When people donate, they rarely give to the charities that do the most good perdollar. Why is this? One possibility is that they do not know how to giveeffectively. Another possibility is that they are not motivated to do so. Acrosssix tasks (Studies 1a, 1b), we found support for both explanations. Among laydonors, we observed multiple misconceptions—regarding disaster relief,overhead costs, donation splitting, and the relative effectiveness of local andforeign charities—that reduced the effectiveness of their giving.Similarly, we found that they were unfamiliar with the most effective charities(Studies 2a, 2b). Debunking these misconceptions and informing people abouteffectiveness boosted effective donations; however, a portion of lay donorscontinued to give ineffectively to satisfy their personal preferences. Bycontrast, a sample of self-identified effective altruists gave effectivelyacross all tasks. They exhibited none of the misconceptions that we observedamong lay donors and overwhelmingly favored the most effective option in theirchoice set (Study 3). Taken together, our studies imply that donors need to beboth informed and motivated to give effectively on a consistent basis.

A prosocial action typically provides a more sizable benefit when directed at those who have less as opposed to those who have more. However, not all prosocial acts have a direct bearing on socioeconomic disadvantage, nor does disadvantage necessarily imply a greater need for the prosocial outcome. Of interest here, welfare impact may depend on the number of beneficiaries but not on their socioeconomic status. Across four preregistered studies of life-saving decisions, we demonstrate that when allocating resources, many people are benevolently partial. That is, they choose to help the disadvantaged even when this transparently implies sacrificing lives. We suggest that people construct prosocial aid as an opportunity to correct morally aversive inequalities, thus making relatively more disadvantaged recipients a more justifiable target of help. Benevolent partiality is reduced when people reflect beforehand on what aspects they will prioritize in their donation decision.

In this paper we investigate the effect of moral suasion on ingroup favouritism. We report a well-powered, pre-registered, two-stage 2x2 mixed-design experiment. In the first stage, groups are formed on the basis of how participants answer a set of questions, concerning non-morally relevant issues in one treatment (assorting on non-moral preferences), and morally relevant issues in another treatment (assorting on moral preferences). In the second stage, participants choose how to split a given amount of money between participants of their own group and participants of the other group, first in the baseline setting and then in a setting where they are told to do what they believe to be morally right (moral suasion). Our main results are: (i) in the baseline, participants tend to favour their own group to a greater extent when groups are assorted according to moral preferences, compared to when they are assorted according to non-moral preferences; (ii) the net effect of moral suasion is to decrease ingroup favouritism, but there is also a non-negligible proportion of participants for whom moral suasion increases ingroup favouritism; (iii) the effect of moral suasion is substantially stable across group assorting and four pre-registered individual characteristics (gender, political orientation, religiosity, pro-life vs pro-choice ethical convictions).

In 2012, two independent groups simultaneously demonstrated that intuitive mindset enhances belief in God. However, there is now some mixed evidence on both the effectiveness of manipulations used in these studies and the effect of mindset manipulation on belief in God. Thus, this proposal attempted to replicate one of those experiments (Shenhav, Rand & Greene, 2012) for the first time in a high-powered experiment using an under-represented population (Turkey). In line with the intuitive belief hypothesis, a negative correlation between reflectiveness and religious belief emerged, at least in one of the experimental conditions. In contrast to that hypothesis, however, the results revealed no effect of the cognitive style manipulation on religious belief. Although a self-report measure (Faith in Intuition) provided evidence that the manipulation worked as intended, it did not influence actual performance (Cognitive Reflection Test), suggesting a demand effect problem. Overall, the results failed to provide support for the intuitive belief hypothesis in our non-WEIRD sample, despite generally following the predicted patterns, and suggest that using stronger manipulation techniques are warranted in future studies.

People who possess greater mathematical skills (i.e., numeracy) are generally more accurate in interpreting numerical data than less numerate people. However, recent evidence has suggested that more numerate people may use their numerical skills to interpret data only if their initial interpretation conflicts with their worldview. That is, if an initial, intuitive (but incorrect) interpretation of data appears to disconfirm one’s beliefs, then numerical skills are used to further process the data and reach the correct interpretation, whereas numerical skills are not used in situations where an initial incorrect interpretation of the data appears to confirm one’s beliefs (i.e., motivated numeracy). In the present study, participants were presented with several data problems, some with correct answers confirming their political views and other disconfirming their views. The difficulty of these problems was manipulated to examine how numeracy would influence the rate of correct responses on easier vs. more difficult problems. Results indicated that participants were more likely to answer problems correctly if the correct answer confirmed rather than disconfirmed their political views, and this response pattern did not depend on problem difficulty or numerical skill. Although more numerate participants were more accurate overall, this was true both for problems in which the correct answer confirmed and disconfirmed participants’ political views.

Previous studies have shown that people are truth-biased in that they tend to believe the information they receive, even if it is clearly flagged as false. The truth bias has been recently proposed to be an instance of meta-cognitive myopia, that is, of a generalized human insensitivity towards the quality and correctness of the information available in the environment. In two studies we tested whether meta-cognitive myopia and the ensuing truth bias may operate in a courtroom setting. Based on a well-established paradigm in the truth-bias literature, we asked mock jurors (Study 1) and professional judges (Study 2) to read two crime reports containing aggravating or mitigating information that was explicitly flagged as false. Our findings suggest that jurors and judges are truth-biased, as their decisions and memory about the cases were affected by the false information. We discuss the implications of the potential operation of the truth bias in the courtroom, in the light of the literature on inadmissible and discredible evidence, and make some policy suggestions.

