Backward magical contagion describes instances in which individuals (sources) express discomfort or pleasure when something connected to them (medium; e.g., hair, a diary) falls into the possession of a negatively- or positively-perceived individual (recipient). The reaction seems illogical, since it is made clear that the source will never experience the object again, and the psychological effect appears to reverse the standard forward model of causality. Backward magical contagion was originally believed to be a belief held only within traditional cultures. Two studies examined negative backward contagion in adult Americans in online surveys. Study 1 indicated that backward contagion effects occur commonly, particularly when a recipient knows of the medium’s source. Study 2 showed that backward contagion effects tend to be neutralized when the recipient burns the object, as opposed to just possessing it or discarding it. Ironically, in traditional cultures, burning is a particularly potent cause of backward contagion.

A widely used measure of individual propensity to utilize analytic processing is the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), a set of math problems with intuitively compelling but incorrect answers. Here, we ask whether scores on this measure are temporally stable. We aggregate data from 11 studies run on Amazon Mechanical Turk in which the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) was administered and identify N = 3,302 unique individuals who completed the CRT two or more times. We find a strong correlation between an individual’s first and last CRT performance, r = .806. This remains true even when constraining to data points separated by over 2 years, r = .755. Furthermore, we find that CRT scores from one timepoint correlated negatively with belief in God and social conservatism from the other timepoint (and to a similar extent as scores gathered at the same timepoint). These results show that CRT scores are stable over time, and – given the stable relationship between CRT and religious belief and ideology – provide some evidence for the stability of analytic cognitive style more generally.

This study examined framing effects in decisions concerning public health. Tversky and Kahneman’s famous Asian Disease Problem served as experimental paradigm. Subjects chose between a sure and a risky option either presented as gains (saving lives) or as losses (dying). The amount of risk varied in terms of different probabilities. The number of affected people was either small (low need) or large (high need). Additionally, the decisions were linked to three different types of diseases (unusual infection, AIDS, leukemia). We also implemented two different time constraints during which the subjects had to give a response. Finally, we tested a within-subject design. The data analysis assuming a linear mixed effects model revealed significant effects of framing, probabilities, and need. Furthermore, the type of disease and time constraints were moderating the framing effect. Across the different diseases, framing effects were amplified when decision time was short.

Brier score decompositions, including those attributed to Murphy and to Yates, provide popular metrics for estimating forecast performance attributes like calibration and discrimination. However, the decompositions are generally limited to situations where forecasters make successive forecast judgments against the same class of substantive event (e.g., rain vs. no rain). They do not readily translate to common situations where: forecasts are weighted unequally; forecasts can be made against a range of heterogeneous topics and events over varying time horizons; forecasts can be updated over time until an event occurs or an event deadline is reached; or outcome alternatives can vary in number and nature (e.g., ordered vs. unordered outcomes) across forecast questions. In this paper, we propose extensions of the Murphy and Yates decompositions to address these features. The extensions involve new analytic expressions for the decompositions of weighted Brier scores, along with proposed resampling methods. We use data from a recent forecasting tournament to illustrate the methods.

Religious belief is a topic of longstanding interest to psychological science, but the psychology of religious disbelief is a relative newcomer. One prominently discussed model is analytic atheism, wherein cognitive reflection, as measured with the Cognitive Reflection Test, overrides religious intuitions and instruction. Consistent with this model, performance-based measures of cognitive reflection predict religious disbelief in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic) samples. However, the generality of analytic atheism remains unknown. Drawing on a large global sample (N = 3461) from 13 religiously, demographically, and culturally diverse societies, we find that analytic atheism as usually assessed is in fact quite fickle cross-culturally, appearing robustly only in aggregate analyses and in three individual countries. The results provide additional evidence for culture’s effects on core beliefs.

