We study the effects of experimental manipulation of decision mode (rational“brain” vs. affective “heart”) and individualdifference in processing styles (intuition vs. deliberation) on prosocialbehavior. In a survey experiment with a diverse sample of the Swedish population(n = 1,828), we elicited the individuals’ processingstyle and we experimentally manipulated reliance on affect or reason, regardlessof subjects’ preferred mode. Prosocial behavior was measured across aseries of commonly used and incentivized games (prisoner’s dilemma game,public goods game, trust game, dictator game). Our results show that prosocialbehavior increased for the affective (“heart”) decision mode.Further, individual differences in processing style did not predict prosocialbehavior and did not interact with the experimental manipulation.

Can deliberation increase charitable giving when giving is impulsive (i.e., aone-time small gift in response to an immediate appeal)? We conduct two studiesin Israel and Sweden to compare two forms of deliberation, unguided and guided,in their ability to decrease the singularity effect (i.e., giving more to onethan many victims), often evident in impulsive giving. Under unguideddeliberation, participants were instructed to simply think hard before making adonation decision whereas participants in the guided deliberation condition wereasked to think how much different prespecified decision attributes shouldinfluence their decision. We find that both types of deliberation reduce thesingularity effect, as people no longer value the single victim higher than thegroup of victims. Importantly, this is driven by donations being decreased underdeliberation only to the single victim, but not the group of victims. Thus,deliberation affects donations negatively by overshadowing the affectiveresponse, especially in situations in which affect is greatest (i.e., to asingle victim). Last, the results show that neither type of deliberationsignificantly reversed the singularity effect, as people did not help the groupsignificantly more than the single victim. This means that deliberate thinkingdecreased the overall willingness to help, leading to a lower overall valuationof people in need.

Decades of research show that (i) social value orientation (SVO)is related to important behavioral outcomes such as cooperation and charitablegiving, and (ii) individuals differ in terms of SVO. Aprominent scale to measure SVO is the social value orientation slider measure(SVOSM). The central premise is that SVOSM captures a stable trait. But it isunknown how reliable the SVOSM is over repeated measurements more than one weekapart. To fill this knowledge gap, we followed a sample of N =495 over 6 months with monthly SVO measurements. We find that continuous SVOscores are similarly distributed (Anderson-Darling k-sample p =0.57) and highly correlated (r ≥ 0.66) across waves. Theintra-class correlation coefficient of 0.78 attests to a high test-retestreliability. Using multilevel modeling and multiple visualizations, wefurthermore find that one’s prior SVO score is highly indicative of SVOin future waves, suggesting that the slider measure consistently capturesone’s SVO. Our analyses validate the slider measure as a reliable SVOscale.

We report on three pre-registered studies testing whether people in the positionof describing a decision problem to decision-makers exploit this opportunity fortheir benefit, by choosing descriptions that may be potentially beneficial forthemselves. In Study 1, recipients of an extreme dictator game (where dictatorscan either take the whole pie for themselves or give it entirely to thereceiver) are asked to choose the instructions used to introduce the game todictators, from six different instructions known from previous research toaffect dictators’ decisions. The results demonstrate that some dictatorgame recipients tend to choose instructions that make them more likely toreceive a higher payoff. Study 2 shows that people who choose descriptions thatmake them more likely to receive a higher payoff indeed believe that they willreceive a higher payoff. Study 3 shows that receivers are more likely thandictators to choose these self-serving descriptions. In sum, our work suggeststhat some people choose descriptions that are beneficial to themselves; we alsofound some evidence that deliberative thinking and young age are associated withthis tendency.

Previous research has demonstrated systematic discrepancies between description-and experience-based risky choices. This description-experiencegap has been attributed to several factors such as reliance onsmall samples and differential probability weighting patterns. Becausecontext-dependent outcome expectation regarding safe options might influenceexperience-based risky choices, it constitutes another potential contributor tothe gap. Using a free-sampling paradigm and risky options with rare outcomesthat were either attractive or unattractive relative to the frequent ones, twoexperiments examined the existence and impact of such outcome expectation inexperience-based risky choices. Both experiments had two information conditions:hint information meant to eliminate outcome expectation was provided in onecondition but not the other. Experiment 1, which indicated the numbers ofpossible outcomes regarding both safe and risky options under the hintcondition, revealed different choice behaviors regarding risky-safe trialsbetween the two information conditions, no matter whether the rare outcome ofthe risky option in such a trial (i.e., the local context) wasattractive or unattractive. However, this result provided only indirect evidencefor the role of outcome expectation because it was unclear whether the hintinformation affected only the outcome expectation and thus evaluation of safeoptions or the evaluations of both safe and risky ones. With refined hintinformation arguably removing potential impacts on the evaluation of riskyoptions, Experiment 2 showed that expectation of a non-existent rare outcome ofsafe options did contribute to experience-based risky choices. In addition, itappeared that the rare outcomes of the risky options in other decision problemspresented in the same experiment (i.e., the global context)also affected outcome expectation. Future research could investigate how theinteraction between local and global contexts determines outcome expectation todeepen our understanding of its contribution to experience-based risky choiceand the description-experience gap.

