To the known causes of overconfidence in decisions and judgments, we reveal another source that derives from a bias during the act of decision making. While this bias, the predecisional distortion of information, is well studied, its impact on overconfidence is not. We demonstrate how the distortion of information creates overconfidence in those professionals often regarded as singularly overconfident, entrepreneurs. When these professionals use a sequence of relevant information to make an accept-reject decision about a business opportunity, a cycle of confidence-distortion-confidence builds unjustified confidence in the chosen action – and does so whether that action is to accept or reject the venture. Overconfidence is a well-recognized cause of flawed decision making. Our work demonstrates the paradoxical converse of this claim, that flawed decision making can be a cause of overconfidence.

In 2 experiments, we attempted to reduce belief-consistent biases in interpretations of a polarized problem by making information easier to interpret. In the experiments, participants solved numerical problems that were either framed in a politically polarized (the effects of Muslim prayer rooms on support for Islamic extremism) or a neutral setting (the effects of a skin cream on skin rash). In both studies, the problems were presented twice, with the second presentation accompanied with an aid to facilitate problem-solving. In Experiment 1, this aid came in the form of an informative text on how to calculate the numbers to solve the problem. In Experiment 2, the aid provided participants with the first calculus necessary to solve the problem: transforming frequencies to percentages. Overall, results demonstrated belief-consistent responses in the polarized scenario when participants attempted to solve the first problem (higher accuracy when the correct conclusion was in line with participants’ ideology). Information on how to calculate the problem (Experiment 1) only slightly reduced the biased responses, whereas the added percentages (Experiment 2) led to a substantial reduction of the bias. Thus, we demonstrate that the facilitation of complex information on a polarized topic reduces biases in favor of rational reasoning.

Existing research suggests a negative correlation between reflective thinking and religious belief. The dual process model (DPM) posits that reflection diminishes religious belief by limiting intuitive decisions. In contrast, the expressive rationality model (ERM) argues that reflection serves an identity-protective function by bolstering rather than modifying preexisting beliefs. Although the current literature tends to favor the DPM, many studies suffer from unbalanced samples. To avoid this limitation, we recruited comparably large number of participants for both religious believers (n = 580) and non-believers (n = 594) and observed the relationship between reflection and two measures of religious belief: belief in God and disbelief in evolution. Our findings corroborate the negative associations found between higher levels of reflection and both types of belief, independent of religious affiliation. Our results align with the broader literature, supporting the DPM but not the ERM.

Addressing climate change requires substantial shifts in individual behavior. Providing information about climate externalities through carbon labels is a promising tool to foster sustainable choices when individuals weigh environmental against personal outcomes. We study the impact of carbon labels over time and their underlying mechanisms in a repeated risky choice task. We ran two preregistered experiments (US samples, N = 1,268) with realized carbon and monetary payoffs, examining how choice is influenced by the timing of carbon information (One-off vs. Recurring) and participants’ political preference (i.e., Democrat or Republican voters). In Study 1, we find that both Democrats and Republicans reduce carbon emissions when carbon labels were provided. Further, recurring labels significantly reduced carbon choices compared to one-off labels. Study 2 replicated the results in a within-participant design and showed that the impact of recurring carbon labels on sustainable choices cannot be explained by the strength of emission recall. This suggests that recurring labels amplify the importance given to the climate attribute in the decision process, operating via attentional rather than informational mechanisms. Our results emphasize the importance of providing climate externality information at time of use to raise awareness about climate costs and bolster sustainable preferences across population segments.

There is a large literature evaluating the dual process model of cognition, including the biases and heuristics it implies. However, our understanding of what causes effortful thinking remains incomplete. To advance this literature, we focus on what triggers decision-makers to switch from the intuitive process (System 1) to the more deliberative process (System 2). We examine how the framing of incentives (gains versus losses) influences decision processing. To evaluate this, we design experiments based on a task developed to distinguish between intuitive and deliberative thinking. Replicating previous research, we find that losses elicit more cognitive effort. Most importantly, we also find that losses differentially reduce the incidence of intuitive answers, consistent with triggering a shift between these modes of cognition. We find substantial heterogeneity in these effects, with young men being much more responsive to the loss framing. To complement these findings, we provide robustness tests of our results using aggregated data, the imposition of a constraint to hinder the activation of System 2, and an analysis of incorrect, but unintuitive, answers to inform hybrid models of choice.

