Although new information technologies and social networks make a wide variety of opinions and advice easily accessible, one can never be sure to get support on a focal judgment task. Nevertheless, participants in traditional advice taking studies are by default informed in advance about the opportunity to revise their judgment in the light of advice. The expectation of advice, however, may affect the weight assigned to it. The present research therefore investigates whether the advice taking process depends on the expectation of advice in the judge-advisor system (JAS). Five preregistered experiments (total N = 2019) compared low and high levels of advice expectation. While there was no evidence for expectation effects in three experiments with block-wise structure, we obtained support for a positive influence of advice expectation on advice weighting in two experiments implementing sequential advice taking. The paradigmatic disclosure of the full procedure to participants thus constitutes an important boundary condition for the ecological study of advice taking behavior. The results suggest that the conventional JAS procedure fails to capture a class of judgment processes where advice is unexpected and therefore weighted less.

Previous literature and conventional wisdom have led researchers to believe that boredom increases economic risk taking, but the evidence in support of this conclusion is limited and has important shortcomings. In four experiments (including more than 1,300 subjects), we systematically studied the effects of boredom on economic risk preferences. Across different risk elicitation tasks, boredom inductions, incentive schemes, subject pools, and using both reduced form and structural analyses, we consistently failed to find an effect of boredom on risky decisions. Our results disprove that boredom leads to even small increments in risk taking in one-shot elicitation tasks, and small to medium increases in multiple-choice elicitations. These findings question an important established belief, contribute to better understand the consequences of boredom, and have substantive implications for experiments on economic decision making.

Humans are evidently able to learn contingencies from the co-occurrence of cuesand outcomes. But how do humans judge contingencies when observations of cue andoutcome are learned on different occasions? The pseudocontingency frameworkproposes that humans rely on base-rate correlations across contexts, that is,whether outcome base rates increase or decrease with cue base rates. Here, weelaborate on an alternative mechanism for pseudocontingencies that exploits baserate information within contexts. In two experiments, cue and outcome base ratesvaried across four contexts, but the correlation by base rates was kept constantat zero. In some contexts, cue and outcome base rates were aligned (e.g., cueand outcome base rates were both high). In other contexts, cue and outcome baserates were misaligned (e.g., cue base rate was high, but outcome base rate waslow). Judged contingencies were more positive for contexts in which cue andoutcome base rates were aligned than in contexts in which cue and outcome baserates were misaligned. Our findings indicate that people use the alignment ofbase rates to infer contingencies conditional on the context. As such, they lendsupport to the pseudocontingency framework, which predicts that decision makersrely on base rates to approximate contingencies. However, they challengeprevious conceptions of pseudocontingencies as a uniform inference fromcorrelated base rates. Instead, they suggest that people possess a repertoire ofmultiple contingency inferences that differ with regard to informationalrequirements and areas of applicability.

According to the positive time-discounting assumption of intertemporal decision-making, people prefer to undergo negative events in the future rather than in the present. However, negative discounting has been identified in the intertemporal choice and loss domains, which refers to people’s preference to experience negative events earlier rather than later. Studies have validated and supported the "anticipated dread" as an explanation for negative discounting. This study again explored the effect of anticipated dread on intertemporal choice using content analysis; that is, having participants identify anticipated dread among reasons for negative discounting. This study also validated the effect of anticipated dread on negative discounting by manipulating anticipated dread. This study adds empirical and direct evidence for the role of anticipated dread in negative discounting.

Large-scale societal issues such as public health crises highlight the need to communicate scientific information, which is often uncertain, accurately to the public and policy makers. The challenge is to communicate the inherent scientific uncertainty — especially about the underlying quality of the evidence — whilst supporting informed decision making. Little is known about the effects that such scientific uncertainty has on people’s judgments of the information. In three experimental studies (total N=6,489), we investigate the influence of scientific uncertainty about the quality of the evidence on people’s perceived trustworthiness of the information and decision making. We compare the provision of high, low, and ambiguous quality-of-evidence indicators against providing no such cues. Results show an asymmetric relationship: people react more strongly to cues of low quality of evidence than they do to high quality of evidence compared to no cue. While responses to a cue of high quality of evidence are not significantly different from no cue; a cue of low or uncertain quality of evidence is accompanied by lower perceived trustworthiness and lower use of the information in decision making. Cues of uncertain quality of evidence have a similar effect to those of low quality. These effects do not change with the addition of a reason for the indicated quality level. Our findings shed light on the effects of the communication of scientific uncertainty on judgment and decision making, and provide insights for evidence-based communications and informed decision making for policy makers and the public.

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.

According to normative decision-making theories, the composition of a choice setshould not affect people’s preferences regarding the different options.This assumption contrasts with decades of research that have identified multiplesituations in which this principle is violated, leading to context effects.Recently, research on context effects has been extended to the domain ofexperience-based choices, where it has been shown that forgone outcomes fromirrelevant alternatives affect preferences — an accentuation effect. Morespecifically, it has been shown that an option presented in a situation in whichits outcomes are salient across several trials is evaluated more positively thanin a context in which its outcomes are less salient. In the present study, weinvestigated whether irrelevant information affects preferences as much asrelevant information. In two experiments, individuals completed a learning taskwith partial feedback. We found that past outcomes from non-chosen options,which contain no relevant information at all, led to the same accentuationeffect as did counterfactual outcomes that provided new and relevantinformation. However, if the information is entirely irrelevant (from optionsthat could not have been chosen), individuals ignored it, thus ruling out apurely perceptual account of the accentuation effect. These results providefurther support for the influence of salience on learning and highlight thenecessity of mechanistic accounts in decision-making research.

