I present a novel way to conceptualize Turiel and colleagues’ Social Domain Theory (SDT), and Haidt and colleagues’ Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), as theories of how concepts of moral violations are mentally represented. I argue that SDT is best viewed as a theory of the features that are associated with concepts of moral violations, including wrongness, generalizability across cultures, and intrinsic harmfulness, and that MFT, in contrast, is best viewed as a theory of individual differences in what kinds of acts are categorized as moral violations (i.e., of category membership). This perspective generates a novel prediction: the same individual difference variables that predict variation in moral values according to MFT should predict ascription of the features predicted by SDT. That is, judgments of wrongness, generalizability, and intrinsic harmfulness should covary with the same predictors as do endorsed moral values, specifically, political orientation and analytic thinking. Three studies supported this hypothesis.

According to the Selective Accessibility Model of anchoring, the comparison question in the standard anchoring paradigm activates information that is congruent with an anchor. As a consequence, this information will be more likely to become the basis for the absolute judgment which will therefore be assimilated toward the anchor. However, if the activated information overlaps with information that is elicited by the absolute judgment itself, the preceding comparative judgment should not exert an incremental effect and should fail to result in an anchoring effect. The present studies find this result when the comparative judgment refers to a general category and the absolute judgment refers to a subset of the general category that was activated by the anchor value. For example, participants comparing the average annual temperature in New York City to a high 102 °F judged the average winter, but not summer temperature to be higher than participants making no comparison. On the other hand, participants comparing the annual temperature to a low –4 °F judged the average summer, but not winter temperature to be lower than control participants. This pattern of results was shown also in another content domain. It is consistent with the Selective Accessibility Model but difficult to reconcile with other main explanations of the anchoring effect.

Consumers often face prices that are the sum of two components, for example, an online purchase that includes a stated price and shipping costs. In such cases consumer behavior may be influenced by framing, i.e., how the components are bifurcated. Previous studies have demonstrated the effects of framing and anchoring in auctions. This study examines bidding patterns in a series of first-price sealed-bid experimental money auctions (where the commodity being auctioned is money itself). We hypothesize that bidders’ behavior is affected by the framing of the potential monetary payoff into “monetary prize” and “winner’s bonus” components. We find strong evidence of an anchoring effect that influences the strategic behavior of bidders.

Previous research has shown that interruptions can lead to delays and errors on the interrupted task. Such research, however, seldom considers whether interruptions cause a change in how information is processed. The central question of this research is to determine whether an interruption causes a processing change. We investigate this question in a decision-making paradigm well-suited for examining the decision-making process. Participants are asked to select from a set of risky gambles, each with multiple possible stochastic outcomes. The information gathering process is measured using a mouse-click paradigm. Consistent with past work, interruptions did incur a cost: An interruption increased the time and the amount of information needed to make a decision. Furthermore, after an interruption, participants did seem to partially “restart” the task. Importantly, however, there was no evidence that the information gathering pattern was changed by an interruption. There was also no overall cost to the interruption in terms of choice outcome. These results are consistent with the idea that participants recall a subset of pre-interruption information, which was then incorporated into post-interruption processing.

The recognition heuristic (RH) is a hypothesized decision strategy that is assumed to enable individuals to make decisions quickly and with minimal effort. To further test this hypothesized strategy, an experiment assessed the proportion of RH-consistent selections when recognition was unconfounded with any other cues (at the group level). This was accomplished by showing participants a fictitious city in the beginning of the experimental procedure, before asking them to decide Whether the previously presented city or a novel fictitious city has the larger population. As hypothesized, people made significantly more RH-consistent selections than chance. Thus, Experiment 1 demonstrated that RH can explain a considerable proportion of participant decisions in a procedure that experimentally excluded alternative interpretations of that behavior. In a second experiment, each participant was given a training session with accuracy feedback. In one group, well-known cities were larger on 80% of trials. In another group, well-known cities were larger on 50% of trials. In a third group, well-known cities were larger on only 20% of trials. On a judgment task later in the procedure, on which there was no feedback, participants from the third group made significantly fewer RH-consistent selections than those in the first two groups. Overall, the present results experimentally remove potential confounds and ambiguities that were present in many prior studies. Specifically, Experiment 1 establishes that people’s choice of recognized over unrecognized objects truly does reflect the use of recognition, rather than other cues; Experiment 2 experimentally demonstrates that learned recognition validity affects the use of recognition, even with a small training sample.