This paper summarizes an empirical comparison of the accuracy of forecasts included in analysis reports developed by professional intelligence analysts to comparable forecasts in a prediction market that has broad participation from across an intelligence community. To compare forecast accuracy, 99 event forecasts were extracted from qualitative descriptions found in 41 analysis reports and posted on the prediction market. Quantitative probabilities were imputed from the qualitative forecasts by asking seasoned professional analysts, who did not participate in the prediction market, to read the reports and to infer a quantitative probability based on what was written. These readers were also asked to provide their personal probabilities before and after reading the reports. There were two statistically significant results of particular interest. First, the primary result is that the prediction market forecasts were more accurate than the analysis reports. On average prediction market probabilities were 0.114 closer to ground truth than the analysis report probabilities. Second, in cases where analysts (readers) updated their personal probabilities in a direction opposite to what the reports implied, analysts tended to update their probabilities in the correct direction. This occurred even though, on average, reading the reports did not make readers more accurate.

When comparing a pair of attribute values, English speakers can use a “larger” comparative (“A is larger/longer/higher/more than B”) or a “smaller” comparative (“B is smaller/shorter/lower/less than A”). This choice matters because it affects people’s inferences about the absolute magnitudes of the compared items, and influences the perceived truthfulness of the comparative sentence itself. In 4 studies (total N = 2335), we investigated the language that people use to describe ordinal relations between attributes. Specifically, we examined whether demography, emotion, and personality predict the tendency to use “larger” comparatives rather than “smaller” ones. Participants viewed pairs of items differing in a single attribute and indicated the word they would use to describe the relationship between them; they also completed a series of self-report measures. Replicating previous work, we found a robust tendency to use “larger” comparatives, both when people chose between two adjectives and when they freely produced their own words in a sentence completion task. We also found that this tendency was more pronounced in older participants, those with positive mood or outlook, and among people high in agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability. However, these effects were very small, with meta-analytic effect sizes indicating they explain less than 1% of the variance. We conclude that, although people’s use of comparative adjectives is influenced by properties of the items that are being compared, the way that people describe magnitude relations is relatively stable across variation in a range of important traits and dispositions, protecting decision-makers from a potentially undesirable source of bias in their inferences and representations of described options.

In considering moral dilemmas, people often judge the acceptability of exchanging individuals’ interests, rights, and even lives. Here we investigate the related, but often overlooked, question of how people decide who to sacrifice in a moral dilemma. In three experiments (total N = 558), we provide evidence that these decisions often depend on the feeling that certain people are fungible and interchangeable with one another, and that one factor that leads people to be viewed this way is shared nationality. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants read vignettes in which three individuals’ lives could be saved by sacrificing another person. When the individuals were characterized by their nationalities, participants chose to save the three endangered people by sacrificing someone who shared their nationality, rather than sacrificing someone from a different nationality. Participants do not show similar preferences, though, when individuals were characterized by their age or month of birth. In Experiment 3, we replicated the effect of nationality on participant’s decisions about who to sacrifice, and also found that they did not show a comparable preference in a closely matched vignette in which lives were not exchanged. This suggests that the effect of nationality on decisions of who to sacrifice may be specific to judgments about exchanges of lives.

Theories of trust distinguish general trust in situations of social uncertainty from assurance-based trust in committed, long-term relationships. This study investigates European-Japanese differences using the Centipede game, in which two players choose between cooperation and defection. The game models repeated reciprocal interactions, necessitating assurance-based trust to sustain cooperation. We included game conditions offering players the option of purchasing commitment-enhancing tools to increase social certainty. Japanese participants were more cooperative than Europeans, confirming higher assurance-based trust, and also purchased more commitment-enhancing tools, demonstrating their preferences for social certainty. Purchase of commitment-enhancing tools improved cooperativeness in both groups. However, if co-players refused tool purchase, the Japanese appeared to interpret this as non-cooperative intent and cooperativeness in the respective games decreased.