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.

Ethnographers have recorded many instances of tokens donated as gifts to attract new partners or strengthen ties to existing ones. We study whether gifts are an effective pledge of the donor’s trustworthiness through an experiment modeled on the trust game. We vary whether the trustee can send a token before the trustor decides whether to transfer money; whether one of the tokens is rendered salient through experimental manipulations (a vote or an incentive-compatible rule of purchase for the tokens); and whether the subjects interact repeatedly or are randomly re-matched in each round. Tokens are frequently sent in all studies in which tokens are available, but repeated interaction, rather than gifts, is the leading behavioral driver in our data. In the studies with random pairs, trustors send significantly more points when the trustee has sent a token. Subjects in a fixed matching achieve comparable levels of trust and trustworthiness in the studies with and without tokens. The trustee’s decision to send a token is not predictive of the amount the trustee returns to the trustor. A token is used more sparingly whenever salient — a novel instance of endogenous value creation in the lab.

People often choose the option that is better on the most subjectively prominentattribute — the prominence effect. We studied the effect of prominence inhealth care priority setting and hypothesized that values related to healthwould trump values related to costs in treatment choices, even when individualsthemselves evaluated different treatment options as equally good. We conductedpre-registered experiments with a diverse Swedish sample and a sample ofinternational experts on priority setting in health care (n = 1348).Participants, acting in the role of policy makers, revealed their valuation fordifferent medical treatments in hypothetical scenarios. Participants weresystematically inconsistent between preferences expressed through evaluation ina matching task and preferences expressed through choice. In line with ourhypothesis, a large proportion of participants (General population: 92%, Experts84% of all choices) chose treatment options that were better on the healthdimension (lower health risk) despite having previously expressed indifferencebetween those options and others that were better on the cost dimension. Thus,we find strong evidence of a prominence effect in health-care priority setting.Our findings provide a psychological explanation for why opportunity costs(i.e., the value of choices not exercised) are neglected in health care prioritysetting.

We analyze the impact of acute stress on risky choice in a pre-registered laboratory experiment with 194 participants. We test the causal impact of stress on the stability of risk preferences by separating noise in decision-making from an actual shift in preferences. We find no significant differences in risk attitudes across conditions on the aggregate, using both descriptive analyses as well as structural estimations for risk aversion and different noise structures. Additionally, in line with the previous literature, we find statistically significant evidence for lower cognitive abilities being correlated with more noise in decision-making in general. We do not find a significant interaction effect between cognitive abilities and stress on noise levels.

Decision makers weight small probabilities differently when sampling them and when seeing them stated. We disentangle to what extent the gap is due to how decision makers receive information (through description or experience), the literature’s prevailing focus, and what information they receive (population probabilities or sample frequencies), our novel explanation. The latter determines statistical confidence, the extent to which one can know that a choice is superior in expectation. Two lab studies, as well as a review of prior work, reveal sample decisions to respond to statistical confidence. More strongly, in fact, than decisions based on population probabilities, leading to higher payoffs in expectation. Our research thus not only offers a more robust method for identifying description-experience gaps. It also reveals how probability weighting in decisions based on samples — the typical format of real-world decisions — may actually come closer to an unbiased ideal than decisions based on fully specified probabilities — the format frequently used in decision science.

Individuals often assess themselves as being less susceptible to common biases compared to others. This bias blind spot (BBS) is thought to represent a metacognitive error. In this research, we tested three explanations for the effect: The cognitive sophistication hypothesis posits that individuals who display the BBS more strongly are actually less biased than others. The introspection bias hypothesis posits that the BBS occurs because people rely on introspection more when assessing themselves compared to others. The conversational processes hypothesis posits that the effect is largely a consequence of the pragmatic aspects of the experimental situation rather than true metacognitive error. In two experiments (N = 1057) examining 18 social/motivational and cognitive biases, there was strong evidence of the BBS. Among the three hypotheses examined, the conversational processes hypothesis attracted the greatest support, thus raising questions about the extent to which the BBS is a metacognitive effect.

Above-and-below-average effects are well-known phenomena that arise whencomparing oneself to others. Kruger (1999) found that people rate themselves asabove average for easy abilities and below average for difficult abilities. Weconducted a successful pre-registered replication of Kruger’s (1999)Study 1, the first demonstration of the core phenomenon (N =756, US MTurk workers). Extending the replication to also include abetween-subject design, we added two conditions manipulating easy and difficultinterpretations of the original ability domains, and with an additionaldependent variable measuring perceived difficulty. We observed anabove-average-effect in the easy extension and below-average-effect in thedifficult extension, compared to the neutral replication condition. Bothextension conditions were perceived as less ambiguous than the original neutralcondition. Overall, we conclude strong empirical support for Kruger’sabove-and-below-average effects, with boundary conditions laid out in theextensions expanding both generalizability and robustness of the phenomenon.

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.