The cost of richness: The effect of the size and diversity of decision sets on post-decision regret.

Decision making is often made difficult by the knowledge that one has to live with the outcomes of one's choices and with the regret that these might engender. Formal theories propose that regret is proportional to the difference between the outcome of the option chosen and the expected outcome of the next best alternative that one may have chosen instead. It follows that the number of alternatives available for choice does not affect post-decisional regret. In this study, however, the authors proposed that regret is related to the comparison between the alternative chosen and the union of the positive attributes of the alternatives rejected. This general proposition yielded 2 hypotheses: (a) the larger number of alternatives from which one can choose and (b) the more diverse those alternatives are, the stronger the regret that an unsatisfactory choice would cause. These hypotheses were tested and supported by 4 experiments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mixed motives and racial bias: The impact of legitimate and illegitimate criteria on decision making.

Recent high-profile court rulings addressing the influence of illegitimate information--such as race--on decision making have highlighted the difficulty of establishing whether and when discrimination has occurred. One factor complicating such efforts is that decision makers are often simultaneously influenced by racial and nonracial information. The authors examined the psychological processes underlying such mixed-motive decision making, demonstrating how legitimate information can be manipulated to justify preferences based on illegitimate factors such as race. Study 1 showed that Black candidates were favored over White candidates in hypothetical college admissions decisions, although participants justified their decisions using nonracial information, and further showed that participants' levels of prejudice predicted both which candidate was chosen and how those choices were justified. Study 2 demonstrated that these justifications were not simply strategic and post hoc but also occurred as a natural part of the process of evaluating candidates. Discussion focuses on policy and legal implications for employment discrimination, affirmative action, and courtroom proceedings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Utilization of emotion cues in male and female offenders with antisocial personality disorder: Results from a lexical decision task.

Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) diagnoses have demonstrated good reliability and validity in male offenders. However, there is a paucity of research assessing utilization of emotion cues in ASPD individuals and the extent to which correlates of ASPD in males generalize to females. This investigation examined emotion utilization in incarcerated men and women with and without ASPD using a lexical decision task with emotional and neutral words. The performance of male offenders with ASPD was similar to that of male controls, whereas women with ASPD demonstrated greater emotional facilitation than female controls. Moreover, the number of violent crimes committed by female inmates with ASPD was related to emotion facilitation, suggesting a link between their sensitivity to emotion cues and antisocial behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Making choices impairs subsequent self-control: A limited-resource account of decision making, self-regulation, and active initiative.

The current research tested the hypothesis that making many choices impairs subsequent self-control. Drawing from a limited-resource model of self-regulation and executive function, the authors hypothesized that decision making depletes the same resource used for self-control and active responding. In 4 laboratory studies, some participants made choices among consumer goods or college course options, whereas others thought about the same options without making choices. Making choices led to reduced self-control (i.e., less physical stamina, reduced persistence in the face of failure, more procrastination, and less quality and quantity of arithmetic calculations). A field study then found that reduced self-control was predicted by shoppers' self-reported degree of previous active decision making. Further studies suggested that choosing is more depleting than merely deliberating and forming preferences about options and more depleting than implementing choices made by someone else and that anticipating the choice task as enjoyable can reduce the depleting effect for the first choices but not for many choices. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The classroom environment and students' reports of avoidance strategies in mathematics: A multimethod study.

The relation between the learning environment (e.g., students' perceptions of the classroom goal structure and teachers' instructional discourse) and students' reported use of avoidance strategies (self-handicapping, avoidance of help seeking) and preference to avoid novelty in mathematics was examined. Quantitative analyses indicated that students' reports of avoidance behaviors varied significantly among classrooms. A perceived emphasis on mastery goals in the classroom was positively related to lower reports of avoidance. Qualitative analyses revealed that teachers in high-mastery/low-avoidance and low-mastery/high-avoidance classrooms used distinctively different patterns of instructional and motivational discourse. High incidence of motivational support was uniquely characteristic of high-mastery/ low-avoidance classrooms, suggesting that mastery goals may include an affective component. Implications of the results for both theory and practice are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The aging decision maker: Cognitive aging and the adaptive selection of decision strategies.

