Journal of Behavioral Decision Making最新文献

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.

There has been considerable conceptual and empirical progress on the measurement of rational thinking in adult samples. Studies in developmental samples have demonstrated that many of these domains and paradigms can also be assessed in children and youth, especially in adolescent samples. Here, we present an efficient rationality assessment battery for adolescents and youth—the Assessment of Rational Thinking for Youth (ART-Y). The ART-Y consists of five subtests: Probabilistic and Statistical Thinking, Scientific Thinking, Avoidance of Framing, Knowledge Calibration, and Rational Temporal Discounting. Two supplementary measures of thinking dispositions are included in the ART-Y: Actively Open-Minded Thinking (AOT) and Deliberative Thinking. The ART-Y battery was examined in a sample of 143 adolescents (mean age = 15.4 years). The five rational thinking subtests displayed intercorrelations largely consistent with those obtained in the adult literature. Age, cognitive ability, problem solving, probabilistic numeracy, and thinking dispositions predicted variance differently across the five subtests of the ART-Y, but again largely consistent with the adult literature. These measures, along with the ART-Y subtests, were examined as predictors of two real-world skills: financial literacy and academic achievement. Scientific thinking, knowledge calibration, and rational temporal discounting were significant unique predictors of financial literacy when statistically controlling for cognitive ability. Scientific thinking predicted academic achievement when statistically controlling for cognitive ability.