Failures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by adopting policies, technologies, and lifestyle changes have led the world to the brink of crisis, or likely beyond. Here we use Internet surveys to attempt to understand these failures by studying factors that affect the adoption of personal energy conservation behaviors and also endorsement of energy conservation goals proposed for others. We demonstrate an asymmetry between goals for self and others (“I’ll do the easy thing, you do the hard thing”), but we show that this asymmetry is partly produced by actor/observer differences: people know what they do already (and generally do not propose those actions as personal goals) and also know their own situational constraints that are barriers to action. We also show, however, that endorsement of conservation goals decreases steeply as a function of perceived difficulty; this suggests a role for motivated cognition as a barrier to conservation: difficult things are perceived as less applicable to one’s situation.

Although post-error slowing and the “hot hand” (streaks of good performance) are both types of sequential dependencies arising from the differential influence of success and failure, they have not previously been studied together. We bring together these two streams of research in a task where difficulty can be controlled by participants delaying their decisions, and where responses required a degree deliberation, and so are relatively slow. We compared performance of unpaid participants against paid participants who were rewarded differentially, with higher reward for better performance. In contrast to most previous results, we found no post-error slowing for paid or unpaid participants. For the unpaid group, we found post-error speeding and a hot hand, even though the hot hand is typically considered a fallacy. Our results suggest that the effect of success and failure on subsequent performance may differ substantially with task characteristics and demands. We also found payment affected post-error performance; financially rewarding successful performance led to a more cautious approach following errors, whereas unrewarded performance led to recklessness following errors.

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 demonstrate that the desirability bias, the elevation of the estimated likelihood of a preferred event, can be due in part to the desire for consistency between the preference for the favored event and its predicted likelihood. An experiment uses a participant’s favorite team in Major League Baseball games and a recently devised method for priming the consistency goal. When preference is the first response, priming cognitive consistency moves prediction toward greater agreement with that preference, thereby increasing the desirability bias. In contrast, when prediction is the first response, priming cognitive consistency facilitates greater agreement with the factual information for each game. This increases the accuracy of the prediction and reduces the desirability bias.

We conducted additional analyses of Pennycook et al.’s (2015, Study 2) data to investigate the possibility that there would be ideological differences in “bullshit receptivity” that would be explained by individual differences in cognitive style and ability. As hypothesized, we observed that endorsement of neoliberal, free market ideology was significantly but modestly associated with bullshit receptivity. In addition, we observed a quadratic association, which indicated that ideological moderates were more susceptible to bullshit than ideological extremists. These relationships were explained, in part, by heuristic processing tendencies, faith in intuition, and lower verbal ability. Results are inconsistent with approaches suggesting that (a) there are no meaningful ideological differences in cognitive style or reasoning ability, (b) simplistic, certainty-oriented cognitive styles are generally associated with leftist (vs. rightist) economic preferences, or (c) simplistic, certainty-oriented cognitive styles are generally associated with extremist (vs. moderate) preferences. Theoretical and practical implications are briefly addressed.

Prospect Theory predicts that people tend to be more risk seeking if their reference point is perceived as a loss and more risk averse when the reference point is perceived as a gain. In line with this prediction, Franken, Georgieva, Muris and Dijksterhuis (2006) showed that young adults who had a prior experience of monetary gains make more safe choices on subsequent decisions than subjects who had an early experience of losses. There are no experimental studies on how experiencing prior gains and losses differently influences young and older adults on a subsequent decision-making task (the Iowa Gambling Task). Hence, in the current paper, adapting the methodology employed by Franken et al.’s (2006), we intended to test the generality of their effect across the life span. Overall, we found that subjects who experienced prior monetary gains or prior monetary losses did not display significant differences in safe/risky choices on subsequent performance in the Iowa Gambling task. Furthermore, the impact of prior gains and losses on risky/safe card selection did not significantly differ between young and older adults. These results showed that the effect found in the Franken et al.’s study (2006) is limited in its generality.

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.

