Journal of Behavioral Decision Making最新文献

About 95% of criminal convictions in the United States are obtained through plea decisions, a growing global practice. Courts justify these convictions based on defendant choice—defendants, as rational agents, can freely choose to plead guilty or go to trial. However, a fundamental axiom of rational choice—descriptive invariance—has never been effectively tested for plea decisions. To test this axiom, we manipulated gain–loss framing of plea options. The shadow-of-trial model, the leading theory of plea decision-making, is predicated on expected utility theory which is in turn predicated on the invariance axiom; if the axiom is falsified, the entire structure collapses. Thus, framing effects are important as a test of fundamental assumptions undergirding practice and as an empirical phenomenon revealing effects of context. We tested framing effects in students and community members including those with criminal involvement for whom plea bargaining has personal relevance. Varying subtle changes in wording of outcomes, we produced pronounced differences in choices to accept a plea rather than proceed to trial. These framing effects were robust to age, sex, educational attainment, risk propensity (DOSPERT and sensation seeking), and loss aversion. Perceived fairness of the legal system increased acceptance and risk propensity decreased it (each about 32%). However, controlling for those effects, loss (compared to gain) framing increased the odds of going to trial by 664%. Criminal involvement did not account for additional variance. These results are consistent with prospect theory and fuzzy-trace theory, but they challenge the legal theory of bargaining in “the shadow of trial.”

This study examined economic risk preferences using a multidimensional approach in adolescents and young adults (N = 444, ages 13–27). Despite the two major theoretical approaches in adolescent economic risk-taking—socioemotional theories and fuzzy-trace theory—comparatively little is known about the role of incidental affective factors in economic risk-taking. We tested six demographic and psychological determinants (age, gender, positive/negative affect, state anxiety, and indecision) on two economic risk decision tasks (loss aversion and skewness). Adolescents reported higher positive affect and lower negative affect than adults, but anxiety and indecision were age-invariant. Women showed lower positive affect and higher negative affect, state anxiety, and indecision compared to men. We found women to be more loss-averse; all other factors were not related to loss aversion. Adolescents were equally likely to accept symmetric and skewed gambles, whereas adults had more nuanced preferences. Adolescents also demonstrated a reduced bias toward negatively skewed risks compared to young adults, but both groups showed similar preferences for positively skewed and symmetric risks. These results support fuzzy-trace theory's prediction of age-related shifts from verbatim to gist representations: More verbatim processing during adolescence facilitated risk-taking in negatively skewed risks, diverging from prospect theory. Positive affect shifted risk preference for adolescents and young adults in divergent directions—adolescents favored symmetrical risks more, while adults favored negatively skewed risks more. These patterns illustrate that adolescents and young adults in positive moods demonstrate risk preferences that are rare for their developmental stage, with potentially detrimental consequences depending on the choice at hand.

People often judge the quality of selection decisions made by others: The CEO of a firm may judge the quality of hiring decisions made by the firm's HR personnel; the readers of a journal may judge the quality of manuscript-acceptance decisions by the journal's editor. To accurately judge others' selection decision quality, evaluators should consider not only the outcome of the selection decisions but also the constraints of the decision-maker. For example, to judge the quality of the hiring decisions made by the HR personnel, the CEO should consider not only how many high-quality (vs. low-quality) candidates the HR personnel hired, but also how many high-quality (vs. low-quality) candidates applied, and how many candidates the HR personnel needed to hire. We theorize that evaluators tend to overlook these constraints, and, consequently, judge decision-makers who faced greater constraints as having made worse decisions than decisions-makers who faced lesser constraints, even if the former's decisions were actually as good as or better than the latter's. We refer to this phenomenon as Blaming the Strawless Brickmaker (from the saying “making bricks without straw”). Eight studies, employing mixed methods, demonstrate the Blaming-the-Strawless-Brickmaker effect, examine its underlying mechanism, and suggest ways to improve the quality of judged selection decision quality.

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.