Journal of Behavioral Decision Making最新文献

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.

We explore and demonstrate the anticipated and actual emotions that are experienced by individuals who engage in dishonest behaviors that benefit others (altruistic dishonesty) versus the self (egoistic dishonesty), and primarily focus on the positive emotion of pride. Across three preregistered experiments (one scenario experiment and two incentivized behavioral ones), we found that engaging in altruistic dishonesty was not only more prevalent than egoistic dishonesty but also evoked more pride and less guilt and shame. Interestingly, the increase in pride and decrease in guilt and shame when cheating solely for the benefit of others were attenuated when participants cheated for the benefit of both others and themselves. These findings shed further light on the emotional processes involved in dishonesty and highlight the understudied role of pride. The positive association between engaging in altruistic dishonesty and pride may explain the relatively high rates of altruistic dishonesty observed in the current and previous studies, as it suggests that having an altruistic justification may not only enable cheaters to maintain a clear conscience but also even boost how they feel about themselves.

A continuous attribute (e.g., calorie count) can be classified into separate categories (e.g., high vs. low), and a similar attribute value can fall into different categories depending on where the category boundaries are drawn. This research explores the effect of categorization on judgments of options (e.g., products and incentive-compatible games) with continuous attributes. I predict and find a systematic preference shift between two options that were presented with different categorization criteria: When two options involve a tradeoff between two continuous attributes, people tend to prefer the option with both attributes classified into the favorable categories given the categorization criteria. I further show that this effect is driven by larger perceived differences between attribute values across category boundaries and is moderated by people's tendency to rely on category information. Overall, this effect holds even when people are highly familiar with the attributes and feel confident to make similarity evaluations, when people are cued that the categories provide little informational value, and when people are incentivized to make deliberate decisions. The findings in this research carry both theoretical and practical implications.