Response time is used here to interpret choice in decision problems. I first establish that there is a close connection between short response time and choices that are clearly a mistake. I then investigate whether a correlation also exists between response time and behavior that is inconsistent with some standard theories of decision making. The lack of such a correlation could be interpreted to imply that such behavior does not reflect a mistake. It is also shown that a typology of slow and fast responders may, in some cases, be more useful than the standard typologies.

We provide systematic evidence for the range and importance of hedonic reversals as a major source of pleasure, and incorporate these findings into the theory of benign masochism. Twenty-nine different initially aversive activities are shown to produce pleasure (hedonic reversals) in substantial numbers of individuals from both college student and Mechanical Turk samples. Hedonic reversals group, by factor analysis, into sadness, oral irritation, fear, physical activity/exhaustion, pain, strong alcohol-related tastes, bitter tastes, and disgust. Liking for sad experiences (music, novels, movies, paintings) forms a coherent entity, and is related to enjoyment of crying in response to sad movies. For fear and oral irritation, individuals also enjoy the body’s defensive reactions. Enjoyment of sadness is higher in females across domains. We explain these findings in terms of benign masochism, enjoyment of negative bodily reactions and feelings in the context of feeling safe, or pleasure at “mind over body”. In accordance with benign masochism, for many people, the favored level of initially negative experiences is just below the level that cannot be tolerated.

Two experiments examined the impact on the decoy effect of making salient thepossibility of post-decision regret, a manipulation that has been shown inseveral earlier studies to stimulate critical examination and improvement ofdecision process. Experiment 1 (N = 62) showed that making regret salienteliminated the decoy effect in a personal preference task. Experiment 2 (N =242) replicated this finding for a different personal preference task and for aprediction task. It also replicated previous findings that externalaccountability demands do not reduce, and may exacerbate, the decoy effect. Weinterpret both effects in terms of decision justification, with differentjustification standards operating for different audiences. The decoy effect, inthis account, turns on accepting a weak justification, which may be seen asadequate for an external audience or one’s own inattentive self butinadequate under the more critical review triggered by making regretpossibilities salient. Seeking justification to others (responding toaccountability demands) thus maintains or exacerbates the decoy effect; seekingjustification to oneself (responding to regret salience) reduces or eliminatesit. The proposed mechanism provides a theoretical account both of the decoyeffect itself and of how regret priming provides an effective debiasingprocedure for it.

Repeated decision making is subject to changes over time such as decreases in decision time and information use and increases in decision accuracy. We show that a traditional strategy selection view of decision making cannot account for these temporal dynamics without relaxing main assumptions about what defines a decision strategy. As an alternative view we suggest that temporal dynamics in decision making are driven by attentional and perceptual processes and that this view has been expressed in the information reduction hypothesis. We test the information reduction hypothesis by integrating it in a broader framework of top down and bottom up processes and derive the predictions that repeated decisions increase top down control of attention capture which in turn leads to a reduction in bottom up attention capture. To test our hypotheses we conducted a repeated discrete choice experiment with three different information presentation formats. We thereby operationalized top down and bottom up control as the effect of individual utility levels and presentation formats on attention capture on a trial-by-trial basis. The experiment revealed an increase in top down control of eye movements over time and that decision makers learn to attend to high utility stimuli and ignore low utility stimuli. We furthermore find that the influence of presentation format on attention capture reduces over time indicating diminishing bottom up control.

Research on individual differences in maximizing (versus satisficing) has recently proliferated in the Judgment and Decision Making literature, and high scores on this construct have been linked to lower life satisfaction as well as, in some cases, to worse decision-making performance. The current study exported this construct to the organizational domain and evaluated the utility of the three most widely used measures of maximizing in predicting several criteria of interest to organizational researchers: job satisfaction, intentions to quit the organization, performance in the job role, and income. Moreover, this study used relative weight analyses to determine the relative importance of maximizing and two dispositional variables (conscientiousness and core self-evaluations) that are traditionally used to predict these criteria in the organizational literature. Results indicate that relationships between maximizing and these criteria are influenced by the way in which maximizing is measured. Yet, regardless of how it is measured, maximizing is not a particularly strong predictor of these criteria compared to traditional organizational predictors. Limitations and future research directions are discussed.