The accuracy of human forecasters is often reduced because of incompleteinformation and cognitive biases that affect the judges. One approach to improvethe accuracy of the forecasts is to recalibrate them by means of non-lineartransformations that are sensitive to the direction and the magnitude of thebiases. Previous work on recalibration has focused on binary forecasts. Wepropose an extension of this approach by developing an algorithm that uses asingle free parameter to recalibrate complete subjective probabilitydistributions. We illustrate the approach with data from the quarterly Survey ofProfessional Forecasters (SPF) conducted by the European Central Bank (ECB),document the potential benefits of this approach, and show how it can be used inpractical applications.

Survey respondents over-forecast inflation: they expect it to be higher than itturns out to be. Furthermore, people are generally overconfident in theirforecasts. In two experiments, we show that providing outcome feedback thatinforms people of the actual level of the inflation that they have forecastreduces both over-forecasting and overconfidence in forecasts. Theseimprovements were preserved even after feedback had been withdrawn, a findingthat indicates that they were not produced because feedback had a temporaryincentive effect but because it had a more permanent learning effect. However,providing forecasters with more outcome feedback did not have a greater effect.Feedback appears to provide people with information about biases in theirjudgments and, once they have received that information, no additional advantageis obtained by giving it to them again. Reducing over-forecasting also had noclear effect on overall error. This was because providing outcome feedback afterevery judgment also affected the noise or random error in forecasts, increasingit by a sufficient amount to cancel out the benefits provided by the reductionin over-forecasting.

The act of suicide is commonly viewed as wrong in some sense, but it is not clearwhy this is. Based on past empirical research and philosophical theorizing, wetest ten different explanations for why suicide is opposed on normative grounds.Using a within-subjects design, Study 1 showed that seven out of tenmanipulations had significant effects on normative judgments of suicide: timeleft to live, lack of close social relationships, a history of prior immoralbehavior, the manner in which the suicide is committed, painful, incurablemedical issues, impulsive decision-making, and the actor’s ownmoral-religious background. However, in all cases, the act of suicide was stillconsidered wrong, overall. Using a between-subjects design, Study 2 tested thecombined effect of the seven significant manipulations from Study 1. Incombination, the seven manipulations eliminated opposition to suicide, onaverage. Implications for moral psychology and suicide prevention arediscussed.

Many individuals experience problems understanding and preparing forlow-probability/high-impact risk, like natural disasters and pandemics –unless they experience these events, yet then it is often too late to avoiddamages. Individuals with recent disaster risk experience are, on average,better prepared. This seems to be mediated through emotions and a betterunderstanding of the consequences. In this study, we use immersive virtualreality (VR) technology to examine whether a simulated disaster can stimulatepeople to invest in risk reducing measures in the context of flooding, which isone of the deadliest and most damaging natural disasters in the world. Weinvestigate the possibility to boost risk perception, coping appraisal, negativeemotions and damage-reducing behavior through a simulated flooding experience.We find that participants who experienced the virtual flood invest significantlymore in the flood risk investment game than those in the control group. Theinvestments in the VR treatment seem to decrease after four weeks but notsignificantly so.

Curbing the COVID-19 pandemic remains an ongoing global challenge. Institutionsoften release information about confirmed COVID-19 cases by citing the totalnumber of cases (e.g., 100,000), their (relative) frequency (e.g., 100 per1,000,000), or occasionally their proportion (e.g., 0.0001) in a region. Icompared the effect of these three presentation formats — total cases,frequency, and proportion — on people’s perceived risk. I foundpeople perceived a higher risk of COVID-19 from a total-cases format than fromfrequency formats when the denominators are relatively small, and the lowestrisk from a proportion format. Correspondingly, people underestimated totalinfections when given frequency and overestimated frequency when given totalnumber of cases. Additional comparisons were made among mathematicallyequivalent variations of frequency formats (e.g., 1 in 100, 10 in 1,000, 1,000in 10,000, etc.). The results provided qualified support for denominatorneglect, which seems to occur in bins into which denominators are grouped (e.g.,1–1000, 10000–100000), such that only across bins couldparticipants perceive differences. Finally, a mixed format of proportion andtotal cases reduced perceived risks from total cases alone, while a mixed formatof frequency and total cases failed to produce similar results. I conclude byproviding concrete suggestions regarding COVID-19 information releases.