Journal of Behavioral Decision Making最新文献

Subjective experiences of resource scarcity can make individuals short-term oriented, capture attention, and trigger feelings of unfairness. However, the impact of scarcity on information processing and ethical decision-making remains poorly understood. This eye-tracking study explored how acute financial scarcity affects selective information search and ethical decision-making in an economic task with competing incentives (N = 60, 12,000 observations). Results revealed that participants experiencing financial scarcity displayed a strong attentional bias towards financially tempting information, although they ultimately did not behave more unethically. These findings might reveal a “moral boundary” dictating when attentional biases translate into decision-making. Our results contribute to understanding how individuals in scarcity contexts process and prioritize information in ethical decision-making, helping organizations and policymakers combat stereotypes surrounding resource-deprived individuals, and design evidence-based policy interventions promoting ethical behavior in financially scarce situations.

Decision makers often prefer safe wins over risky gambles, even if the latter promise higher payoffs than the former. One mechanism that explains this choice pattern is the certainty effect, whereby probabilities of 0 and 1 are interpreted accurately but intermediate probabilities are distorted by diminishing sensitivity. We tested an alternative explanation that was recently proposed, the idea that people would be motivated by avoiding zero outcomes rather than being attracted to sure gains. This zero-outcome aversion in gain-domain choices was called the zero effect. By analogy, we proposed that decision makers would approach zero outcomes in the loss domain. Two eye-tracking experiments investigated visual attention as a key component of the zero effect in the gain domain (Experiment 1) and the loss domain (Experiment 2). Choices were consistent with the zero effect. In the gain domain, gambles were chosen less frequently if they included a zero outcome. In contrast, zero-outcome gambles were chosen more frequently in the loss domain. Eye movements and pupillometry indicated that zero outcomes in both domains (a) were less frequently fixated than other outcomes and (b) were associated with increased arousal. We concluded that domain-specific affective responses to zero outcomes aligned with approach/avoidance motivation. These distinct motivations in turn biased information search and choice behavior.

Expert judgment often involves estimating magnitudes, such as the frequency of deaths due to a pandemic. Three experiments (Ns = 902, 431, and 755, respectively) were conducted to examine the effect of outcome framing (e.g., half of a threatened group expected to survive vs. die), probability level (low vs. high), and probability format (verbal, numeric, or combined) on the estimated frequency of survivals/deaths. Each experiment found an interactive effect of frame and probability level, which supported the hypothesis that forecasted outcomes received by participants were implicitly quantified as lower bounds (i.e., “at least half”). Responding in a manner consistent with a lower-bound “at least” interpretation was unrelated to incoherence (Experiments 1 and 2) and positively related to numeracy (Experiments 1 and 3), verbal reasoning (Experiment 3), and actively open-minded thinking (Experiments 2 and 3). The correlational results indicate that implicit lower bounding is an aspect of linguistic inference and not a cognitive error. Implications for research on framing effects are discussed.

Vividly imagining personally relevant, future episodes (episodic future thinking) reduces delay discounting, with potential to provide many applied benefits. It is not clear whether the events imagined must involve the self, or whether vividly imagining future events that will happen to another person would also reduce delay discounting. In the current study, two groups of students wrote about future events, we then cued them to vividly imagine these future events while making delay-amount trade-off decisions (e.g., would you choose $500 now or $1000 in one year?). One group imagined future events happening to themselves, and another group to a specific person they knew. We compared discounting to a control condition where participants were simply instructed to “choose.” Only the group that imagined personally relevant, future events demonstrated reduced delay discounting. This suggests that episodic future thinking more effectively reduces delay discounting when future events happen to the self rather than another person. The group that imagined personally relevant future events were not more able to report the experimental hypotheses suggesting that this difference was not primarily driven by demand characteristics.

Defaults are powerful nudges to shape individuals' behavior: In three experiments, including a large experiment using representative samples from five European countries (n = 4207), we show that they can significantly affect risk-taking by medium to large effect sizes. We also show that implementing a default nudge leads to a lower rating of the advice delivered by the wealth manager compared to no default, an effect that has a medium to large effect size. In addition, defaults the targeted individuals refuse result in lower advice ratings. These side effects call for caution before applying nudges and individualized defaults rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. Additionally, we find evidence pointing to two small effects of framing in default presentation. First, asking how much individuals want to invest in the risky asset emphasizes risk. It reduces investment in the risky asset compared to asking them how much they want to leave on the safe account, particularly for more risk-averse individuals. Second, asking individuals if they want to change a default allocation of 100% in the risky asset leads to more investment in the risky asset than asking them whether they accept such an allocation. Perceived wealth manager honesty appears to mediate the relationship between the default nudge and the rating of the advice.

Intertemporal choices (i.e., the choice between a sooner available but smaller reward and a later available but larger reward) were initially thought to reflect stable preferences for immediate or delayed rewards. However, recently, it has been shown that intertemporal choices are influenced by factors such as context variables and attentional processes. Here, we investigate if another factor, the choice repetition bias, affects decision making and attentional processes in intertemporal choice. The choice repetition bias is characterized by the tendency to repeat previous choices and to be slower when switching to an alternative choice. In a series of two experiments (including a preregistered, eye-tracking study), we find that the choice repetition bias exists in intertemporal choice. We also find tentative support for an early attentional bias towards the favored attribute dimension of the previous choice; however, this effect disappears when taking the whole decision process into account. This finding raises interesting questions about the cognitive processes underlying the choice repetition bias. In addition, we successfully replicate other attentional effects from the intertemporal choice literature (e.g., more fixations on monetary dimension, gaze cascade effect).

Wang, Y. (2024). The Categorization of Continuous Attributes. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 37(2), e2383.

There is an omission of acknowledgement of Professor Christopher Hsee's contribution to this project. The author wants to thank Professor Christopher K. Hsee for his valuable contributions to the research idea and study design throughout this project.

I sincerely apologize for this error.