The present research examines the prevalence of predictions in daily life. Specifically we examine whether spending predictions for specific purchases occur spontaneously in life outside of a laboratory setting. Across community samples and student samples, overall self-report and diary reports, three studies suggest that people make spending predictions for about two-thirds of purchases in everyday life. In addition, we examine factors that increase the likelihood of spending predictions: the size of purchase, payment form, time pressure, personality variables, and purchase decisions. Spending predictions were more likely for larger, more exceptional purchases and for item and project predictions rather than time periods.

In two studies, people were reluctant to trade items they own, but glad to accept upgrades with identical end states. The framing of the transaction makes a difference. A mediational analysis suggests that the relationship between the frame of the transaction and measures of value (willingness to accept, WTA) depends on perceived losses. Losses are perceived as greater when the transaction is a trade than as an upgrade. We manipulated perceptions of loss across descriptions of transactions and found that, when the difference in perceptions of losses with trades versus upgrades was large, framing effects were strong. But when the difference was small, framing effects disappeared. These framing effects with identical end states influence WTA because trades are associated with perceived losses, while upgrades are associated with perceived costs.

Every day, people struggle to make healthy eating decisions. Nutrition labels have been used to help people properly balance the tradeoff between healthiness and taste, but research suggests that these labels vary in their effectiveness. Here, we investigated the cognitive mechanism underlying value-based decisions with nutrition labels as modulators of value.

More specifically, we used a binary decision task between products along with two different nutrition labels to examine how salient, color-coded labels, compared to purely information-based labels, alter the choice process. Using drift-diffusion modeling, we investigated whether color-coded labels alter the valuation process, or whether they induce a simple stimulus-response association consistent with the traffic-light colors irrespective of the features of the item, which would manifest in a starting point bias in the model. We show that color-coded labels significantly increased healthy choices by increasing the rate of preference formation (drift rate) towards healthier options without altering the starting point. Salient labels increased the sensitivity to health and decreased the weight on taste, indicating that the integration of health and taste attributes during the choice process is sensitive to how information is displayed. Salient labels proved to be more effective in altering the valuation process towards healthier, goal-directed decisions.

How do people make decisions between an immediate but small reward and a delayed but large one? The outcome of such decisions indicates that people discount rewards by their delay and hence these outcomes are well described by discounting functions. However, to understand irregular decisions and dysfunctional behavior one needs models which describe how the process of making the decision unfolds dynamically over time: how do we reach a decision and how do sequential decisions influence one another? Here, we present an attractor model that integrates into and extends discounting functions through a description of the dynamics leading to a final choice outcome within a trial and across trials. To validate this model, we derive qualitative predictions for the intra-trial dynamics of single decisions and for the inter-trial dynamics of sequences of decisions that are unique to this type of model. We test these predictions in four experiments based on a dynamic delay discounting computer game where we study the intra-trial dynamics of single decisions via mouse tracking and the inter-trial dynamics of sequences of decisions via sequentially manipulated options. We discuss how integrating decision process dynamics within and across trials can increase our understanding of the processes underlying delay discounting decisions and, hence, complement our knowledge about decision outcomes.

Reputation plays a major role in human societies, and it has been proposed as an explanation for the evolution of cooperation. While the majority of previous studies equates reputation with a transparent and complete history of players’ past decisions, reputations in real life are often ambiguous and opaque. Using web-based experiments, we explore the extent to which opaque reputation works in isolating defectors, with and without partner selection opportunities. We found that low reputation works as a signal of untrustworthiness, whereas medium or high reputations are not taken into account by subjects for orienting their choices. Reputation without partner selection does not promote cooperative behavior; that is, defectors do not turn into cooperators only for the sake of getting a positive reputation. Finally, in a third study, when reputation is pivotal to selection, then a substantial proportion of would-be-defectors turn into cooperators. Taken together, these results provide insights about the characteristics of reputation and about the way in which humans make use of it when selecting partners, and also when knowing that they will be selected.

