Journal of Behavioral Decision Making最新文献

In two studies, we investigated the effectiveness of an automated form of calibration training via individualized feedback as a means to improve calibration in forecasts. In Experiment 1, this training procedure was tested in a realistic forecasting situation, namely, predicting the outcome of baseball games. Experiment 2 was similar but used a more controlled forecasting task, predicting whether competitors would bust in a modified version of blackjack. In comparison to a control group without training, participants provided with calibration training had reduced confidence levels, which translated into reduced overconfidence and better overall calibration in Experiment 2. The results across both studies suggest that an automated form of individualized performance feedback can reduce the confidence of initially overconfident forecasters.

How should managers supervising multiple teams allocate bonuses—based on each team's size or based on each team's contribution? According to the commonly accepted equity norm for allocating rewards, managers should distribute bonuses based on the relative contributions of the team. In contrast, we propose that managers are instead distracted by the number of employees in each team and neglect team contribution highlighted in the equity norm. Pilot Studies 1 and 2 confirmed that in both individual- and team-based bonus allocation situations, people preferred and actually allocated rewards according to the equity norm rather than the equality norm or the need norm when only contribution was manipulated. However, Study 1, a laboratory experiment, revealed that individuals assigned to the role of a manager allocated more bonuses to the larger team even though the two teams' actual work output (in terms of the number of units of work completed) was nearly identical. Study 2 replicated the key findings of Study 1 using a sample of managers supervising teams in organizations. Study 3 developed an information nudge—highlighting the team contribution—that reduced this bias. Together, these studies indicate a novel team-size bias that creeps in when managers allocate rewards to multiple teams and document an information nudge to reduce this bias.

Group-level risk attitudes are often studied across psychology domains (e.g., binge drinking among college students, and driving risk by gender). In measuring these differences by self-report, such work relies on the assumption that those measures of risk attitude function equivalently across demographic groups—that is, that the measure employed has the property of measurement invariance. Here, we examine the measurement invariance properties of a widely used risk measure, the Domain-Specific Risk-Taking (DOSPERT) scale across different demographic groups. A secondary goal was to determine whether a hierarchical or bifactor model better fits the data. Data were collected from Prolific using a stratified sampling approach to ensure sufficient and unconfounded sampling of sex, socioeconomic status (SES), and race (N = 412). Sample groups consisted of approximately 50 participants each, based on the intersection of three dichotomized demographic groups (high vs. low SES, White vs. non-White, and female vs. male). Subjects completed the 30-item form of the DOSPERT assessing likelihood, perceived benefit, and riskiness of the same 30 behaviors. The bifactor models showed a superior fit to the hierarchical models and were used in subsequent analyses. These analyses demonstrated that no models fit generally acceptable criteria for configural fit, and many models additionally fail cutoffs for metric and scalar invariance. This study adds to findings that the DOSPERT does not perform equivalently across demographic groups. We suggest development of a scale of risk that is invariant across commonly assessed demographic factors.

Many collective action problems are inherently linked to honesty. By deciding to behave honestly, people contribute to solving the collective action problem. We use a laboratory experiment from two sites (n = 331 and n = 319) to test whether honest preferences can drive cooperation and whether these preferences can be differentially activated by framing. Subjects participate in an asymmetric information variant of the public goods game in one of two treatments that vary only in their wording: The Contribution Frame uses a standard public good game framing, while in the Honesty Frame, words aimed to trigger honesty are used. We measure subjects' honesty in three ways using the (i) sender–receiver task, (ii) the die-roll task, and (iii) self-reported honesty levels and account for other-regarding preferences and social norms to disentangle key alternative motives. We find that all three measures of honesty preferences robustly predict contributions, as do other-regarding preferences and empirical expectations but not normative expectations. Additionally, honesty preferences predict contributions in the Honesty Frame but not in the Contribution Frame, although the difference between these is not consistently significant. Finally, we find no differences in average cooperation across the treatments.

People want what they cannot have. Yet would people still covet a forgone option when they have no initial preference for it? We examined this question in two parts by identifying five unique types of choice indifference and testing what choices people make when they have “no preference” for receiving an endowed good that subsequently becomes unavailable. First, we found that feeling indifferent among options is a common response to making decisions; furthermore, we found that previously established effects are significantly altered when accounting for participants' indifference. Second, when people experience the loss of a would-be endowed option, we found that they replace it with a similar option, to such an extent that they choose an option that is inferior to other available options. Together, our results demonstrate that the classic endowment effect does not only emerge after people are endowed but beforehand. That is, when people expect to be endowed with a good, they behave like it is already theirs and replace its loss with a similar good even when (1) they are initially indifferent to it and (2) they could choose something better.

