An intrapersonal externality exists when an individual’s decisions affect the outcomes of her future decisions. It can result in decreasing or increasing average returns to the rate of consumption, as occurs in addiction or exercise. Experimentation using the Harvard Game, which models intrapersonal externalities, has found differences in decision making between drug users and control subjects, leading to the argument that these externalities influence the course of illicit drug use. Nevertheless, it is unclear how participants who behave optimally conceptualise the problem. We report two experiments using a simplified Harvard Game, which tested the differences in contingency knowledge between participants who chose optimally and participants who did not. Those who demonstrated optimal performance exhibited both a pattern of correct responses and systematic errors to questions about the payoff schedules. The pattern suggested that they learned explicit knowledge of the change in reinforcement on a trail-by-trial basis. They did not have, or need, a full knowledge of the historical interaction leading to each payoff. We also found no evidence of choice differences between participants who were given a guaranteed payment and participants who were paid contingent on their performance, but those given a guaranteed payment were able to report more contingency knowledge as the experiment progressed, suggesting that they explored more rather than settling into a routine. Experiment 2 showed that using a fixed inter-trial interval did not change the results.

We compare four different risk-taking propensity measures on their ability to describe and to predict actual risky behavior in the domain of health. The risk-taking propensity measures we compare are: (1) a general measure of risk-taking propensity derived from a one-item survey question (Dohmen et al., 2011), (2) a risk aversion index calculated from a set of incentivized monetary gambles (Holt & Laury, 2002), (3) a measure of risk taking derived from an incentive compatible behavioral task—the Balloon Analog Risk Task (Lejuez et al., 2002), and (4) a composite score of risk-taking likelihood in the health domain from the Domain-Specific Risk Taking (DOSPERT) scale (Weber et al., 2002). Study participants are 351 clients of health centers around Witbank, South Africa. Our findings suggest that the one-item general measure is the best predictor of risky health behavior in our population, predicting two out of four behaviors at the 5% level and the remaining two behaviors at the 10% level. The DOSPERT score in the health domain performs well, predicting one out of four behaviors at the 1% significance level and two out of four behaviors at the 10% level, but only if the DOSPERT instrument contains a hypothetical risk-taking item that is similar to the actual risky behavior being predicted. Incentivized monetary gambles and the behavioral task were unrelated to actual health behaviors; they were unable to predict any of the risky health behaviors at the 10% level. We provide evidence that this is not because the participants had trouble understanding the monetary trade-off questions or performed poorly in the behavioral task. We conclude by urging researchers to further test the usefulness of the one-item general measure, both in explaining health related risk-taking behavior and in other contexts.

People make systematic and predictable mistakes regarding estimations of average speed and journey time. In addition, people have been shown to commit a time-saving bias by underestimating the time that can be saved when increasing from a low speed and overestimating the time that can be saved when increasing from a relatively high speed. These misestimations have been shown to relate to biases in judgments of the speed required to arrive at a specific time and to choosing unduly high speed. Professional drivers, such as taxi drivers, might be less susceptible to these biases due to their increased driving experience. In the current study, we interviewed taxi drivers about a journey they were currently making and examined their estimations of journey time, average speed and time savings. Compared to a group of non-professional car drivers, taxi drivers showed the same considerable misestimations of driving speed, journey time and time savings as non-professionals. However, overestimations of time savings among taxi drivers were smaller than those made by car drivers. We discuss the practical significance of these findings.

We present the Maximization Inventory, which consists of three separate scales: decision difficulty, alternative search, and satisficing. We show that the items of the Maximization Inventory have much better psychometric properties when compared to the original Maximization Scale (Schwartz et al., 2002). The satisficing scale is a new addition to the study of maximization behavior, and we demonstrate that this scale is positively correlated with positive adaptation, whereas the decision difficulty and alternative search scales are positively correlated with nonproductive decisional behavior. The Maximization Inventory was then compared to previous maximization scales and, while the decision difficulty and alternative search scales are positively correlated with similar previous constructs, the satisficing scale offers a dimension entirely different from maximization.

