Journal of Behavioral Decision Making最新文献

Cooperation and trust are critical parts of many relationships. However, such relationships are often studied in siloed ways, leading to incomplete explanations of behavior (e.g., from the point of view of a buyer or a seller, but not necessarily both). This paper makes three contributions to broadening this perspective. First, the authors develop a model incorporating individual differences (genetics), environmental (interpersonal touch), and psychological (empathy and trust) elements to shed light on when and how cooperation is influenced in dyadic relationships. Empathy was predicted to be elicited by the interaction of human touch and the COMT gene to induce, in turn, felt trust and cooperative behaviors. Second, the centipede game is used as a behaviorally relevant context to study how and under what conditions players cooperate while competing with each other. The results of a conditional serial mediation demonstrate that cooperative responses are guided by the interaction of touch and the COMT gene, where empathy and trust are mediators. Actual actions of players are recorded and real behaviors explained. In an additional registered experiment, the mediator, empathy, was manipulated to show that it had a positive effect on trust.

It is increasingly recognized that new information is filtered through the lens of prior experience. Research has shown descriptive probability information (“description”) often does not impact decisions for people who have previously observed a sample of outcomes related to the choice (“experience”). However, the effect of description on mental representations of risk probability in the presence of experience has rarely been examined. In two experiments, participants (n = 263 college students and n = 1032 MTurk workers) played a game that exposed them to a predetermined rate of wins and losses, after which some participants received information about the game's expected rate of losses. Description strongly impacted participants' verbatim estimates of the risk of losing the game. However, description had little or no detectable impact on participants' gist risk estimates. Further analysis showed that lower gist risk estimates were associated with later decisions to continue playing the game. Verbatim risk estimates were correlated with later decisions, but no effect was observed while controlling for the effects of gist on decisions. This research additionally tested two approaches to strengthening the effect of description on gist, finding a small effect of one approach but not the other. Results suggest that descriptive information materials delivered after experience may be less likely to alter future decisions if the information does not alter gist representations of risk.

When resource allocation decisions involve marginal underperformers (MUs)—individuals or parties who underperform only “by inches” relative to a threshold—allocators may adopt the consolatory approach, compensating MUs with a small portion of the total resource. Seven studies (N = 2585) revealed that the consolatory approach, albeit often well intended, may backfire. Specifically, when compared with the non-consolatory, binary approach (allocating all the resource to outperformers and nothing to MUs), the consolatory approach can be perceived as less fair, even by MUs themselves who economically benefit from it. As the consolatory approach is objectively more equitable than the binary approach, this effect contradicts the prediction of proportional equity, thereby demonstrating its discontinuity at zero. The underlying mechanism is grounded in people's fundamental perception of zero as unique relative to other numbers, which leads them to adopt different criteria to evaluate fairness depending on whether the allocation outcomes involve zero. This work suggests that the common practice of offering MUs a small “consolation prize” may backfire, harming fairness without mitigating MUs' negative feelings of losing.

Fetchenhauer, D., Dunning, D., Ehlebracht, D., Graczyk, T., Schlosser, T., Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 38(4), e70037. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bdm.70037.

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Polarization has become a major concern in behavioral science and popular media, as it may affect many important areas of life. For instance, how polarized are people's perceptions of risks, such as regarding (not) imposing mitigation measures during a pandemic? Answering this question is surprisingly challenging: Whereas multiple theoretical views of polarization and their respective mathematical operationalizations coexist, the latter are often used interchangeably as measures of “polarization.” This may be indicative of a jingle fallacy, because it is unknown whether the diverse ways of quantifying polarization in people's perceptions of important societal matters empirically converge. In study 1, we thus ran a reanalysis of a large dataset from the World Values Survey covering diverse topics of societal relevance (N = 93,214), finding only moderate empirical convergence between six operationalizations of polarization. In study 2, we applied the same approach focusing specifically on people's risk perceptions of COVID-19 mitigation measures (N = 768) and found a similar pattern of low convergence between different operationalizations of polarization. However, according to one operationalization with a clear threshold for polarization, risk perceptions were polarized in 11 out of 12 experimental conditions. Our findings emphasize the need to carefully consider how polarization is operationalized to avoid broad generalizations, keeping in mind that some operationalizations may speak to specific theoretical conceptualizations. To raise awareness for this concern and support behavioral science researchers in conducting similar analyses with their own datasets, we provide a novel online tool available at https://shiny.cbdr-lab.net/polarization.

Despite the abundance of priming effects identified in the literature, the replicability of prior findings pertaining to several priming effects has been recently challenged. Therefore, research has focused more extensively on pinpointing boundary conditions under which priming effects might surface or be attenuated. We contribute to this stream of literature, showing how visceral states (“hot” affective states) moderate the effectiveness of priming procedures. We demonstrate that active visceral states inhibit the effectiveness of primes that are unrelated to this state in decision domains that are also unrelated to this state (e.g., hungry people primed with the color orange making non-food related product choices). More importantly, extending the direct implications originating from previous research, we provide evidence that unrelated primes can still influence judgment and decision-making in judgment domains that are related to the visceral state when such a state is still experienced (e.g., hungry participants primed with the color orange making food-related rather than non-food-related product choices). The present research thus presents a nuanced view on when seemingly unrelated primes may or may not be expected to yield downstream consequences on judgment and choice.

This paper shows the effect of recipients' gender on donors' preferences, depending on donors' culture. Among study participants from both Eastern and Western cultures, the choice of donating to a boy or a girl followed donors' cultural norms. In Western culture (e.g., the United States), donors chose to donate to a girl over a boy, whereas in Eastern culture (e.g., China), the choice was reversed. A choice set of different-gender recipients increased donations (compared to a choice set of the same gender), as gender stereotypes served to justify choosing one recipient over the other. However, when the choice was between an organization and a single child, the child's gender (either boy or girl) did not affect donation behavior. Thus, gender preferences are driven by cultural norms only in cases where the recipient's gender is salient and serves as a culturally justifiable reason for the donor's choice.

Life is full of decisions about whether to trust other people. At a cognitive level, people can be skeptical about another person's trustworthiness but are averse to signaling their suspicions at a behavioral level. This phenomenon of “principled trustfulness” has been documented for trust implicating the moral character of another person but not explored for cases involving their competence. We introduce a new game-theoretical paradigm, the competence game, in which participants can bet money on whether an interaction partner will pass an intelligence test, thus placing trust in their partner's competence. Across four studies (N = 3337 participants analyzed, each making a decision to risk), we compared behavior in competence games and traditional trust games, which focus on moral choice and lottery gambles. In competence games, participants were significantly less likely to trust their interaction partner than in trust games even if the pay-off structure and likelihood of reaching a positive outcome were identical. Thus, trust in competence is not as principled to the same degree as trust in moral character but seems to be approached more like a self-interested investment decision.

Established procedures of analyzing the effect of context on choice consider simple, compact environments in laboratory settings. However, these approaches severely limit the study of context effects and, as a consequence, the applicability of their findings. In this paper, we generalize existing approaches in modeling choice with the aim of developing a toolbox for the analysis of observational data. We consider three main context measures: attraction, compromise, and similarity. The proposed methodology hinges on ex ante calculation of context features for every alternative in multioption, multiattribute choice sets. This approach minimizes the computational complications of estimating the resulting choice model. The proposed approach is applied to air traveler choice data using an extensive observational dataset. This yields the first examination of all three context effects simultaneously in a large observational dataset. We discuss the consequences of product (re)design based on the results of the empirical exercise to showcase the potential use of the developed methodology in managerial practice.