We examined the effect of explicit norm nudge requests for compliance in a field study on workplace dishonesty and three controlled experiments on reciprocity. The requests were presented either with affirmation (e.g., “please pay” and “please remember to pay”) or negation (e.g., “please, do not forget to pay”) and solicited by either one person or three people who were also the beneficiaries of compliance. We also explored how these requests affected first time and repeated behaviors. We found no effect of the number of people soliciting the requests. However, we did find that for first-time behaviors, any request increased compliance compared with no request, and those worded with affirmation were more effective than those worded with negation. We replicated this pattern in repeated behaviors—both at the group and at the individual level—but only when the initial compliance, before the request, was low. Importantly, no increase emerged when individuals did not receive requests, showing that requests only, and not regression to the mean, explained the effect.

Visceral factors are negative emotions and drive and feeling states that grab people's attention and motivate them to engage in certain behaviors. They can contribute to discrepancies between an individual's long-term self-interest and their actual behavior. One such discrepancy concerns risk-taking in health contexts as well as in a variety of other domains such as financial or career-related decisions. This study examines the relationship between somatic symptoms of pain and domain-specific risk attitudes in participants of a large population-based cohort study. Somatic symptoms refer to back pain; pain in arms, legs, or joints; and headache. We show that the association between pain and risk attitudes is especially robust for the financial and leisure/sports domain across different model specifications. Pain is negatively associated with willingness to take risks in both domains. When controlling for fatigue (another visceral factor), the relationship between pain and risk attitudes persists only in the financial context. However, associations between fatigue and risk attitudes emerge in the general, health, leisure/sports, and career domains. We discuss potential implications of our findings especially in light of financial decision-making.

Voluntary actions are accompanied by a sense of control over this action and its effects. Forming an appropriate sense of control (or sense of agency) has widespread consequences of individual and societal relevance. Moreover, perceived control might serve as a powerful action motivator, although this critical function has been addressed scarcely so far. Thus, in two experiments (N = 101 adults for each study), we directly examined the value of control for human agents by allowing participants to choose between financial gain and situational control. Crucially, a significant share of participants chose to be in control even when this option was less financially rewarding. That is, participants had to be offered 66% (Study 1) and 34% (Study 2) of expected asset earnings as an additional reward to make them predictably waive control. In addition to the value of objective decision rights, we also measured subjectively perceived control. This is a further extension of prior research as similar levels of objective control can lead to substantially different subjective feelings of control. Hereby, we found a share of the participants to create an illusionary sense of agency in situations of little objective control. These results portray perceived control as a powerful motivator for human behavior that comes with a unique and quantifiable value for individual agents.

The ostrich effect refers to the observation that people prioritize gathering information about prospectively positive financial outcomes. It is especially problematic when information about negative and positive outcomes is equally useful for making sound financial decisions. Yet, it is unclear to what extent this phenomenon is moderated by whether outcome information is useful for making choices. Here, we test whether making outcome information instrumental to choice moderates the ostrich effect by randomly assigning 800 adults to one of two computer-based gambling tasks, one in which they chose between two 50/50 win/lose gambles and another in which the computer chose one for them at random. The four possible outcomes were concealed by win/loss marked tiles, and participants were required to reveal three of the four possible outcomes before a gamble could be selected. The key finding was that demand for full information about losses increased significantly when participants made their own choices, and thus, outcome information was instrumental. The findings suggest that information about losses is de-prioritized particularly when people cannot take action to influence payoffs.

Investigating decision making with two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) tasks may artificially constrain decisions, especially in the moral domain where we may want to express nuance. We aimed at examining whether paradigm constraints—that is, binary (as in 2AFC tasks) versus continuous response mode—constrained early decision-making dynamics, as traceable in mouse movements. In the moral domain, long sentences are often used, and we therefore developed a new mouse-tracking design adapted to long-to-process stimuli while also introducing mouse-tracking-compatible continuous response scales. Two preregistered studies, with adapted (Study 1) and newly designed (Study 2) mouse-tracking paradigms tested how trajectories differed between response modes from an early stage onwards. Overall, findings provide evidence consistent with hypothesis, ruling out alternative explanations in terms of motor planning, hence questioning the prevalence of 2AFC tasks in decision-making research. Discussion further focuses on paradigmatic challenges addressed by the present research and basic contributions regarding the bidirectional influences between ongoing actions and decisions.