Reid Hastie

The Preference for Moderation Scale
Date Posted:Sat, 01 Aug 2020 01:37:15 -0500
We propose that individual differences in the value placed on the principle of moderation exist and influence many aspects of consumer decision-making. The idea that moderation is an important guiding norm of human behavior is prevalent throughout history and an explicit theme in many philosophies, religions, and cultures. Yet, moderation has not been studied as an individual-level determinant of consumer behavior. We develop a scale that measures the degree to which individuals have a Preference for Moderation (PFM). The PFM scale predicts consequential behavior in many decision contexts. We first report on scale development, including the generation and selection of items. We then report analyses that show PFM is distinct from several popular individual-difference variables. Related to cultural background, PFM reliably predicts the use of compromise (Study 1) and balancing (vs. highlighting) strategies (Study 2), as well as various decision-making behaviors, including reliance on the representativeness heuristic (Study 3), self-reported financial habits and outcomes (Studies 4-5), real-world online reviewing behavior (Study 6), and split-ticket voting behavior in the 2018 U.S. midterm elections (Study 7).

New: The Preference for Moderation Scale
Date Posted:Fri, 31 Jul 2020 16:38:15 -0500
We propose that individual differences in the value placed on the principle of moderation exist and influence many aspects of consumer decision-making. The idea that moderation is an important guiding norm of human behavior is prevalent throughout history and an explicit theme in many philosophies, religions, and cultures. Yet, moderation has not been studied as an individual-level determinant of consumer behavior. We develop a scale that measures the degree to which individuals have a Preference for Moderation (PFM). The PFM scale predicts consequential behavior in many decision contexts. We first report on scale development, including the generation and selection of items. We then report analyses that show PFM is distinct from several popular individual-difference variables. Related to cultural background, PFM reliably predicts the use of compromise (Study 1) and balancing (vs. highlighting) strategies (Study 2), as well as various decision-making behaviors, including reliance on ...

Predicting Outcomes in a Sequence of Binary Events: Belief Updating and Gambler?s Fallacy Reasoning
Date Posted:Thu, 04 Jun 2020 19:46:43 -0500
We report on six experiments studying participants? predictions of the next outcome in a sequence of binary events. Participants faced one of three mechanisms generating 18 sequences of 8 events: a random mechanical bingo cage, an intentional goal-directed actor, and a financial market. We systematically manipulated participants? beliefs about the base rate probabilities at which different types of outcomes were generated by each mechanism. Participants either faced unknown (ambiguous) base rates, a specified distribution of three equiprobable base rates, or a precise, stationary base rate. Six target sequences ended in streaks of between two and seven identical outcomes. We focused on participants? predictions of the ninth, unobserved outcome in each of these target sequences. Across all generating mechanisms and prior belief conditions, the most common prediction pattern was best described as close-to-rational belief updating, producing an increasingly strong bias toward repetition of streaks. The exception to this generalization was for sequences generated by a random mechanical bingo cage with a precise, stationary base rate of .50. Under these conditions, participants exhibited a bias toward reversal of streaks. This effect was irrational, given our instructions on the nature of the generator. We conclude that the dominant judgment habit when predicting outcomes of sequences of binary events is reasonable belief updating. We review alternate accounts for the a

New: Predicting Outcomes in a Sequence of Binary Events: Belief Updating and Gambler’s Fallacy Reasoning
Date Posted:Thu, 04 Jun 2020 10:47:17 -0500
We report on six experiments studying participants’ predictions of the next outcome in a sequence of binary events. Participants faced one of three mechanisms generating 18 sequences of 8 events: a random mechanical bingo cage, an intentional goal-directed actor, and a financial market. We systematically manipulated participants’ beliefs about the base rate probabilities at which different types of outcomes were generated by each mechanism. Participants either faced unknown (ambiguous) base rates, a specified distribution of three equiprobable base rates, or a precise, stationary base rate. Six target sequences ended in streaks of between two and seven identical outcomes. We focused on participants’ predictions of the ninth, unobserved outcome in each of these target sequences. Across all generating mechanisms and prior belief conditions, the most common prediction pattern was best described as close-to-rational belief updating, producing an increasingly strong bias toward ...