Previous research has established that higher levels of trait Honesty-Humility (HH) are associated with less dishonest behavior in cheating paradigms. However, only imprecise effect size estimates of this HH-cheating link are available. Moreover, evidence is inconclusive on whether other basic personality traits from the HEXACO or Big Five models are associated with unethical decision making and whether such effects have incremental validity beyond HH. We address these issues in a highly powered reanalysis of 16 studies assessing dishonest behavior in an incentivized, one-shot cheating paradigm (N = 5,002). For this purpose, we rely on a newly developed logistic regression approach for the analysis of nested data in cheating paradigms. We also test theoretically derived interactions of HH with other basic personality traits (i.e., Emotionality and Conscientiousness) and situational factors (i.e., the baseline probability of observing a favorable outcome) as well as the incremental validity of HH over demographic characteristics. The results show a medium to large effect of HH (odds ratio = 0.53), which was independent of other personality, situational, or demographic variables. Only one other trait (Big Five Agreeableness) was associated with unethical decision making, although it failed to show any incremental validity beyond HH.

Online, social media communication is often ambiguous, and it can encourage speed and inattentiveness. We investigated whether Actively Open Minded Thinking (AOT), a dispositional willingness to seek out new or potentially threatening information, may help users avoid these pitfalls. In Study 1, we determined that correctly assessing social media authors’ traits was positively predicted by raters’ AOT. In Study 2, we used data-driven methods to devise a three-dimensional picture of online behaviors of people high or low in AOT, finding that AOT is associated with thoughtful, nuanced, idiosyncratic actions and with resisting the typically fast pace of online interactions. AOT may be an important factor in accurate, socially responsible online behavior.

Risk and reward are negatively correlated in a wide variety of environments, and in many cases this trade off approximates a fair bet. Pleskac and Hertwig (2014) recently proposed that people have internalized this relationship and use it as the basis for probability estimation and subsequent choice under conditions of uncertainty. Specifically, they showed that risky options with high-value outcomes are inferred to have lower probability than options offering a less valuable reward. We report two experiments that test a simple corollary of this idea. In both studies, participants estimated the magnitude of prizes offered by lotteries with known win-probabilities. The relationship between estimates and probabilities followed the power relationship predicted by the risk-reward heuristic, albeit with a tendency to overestimate outcome magnitude. In addition, people’s estimates predicted their willingness to take the gamble. Our results provide further evidence that people have internalized the ecological relationship between risk and reward in financial lotteries, and we suggest that this relationship exerts a wide-ranging influence on decision-making.

The present study investigated skilled and adaptive strategy selection in risky decision making. We proposed that people with high objective numeracy, a strong predictor of general decision making skill, would have a broad repertoire of choice strategies andadaptively select these strategies depending on the importance of the decision. Thus more objectively numerate people would maximize their effort (e.g., invest more time) in important, high-payoff decisions and switch to a simple, fast heuristic strategy in trivial decisions. Subjective numeracy would, by contrast, be more closely related to interest in problem solving for its own sake and would not yield such an effect of importance. Participants made twelve high-payoff choices and twelve low-payoff choices in binary two-outcome gambles framed as gains. We measured objective and subjective numeracy using standard measures. Results showed that people with high subjective numeracy generally maximized the expected value (EV) in all decisions. In contrast, participants with high objective numeracy maximized EV only when choice problems were meaningful (i.e., they could result in high payoffs). When choice problems were trivial (i.e., choosing the normatively better option would not result in a large payoff), more objectively numerate participants made choices consistent with faster, more frugal heuristic strategies.

One challenge facing humans (and nonhuman animal) is that some options that appear attractive locally may not turn out best in the long run. To analyse this human learning problem, we explore human performance in a dynamic decision-making task that places local and global rewards in conflict. We found that experiences that included previous choices and rewards are not easily incorporated into people’s strategy to enhance their performance. Our results suggest that humans are easily driven by concerns about recent feedback, and that choice of a suboptimal behaviour option may be overcome by providing informative cues that indicate a clear immediate outcome for a better option.

We are regularly told about people at various locations around the globe, both near and far, who are in distress or in dire need. In the present research, we examined how the prospective donor’s psychological distance from a given victim may interact with the victim’s identification to determine the donor’s willingness to accede to requests for donations to help the victim in question. In three studies, we measured willingness to donate (Studies 1 & 2) and actual donations (Study 3) to identified or unidentified victims, while measuring (Study 1) or manipulating (Studies 2 & 3) the psychological distance between prospective donors and the recipients. Results indicate that increasing the psychological distance between prospective donors and victims decreases willingness to help — but only when the victims are unidentified, not when they are identified. This suggests that victim’s identification mitigates the effect of distance on donor’s willingness to help.