This research examines the relationship between positive and negative perceptions of pensions and motivation to engage in the decision process of choosing a private pension plan, as well as satisfaction from the chosen pension plan, among trained economists. A sample of 134 economists completed a self-report survey examining the decision process of different decision contexts in life, including pension decisions. Overall, participants showed low motivation to engage in the process of choosing a private pension plan, compared to their motivation to engage in other decision tasks. However, economists invested more in the decision process and showed greater satisfaction from their decision regarding their pension plan when they had a more positive perception of pensions. This perception is represented by higher subjective likelihood of receiving pension allowances for a long period, and by a profitable view of the balance between current payments and expected incomes from pension saving.

Research on forecasting is effectively limited to forecasts that are expressed with clarity; which is to say that the forecasted event must be sufficiently well-defined so that it can be clearly resolved whether or not the event occurred and forecasts certainties are expressed as quantitative probabilities. When forecasts are expressed with clarity, then quantitative measures (scoring rules, calibration, discrimination, etc.) can be used to measure forecast accuracy, which in turn can be used to measure the comparative accuracy of different forecasting methods. Unfortunately most real world forecasts are not expressed clearly. This lack of clarity extends to both the description of the forecast event and to the use of vague language to express forecast certainty. It is thus difficult to assess the accuracy of most real world forecasts, and consequently the accuracy the methods used to generate real world forecasts. This paper addresses this deficiency by presenting an approach to measuring the accuracy of imprecise real world forecasts using the same quantitative metrics routinely used to measure the accuracy of well-defined forecasts. To demonstrate applicability, the inferred probability method is applied to measure the accuracy of forecasts in fourteen documents examining complex political domains.

Individual true and error theory assumes that responses by the same person to the same choice problem within a block of trials are based on the same true preferences but may show preference reversals due to random error. Between blocks, a person’s true preferences may differ or stay the same. This theory is illustrated with studies testing two critical properties that distinguish models of risky decision making: (1) restricted branch independence, which is implied by original prospect theory and violated in a specific way by both cumulative prospect theory and the priority heuristic; and (2) stochastic dominance, which is implied by cumulative prospect theory. Corrected for random error, most individuals systematically violated stochastic dominance, ruling out cumulative prospect theory. Furthermore, most people violated restricted branch independence in the opposite way predicted by that theory and the priority heuristic. Both violations are consistent with the transfer of attention exchange model. No one was found whose data were compatible with cumulative prospect theory, except for those that were also compatible with expected utility, and no one satisfied the priority heuristic.

The construction of social preferences often requires one to reconcile various social motives, such as concern with unfavorable inequality and maximization of social welfare. We propose a novel theory whereby people’s level of agency influences the relative intensities of their social motives, and thus their social preferences. Agency in this context refers to decision makers’ active involvement in the processes that produce social outcomes. Nonagentic decision makers are not involved in creating the outcomes. Therefore, the comparison between self and others is highly informative for them and they shun settings in which their outcome appears to be inferior. Conversely, agentic decision makers, who take action to influence social outcomes, care more about others’ outcomes and are more inclined to promote social welfare. We report five studies testing the agency hypothesis. Participants were presented with realistic scenarios involving outcomes for themselves and another person. In each scenario, the outcome for oneself was fixed, while the outcome for the other person varied. The participants’ task was to indicate their satisfaction with the other person obtaining either the same outcome as their own or a better one. We found that participants who were involved in creating the outcomes (agentic condition) were more satisfied with the other getting the better option than were participants who were not involved (nonagentic condition). Even low levels of influence on the outcomes were sufficient for a strong agency effect to occur. We discuss the agency hypothesis in relation to theories of social preference, the effects of voicing and participation in decision processes, and trade-offs in public policy.

A recent study indicates that acute stress affects moral decision making (Youssef et al., in press). The current study examines whether results can be replicated using a different kind of stressor and a different kind of stress measurement. We induced stress in 25 participants with a cover-story of an anticipated speech. Another group of 25 participants was tested in a control condition. Stress levels and stress responses were assessed with questionnaires and heart rate. All participants performed a moral decision-making task describing moral dilemmas. These dilemmas were either personal or impersonal and each offered a utilitarian and a non-utilitarian option. Acutely stressed participants, compared to control participants, made fewer utilitarian judgments and needed longer for making a decision. Individual physiological stress response was related to fewer utilitarian judgments. Results are in line with those previously found although different instruments were used.