REVISION: Garbage in, Garbage Out? Some Micro Sources of Macro Errors
Date Posted:Mon, 18 Nov 2013 04:41:57 -0600
Many institutions, large or small, make their decisions through some process of deliberation. Nonetheless, deliberating institutions often fail, in the sense that they make judgments that are false or that fail to take advantage of the information that their members have. Micro mistakes can lead to macro blunders or even catastrophes. There are four such failures; all of them have implication for large-scale institutions as well as small ones. (1) Sometimes the predeliberation errors of an institution’s members are amplified, not merely propagated, as a result of deliberation. (2) Institutions fall victim to cascade effects, as the initial speakers or actors are followed by their successors, who do not disclose what they know. Nondisclosure, on the part of those successors, may be a product of either informational or reputational cascades. (3) As a result of group polarization, deliberating institutions sometimes end up in a more extreme position in line with their predeliberation ...

Garbage in, Garbage Out? Some Micro Sources of Macro Errors
Date Posted:Wed, 28 Nov 2012 18:39:42 -0600
Many institutions, large or small, make their decisions through some process of deliberation. Nonetheless, deliberating institutions often fail, in the sense that they make judgments that are false or that fail to take advantage of the information that their members have. Micro mistakes can lead to macro blunders or even catastrophes. There are four such failures; all of them have implication for large-scale institutions as well as small ones. (1) Sometimes the predeliberation errors of an institution?s members are amplified, not merely propagated, as a result of deliberation. (2) Institutions fall victim to cascade effects, as the initial speakers or actors are followed by their successors, who do not disclose what they know. Nondisclosure, on the part of those successors, may be a product of either informational or reputational cascades. (3) As a result of group polarization, deliberating institutions sometimes end up in a more extreme position in line with their predeliberation tendencies. Sometimes group polarization leads in desirable directions, but there is no assurance to this effect. (4) In deliberating institutions, shared information often dominates or crowds out unshared information, ensuring that institutions do not learn what their members know. Informational signals and reputational pressure help to explain all four errors. The results can be harmful to numerous institutions, including large ones, and to societies as a whole. Markets are able to correct some of

REVISION: Garbage in, Garbage Out? Some Micro Sources of Macro Errors
Date Posted:Wed, 28 Nov 2012 13:39:43 -0600
Many institutions, large or small, make their decisions through some process of deliberation. Nonetheless, deliberating institutions often fail, in the sense that they make judgments that are false or that fail to take advantage of the information that their members have. There are four such failures; all of them have implication for large-scale institutions as well as small ones. (1) Sometimes the predeliberation errors of an institution’s members are amplified, not merely propagated, as a ...

New: Democracy Under Uncertainty: The ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ and the Free-Rider Problem in Group Decision Mak
Date Posted:Thu, 16 Sep 2010 10:13:23 -0500
We introduce a game theory model of individual decisions to cooperate by contributing personal resources to group decisions versus by free-riding on the contributions of other members. In contrast to most public-goods games that assume group returns are linear in individual contributions, the present model assumes decreasing marginal group production as a function of aggregate individual contributions. This diminishing marginal returns assumption is more realistic and generates starkly ...

Democracy Under Uncertainty: The ?Wisdom of Crowds? and the Free-Rider Problem in Group Decision Making
Date Posted:Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0500
We introduce a game theory model of individual decisions to cooperate by contributing personal resources to group decisions versus by free-riding on the contributions of other members. In contrast to most public-goods games that assume group returns are linear in individual contributions, the present model assumes decreasing marginal group production as a function of aggregate individual contributions. This diminishing marginal returns assumption is more realistic and generates starkly different predictions compared to the linear model. One important implication is that, under most conditions, there exist equilibria where some, but not all members of a group contribute, even with completely self-interested motives. An agent-based simulation confirms the individual and group advantages of the equilibria in which behavioral asymmetry emerges from a game structure that is a priori perfectly symmetric for all agents (all agents have the same payoff function and action space, but take different actions in equilibria). And a behavioral experiment demonstrates that cooperators and free-riders coexist in a stable manner in groups performing with the non-linear production function. A collateral result demonstrates that, compared to a ? dictatorial decision scheme guided by the best member in a group, the majority-plurality decision rules can pool information effectively and produce greater individual net welfare at equilibrium, even if free-riding is not sanctioned. This is an origin

New: What’s Next? Judging Sequences of Binary Events
Date Posted:Sat, 20 Feb 2010 05:35:08 -0600
The authors review research on judgments of random and nonrandom sequences involving binary events with a focus on studies documenting gambler’s fallacy and hot hand beliefs. The domains of judgment include random devices, births, lotteries, sports performances, stock prices, and others. After discussing existing theories of sequence judgments, the authors conclude that in many everyday settings people have naive complex models of the mechanisms they believe generate observed events, and they ...