When given a desirable item, people have a tendency to value this owned item more than an equally-desirable, unowned item. Conversely, when the endowed item is undesirable, in some circumstances people have a tendency to swap it for an equally undesirable item, a phenomenon known as the reversed endowment effect. The fact that the endowment effect can reverse for undesirable items has been taken as evidence against loss aversion being the underlying cause of the endowment effect. This study represents the first time that the reversed endowment effect has been observed for choices with real consequences. However, we find that the reversed endowment effect occurs only when participants’ ability to compare the available choice options is limited. We further show that these endowment reversals can also be induced for choices between desirable options and removed for choices between undesirable options by manipulating the expectations participants have when making a choice. Finally, we show that our data, including endowment reversals, can in principle be explained by loss aversion.

The study investigates the psychometric characteristics of the Slovak version of the original and short form of the Indecisiveness Scale on three samples of university students and one general population sample. An exploratory as well as confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the one factor structure of the scale with a satisfactory internal consistency and time stability of scores. The criterion validity was examined through relationships with thinking styles, decision-making styles, the Big Five factors, decision outcomes, well-being and perceived stress, as well as through a comparison of the general population sample with a sample with an obsessive-compulsive disorder diagnosis. Subjects who self-reported as undecided in their future intentions regarding migration tendencies had higher scores in indecisiveness. Both examined forms of the Slovak version of the Indecisiveness Scale were demonstrated to be reliable and valid instruments for the measurement of indecisiveness with the short form being favorited as more appropriately tapping into the core aspect of indecisiveness.

In this paper I investigate the impact of numerological superstitions and discounts’ effect on the buyers’ behavior in the apartment market using actual sales data. Based on the dataset from Moscow primary real estate market, which includes 40 buildings, we test the apartments buyers’ demand on lucky 7th floor and unlucky 13th floor in comparison to neighboring floors and its response to developers’ discount policy for the apartments on the 13th floor. Results of the random-effects model for the preference towards 7th floor show that that “good luck” effect is present at the 90% confidence interval. Results of the mixed-effects model for the preference towards the 13th floor’s apartments show that in case of discount moderation, the “bad luck” effect of the 13th floor is mitigated, while in case of “no discount” buildings we find the clear negative effect of the 13th floor.

Sunk costs have been known to elicit violations of expected utility theory, in particular, the independence or cancellation axiom. Separately, violations of the stochastic dominance principle have been demonstrated in various settings despite the fact that descriptive models of choice favored in economics deem such violations irrational. However, it is currently unknown whether sunk costs also yield stochastic dominance violations. In two studies using a tri-colored roulette wheel choice task with non-equiprobable events yet equal payoffs, we observed that those who had sunk costs selected a stochastically dominated option significantly more than did those who had no costs. Moreover, a second study revealed that people chose a stochastically dominated option significantly more when the expected value was low compared to high. A model comparison of psychological explanations demonstrated that theories that incorporate a reference shift of the status quo could predict these sunk cost-based violations of stochastic dominance whereas other models could not.

We aggregated data from 28 studies (total N=13,386) to assess the relationship between individual differences in character strengths, as described by the VIA model of character, and economically-relevant behaviors and cognition. Factor analyzing the character strength inventory responses revealed four factors – Caring, Leadership, Inquisitiveness, and Self-control – each of which correlated with a variety of measures. Caring was associated with the willingness to pay costs to benefit others, as well as reliance on intuitive decision-making; Leadership was associated with inefficient, anti-social behaviors, risk taking, and trusting one’s intuitions while also liking to reason; Inquisitiveness was associated with efficient behaviors in both the social and risk domains, and reliance on deliberative decision-making; and Self-control was associated with delaying gratification, risk aversion, and a reliance on reason. These results help shed light on the relationship between character – and personality more generally – and economic behaviors. In doing so, we give some indication of which types of people will be most successful in which decision-making contexts.