The heuristics-and-biases research program highlights reasons for expecting people to be poor intuitive forecasters. This article tests the power of a cognitive-debiasing training module (“CHAMPS KNOW”) to improve probability judgments in a four-year series of geopolitical forecasting tournaments sponsored by the U.S. intelligence community. Although the training lasted less than one hour, it consistently improved accuracy (Brier scores) by 6 to 11% over the control condition. Cognitive ability and practice also made largely independent contributions to predictive accuracy. Given the brevity of the training tutorials and the heterogeneity of the problems posed, the observed effects are likely to be lower-bound estimates of what could be achieved by more intensive interventions. Future work should isolate which prongs of the multipronged CHAMPS KNOW training were most effective in improving judgment on which categories of problems.

The present research addresses advice taking from a holistic perspective covering both advice seeking and weighting. We build on previous theorizing that assumes that underweighting of advice results from biased samples of information. That is, decision makers have more knowledge supporting their own judgment than that of another person and thus weight the former stronger than the latter. In the present approach, we assume that participants reduce this informational asymmetry by the sampling of advice and that sampling frequency depends on the information ecology. Advice that is distant from the decision maker’s initial estimate should lead to a higher frequency of advice sampling than close advice. Moreover, we assume that advice distant from the decision maker’s initial estimate and advice that is supported by larger samples of advisory estimates are weighted more strongly in the final judgment. We expand the classical research paradigm with a sampling phase that allows participants to sample any number of advisory estimates before revising their judgments. Three experiments strongly support these hypotheses, thereby advancing our understanding of advice taking as an adaptive process.

Much research in cognitive psychology has focused on the tendency to conserve limited cognitive resources. The CRT is the predominant measure of such miserly information processing, and also predicts a number of frequently studied decision-making traits (such as belief bias and need for cognition). However, many subjects from common subject populations have already been exposed to the questions, which might add considerable noise to data. Moreover, the CRT has been shown to be confounded with numeracy. To increase the pool of available questions and to try to address numeracy confounds, we developed and tested the CRT-2. CRT-2 questions appear to rely less on numeracy than the original CRT but appear to measure closely related constructs in other respects. Crucially, substantially fewer subjects from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk have been previously exposed to CRT-2 questions. Though our primary purpose was investigating the CRT-2, we also found that belief bias questions appear suitable as an additional source of new items. Implications and remaining measurement challenges are discussed.

Economic games offer a convenient approach for the study of prosocial behavior. As an advantage, they allow for straightforward implementation of different techniques to reduce socially desirable responding. We investigated the effectiveness of the most prominent of these techniques, namely providing behavior-contingent incentives and maximizing anonymity in three versions of the Trust Game: (i) a hypothetical version without monetary incentives and with a typical level of anonymity, (ii) an incentivized version with monetary incentives and the same (typical) level of anonymity, and (iii) an indirect questioning version without incentives but with a maximum level of anonymity, rendering responses inconclusive due to adding random noise via the Randomized Response Technique. Results from a large (N = 1,267) and heterogeneous sample showed comparable levels of trust for the hypothetical and incentivized versions using direct questioning. However, levels of trust decreased when maximizing the inconclusiveness of responses through indirect questioning. This implies that levels of trust might be particularly sensitive to changes in individuals’ anonymity but not necessarily to monetary incentives.

To study the effect of cognitive reflection on behavioral anomalies, we used the cognitive reflection test to measure cognitive reflection. The study was conducted on 395 Iranian university students and shows that subjects with lower cognitive reflection are significantly more likely to exhibit the conjunction fallacy, illusion of control, overconfidence, base rate fallacy, and conservatism. In addition, test scores are correlated with risk preferences. The results do not show any relationship between cognitive reflection and self-serving bias or status quo bias. We also find that gender is significantly related to illusion of control and self-serving bias.

I raise a methodological concern regarding the study performed by Pennycook, Cheyne, Barr, Koehler & Fugelsang (2015), in which they used randomly generated, but syntactically correct, statements that were rated for profundity by subjects unaware of the source of the statements. The assessment of each statement’s profundity was not based on its impact on the subject but was already predetermined to be “bullshit” based on its random generation by a computer. The statements could nonetheless have been subjectively profound and could have provided glimpses of insight and wisdom to the subjects.

In reply to Dalton (2016), we argue that bullshit is defined in terms of how it is produced, not how it is interpreted. We agree that it can be interpreted as profound by some readers (and assumed as much in the original paper). Nonetheless, we present additional evidence against the possibility that more reflective thinkers are more inclined to interpret bullshit statements as profound.