What?s Next? Judging Sequences of Binary Events
Date Posted:Sat, 20 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0600
The authors review research on judgments of random and nonrandom sequences involving binary events with a focus on studies documenting gambler?s fallacy and hot hand beliefs. The domains of judgment include random devices, births, lotteries, sports performances, stock prices, and others. After discussing existing theories of sequence judgments, the authors conclude that in many everyday settings people have naive complex models of the mechanisms they believe generate observed events, and they rely on these models for explanations, predictions, and other inferences about event sequences. The authors next introduce an explanation-based, mental models framework for describing people?s beliefs about binary sequences, based on 4 perceived characteristics of the sequence generator: randomness, intentionality, control, and goal complexity. Furthermore, they propose a Markov process framework as a useful theoretical notation for the description of mental models and for the analysis of actual event sequences.

New: Perceived Causality as a Cue to Temporal Distance
Date Posted:Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:22:49 -0600
The three experiments reported show that judgments of elapsed time between events depend on perceived causal relations between the events. Participants judged pairs of causally related events to occur closer together in time than pairs of causally unrelated events that were separated by the same actual time interval. The causality-time relationship was first demonstrated for time judgments about historical events. Causally related events were judged to be significantly closer together in time ...

Perceived Causality as a Cue to Temporal Distance
Date Posted:Mon, 30 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600
The three experiments reported show that judgments of elapsed time between events depend on perceived causal relations between the events. Participants judged pairs of causally related events to occur closer together in time than pairs of causally unrelated events that were separated by the same actual time interval. The causality-time relationship was first demonstrated for time judgments about historical events. Causally related events were judged to be significantly closer together in time than causally unrelated events. In two subsequent experiments, perceived causality was manipulated by providing expert information and by asking the participants themselves to imagine causal relationships between the to-be-judged events. Again, substantial and reliable effects of perceived causality were obtained. Our results suggest that people use strength of perceived causality as a cue to infer temporal distance.

New: Introduction to the Special Issue: Decision Making and the Law
Date Posted:Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:45:57 -0500
Legal decision making is different from other types of decision making in several ways. For example, the decision makers range from highly qualified and trained professionals such as judges, making repeated decisions alone to novices such as jurors, making one off decisions in groups. Pertinent information may be unavailable to the decision maker, and he/she is also unlikely to receive much feedback about the quality of a decision. However, legal decision makers rarely suffer any consequences ...

Introduction to the Special Issue: Decision Making and the Law
Date Posted:Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500
Legal decision making is different from other types of decision making in several ways. For example, the decision makers range from highly qualified and trained professionals such as judges, making repeated decisions alone to novices such as jurors, making one off decisions in groups. Pertinent information may be unavailable to the decision maker, and he/she is also unlikely to receive much feedback about the quality of a decision. However, legal decision makers rarely suffer any consequences for making poor decisions. In our own research programs, we have strived to explain the judgment and decision making (JDM) of various legal actors including lay judges, juries, attorneys, and defendants. We have shown how the legal decision making process may conflict with scientific norms, as well as other benchmarks of rationality, and we have challenged the accuracy of such decisions. In organizing this special issue on Decision Making and the Law, our goals were to demonstrate some of the types of insights that research on legal decision making can provide to the field of JDM, as well as to stimulate our JDM colleagues into considering how their basic research may be applied to the legal context.

REVISION: Decision and Experience: Why Don't We Choose What Makes Us Happy?
Date Posted:Mon, 10 Nov 2008 09:44:27 -0600
Recent years have witnessed a growing interest among psychologists and other social scientists in subjective wellbeing and happiness. Here we review selected contributions to this development from the literature on behavioral decision theory. In particular, we examine many, somewhat surprising, findings that show people systematically fail to predict or choose what maximizes their happiness, and we look at reasons why they fail to do so. These findings challenge a fundamental assumption that ...

