In this investigation, we test whether temporal discounting is domain-specific (i.e., compared to other people, can an individual have a relatively high discount rate for one type of reward but a relatively low discount rate for another?), and we examine whether individual differences in the types of rewards one finds tempting explain domain-specificity in discount rates. Adults discounted delayed rewards they found particularly tempting (defined as the visceral attraction to and enjoyment of a reward) more steeply than did adults who did not find the rewards as tempting, contrary to what might be expected from the magnitude effect. Furthermore, we found significant group by domain interactions (e.g., chip lovers who do not like beer have relatively high discount rates for chips and relatively low discount rates for beer, whereas beer lovers who do not like chips showed the opposite pattern). These results suggest that domain-specificity in temptation partially accounts for corresponding domain-specificity in temporal discounting.

Overprecision is the most robust type of overconfidence. We present a new method that significantly reduces this bias and offers insight into its underlying cause. In three experiments, overprecision was significantly reduced by forcing participants to consider all possible outcomes of an event. Each participant was presented with the entire range of possible outcomes divided into intervals, and estimated each interval’s likelihood of including the true answer. The superiority of this Subjective Probability Interval Estimate (SPIES) method is robust to range widths and interval grain sizes. Its carryover effects are observed even in subsequent estimates made using the conventional, 90% confidence interval method: judges who first made SPIES judgments considered a broader range of values in subsequent conventional interval estimates as well.

The paper extends research on fixed-pie perceptions by suggesting that disputants may prefer proposals that are perceived to be equally attractive to both parties (i.e., balanced) rather than one-sided, because balanced agreements are seen as more likely to be successfully implemented. We test our predictions using data on Israeli support for the Geneva Accords, an agreement for a two state solution negotiated by unofficial delegations of Israel and the Palestinian Authority in 2003. The results demonstrate that Israelis are more likely to support agreements that are seen favorably by other Israelis, but — contrary to fixed-pie predictions — Israeli support for the accords does not diminish simply because a majority of Palestinians favors (rather than opposes) the accords. We show that implementation concerns create a demand among Israelis for balance in the degree to which each side favors (or opposes) the agreement. The effect of balance is noteworthy in that it creates considerable support for proposals even when a majority of Israelis and Palestinians oppose the deal.

When people learn to make decisions from experience, a reasonable intuition is that additional relevant information should improve their performance. In contrast, we find that additional information about foregone rewards (i.e., what could have gained at each point by making a different choice) severely hinders participants’ ability to repeatedly make choices that maximize long-term gains. We conclude that foregone reward information accentuates the local superiority of short-term options (e.g., consumption) and consequently biases choice away from productive long-term options (e.g., exercise). These conclusions are consistent with a standard reinforcement-learning mechanism that processes information about experienced and forgone rewards. In contrast to related contributions using delay-of-gratification paradigms, we do not posit separate top-down and emotion-driven systems to explain performance. We find that individual and group data are well characterized by a single reinforcement-learning mechanism that combines information about experienced and foregone rewards.

Inferences about target variables can be achieved by deliberate integration of probabilistic cues or by retrieving similar cue-patterns (exemplars) from memory. In tasks with cue information presented in on-screen displays, rule-based strategies tend to dominate unless the abstraction of cue-target relations is unfeasible. This dominance has also been demonstrated — surprisingly — in experiments that demanded the retrieval of cue values from memory (M. Persson & J. Rieskamp, 2009). In three modified replications involving a fictitious disease, binary cue values were represented either by alternative symptoms (e.g., fever vs. hypothermia) or by symptom presence vs. absence (e.g., fever vs. no fever). The former representation might hinder cue abstraction. The cues were predictive of the severity of the disease, and participants had to infer in each trial who of two patients was sicker. Both experiments replicated the rule-dominance with present-absent cues but yielded higher percentages of exemplar-based strategies with alternative cues. The experiments demonstrate that a change in cue representation may induce a dramatic shift from rule-based to exemplar-based reasoning in formally identical tasks.

