcomes. Across three experiments, using advice conveyed less responsibility than either acting alone or acting contrary to advice, with greater use of advice further reducing responsibility. The magnitude of diffusion was influenced by the task outcome valence in ways consistent with self-serving bias when acting alone and other-serving bias when using advice. Diffusion was greater with distributive than case-based responsibility models. The results were generally consistent across felt, judged, and anticipated responsibility, as well as with choice and judgment tasks. Implications and future research possibilities are discussed.

Risk and decision-making are central to human behavior and have been extensively studied across many disciplines. To better understand the factors that influence an individual's risk-related choices, this paper investigates the influence of frame valence intensity. It does so by comparing predictions from two prominent theories of decision-making: Prospect theory (PT) and fuzzy-trace theory (FTT). PT relies on the numerical transformation of subjective value information suggesting that the intensity of the frame should not affect the decision outcome. In contrast, FTT predicts that the level of frame valence should correspond to the intensity of the extracted memory trace and have predictable effects on risky choice. The results demonstrate that risky choice varies across different levels of the frame's valence. For positive frames, increasing valence intensity is associated with decreased risk preference. For negative frames, the relationship is more complex and context-dependent. These findings extend our understanding of framing effects, suggesting that both the direction and intensity of frame valence influence risk preferences. While broadly aligning with FTT predictions regarding gist extraction, our results also indicate that PT could be extended to account for valence intensity effects, potentially bridging these theoretical perspectives.

Alternative messages that present logically equivalent information, often referred to as equivalence frames, have been shown to influence readers' opinions on public issues. While equivalence framing has been studied in the context of issue advocacy, exhibiting pervasive effects across domains of decision-making, little attention has been paid to whether the general public is able to choose these equivalence frames based on the goal of persuasion. Given that framing effects have important implications on democratic decision-making, this paper reports on experiments that manipulate the strategic goal of policy advocacy (i.e., supporting alternative policy proposals) and ask respondents to select between equivalence frames to enhance the persuasive power of the advocacy toward the specified goal. Findings across three issue topics suggest that for the general adult population, only a small proportion of people were able to select equivalence frames based on the goal of persuasion with most people failing to do so. Also, a follow-up study with a university student sample showed that familiarity with one equivalence frame over the other was a more consistent predictor of equivalence frame use than the goal of advocacy in communicating policy issues.