New: Effects of Amount of Information on Judgment Accuracy and Confidence
Date Posted:Mon, 10 Nov 2008 03:57:37 -0600
When a person evaluates his or her confidence in a judgment, what is the effect of receiving more judgment-relevant information? We report three studies that show when judges receive more information, their confidence increases more than their accuracy, producing substantial confidence-accuracy discrepancies. Our results suggest that judges do not adjust for the cognitive limitations that reduce their ability to use additional information effectively. We place these findings in a more general ...

Effects of Amount of Information on Judgment Accuracy and Confidence
Date Posted:Mon, 10 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0600
When a person evaluates his or her confidence in a judgment, what is the effect of receiving more judgment-relevant information? We report three studies that show when judges receive more information, their confidence increases more than their accuracy, producing substantial confidence-accuracy discrepancies. Our results suggest that judges do not adjust for the cognitive limitations that reduce their ability to use additional information effectively. We place these findings in a more general framework of understanding the cues to confidence that judges use and how those cues relate to accuracy and calibration.

REVISION: Hedonomics: Bridging Decision Research with Happiness Research
Date Posted:Mon, 03 Nov 2008 08:59:34 -0600
One way to increase happiness is to increase the objective levels of external outcomes; another is to improve the presentation and choices among external outcomes without increasing their objective levels. Economists focus on the 1st method. We advocate the second, which we call hedonomics. Hedonomics studies (a) relationships between presentations (how a given set of mfoutcomes are arranged among themselves or relative to other outcomes) and happiness and (b) relationships between choice ...

REVISION: Hedonomics: Bridging Decision Research with Happiness Research
Date Posted:Fri, 31 Oct 2008 07:34:10 -0500
One way to increase happiness is to increase the objective levels of external outcomes; another is to improve the presentation and choices among external outcomes without increasing their objective levels. Economists focus on the 1st method. We advocate the second, which we call hedonomics. Hedonomics studies (a) relationships between presentations (how a given set of mfoutcomes are arranged among themselves or relative to other outcomes) and happiness and (b) relationships between choice ...

REVISION: Hedonomics: Bridging Decision Research with Happiness Research
Date Posted:Fri, 23 May 2008 08:35:39 -0500
One way to increase happiness is to increase the objective levels of external outcomes; another is to improve the presentation and choices among external outcomes without increasing their objective levels. Economists focus on the 1st method. We advocate the second, which we call hedonomics. Hedonomics studies (a) relationships between presentations (how a given set of mfoutcomes are arranged among themselves or relative to other outcomes) and happiness and (b) relationships between choice ...

Hedonomics: Bridging Decision Research with Happiness Research
Date Posted:Fri, 23 May 2008 00:00:00 -0500
One way to increase happiness is to increase the objective levels of external outcomes; another is to improve the presentation and choices among external outcomes without increasing their objective levels. Economists focus on the 1st method. We advocate the second, which we call hedonomics. Hedonomics studies (a) relationships between presentations (how a given set of mfoutcomes are arranged among themselves or relative to other outcomes) and happiness and (b) relationships between choice (which option among alternative options one chooses) and happiness.

New: Four Failures of Deliberating Groups
Date Posted:Fri, 18 Apr 2008 05:52:32 -0500
Many groups make their decisions through some process of deliberation, usually with the belief that deliberation will improve judgments and predictions. But deliberating groups often fail, in the sense that they make judgments that are false or that fail to take advantage of the information that their members have. There are four such failures. (1) Sometimes the predeliberation errors of group members are amplified, not merely propagated, as a result of deliberation. (2) Groups may fall victim ...

Four Failures of Deliberating Groups
Date Posted:Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0500
Many groups make their decisions through some process of deliberation, usually with the belief that deliberation will improve judgments and predictions. But deliberating groups often fail, in the sense that they make judgments that are false or that fail to take advantage of the information that their members have. There are four such failures. (1) Sometimes the predeliberation errors of group members are amplified, not merely propagated, as a result of deliberation. (2) Groups may fall victim to cascade effects, as the judgments of initial speakers or actors are followed by their successors, who do not disclose what they know. Nondisclosure, on the part of those successors, may be a product of either informational or reputational cascades. (3) As a result of group polarization, groups often end up in a more extreme position in line with their predeliberation tendencies. Sometimes group polarization leads in desirable directions, but there is no assurance to this effect. (4) In deliberating groups, shared information often dominates or crowds out unshared information, ensuring that groups do not learn what their members know. All four errors can be explained by reference to informational signals, reputational pressure, or both. A disturbing result is that many deliberating groups do not improve on, and sometimes do worse than, the predeliberation judgments of their average or median member.

