Journal of Behavioral Decision Making最新文献

We examine the impact of advice use on perceptions of competence. We propose that advice use sends opposing signals to an advisor regarding the advisee's competence. Greater advice use signals respect for the advisor, which is reciprocated by enhancing competence perceptions. However, greater advice use also indicates a lack of independence in judgment, reducing perceptions of competence. As a result, as advice use increases (i.e., gets closer to the exact advice provided), perceptions of competence first increase but then decrease. We further argue that the impact of advice use on competence is influenced by perceptions of information accessibility, such that when advisor and advisee have access to the same information, lower reliance on advice is more tolerated and less impactful on competence. We show that this effect is conceptually and empirically distinct from advisor's confidence and subsequent preference for advice use.

Researchers have long been trying to understand why individuals dislike annuities. Here, we investigate if the process individuals use to assess the financial value of annuities may lead them to inaccurately value annuities. In Study 1, participants were asked to assess the monthly payments associated with a specific annuity lump sum or the annuity lump sum associated with a specific monthly payment. They were then asked to describe how they arrived at their answers. We find that when making this assessment, 42% of participants report attempts at using math, with some even describing mathematical formulas. Most other participants reported guessing instead. Reporting attempts at math is more common among participants with higher financial literacy and numeracy. Reported attempts at math, financial literacy, and numeracy predict arriving at more realistic financial values for annuities, as well as incorporating assessments of life expectancy in the math. Based on this process knowledge, we then designed an experiment in Study 2 and tested the effect of presenting information about life expectancy, providing feedback about payouts or their combination. We find that we can thereby change the assessed financial value of annuities and increase participants' interest in annuities, especially among participants that reported attempts at using math. Understanding the processes individuals use to assess the value of annuities informs theory and practice.

The present paper is an exploratory study of the anchoring bias among individuals with autism. Anchoring bias is one of the most robust choice heuristics. The anchoring bias is measured and compared among adults with autism and age-, gender-, and education level-matched, neurotypical controls. The study differentiates between high and low anchors. Results show that individuals with autism are generally equally susceptible to the anchoring bias as neurotypical individuals in judgment and decision making.

Conformity—shifting one's behavior patterns towards group norms—is both common and powerful. Prior research shows that conformity can drive behavioral patterns towards both positive and negative outcomes (e.g., environmentalism vs. anti-environmentalism). However, we know little about conformity in response to sanctions for norm violations. This research explores conformity in punishment for norm violations and how this behavior is enhanced or weakened by empathic concern (N = 1108). The participants acted as third parties to punish unfairness either in a third-party punishment game or in lifelike unfair allocation scenarios. They behaved in a group where other members inflicted either high or low punishment on the unfair proposers. The results of this study show that the participants conformed to both the high-punishment norm and the low-punishment norm, and their conformity persisted after removing the group context (Studies 1A and 1B). Studies 2A and 2B show that evoking empathic concern towards recipients (victims) in unfair situations increased the punishment of the dictator and diminished conformity to the low-punishment norm. Study 3 shows that the enhancement effect of empathic concern on conformity when embedded in the high-punishment norm strengthened over time, whereas the weakening effect of empathic concern on conformity among those representing a low-punishment norm declined over time. These findings extend the understanding of conformity and the role of emotion in this behavior, with the potential for conformity-modulating interventions.

Human prosociality is a valuable but also deeply puzzling trait. While several studies suggest that prosociality is an impulsive behavior, others argue that self-control is necessary to develop prosocial behaviors. Yet, prosociality and self-control in children have rarely been studied jointly. Here, we measured self-control (i.e., delay-of-gratification) and prosociality (i.e., giving in a dictator game) in 250 4- to 6-year-old French schoolchildren. Contrary to previous studies, we found a negative relationship between waiting in the delay-of-gratification task and giving in the dictator game. The effect was especially pronounced when the partner in the dictator game was unknown compared with giving in a dictator game where the partner was a friend. Our results suggest that self-control is not always necessary to act prosocially. Future studies investigating whether and how such pattern develops across the lifespan and across cultures are warranted.

