The pursuit of unhealthy behaviors, such as smoking or binge drinking, not only carries various downside risks, but also provides pleasure. A parsimonious model, used in the literature to explain the decision to pursue an unhealthy activity, represents that decision as a tradeoff between risks and benefits. We build on this literature by surveying a rural population in South Africa to elicit the perceived riskiness and the perceived pleasure for various risky activities and to examine how these perceptions relate to the pursuit of four specific unhealthy behaviors: frequent smoking, problem drinking, seatbelt nonuse, and risky sex. We show that perceived pleasure is a significant predictor for three of the behaviors and that perceived riskiness is a significant predictor for two of them. We also show that the correlation between the riskiness rating and behavior is significantly different from the correlation between the pleasure rating and behavior for three of the four behaviors. Finally, we show that the effect of pleasure is significantly greater than the effect of riskiness in determining drinking and risky sex, while the effects of pleasure and riskiness are not different from each other in determining smoking and seatbelt nonuse. We discuss how our findings can be used to inform the design of health promotion strategies.

We asked how repeated media reports on technological hazards influence an individual’s risk perception. We looked for two contradictory effects, an increasing effect of repetition on perceived risk with the first few repetitions and a decreasing effect with later repetitions, leading to the inverted U-shaped pattern. In an experiment, we demonstrated the inverted U-shaped relationship between the repetition and perceived risk in the context of food risk. The finding broadens the range of mere-exposure effects and indicates that exposure to risk information can be a double-edged sword, which brings either an increasing or a decreasing perceived risk.

UK bookies (bookmakers) herd geographically in less-affluent areas. The present work shows that UK bookies also herd with the special bets that they advertise to consumers, both in their shop window advertising and on TV adverts as shown to millions of viewers. I report an observational study of betting adverts over the 2014 soccer World Cup. Bet types vary in complexity, with complex types having the highest expected losses. Bookies herded on a common strategy of advertising special bets on two levels: by almost exclusively advertising complex bet types with high expected losses, and by advertising representative events within a given complex bet type. This evidence is most consistent with bookies’ advertising targeting a representativeness heuristic amongst bettors. Bookies may know how to nudge bettors toward larger losses.

Applied to uncertainty communication, politeness theory postulates that when announcing bad news (1) speakers may intend not only to inform, but also to manage (e.g., save) the hearers’ or speakers’ own faces (i.e., face-managing intentions), and (2) speakers may perform face-managing intentions by altering the explicitly communicated probability. Previous research has assumed these two core postulates when explaining various reasoning and judgment phenomena in hearers, but has failed to test them empirically in a comprehensive and direct way: jointly in relation to speakers. To provide this critical evidence, we asked subjects to communicate a predefined numerical probability of two negative outcomes, using a verbal probability scale. Subjects reported their communication intentions afterwards. In line with the first politeness theory postulate, speakers intended not only to be informative but also to tactfully announce bad news or to avoid being blamed in case they made inaccurate (too low or too high) prediction. In line with the second politeness theory postulate, speakers altered their explicitly communicated probability more often and more substantially when adopting face-managing intentions than when adopting informative intentions. We discuss how this evidence corroborates the politeness theory and validates the previous research that focused on hearers.

When people judge risk or the probability of a risky prospect, single case narratives can bias judgments when a statistical base-rate is also provided. In this work we investigate various methodological and procedural factors that may influence this narrative bias. We found that narratives had the strongest effect on a non-numerical risk measure, which was also the best predictor of behavioral intentions. In contrast, two scales for subjective probability reflected primarily statistical variations. We observed a negativity bias on the risk measure, such that the narratives increased rather than decreased risk perceptions, whereas the effect on probability judgments was symmetric. Additionally, we found no evidence that the narrative bias is solely produced by adherence to conversational norms. Finally, changing the absolute number of narratives reporting the focal event, while keeping their relative frequency constant, had no effect. Thus, individuals extract a representation of likelihood from a sample of single-case narratives, which drives the bias. These results show that the narrative bias is in part dependent on the measure used to assess it and underline the conceptual distinction between subjective probability and perceived risk.

We investigate decision-making in the Judge-Advisor-System where one person, the “judge”, wants to estimate the number of a certain entity and is given advice by another person. The question is how to combine the judge’s initial estimate and that of the advisor in order to get the optimal expected outcome. A previous approach compared two frequently applied strategies, taking the average or choosing the better estimate. In most situations, averaging produced the better estimates. However, this approach neglected a third strategy that judges frequently use, namely a weighted mean of the judges’ initial estimate and the advice. We compare the performance of averaging and choosing to weighting in a theoretical analysis. If the judge can, without error, detect ability differences between judge and advisor, a straight-forward calculation shows that weighting outperforms both of these strategies. More interestingly, after introducing errors in the perception of the ability differences, we show that such imperfect weighting may or may not be the optimal strategy. The relative performance of imperfect weighting compared to averaging or choosing depends on the size of the actual ability differences as well as the magnitude of the error. However, for a sizeable range of ability differences and errors, weighting is preferable to averaging and more so to choosing. Our analysis expands previous research by showing that weighting, even when imperfect, is an appropriate advice taking strategy and under which circumstances judges benefit most from applying it.

Kieslich and Hilbig (2014) employ a mouse-tracking technique to measure decision conflict in social dilemmas. They report that defectors exhibit more conflict than do cooperators. They infer that cooperation thus is the reflexive, default behavior. We argue, however, that their analysis fails to discriminate between reflexive versus cognitively controlled behavioral responses. This is because cognitive conflict can emanate from resisting impulse successfully—or unsuccessfully.

Myrseth and Wollbrant (2015) offer an alternative theoretical explanation for our finding that defection entails more cognitive conflict than cooperation (Kieslich & Hilbig, 2014). Although we completely agree that different theoretical explanations for a result are possible, we maintain that the theoretical approach we tested (Rand et al., 2014) is parsimonious and falsifiable, excluding certain plausible results a priori. By comparison, the alternative framework proposed by Myrseth and Wollbrant requires several debatable assumptions to account for our findings, rendering it the more complex theory. Besides, their framework as a whole could have accounted for any possible finding in our experiment, making it impossible to falsify it with our data. We thus conclude that the notion by Rand et al.—that there is a spontaneous disposition to cooperate—has more empirical content while requiring fewer assumptions.