This research explores a phenomenon that we see nearly every day and has implications for how we view people in other nations: Different media outlets may report the same international events either in terms of the nation (e.g., “Russia invades Ukraine”) or in terms of the leader (e.g., “Putin invades Ukraine”). Five studies, conducted during the 2022 Russia-Ukraine Conflict and involving both field and experimental data, find that readers of nation-framed news about the conflict had worse impressions of the people in the associated nation (Russians) than readers of the corresponding leader-framed version. We explain the psychology behind this framing effect and identify its moderators. Our research underscores the importance of responsible media practices in shaping global perceptions.

Many people struggle to make tradeoffs between present wants and future wishes, resulting in the tendency to overly discount the value of future rewards. To explain such behavior, past work has pointed to future self-continuity or the perceived connection between a person’s current and future selves. Yet, most of this past work has been conducted on small-to-medium size convenience samples, and as such, little is known regarding the population-level statistics of future self-continuity or how its link to important financial health variables like saving behavior and financial well-being play out in a nationally representative sample. Here, we use a nationally representative sample of over 6,000 Americans to investigate the generalizability of future self-continuity and its connection to financial outcomes such as savings behavior and global financial well-being. We also examine the strength of these associations in the face of a host of other relevant constructs. Overall, this research replicates and extends existing work on the relationship between future self-continuity and financial decision-making among a representative population, and sheds further insight on its potential implications for interventions aimed at enhancing long-term financial well-being.

Sustainable financial investments play a role in mitigating climate change. With this research, we explored how decision-makers use three investment strategies illustrating different primary motives: (1) money maximization (economic self-interest), (2) exclusion (not personally harming the environment), and (3) inclusion (helping the environment most efficiently). The relative use of these strategies was tested within a novel investment paradigm, aiming to artificially create a trade-off between financial payoffs (money maximization), environmental purity (exclusion), and environmental impact (inclusion). We recruited 1422 participants online and let them make ten consecutive investment choices, with incentivized outcomes, both monetary (i.e., potential bonus payment) and environmental (i.e., number of trees planted). We tested the change in investment choices using a between-subject design with four conditions, a control, and one default condition for each investment strategy. The three strategies were chosen about equally often in the control condition, but we find that this investment pattern could be altered by a default intervention. Preliminary evidence suggests that participants primarily using the exclusion and inclusion strategies differ in their moral reasoning. Utilitarianism better predicted the inclusion strategy, whereas high self-importance of moral identity better predicted the exclusion strategy.

Advice taking is a crucial part of decision-making and has attracted the interest of scholars across the world. Laboratory research on advice taking has revealed several robust phenomena, such as sensitivity to advice quality or a tendency to underutilize advice. Despite extensive investigations in different countries, cultural differences in advice taking remain understudied. Knowing whether such cultural differences exist would not only be interesting from an academic standpoint but might also have consequences for multinational organizations and businesses. Here, we argue that prior laboratory research on cultural differences in advice taking is hindered by confounding factors, particularly the confound between participants’ cultural background and task difficulty. To draw a valid conclusion about cultural differences in advice taking, it is vital to develop a decision task devoid of this confound. Here, we develop such a judgment task and demonstrate that the core phenomena of advice taking manifest in a sample of German participants. We then use this task in a cross-national comparison of German and Chinese participants. While the core phenomena of advice taking consistently manifested in both samples, some differences emerged. Most notably, Chinese participants were more receptive of advice, even though they still underutilized it. This greater reliance on advice was driven by Chinese participants’ greater preference for averaging their own and the advisor’s judgments. We discuss how our findings extend current understanding of the nuanced interplay between cultural values and the dynamics of advice taking.

Context effects occur when the preference between two alternatives is affected by the presence of an extra alternative. These effects are some of the most well studied phenomena in multi-alternative, multi-attribute decision making. Recent research in this area has revealed an intriguing pattern of results. On the one hand, these effects are robust and ubiquitous. That is, they have been demonstrated in many domains and different choice settings. On the other hand, they are fragile and they disappear or even reverse under different conditions. This pattern of results has spurred debate and speculation about the cognitive mechanisms that drive these choices. The attraction effect, where the preference for an option increases in the presence of a dominated decoy, has generated the most controversy. In this registered report, we systematically vary factors that are known to be associated with the attraction effect to build a solid foundation of empirical results to aid future theory development. We find a robust attraction effect across the different conditions. The strength of this effect is modulated by the display order (e.g., decoy top, target middle, competitor bottom) and mode (numeric vs. graphical) but not display layout (by-attribute vs. by-alternative).