Many situations involving exploration, such as businesses expanding into new products or locations, expose the explorer to the potential for subjective losses. How does the potential to experience losses during the course of a search affect individuals' appetite for exploration? In three incentivized studies, we manipulate search outcomes by presenting participants either with a gain-only environment or a gain-loss environment. The two environments offer objectively identical incentives for exploration: Using a framing manipulation, we decrease gain-loss payoffs and provide participants an initial endowment to offset the difference. Participants decide how to explore a one-dimensional space, receiving payoffs based on their location each period. We predict and find that participants are motivated to avoid losses, which increases exploration when they are incurring losses but decreases exploration when they face the potential for losses. We conclude that exploration is driven by hope of potential gains, constrained by fear of potential losses, and motivated by avoidance of experienced losses.

When participants are shown a series of stimuli, their responses differ depending on whether they respond after each stimulus or only at the end of the series, in what we call a measurement effect. These effects have received paltry attention compared with more well-known order effects and pose a unique challenge to theories of decision-making. In a series of two preregistered experiments, we consistently find measurement effects such that responding to a stimulus reduces its impact on later stimuli. While previous research has found such effects in noncumulative tasks, where participants are instructed only to respond to the most recent stimulus, this may be the first demonstration of these effects when participants are asked to combine information across either two or four stimuli. We present modeling results showing that although several extant classical and quantum models fail to predict the direction of these effects, new versions can be created that can do so. Ways in which these effects can be described using either quantum or classical models are discussed, as well as potential connections with other well-known phenomena like the dilution effect.

The increasing inequality rate within countries worldwide makes social comparisons more evident. In seven experiments, we demonstrate that people comparing themselves to others in a superior socioeconomic position (upward comparison) judge that wealthier others should donate more time and money to charity. However, social comparison to others in an inferior position (downward comparison) does not always increase monetary donations. This discrepancy in prescriptions for monetary donations between those who make upward and downward social comparisons is driven by judgments about relative spare money; while people making upward comparisons believe that others have more spare money, people making downward comparisons only think they have more spare money, and should donate more, when reminded of their hierarchical position at the time of judgment. Low meritocracy beliefs exacerbate the difference between the prescriptions of how much oneself and others should donate given their socioeconomic position. This differential pattern among individuals making upward and downward social comparisons helps to propagate economic inequality. People making upward comparisons prescribe to wealthier others the responsibility to donate to charity, who in turn may not think they should donate more money. These findings have implications for charitable and non-profit organizations and contribute to research on social comparison, inequality, and judgments about monetary and time donations.

At some point in their lives, most people have told a lie, intentionally hurt someone else, or acted selfishly at the expense of another. Despite knowledge of their moral failings, individuals are often able to maintain the belief that they are moral people. This research explores one mechanism by which this paradoxical process occurs: the tendency to represent one's past immoral behaviors in concrete or mechanistic terms, thus stripping the action of its moral implications. Across five studies, we document this basic pattern and provide evidence that this process impacts evaluations of an act's moral wrongness. We further demonstrate an extension of this effect, such that when an apology describes an immoral behavior using mechanistic terms, it is viewed as less sincere and less forgivable, likely because including low-level or concrete language in an apology fails to communicate the belief that one's actions were morally wrong.

Meta-information is information about information that can be used as cues to guide judgments and decisions. Three types of meta-information that are routinely used in intelligence analysis are source reliability, information credibility, and classification level. The first two cues are intended to speak to information quality (in particular, the probability that the information is accurate), and classification level is intended to describe the information's security sensitivity. Two experiments involving professional intelligence analysts (N = 25 and 27, respectively) manipulated meta-information in a 6 (source reliability) × 6 (information credibility) × 2 (classification) repeated-measures design. Ten additional items were retested to measure intra-individual reliability. Analysts judged the probability of information accuracy based on its meta-informational profile. In both experiments, the judged probability of information accuracy was sensitive to ordinal position on the scales and the directionality of linguistic terms used to anchor the levels of the two scales. Directionality led analysts to group the first three levels of each scale in a positive group and the fourth and fifth levels in a negative group, with the neutral term “cannot be judged” falling between these groups. Critically, as reliability and credibility cue inconsistency increased, there was a corresponding decrease in intra-analyst reliability, interanalyst agreement, and effective cue utilization. Neither experiment found a significant effect of classification on probability judgments.