Previous research on the role of choice set size in decision making has focused on decision outcomes and satisfaction. In contrast, little is known about interindividual differences in preferences for larger versus smaller choice sets, let alone the causes of such differences. Drawing on self-efficacy theory, two studies examined the role of decision-making self-efficacy in preferences for choice. Using a correlational approach, Study 1 (n = 89) found that decision-making self-efficacy was positively associated with preferences for choice across a range of consumer decisions. This association was found both between- and within-subjects. Study 2 (n = 65) experimentally manipulated decision-making self-efficacy for an incentive-compatible choice among photo printers. Preferences for choice and pre-choice information seeking were significantly lower in a low-efficacy condition compared to a high-efficacy condition and a control group. Future research directions and implications for decision-making theory and public policy are discussed.

A recent survey of inequality (Norton and Ariely, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 9–12) asked respondents to indicate what percent of the nation’s total wealth is—and should be—controlled by richer and poorer quintiles of the U.S. population. We show that such measures lead to powerful anchoring effects that account for the otherwise remarkable findings that respondents reported perceiving, and desiring, extremely low inequality in wealth. We show that the same anchoring effects occur in other domains, namely web page popularity and school teacher salaries. We introduce logically equivalent questions about average levels of inequality that lead to more accurate responses. Finally, when we made respondents aware of the logical connection between the two measures, the majority said that typical responses to the average measures, indicating higher levels of inequality, better reflected their actual perceptions and preferences than did typical responses to percent measures.

Eyal, T., Liberman, N., & Trope, Y., (2008). Judging near and distant virtue and vice. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 1204–1209, explored how psychological distance influences moral judgment and found that more extreme moral appraisals were given to distal behaviors rather than proximal behaviors. Contrary to Eyal et al., the current paper presents converging evidence showing that moral judgments become more extreme at lower-level construals compared to higher-level construals. In four experiments using two different priming techniques, we manipulated construal levels and assessed their effects on moral judgment. High-level consturals elicited less moral outrage toward transgressions and less positive ratings of virtuous behaviors than low-level construals. A replication study was also conducted to reconcile the inconsistencies between the current results and those of Eyal et al. Possible explanations for the different results between two studies are discussed.

People not only seek to avoid losses or secure gains; they also attempt to create opportunities for obtaining positive outcomes. When distributing money between gambles with equal probabilities, people often invest in turning negative gambles into positive ones, even at a cost of reduced expected value. Results of an experiment revealed that (1) the preference to turn a negative outcome into a positive outcome exists when people’s ability to do so depends on their performance levels (rather than merely on their choice), (2) this preference is amplified when the likelihood to turn negative into positive is high rather than low, and (3) this preference is attenuated when people can lie about their performance levels, allowing them to turn negative into positive not by performing better but rather by lying about how well they performed.

Using college student samples, two studies were conducted to validate the Chinese version of the Domain-Specific Risk-Taking (DOSPERT) Scale. The results replicated important findings reported by Weber et al. (2002) in the Chinese culture. Risk-taking and risk perception were domain-specific, whereas perceived-risk attitudes were relatively stable across domains, supporting the risk-return model of risk taking. Results of both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) showed that the ethical, recreational, health/safety, and gambling domains were preserved in the Chinese version of DOSPERT and that the items from social and investment domains formed one factor. This result may be explained by Weber and Hsee's (1998) cushion hypothesis. Other possible reasons for this cross-cultural difference in the factor structure were also discussed.

We employed simple gambles to investigate information processing in relation to the compatibility effect. Subjects should be more likely to engage in a deliberative thinking strategy when completing a pricing task rather than a rating task. We used eye-tracking methodology to measure information acquisition and processing in order to test the above hypothesis as well as to show that losses and alternatives with uncertain outcomes are more likely than gains and alternatives with sure outcomes to be processed through a deliberative thinking process. Results showed that pupil dilations, fixation duration and number of fixations increased when subjects evaluated the gambles with a pricing task. Additionally, the number of fixations increased as the gamble outcome became increasingly negative and when the outcome was uncertain (vs. sure). Fixations were also predictive of subjects’ final evaluations of the gambles. We discuss our results in light of the cognitive processes underlying different response modes in economic preferences.