New: Calibration Trumps Confidence as a Basis for Witness Credibility
Date Posted:Mon, 09 Apr 2007 06:13:36 -0500
In the courtroom and in laboratory studies, confident witnesses are viewed as more credible, and thus have more influence on judgments and verdicts, than unconfident witnesses. In two experiments (with college student subjects) we demonstrate that erroneous testimony may damage the credibility of a high-confidence witness more than a low-confidence one. We show that listeners rely on a source's calibration - whether the source's confidence is appropriate to the level of knowledge - rather ...

Calibration Trumps Confidence as a Basis for Witness Credibility
Date Posted:Mon, 09 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500
In the courtroom and in laboratory studies, confident witnesses are viewed as more credible, and thus have more influence on judgments and verdicts, than unconfident witnesses. In two experiments (with college student subjects) we demonstrate that erroneous testimony may damage the credibility of a high-confidence witness more than a low-confidence one. We show that listeners rely on a source's calibration - whether the source's confidence is appropriate to the level of knowledge - rather than confidence when evaluating testimony.

REVISION: Decision and Experience: Why Don't We Choose What Makes US Happy?
Date Posted:Sun, 15 Oct 2006 05:23:42 -0500
Recent years have witnessed a growing interest among psychologists and other social scientists in subjective wellbeing and happiness. Here we review selected contributions to this development from the literature on behavioraldecision theory. In particular, we examine many,somewhat surprising, findings that show people systematically fail to predict or choose what maximizes their happiness, and we look at reasons why they fail to do so. These findings challenge a fundamental assumption that ...

REVISION: Decision and Experience: Why Don't We Choose What Makes US Happy?
Date Posted:Wed, 11 Oct 2006 08:30:01 -0500
Recent years have witnessed a growing interest among psychologists and other social scientists in subjective wellbeing and happiness. Here we review selected contributions to this development from the literature on behavioraldecision theory. In particular, we examine many,somewhat surprising, findings that show people systematically fail to predict or choose what maximizes their happiness, and we look at reasons why they fail to do so. These findings challenge a fundamental assumption that ...

Decision and Experience: Why Don't We Choose What Makes Us Happy?
Date Posted:Wed, 11 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500
Recent years have witnessed a growing interest among psychologists and other social scientists in subjective wellbeing and happiness. Here we review selected contributions to this development from the literature on behavioral decision theory. In particular, we examine many, somewhat surprising, findings that show people systematically fail to predict or choose what maximizes their happiness, and we look at reasons why they fail to do so. These findings challenge a fundamental assumption that underlies popular support for consumer sovereignty and other forms of autonomy in decision-making (e.g. marriage choice), namely, the assumption that people are able to make choices in their own best interests.

New: What Happened on Deliberation Day?
Date Posted:Mon, 26 Jun 2006 05:33:22 -0500
What are the effects of deliberation about political issues? This essay reports the results of a kind of Deliberation Day, involving sixty-three citizens in Colorado. Groups from Boulder, a predominantly liberal city, met and discussed global warming, affirmative action, and civil unions for same-sex couples; groups from Colorado Springs, a predominately conservative city, met to discuss the same issues. The major effect of deliberation was to make group members more extreme than they were ...

What Happened on Deliberation Day?
Date Posted:Mon, 26 Jun 2006 00:00:00 -0500
What are the effects of deliberation about political issues? This essay reports the results of a kind of Deliberation Day, involving sixty-three citizens in Colorado. Groups from Boulder, a predominantly liberal city, met and discussed global warming, affirmative action, and civil unions for same-sex couples; groups from Colorado Springs, a predominately conservative city, met to discuss the same issues. The major effect of deliberation was to make group members more extreme than they were when they started to talk. Liberals became more liberal on all three issues; conservatives became more conservative. As a result, the division between the citizens of Boulder and the citizens of Colorado Springs were significantly increased as a result of intragroup deliberation. Deliberation also increased consensus, and dampened diversity, within the groups. Implications are explored for the uses and structure of deliberation in general.