In social contexts, we refer to strategic sophistication as the ability to adapt our own behavior based on the possible actions of others. In the current study, we explore the role of other-oriented attention and cognitive reflection in explaining heterogeneity in strategic sophistication. In two eye-tracking experiments, we registered eye movements of participants while playing matrix games of increasing relational complexity (2x2 and 3x3 matrices), and we analyzed individual gaze patterns to reveal the ongoing mechanisms of integration of own and others’ incentives in the current game representation. Moreover, participants completed the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), in addition to alternative measures of cognitive ability. In both classes of games, higher cognitive reflection levels specifically predict the ability to incorporate the counterpart’s incentives in the current model of the game, as well as higher levels of strategic sophistication. Conversely, players exhibiting low cognitive reflection tend to pay less attention to relevant transitions between the counterpart’s payoffs, and such incomplete visual analysis leads to out-of-equilibrium choices. Gaze patterns appear to completely mediate the relationship between cognitive reflection and strategic choices. Our results shed new light on the cognitive factors driving heterogeneity in strategic thinking and on theories of bounded rationality.

The use of gamification to motivate engagement has greatly increased the number of ways in which people compete. Many of these competitions allow individuals to see how they rank as a competition progresses. Our work aims to provide a better understanding of how individuals feel about different rank outcomes in competitions. We do this by applying the principles of expected utility theory to elicit utility curves for over 3,000 people across three studies using hypothetical competition scenarios. We find consistent support for the following generalizations: 1) individuals are risk-seeking when in second place, 2) they are risk-averse when in second-to-last place, and 3) the utility decrease going from first to second place is greater than their decrease going from second-to-last to last place. Our results suggest individuals are both last-place averse and first-place seeking, with an even stronger inclination towards the latter.

Food decisions are driven by differences in value of choice alternatives such that high value items are preferred over low value items. However, recent research has demonstrated that by implementing the Cue-Approach Training (CAT) the odds of choosing low value items over high value items can be increased. This effect was explained by increased attention to the low value items induced by CAT. Our goal was to replicate the original findings and to address the question of the underlying mechanism by employing eye-tracking during participants’ choice making. During CAT participants were presented with images of food items and were instructed to quickly respond to some of them when an auditory cue was presented (cued items), and not without this cue (uncued items). Next, participants made choices between two food items that differed on whether they were cued during CAT (cued versus uncued) and in pre-training value (high versus low). As predicted, results showed participants were more likely to select a low value food item over a high value food item for consumption when the low value food item had been cued compared to when the low value item had not been cued. Important, and against our hypothesis, there was no significant increase in gaze time for low value cued items compared to low value uncued items. Participants did spend more time fixating on the chosen item compared to the unchosen alternative, thus replicating previous work in this domain. The present research thus establishes the robustness of CAT as means of facilitating choices for low value over high value food but could not demonstrate that this increased preference was due to increased attention for cued low value items. The present research thus raises the question how CAT may increase choices for low value options.

New technology can be used to enhance safety by imposing costs, or taxes, on certain reckless behaviors. The current paper presents two pre-registered experiments that clarify the impact of taxation of this type on decisions from experience between three alternatives. Experiment 1 focuses on an environment in which safe choices maximize expected returns and examines the impact of taxing the more attractive of two risky options. The results reveal a U-shaped effect of taxation: some taxation improves safety, but too much taxation impairs safety. Experiment 2 shows a clear negative effect of high taxation even when the taxation eliminates the expected benefit from risk-taking. Comparison of alternative models suggests that taxing reckless behaviors backfires when it significantly increases the proportion of experiences in which a more dangerous behavior leads to better outcomes than the taxed behavior. Qualitative hypotheses derived from naïve sampling models assuming small samples were only partially supported by the data.

Information search is key to making decision from experience: exploration permits people to learn about the statistical properties of choice options and thus to become aware of rare but potentially momentous decision consequences. This registered report investigates whether and how people differ when making decisions from experience in isolation versus under competitive pressure, which may have important implications for choice performance in different types of choice environments: in “kind” environments without any rare and extreme events, frugal search is sufficient to identify advantageous options. Conversely, in “wicked” environments with skewed outcome distributions, rare but important events will tend to be missed in frugal search. One theoretical view is that competitive pressure encourages efficiency and may thereby boost adaptive search in different environments. An alternative and more pessimistic view is that competitive pressure triggers agency-related concerns, leading to minimal search irrespective of the choice environment, and hence to inferior choice performance. Using a sampling game, the present study (N = 277) found that solitary search was not adaptive to different choice environments (M = 14 samples), leading to a high choice performance in a kind and in a moderately wicked environment, but somewhat lower performance in an extremely wicked environment. Competitive pressure substantially reduced search irrespective of the choice environment (M = 4 samples), thus negatively affecting overall choice performance. Yet, from the perspective of a cost-benefit framework, frugal search may be efficient under competitive pressure. In sum, this report extends research on decisions from experience by adopting an ecological perspective (i.e., systematically varying different choice environments) and by introducing a cost-benefit framework to evaluate solitary and competitive search — with the latter constituting a challenging problem for people in an increasingly connected world.