A strategy activated in one task may be transferred to subsequent tasks and prevent activation of other strategies that would otherwise come to mind, a mechanism referred to as procedural priming. In a novel application of procedural priming we show that it can make or break cognitive illusions. Our test case is the 1/k illusion, which is based on the same unwarranted mathematical shortcut as the MPG illusion and the time-saving bias. The task is to estimate distances between values of fractions on the form 1/k. Most people given this task intuitively base their estimates on the distances between the denominators (i.e., the reciprocals of the fractions), which may yield very poor estimations of the true distances between the fractions. As expected, the tendency to fall for this illusion is related to cognitive style (Study 1). In order to apply procedural priming we constructed versions of the task in which the illusion is weak, in the sense that most people do not fall for it anymore. We then gave participants both “strong illusion” and “weak illusion” versions of the task (Studies 2 and 3). Participants who first did the task in the weak illusion version would often persist with the correct strategy even in the strong illusion version, thus breaking the otherwise strong illusion in the latter task. Conversely, participants who took the strong illusion version first would then often fall for the illusion even in the weak illusion version, thus strengthening the otherwise weak illusion in the latter task.

In this research, we explore how experience with an "attraction set" of options, designed to elicit an asymmetric-dominance (attraction) effect, affects choice making in a second "compromise set" designed to elicit a compromise effect. In Experiment 1, when a compromise set was presented, subjects who had chosen an asymmetrically dominating option from an attraction set were less likely to surrender to the compromise heuristic than their counterparts who had chosen the equivalent option from a binary set. Lower susceptibility to the compromise heuristic suggests that asymmetric dominance might have facilitated the learning of attribute preferences. In Experiment 2, subjects were asked to make six choices in the personal computer category. Subjects who had chosen any number of asymmetrically dominating options from the attraction condition were less susceptible to the compromise heuristic in a subsequent choice task than their counterparts who had chosen the same number of equivalent options from the binary condition. It was unlikely that the effect was caused by better memory of asymmetrically dominating options subjects had previously chosen. Results from the two experiments corroborated the reasoning that asymmetric dominance affects the learning of attribute weights and this effect persists in a subsequent choice task.

In lottery gambling, the common phenomenon of risk aversion shows up as preference of the option with the higher win probability, even if a riskier alternative offers a greater expected value. Because riskier choices would optimize profitability in such cases, the present study investigates the visual format, with which lotteries are conveyed, as potential instrument to modulate risk attitudes. Previous research has shown that enhanced attention to graphical compared to numerical probabilities can increase risk aversion, but evidence for the reverse effect — reduced risk aversion through a graphical display of outcomes — is sparse. We conducted three experiments, in which participants repeatedly selected one of two lotteries. Probabilities and outcomes were either presented numerically or in a graphical format that consisted of pie charts (Experiment 1) or icon arrays (Experiment 2 and 3). Further, expected values were either higher in the safer or in the riskier lottery, or they did not differ between the options. Despite a marked risk aversion in all experiments, our results show that presenting outcomes as graphs can reduce — albeit not eliminate — risk aversion (Experiment 3). Yet, not all formats prove suitable, and non-intuitive outcome graphs can even enhance risk aversion (Experiment 1). Joint analyses of choice proportions and response times (RTs) further uncovered that risk aversion leads to safe choices particularly in fast decisions. This pattern is expressed under graphical probabilities, whereas graphical outcomes can weaken the rapid dominance of risk aversion and the variability over RTs (Experiment 1 and 2). Together, our findings demonstrate the relevance of information format for risky decisions.

We explore people’s preferences for numbers in large proprietary data sets from two different lottery games. We find that choice is far from uniform, and exhibits some familiar and some new tendencies and biases. Players favor personally meaningful and situationally available numbers, and are attracted towards numbers in the center of the choice form. Frequent players avoid winning numbers from recent draws, whereas infrequent players chase these. Combinations of numbers are formed with an eye for aesthetics, and players tend to spread their numbers relatively evenly across the possible range.

We experimentally explore the effects of time limitation on decision making. Under different time allowance conditions, subjects are presented with a queueing situation and asked to join one of the two given queues. The results can be grouped under two main categories. The first one concerns the factors driving decisions in a queueing system. Only some subjects behave consistently with rationality principles and use the relevant information efficiently. The rest of the subjects seem to adopt a simpler strategy that does not incorporate some information into their decision. The second category is related to the effects of time limitation on decision performance. A substantial proportion of the population is not affected by time limitations and shows consistent behavior throughout the treatments. On the other hand, some subjects’ performance is impaired by time limitations. More importantly, this impairment is not due to the stringency of the limitation but rather to being exposed to a time constraint.

Regret is one of the most common emotions, but researchers generally measure it in an ad-hoc, unvalidated fashion. Three studies outline the construction and validation of the Regret Elements Scale (RES), which distinguishes between an affective component of regret, associated with maladaptive affective outcomes, and a cognitive component of regret, associated with functional preparatory outcomes. The present research demonstrates the RES’s relationship with distress (Study 1), appraisals of emotions (Study 2), and existing measures of regret (Study 3). We further demonstrate the RES’s ability to differentiate regret from other negative emotions (Study 2) and related traits (Study 3). The scale provides both a new theoretical perspective on regret, and a tool for researchers interested in measuring post-decisional regret.

Previous studies relating low-effort or intuitive thinking to political conservatism are limited to Western cultures. Using Turkish and predominantly Muslim samples, Study 1 found that analytic cognitive style (ACS) is negatively correlated with political conservatism. Study 2 found that ACS correlates negatively with political orientation and with social and personal conservatism, but not with economic conservatism. It also examined other variables that might help to explain this correlation. Study 3 tried to manipulate ACS via two different standard priming procedures in two different samples, but our manipulation checks failed. Study 4 manipulated intuitive thinking style via cognitive load manipulation to see whether it enhances conservatism for contextualized political attitudes but we did not find a significant effect. Overall, the results indicate that social liberals tend to think more analytically than conservatives and people’s long term political attitudes may be resistant to experimental manipulations.

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.