Prior research on self-other differences involving risk have found that individuals make riskier decisions for others than for the self in situations where risk taking is valued. We expand this research by examining whether the direction of self-other differences reverses when risk aversion is valued, as predicted by social values theory (Stone & Allgaier, 2008). Two studies tested for self-other differences in physical safety scenarios, a domain where risk aversion is valued. In Study 1, participants read physical safety and romantic relationship scenarios and selected what they would decide for themselves, what they would decide for a friend, or what they would predict their friend would decide. In Study 2, participants read public health scenarios and either decided or predicted for themselves and for a friend. In keeping with social values theory, participants made more risk-averse decisions for others than for themselves in situations where risk aversion is valued (physical safety scenarios) but more risk-taking decisions for others than for themselves in situations where risk taking is valued (relationship scenarios). Further, we show that these self-other differences in decision making do not arise from incorrectly predicting others’ behaviors, as participants predicted that others’ decisions regarding physical safety scenarios would be either similar (Experiment 1) or more risk taking (Experiment 2) than their own decisions.

The phenomenon that prior gains may increase people’s willingness toaccept risky gambles is named as the house money effect (Thalerand Johnson, 1990). Many studies have shown that the “house moneyeffect” is a robust phenomenon but few scholars explain the mechanism ofit well. We suppose the reason for the house money effect is that the ante(starting amount) is from the prior gambling profits, and its potential loss hasrelatively low psychological value. To test this hypothesis, we designed aseries of studies using two-stage gambles. A total of 915 university studentsparticipated. In Study 1, in addition to a standard condition (which replicatedthe basic effect), we test how people respond to “prospect theory, withmemory” frame, a “concreteness” frame and“quasi-hedonic” editing. None of these types of frames result in asignificant house money effect. In Study 2, we certify the reference point shiftto 100 Yuan in the second-stage gamble, thus the house money effect can beregarded as the absence of loss aversion; Study 3, consisting of 3sub-experiments, indicated that gambling profits and normal income will opendifferent mental accounts which are spent quite differently. The pain of losing100 Yuan allowance is more serious than that of losing 100 Yuan gambling wins.People will typically reject the gamble of 50/50 chance to gain or lose 100 Yuanif the ante is from the “normal income account”, but accept if theante is from the “windfall account”. The results of the series ofexperiments prove the accuracy of our hypothesis mostly.

In jurisdictions with two or more tiers of criminal courts, some defendants can choose the type of trial court to be tried in. This may involve a trade-off between the probability of acquittal/conviction and the estimated severity of sentence if convicted. For instance, in England and Wales, the lower courts have a higher conviction rate but limited sentencing powers, whereas the higher courts have a higher acquittal rate but greater sentencing powers. We examined 255 offenders’ choice of trial court type using a hypothetical scenario where innocence and guilt was manipulated. Participants’ choices were better predicted by a lexicographic than utility maximization model. A greater proportion of “guilty” participants chose the lower court compared to their “innocent” counterparts, and estimated sentence length was more important to the former than latter group. The present findings provide further support for heuristic decision-making in the criminal justice domain, and have implications for legal policy-making.

Physicians expect a treatment to be more effective when its clinical outcomes aredescribed as relative rather than as absolute risk reductions. We examinedwhether effects of presentation method (relative vs. absolute risk reduction)remain when physicians are provided the baseline risk information, a vital pieceof statistical information omitted in previous studies. Using a between-subjectsdesign, ninety five physicians were presented the risk reduction associated witha fictitious treatment for hypertension either as an absolute risk reduction oras a relative risk reduction, with or without including baseline riskinformation. Physicians reported that the treatment would be more effective andthat they would be more willing to prescribe it when its risk reduction waspresented to them in relative rather than in absolute terms. The relative riskreduction was perceived as more effective than absolute risk reduction even whenthe baseline risk information was explicitly reported. We recommend thatinformation about absolute risk reduction be made available to physicians in thereporting of clinical outcomes. Moreover, health professionals should becognizant of the potential biasing effects of risk information presented inrelative risk terms.