Labeling a food as “organic” entails a claim about its production but is silent on its calorie content. Nevertheless, people infer that organic cookies are lower in calories and can be eaten more often than conventional cookies (Study 1). These inferences are observed even when the nutrition label conveys identical calorie content and are more pronounced among perceivers high on pro-environmentalism. Moreover, when evaluating a person with a weight-loss goal, forgoing exercise is deemed more acceptable when the person has just chosen organic rather than conventional dessert (Study 2). These results reflect an “organic/natural”-“healthy” association that is capable of biasing everyday judgments about diet and exercise.

According to the time-saving bias, drivers underestimate the time saved when increasing from a low speed and overestimate the time saved when increasing from a relatively high speed. Previous research used a specific type of task — drivers were asked to estimate time saved when increasing speed and to give a numeric response — to show this. The present research conducted two studies with multiple questions to show that the time-saving bias occurs in other tasks. Study 1 found that drivers committed the time-saving bias when asked to estimate (a) the time saved when increasing speed or (b) the distance that can be completed at a given time when increasing speed or (c) the speed required to complete a given distance in decreasing times. Study 2 showed no major differences in estimations of time saved compared to estimations of the remaining journey time and also between responses given on a numeric scale versus a visual analog scale. Study 3 tested two possible explanations for the time-saving bias: a Proportion heuristic and a Differences heuristic. Some evidence was found for use of the latter.

Health care resource allocation is a central moral issue in health policy, and opinions about it have been studied extensively. Allocation situations have typically been described and presented in a positive manner (i.e., who should receive medical aid). On the other hand, the negative valence allocation situation (i.e., who should not receive medical aid) has been relatively neglected. This paper demonstrates how positive versus negative framing of the exact same health care resource allocation situation can affect the perceived fairness of allocation principles. Participants usually perceived non-egalitarian principles (i.e., need, equity and tenure) to be fairer in positively framed situations (i.e., to deliver health care resources to certain patients) than negatively framed situation (i.e., not to deliver health care resources to other patients). However, framing did not affect the perceived fairness of the equality principle (i.e., a random draw). The paper offers a theoretical explanation for the effect of framing on the perceived fairness of health care resource allocation and discusses implications for both researchers and policy makers.

The Recognition Heuristic (Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 1996; Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2002) makes the counter-intuitive prediction that a decision maker utilizing less information may do as well as, or outperform, an idealized decision maker utilizing more information. We lay a theoretical foundation for the use of single-variable heuristics such as the Recognition Heuristic as an optimal decision strategy within a linear modeling framework. We identify conditions under which over-weighting a single predictor is a mini-max strategy among a class of a priori chosen weights based on decision heuristics with respect to a measure of statistical lack of fit we call “risk”. These strategies, in turn, outperform standard multiple regression as long as the amount of data available is limited. We also show that, under related conditions, weighting only one variable and ignoring all others produces the same risk as ignoring the single variable and weighting all others. This approach has the advantage of generalizing beyond the original environment of the Recognition Heuristic to situations with more than two choice options, binary or continuous representations of recognition, and to other single variable heuristics. We analyze the structure of data used in some prior recognition tasks and find that it matches the sufficient conditions for optimality in our results. Rather than being a poor or adequate substitute for a compensatory model, the Recognition Heuristic closely approximates an optimal strategy when a decision maker has finite data about the world.

Research has shown that risk tolerance increases when multiple decisions and associated outcomes are presented together in a broader “bracket” rather than one at a time. The present studies disentangle the influence of problem bracketing (presenting multiple investment options together) from that of outcome bracketing (presenting the aggregated outcomes of multiple decisions), factors which have been deliberately confounded in previous research. In the standard version of the bracketing task, in which participants decide how much of an initial endowment to invest into each in a series of repeated, identical gambles, we find a problem bracketing effect but not an outcome bracketing effect. However, this pattern of results does not generalize to the cases of non-identical gambles nor discrete choice, where we fail to find the standard bracketing effect.