The impact of default options on choice is a reliable, well-established behavioral finding. However, several different effects may lend to choosing defaults in an often indistinguishable manner, including loss aversion, inattention, information leakage, and transaction costs associated with switching. We introduce the notion of the “default pull” as the effect that even subtle default options have on decision makers’ uncertainty about their own preferences. The default pull shapes what a decision maker prefers by causing her to consider whether she prefers the default. We demonstrate default pull effects using a simple decision making task that strips away many of the usual reasons that defaults could affect choices, and we show that defaults can have substantial effects on choice, even when the default itself was not chosen.

Background: The Domain-Specific Risk Taking scale (DOSPERT) is a widely used instrument that measures perceived risk and benefit and attitude toward risk for activities in several domains, but does not include medical risks.

Objective: To develop a medical risk domain subscale for DOSPERT.

Methods: Sixteen candidate risk items were developed through expert discussion. We conducted cognitive telephone interviews, an online survey, and a random-digit dialing (RDD) telephone survey to reduce and refine the scale, explore its factor structure, and obtain estimates of reliability.

Participants: Eight patients recruited from UIC medical center waiting rooms participated in 45-60 minute cognitive interviews. Thirty Amazon Mechanical Turk workers completed the online survey. One hundred Chicago-area residents completed the RDD telephone survey.

Results: On the basis of cognitive interviews, we eliminated five items due to poor variance or participant misunderstanding. The online survey suggested that two additional items were negatively correlated with the scale, and we considered them candidates for removal. Factor analysis of the responses in the RDD telephone survey and non-statistical factors led us to recommend a final set of 6 items to represent the medical risk domain. The final set of items included blood donation, kidney donation, daily medication use for allergies, knee replacement surgery, general anesthesia in dentistry, and clinical trial participation. The interitem reliability (Cronbach’s α) of the final set of 6 items ranged from 0.57-0.59 depending on the response task. Older respondents gave lower overall ratings of expected benefit from the activities.

Conclusion: We refined a set of items to measure risk and benefit perceptions for medical activities. Our next step will be to add these items to the complete DOSPERT scale, confirm the scale’s psychometric properties, determine whether medical risks constitute a psychologically distinct domain from other risky activities, and characterize individual differences in medical risk attitudes.

Shame leads to devaluation of the social self, and thus to a desire to improve self-esteem. Money, which is related to the notion of one’s ability, may help people demonstrate competence and gain self-esteem and respect from others. Based on the perspectives of feelings-as-information and threatened ego, we tested the hypothesis that a sense of shame heightens the desire for money, prompting self-interested behaviors as reflected by monetary donations and social value orientation. The results showed that subjects in the shame condition donated less money (Experiment 1) and exhibited more self-interested choices in the modified decomposed game (Experiment 2). The desire for money as reflected in overestimated coin sizes mediated the effect of shame on self-interested behavior. Our findings suggest that shame elicits the desire to acquire money to amend the threatened social self and improve self-esteem; however, it may induce a self-interested inclination that could harm social relationships.

Investors, like any decision maker, feel regret when they compare the outcome of an investment with what the outcome would have been had they invested differently. We argue and show that this counterfactual comparison process is most likely to take place when the decision maker’s expectations are violated. Across five scenario experiments we found that decision makers were influenced only by forgone investment outcomes when the realized investment fell short of the expected result. However, when their investments exceeded prior expectations, the effect of foregone investment on regret disappeared. In addition, Experiment 4 found that individual differences in the need to maximize further moderated the effects of their expectations, such that maximizers always take into account the forgone investment. The final experiment found that when probed to make counterfactual comparisons, also investments that exceed expectations may lead to regret. Together these experiments reveal insights into the comparative processes leading to decision regret.

We test in the context of a dictator game the proposition that individuals may experience a self-control conflict between the temptation to act selfishly and the better judgment to act pro-socially. We manipulated the likelihood that individuals would identify self-control conflict, and we measured their trait ability to implement self-control strategies. Our analysis reveals a positive and significant correlation between trait self-control and pro-social behavior in the treatment where we expected a relatively high likelihood of conflict identification—but not in the treatment where we expected a low likelihood. The magnitude of the effect is of economic significance. We conclude that subtle cues might prove sufficient to alter individuals’ perception of allocation opportunities, thereby prompting individuals to draw on their own cognitive resources to act pro-socially.