The body of literature on the relationship between risk aversion and wealth is extensive. However, little attention has been given to examining how future realizations of wealth might affect (current) risk decisions. Using paired lottery choice experiments and exposing subjects experimentally to imagined future wealth frames, I find that individuals are more risk-seeking if they are asked to imagine that they will be wealthy in the future. Yet I find that individuals are not significantly more risk-averse if they are asked to imagine that they will be poor in the future. I discuss theoretical and policy implications of these findings, including why savings rates are so low in the United States.

Previous research on the role of recognition in decision-making in inferentialchoice has focussed on the Recognition Heuristic (RH), which proposes that insituations where recognition is predictive of a decision criterion, recognizedobjects will be chosen over unrecognized ones, regardless of any other availablerelevant information. In the current study we examine the role of recognition inpreferential choice, in which subjects had to choose one of a pair of consumerobjects that were presented with quality ratings (positive, neutral, andnegative). The results showed that subjects’ choices were largely basedon recognition, as the famous brand was preferred even when additional starratings rendered it as less attractive. However, the additional information didaffect the proportion of chosen famous items, in particular in the cases whenstar ratings for the recognised brand were negative. This condition alsoresulted in longer response times compared to neutral and positive conditions.Thus, the current data do not point to a simple compensatory mechanism inpreferential choice: although choice is affected by additional information, itseems that recognition is employed as an initial important first step in thedecision-making process.

An insurance policy may not only affect the consequences for victims but also forperpetrators. In six experiments we find that people recommend milderpunishments for perpetrators when the victim was insured, although peoplebelieve that a sentence should not depend on the victim’s insurancestatus. The robustness of this effect is demonstrated by showing thatrecommendations can even be more lenient for crimes that are in fact moreserious but in which the victim was insured. Moreover, even when harm waspossible but did not materialize, people still prefer to punish crimes lessseverely when the (potential) victim was insured. The final two experimentssuggest that the effect is associated with a change in (1) compassion for thevictim and (2) perceived severity of the transgression. Implications of thisphenomenon are briefly discussed.

Birnbaum (2011) criticized tests of transitivity that are based entirely on binary choice proportions. When assumptions of independence and stationarity (iid) of choice responses are violated, choice proportions could lead to wrong conclusions. Birnbaum (2012a) proposed two statistics (correlation and variance of preference reversals) to test iid, using random permutations to simulate p-values. Cha, Choi, Guo, Regenwetter, and Zwilling (2013) defended methods based on marginal proportions but conceded that such methods wrongly diagnose hypothetical examples of Birnbaum (2012a). However, they also claimed that “true and error” models also satisfy independence and also fail in such cases unless they become untestable. This article presents correct true-and-error models; it shows how these models violate iid, how they might correctly identify cases that would be misdiagnosed by marginal proportions, and how they can be tested and rejected. This note also refutes other arguments of Cha et al. (2013), including contentions that other tests failed to violate iid “with flying colors”, that violations of iid “do not replicate”, that type I errors are not appropriately estimated by the permutation method, and that independence assumptions are not critical to interpretation of marginal choice proportions.