In many situations of indeterminacy, where people agree that no decisive arguments favor one alternative to another, they are still strongly opposed to resolving the dilemma by a coin toss. The robustness of this judgment-decision discrepancy is demonstrated in several experiments, where factors like the importance of consequences, similarity of alternatives, conflicts of opinion, outcome certainty, type of randomizer, and fairness considerations are systematically explored. Coin toss is particularly inappropriate in cases of life and death, even when participants agree that the protagonists should have the same chance of being saved. Using a randomizer may seem to conflict with traditional ideas about argument-based rationality and personal responsibility of the decision maker. Moreover, a concrete randomizer like a coin appears more repulsive than the abstract principle of using a random device. Concrete randomizers may, however, be admissible to counteract potential partiality. Implications of the aversion to use randomizers, even under circumstances in which there are compelling reasons to do so, are briefly discussed.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned against administering over-the-counter cough and cold medicines to children under 2. This study evaluated whether experienced parents show poorer adherence to the FDA warning, as safe experiences are predicted to reduce the impact of warnings, and how adherence can be improved. Participants included 218 American parents (mean age: 29.98 (SD = 6.16), 82.9% female) with children age ≤ 2 who were aware of the FDA warning. We compared adherence among experienced (N=142; with other children > age 2) and inexperienced parents (N=76; only children ≤2). We also evaluated potential moderating variables (amount of warning-related information received, prevalence of side effects, trust in the FDA, frequency of coughs and colds, trust in drug packaging) and quantified the impact of amount of information. Logistic regression assessed the ability of experience alone, and experience combined with amount of information, to predict adherence. 53.3% of inexperienced but 28.4% of experienced parents were adherent (p = 0.0003). The groups did not differ on potential moderating variables. Adherence was 39.5% among experienced parents receiving “a lot of information”, but 15.4% for those receiving less (p = 0.002); amount of information did not affect adherence in inexperienced parents (p = 0.22) but uniquely predicted adherence compared to a model with experience alone (p = 0.0005). Experienced parents were also less likely to mistrust drug packaging (p = 0.03). Targeting FDA information to experienced parents, particularly via drug packaging, may improve their adherence.

By manipulating the scale in graphs, this study demonstrated a new evaluation bias caused by attribute salience in graphical representations. That is, (de)compressing the graph axis scale changed the relative distance with respect to the options of a given attribute and thus changed the salience of the information in graphical representations. Experiment 1 showed that the differences in the graphical representations had a significant impact on the evaluation. Experiment 2 repeated the scale manipulation effect in a different scenario and extended it to a multi-options context. Experiment 3 disentangled the effect of scale distance manipulation from the other variables (e.g., scale resolution and assignment of attributes to axes) and further supported the finding of Experiment 1. These results indicated that attribute salience in graphical representations clearly affects evaluations and that graphs can be manipulated to cause very different impressions of the same data. This finding is not consistent with the axioms of normative economic theory. Experiment 3 also tested the attribute importance hypothesis, but the evidence indicated that the participants did not regard the longer axis as the more important attribute. Finally, we related our findings to the impact of visual processing on decision making and discussed them from the perspective of two-system cognitive theory.

We examine how adding an Attractive but Unattainable Alternative (AUA) to a set of available but less attractive alternatives influences evaluations of near vs. distant future sets of alternatives. According to Construal Level Theory (Liberman & Trope, 2008) including an AUA would decrease the attractiveness of near future sets, but may increase the attractiveness of distant future sets. In four studies participants imagined a choice situation with three alternatives. For some participants a fourth alternatives was added, which was attractive but unattainable. Half of the participants in each condition imagined making a decision in the near future whereas others imagined making the decision in the distant future. Participants then evaluated the attractiveness of the entire set of alternatives, as well as of each alternative separately. We examined choices between jobs, computers and roommates. The last study examined negotiations with the landlord about an apartment. Consistent with our hypothesis, an AUA increased the evaluation of the distant set and decreased the evaluation of the near set.