In this comment, I examine the results of two studies (Shafir, 1993 and Chandrashekar et al., 2021) that relied on the same stimuli to examine the effect of framing selection tasks in terms of choosing versus rejecting, and discuss how, despite the failure of the later study to replicate the results of the earlier one, analyzing the similarities and differences between the two advances our understanding of the processes underlying decisions in general, and decision in such tasks in particular.

Do people like financial nudges? To answer that question we conducted a pre-registered survey presenting people with 36 hypothetical scenarios describing financial interventions. We varied levels of transparency (i.e., explaining how the interventions worked), framing (interventions framed in terms of spending, or saving), and ‘System’ (interventions could target either System 1 or System 2). Participants were a random sample of 2,100 people drawn from a representative Australian population. All financial interventions were tested across six dependent variables: approval, benefit, ethics, manipulation, the likelihood of use, as well as the likelihood of use if the intervention were to be proposed by a bank. Results indicate that people generally approve of financial interventions, rating them as neutral to positive across all dependent variables (except for manipulation, which was reverse coded). We find effects of framing and System. People have strong and significant preferences for System 2 interventions, and interventions framed in terms of savings. Transparency was not found to have a significant impact on how people rate financial interventions. Financial interventions continue to be rated positive, regardless of the messenger. Looking at demographics, we find that participants who were female, younger, living in metro areas and earning higher incomes were most likely to favor financial interventions, and this effect is especially strong for those aged under 45. We discuss the implications for these results as applied to the financial sector.

People frequently engage in dishonest behavior, which entails costs to society. A common advice to increase honesty is to enhance observability. However, previous research produced conflicting findings, making it unclear when and why observability increases honesty. Here we show that observability enhances honesty when observers can gossip to relevant others (i.e., to future interaction partners who can influence the gossip target’s outcome), because it increases reputational concern. In 2 incentivized and pre-registered studies, participants privately rolled a die 30 times and were informed that reporting higher numbers would lead to higher outcomes (total N = 1608; 28650 observations). We manipulated observability and gossip. Both studies revealed that gossip to relevant others decreased dishonest reporting, whereas mere observation did not. Importantly, reputational concern partly mediated the impact of gossip on dishonesty. Moreover, gossip influenced recipients’ trust in gossip targets, with messages denoting dishonesty swaying trust more than messages denoting honesty. Our findings demonstrate when and why observability promotes honesty.

The present study aimed to adapt the actively open-minded thinking about evidence (AOT-E) scale to Brazilian Portuguese and assess its psychometric properties and nomological network in a Brazilian sample. It begins by investigating the underlying content structure of the AOT-E in its original form. Results from an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) of secondary data serve as the basis for the proposed adaptation, which is subjected to both EFA and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). A total of 718 participants from various regions of Brazil completed an online survey that included the AOT-E, along with other instruments that allowed for an assessment of the scale’s nomological network, including measures of science literacy, attitude toward science, conspiracy beliefs, and religiosity. The EFA and CFA of both the original and Brazilian samples suggested a unidimensional solution. Despite the differences found in a multigroup CFA, polychoric correlations provided evidence of expected nomological relationships that replicate international findings. Overall, this study contributes to expanding the availability of adapted and validated research instruments in non-WEIRD samples.

First-order stochastic dominance is a core principle in rational decision-making. If lottery A has a higher or equal chance of winning an amount $x $ or more compared to lottery B for all x, and a strictly higher chance for at least one $x $, then A should be preferred over B. Previous research suggests that violations of this principle may result from failures in recognizing coalescing equivalence. In Expected Utility Theory (EUT) and Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT), gambles are represented as probability distributions, where probabilities of equivalent events can be combined, ensuring stochastic dominance. In contrast, the Transfer of Attention Exchange (TAX) model represents gambles as trees with branches for each probability and outcome, making it possible for coalescing and stochastic dominance violations to occur. We conducted two experiments designed to train participants in identifying dominance by splitting coalesced gambles. By toggling between displays of coalesced and split forms of the same choice problem, participants were instructed to recognize stochastic dominance. Despite this training, violations of stochastic dominance were only minimally reduced, as if people find it difficult—or even resist—shifting from a trees-with-branches representation (as in the TAX model) to a cognitive recognition of the equivalence among different representations of the same choice problem.