While it is well established that the search for information after a decision is biased toward supporting that decision, the case of preference-supporting search before the decision remains open. Three studies of consumer choices consistently found a complete absence of a pre-choice bias toward searching for preference-supporting information. The absence of this confirming search bias occurred for products that were both hedonic and utilitarian, both expensive and inexpensive, and both high and low in expected brand loyalty. Experiment 3 also verified the presence of the expected post-choice search bias to support the chosen alternative. Therefore the absence of a pre-choice search bias in all three studies was not likely to be due to our using a method that was so insensitive that a search bias would not be observed under any circumstances. In addition to the absence of an effect of prior preferences on information selection, subjects’ self-reported search strategies exhibited a clear tendency toward a balance of positive and negative information. Across the three studies, we also tested for the presence of a preference-supporting bias in the evaluation of the information acquired in the search process. This evaluation bias was found both pre- and post-choice.

The idea of automatic decision making approximating normatively optimal decisions without necessitating much cognitive effort is intriguing. Whereas recent findings support the notion that such fast, automatic processes explain empirical data well, little is known about the conditions under which such processes are selected rather than more deliberate stepwise strategies. We investigate the role of the format of information presentation, focusing explicitly on the ease of information acquisition and its influence on information integration processes. In a probabilistic inference task, the standard matrix employed in prior research was contrasted with a newly created map presentation format and additional variations of both presentation formats. Across three experiments, a robust presentation format effect emerged: Automatic decision making was more prevalent in the matrix (with high information accessibility), whereas sequential decision strategies prevailed when the presentation format demanded more information acquisition effort. Further scrutiny of the effect showed that it is not driven by the presentation format as such, but rather by the extent of information search induced by a format. Thus, if information is accessible with minimal need for information search, information integration is likely to proceed in a perception-like, holistic manner. In turn, a moderate demand for information search decreases the likelihood of behavior consistent with the assumptions of automatic decision making.

The attribute framing bias is a well-established phenomenon, in which an object or an event is evaluated more favorably when presented in a positive frame such as “the half full glass” than when presented in the complementary negative framing. Given that previous research showed that visual aids can attenuate this bias, the current research explores the factors underlying the attenuating effect of visual aids. In a series of three experiments, we examined how attribute framing bias is affected by two factors: (a) The display mode—verbal versus visual; and (b) the representation of the critical attribute—whether one outcome, either the positive or the negative, is represented or both outcomes are represented. In Experiment 1 a marginal attenuation of attribute framing bias was obtained when verbal description of either positive or negative information was accompanied by corresponding visual representation. In Experiment 2 similar marginal attenuation was obtained when both positive and negative outcomes were verbally represented. In Experiment 3, where the verbal description represented both positive and negative outcomes, significant attenuation was obtained when it was accompanied by a visual display that represented a single outcome, and complete attenuation, totally eliminating the framing bias, was obtained when it was accompanied by a visual display that represented both outcomes. Thus, our findings showed that interaction between the display mode and the representation of the critical attribute attenuated the framing bias. Theoretical and practical implications of the interaction between verbal description, visual aids and representation of the critical attribute are discussed, and future research is suggested.

When a threat looms large in people’s minds, they may seek protectivemeasures that could mitigate the negative outcomes associated with this threat.Paradoxically, the possession of such protective measures may, in turn, inspirea sense of safety and reduce the perceived probability of the very threat thathad originally triggered their acquisition. Thus, reminding people that theypossess a medical insurance policy attenuated their perceived risk of sufferingfrom health related misfortunes (Tykocinski, 2008). The current studyconceptually replicates these findings and extends them to a different form ofinsurance. Reminding citizens in Israel of the fact that they possess gas maskssignificantly reduced their subjective estimates of the probability that Israelwill be attacked by Iran.

In this paper we test two hypotheses regarding magical thinking about theperceived likelihood of future events. The first is that people believe thatthose who “tempt fate” by failing to take necessary precautionsare more likely to suffer negative outcomes. The second is the“protection effect”, where reminding people of precautions theyhave taken leads them to see related risks as less likely. To this end, wedescribe the results from three attempted direct replications of a protectioneffect experiment reported in Tykocinski (2008) and two replications of atempting fate experiment reported in Risen and Gilovich (2008) in which we add atest of the protection effect. We did not replicate the protection effect butdid replicate the tempting fate effect.