This paper examines conditions that do or do not lead to accurate judgments of frequency (JOF) and judgments of duration (JOD). In three experiments, duration and frequency of visually presented stimuli are varied orthogonally in a within-subjects design. Experiment 1 reveals an asymmetric judgment pattern. JOFs reflected actual presentation frequency quite accurately and were unbiased by exposure duration. Conversely, JODs were almost insensitive to actual exposure duration and were systematically biased by presentation frequency. We show, however, that a tendency towards a symmetric judgment pattern can be obtained by manipulating encoding conditions. Sustaining attention during encoding (Experiment 2) or enhancing richness of the encoded stimuli (Experiment 3) increases judgment sensitivity in JOD and yields biases in both directions (JOF biased by exposure duration, JOD biased by presentation frequency). The implications of these findings for underlying memory mechanisms are discussed.

A gender difference in risk preferences, with women being more averse to risky choices, is a robust experimental finding. Speculating on the sources of this difference, Croson and Gneezy recently pointed to the tendency for women to experience emotions more strongly and suggested that feeling more strongly about negative outcomes would lead to greater risk-aversion. Here we test this hypothesis in an international survey with 424 respondents from India and 416 from US where we ask questions about a hypothetical lottery. In both countries we find that emotions about outcomes are stronger among women, and that this effect partially mediates gender difference in willingness to enter the lottery.

The “less is more effect” (LIME) occurs when a recognition-dependent agent has a greater probability of choosing the better item than a more knowledgeable agent who recognizes more items. Goldstein and Gigerenzer (2002) define α as the probability that a correct choice is made on the basis of recognition alone and β the probability that a correct choice is made when both items are recognized (via additional cues). They claim that a LIME occurs if α > β (α > 1/2) and α and β remain constant as the number of recognized items, n, varies. In fact, it can be shown that neither of these parameters generally remains constant as n varies, and neither of them are simple functions of n. Therefore, a new theoretical basis for the LIME is needed. This paper provides mathematical results for understanding when the LIME can occur and elucidates implications of these results. The major findings presented here are as follows:

• Demonstrations that the LIME can occur when α ≤ β and fail to occur when α > β, and derivation of the conditions for these co-occurrences;

• A new characterization of the conditions under which the LIME occurs;

• Generalizations of this characterization to handle imperfect recognition; and

• Characterization of when the LIME occurs as more items become recognized.

The primary implication of these results is that the advantage of the recognition cue depends not only on cue validities, but also on the order in which items are learned. This realization, in turn, suggests that research in this area should incorporate a more dynamic focus on learning and memory processes, and the effects of reputational information.

Although the priority heuristic (PH) is conceived as a cognitive-process model, some of its critical process assumptions remain to be tested. The PH makes very strong ordinal and quantitative assumptions about the strictly sequential, non-compensatory use of three cues in choices between lotteries: (1) the difference between worst outcomes, (2) the difference in worst-case probabilities, and (3) the best outcome that can be obtained. These aspects were manipulated orthogonally in the present experiment. No support was found for the PH. Although the main effect of the primary worst-outcome manipulation was significant, it came along with other effects that the PH excludes. A strong effect of the secondary manipulation of worst-outcome probabilities was not confined to small differences in worst-outcomes; it was actually stronger for large worst-outcome differences. Overall winning probabilities that the PH ignores exerted a systematic influence. The overall rate of choices correctly predicted by the PH was close to chance, although high inter-judge agreement reflected systematic responding. These findings raise fundamental questions about the theoretical status of heuristics as fixed modules.

“Waste not want not” expresses our culture’s aversion to waste. “I could have gotten the same thing for less” is a sentiment that can diminish pleasure in a transaction. We study people’s willingness to “pay” to avoid this spoiler. In one scenario, participants imagined they were looking for a rental apartment, and had bought a subscription to an apartment listing. If a cheaper subscription had been declined, respondents preferred not to discover post hoc that it would have sufficed. Specifically, they preferred ending their quest for the ideal apartment after seeing more, rather than fewer, apartments, so that the length of the search exceeds that available within the cheaper subscription. Other scenarios produced similar results. We conclude that people may sometimes prefer to be wasteful in order to avoid feeling wasteful.