People often make more rational choices between monetary prospects when their choices will be played out many times rather than just once. For example, previous research has shown that the certainty effect and the possibility effect (two common-ratio effects that violate expected utility theory) are eliminated in multiple-play decisions. This finding is challenged by seven new studies (N = 2391) and two small meta-analyses. Results indicate that, on average, certainty and possibility effects are reduced but not eliminated in multiple-play decisions. Moreover, in our within-participants studies, the certainty and possibility choice patterns almost always remained the modal or majority patterns. Our primary results were not reliably affected by prompts that encouraged a long-run perspective, by participants’ insight into long-run payoffs, or by participants’ numeracy. The persistence of common-ratio effects suggests that the oft-cited benefits of multiple plays for the rationality of decision makers’ choices may be smaller than previously realized.

We examined the effect of perceptions of advantage and disadvantage on the variability and stability of efficacy beliefs in a competition. Perceptions of advantageous or disadvantageous opening position were experimentally manipulated (keeping the actual positions equal) and pre- and post-competition efficacy beliefs were observed. Perceiving an advantage resulted in more variability and less stability in efficacy beliefs. These results are explained by the higher sensitivity of the advantaged to the experiences of the competition.

To successfully select and implement nudges, policy makers need a psychological understanding of who opposes nudges, how they are perceived, and when alternative methods (e.g., forced choice) might work better. Using two representative samples, we examined four factors that influence U.S. attitudes toward nudges – types of nudges, individual dispositions, nudge perceptions, and nudge frames. Most nudges were supported, although opt-out defaults for organ donations were opposed in both samples. “System 1” nudges (e.g., defaults and sequential orderings) were viewed less favorably than “System 2” nudges (e.g., educational opportunities or reminders). System 1 nudges were perceived as more autonomy threatening, whereas System 2 nudges were viewed as more effective for better decision making and more necessary for changing behavior. People with greater empathetic concern tended to support both types of nudges and viewed them as the “right” kind of goals to have. Individualists opposed both types of nudges, and conservatives tended to oppose both types. Reactant people and those with a strong desire for control opposed System 1 nudges. To see whether framing could influence attitudes, we varied the description of the nudge in terms of the target (Personal vs. Societal) and the reference point for the nudge (Costs vs. Benefits). Empathetic people were more supportive when framing highlighted societal costs or benefits, and reactant people were more opposed to nudges when frames highlighted the personal costs of rejection.

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.

Danziger, Levav and Avnaim-Pesso (2011) analyzed legal rulings of Israeli parole boards concerning the effect of serial order in which cases are presented within ruling sessions. They found that the probability of a favorable decision drops from about 65% to almost 0% from the first ruling to the last ruling within each session and that the rate of favorable rulings returns to 65% in a session following a food break. The authors argue that these findings provide support for extraneous factors influencing judicial decisions and cautiously speculate that the effect might be driven by mental depletion. A simulation shows that the observed influence of order can be alternatively explained by a statistical artifact resulting from favorable rulings taking longer than unfavorable ones. An effect of similar magnitude would be produced by a (hypothetical) rational judge who plans ahead minimally and ends a session instead of starting cases that he or she assumes will take longer directly before the break. One methodological detail further increased the magnitude of the artifact and generates it even without assuming any foresight concerning the upcoming case. Implications for this article are discussed and the increased application of simulations to identify nonobvious rational explanations is recommended.

In many competitive situations, our investments increase our gains: Developing better products or research proposals may lead to higher contracts or patents or larger grants. Does increasing investment in such cases always guarantee higher gains? We used an experimental repeated competition game in which prizes depended on contestants’ investments (n=108). Contestants invested more when they increased the potential prize (“enlarge the market”), yet in some cases this tendency was counterproductive (“decrease the profit”): Contestants in fact diminished their earnings, compared to sitting out the competition and keeping their initial funds. Moreover, when a contestant’s investment decreased an opponent’s prize, the contestant tended to invest less; this effect, in turn, led to higher overall gains for both contestants. This result implies that prosocial considerations are at play. Notably, in certain situations, excessive competitive tendencies may lead to a larger waste of resources.

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.