Environmental uncertainty is at the core of much of human activity, ranging fromdaily decisions by individuals to long-term policy planning by governments. Yet,there is little quantitative evidence on the ability of non-expert individualsor populations to forecast climate-related events. Here we report on data from a90-year old prediction game on a climate related event in Alaska: the Nenana IceClassic (NIC). Participants in this contest guess to the nearest minute when theice covering the Tanana River will break, signaling the start of spring.Previous research indicates a strong correlation between the ice breakup datesand regional weather conditions. We study betting decisions between 1955 and2009. We find the betting distribution closely predicts the outcome of thecontest. We also find a significant correlation between regional temperatures aswell as past ice breakups and betting behavior, suggesting that participantsincorporate both climate and historical information into theirdecision-making.

The time-saving bias describes people’s tendency to misestimate the timethey can save by increasing the speed in which they perform an activity such asdriving or completing a task. People typically underestimate time saved whenincreasing from a low speed and overestimate time saved when increasing from analready high speed. We suggest that this bias is the result of people’sfailure to recognize the curvilinear relationship between increasing speed andreducing activity time: As initial speed rises, the same speed increases willyield smaller reductions in time. We explore a new technique to de-bias thesefaulty estimations: converting measurements of speed to a pace measure (e.g.,minutes per fixed distance). Utilizing common driving scenarios, we show thatparticipants who received pace data made more accurate estimations of journeyduration at various speeds, time-savings at various speed increases and therequired speed to complete a journey.

The paper surveys over twenty models of delay discounting (alsoknown as temporal discounting, time preference, timediscounting), that psychologists and economists have put forward toexplain the way people actually trade off time and money. Using little more thanthe basic algebra of powers and logarithms, I show how the models are derived,what assumptions they are based upon, and how different models relate to eachother. Rather than concentrate only on discount functionsthemselves, I show how discount functions may be manipulated to isolaterate parameters for each model. This approach, consistentlyapplied, helps focus attention on the three main components in any discountingmodel: subjectively perceived money; subjectively perceived time; and how theseelements are combined. We group models by the number of parameters that have tobe estimated, which means our exposition follows a trajectory of increasingcomplexity to the models. However, as the story unfolds it becomes clear thatmost models fall into a smaller number of families. We also show how new modelsmay be constructed by combining elements of different models.

The surveyed models are: Exponential; Hyperbolic; Arithmetic; Hyperboloid (Green& Myerson, Rachlin); Loewenstein and Prelec Generalized Hyperboloid;quasi-Hyperbolic (also known as β-δ discounting);Benhabib et al’s fixed cost; Benhabib et al’s Exponential /Hyperbolic / quasi-Hyperbolic; Read’s discounting fractions;Roelofsma’s exponential time; Scholten and Read’sdiscounting-by-intervals (DBI); Ebert and Prelec’s constant sensitivity(CS); Bleichrodt et al.’s constant absolute decreasing impatience (CADI);Bleichrodt et al.’s constant relative decreasing impatience (CRDI);Green, Myerson, and Macaux’s hyperboloid over intervals models;Killeen’s additive utility; size-sensitive additive utility; Yi, Landes,and Bickel’s memory trace models; McClure et al.’s twoexponentials; and Scholten and Read’s trade-off model.

For a convenient overview, a single “cheat sheet” table capturesthe notation and essential mathematics behind all but one of the models.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Earlier frameworks have indicated that older adults tend to experience decline intheir deliberative decisional capacity, while their affective abilities tend toremain intact (Peters, Hess, Västfjäll, & Auman, 2007). Thepresent study applied this framework to the study of risky decision-makingacross the lifespan. Two versions of the Columbia Card Task (CCT) were used totrigger either affective decision-making (i.e., the “warm” CCT) ordeliberative decision-making (i.e., the “cold” CCT) in a sample of158 individuals across the lifespan. Overall there were no age differences inrisk seeking. However, there was a significant interaction between age andcondition, such that older adults were relatively more risk seeking in the coldcondition only. In terms of everyday decision-making, context matters and riskpropensity may shift within older adults depending upon the context.