Are older adults' decision abilities fundamentally compromised by age-related cognitive decline? Or can they adaptively select decision strategies? One study (N = 163) investigated the impact of cognitive aging on the ability to select decision strategies as a function of environment structure. Participants made decisions in either an environment that favored the use of information-intensive strategies or one favoring the use of simple, information-frugal strategies. Older adults tended to (a) look up less information and take longer to process it and (b) use simpler, less cognitively demanding strategies. In accordance with the idea that age-related cognitive decline leads to reliance on simpler strategies, measures of fluid intelligence explained age-related differences in information search and strategy selection. Nevertheless, both young and older adults seem to be equally adapted decision makers in that they adjust their information search and strategy selection as a function of environment structure, suggesting that the aging decision maker is an adaptive one. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Performance benefits of depression: Sequential decision making in a healthy sample and a clinically depressed sample.

Previous research reported conflicting results concerning the influence of depression on cognitive task performance. Whereas some studies reported that depression enhances performance, other studies reported negative or null effects. These discrepant findings appear to result from task variation, as well as the severity and treatment status of participant depression. To better understand these moderating factors, we study the performance of individuals—in a complex sequential decision task similar to the secretary problem—who are nondepressed, depressed, and recovering from a major depressive episode. We find that depressed individuals perform better than do nondepressed individuals. Formal modeling of participants' decision strategies suggested that acutely depressed participants had higher thresholds for accepting options and made better choices than either healthy participants or those recovering from depression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Motivated decision making: Effects of activation and self-centrality of values on choices and behavior.

Six studies examined the value-behavior relation and focused on motivational properties of values, the self, and value activation. Priming environmental values enhanced attention to and the weight of information related to those values, which resulted in environmentally friendly consumer choices. This only occurred if these values were central to the self-concept. Value-congruent choices were also found in response to countervalue behavior in an unrelated context. Donating behavior congruent with central altruistic values was found as a result of enhanced self-focus, thus demonstrating the importance of the self in the value-behavior relation. The external validity of the value-centrality measure and its distinction from attitudes were demonstrated in the prediction of voting. Values were thus found to give meaning to, energize, and regulate value-congruent behavior, but only if values were cognitively activated and central to the self. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Information sampling and group decision making: The effects of an advocacy decision procedure and task experience.

Group discussions tend to focus on information that was previously known by all members (shared information) rather than information known by only 1 member (unshared information). If the shared information implies a suboptimal alternative, this sampling bias is associated with inaccurate group decisions. The present study examines the impact of 2 factors on information exchange and decision quality: (a) an advocacy group decision procedure versus unstructured discussion and (b) task experience. Results show that advocacy groups discussed both more shared and unshared information than free-discussion groups. Further, with increasing experience, more unshared information was mentioned in advocacy groups. In contrast, there was no such increase in unstructured discussions. Yet advocacy groups did not significantly improve their decision quality with experience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Two-stage dynamic signal detection: A theory of choice, decision time, and confidence": Erratum.

Reports an error in "Two-stage dynamic signal detection: A theory of choice, decision time, and confidence" by Timothy J. Pleskac and Jerome R. Busemeyer (Psychological Review, 2010[Jul], Vol 117[3], 864-901). The name of the philosopher Charles Peirce was misspelled throughout as Charles Pierce. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2010-14834-006.) The 3 most often-used performance measures in the cognitive and decision sciences are choice, response or decision time, and confidence. We develop a random walk/diffusion theory—2-stage dynamic signal detection (2DSD) theory—that accounts for all 3 measures using a common underlying process. The model uses a drift diffusion process to account for choice and decision time. To estimate confidence, we assume that evidence continues to accumulate after the choice. Judges then interrupt the process to categorize the accumulated evidence into a confidence rating. The model explains all known interrelationships between the 3 indices of performance. Furthermore, the model also accounts for the distributions of each variable in both a perceptual and general knowledge task. The dynamic nature of the model also reveals the moderating effects of time pressure on the accuracy of choice and confidence. Finally, the model specifies the optimal solution for giving the fastest choice and confidence rating for a given level of choice and confidence accuracy. Judges are found to act in a manner consistent with the optimal solution when making confidence judgments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptual discrimination in static and dynamic noise: The temporal relation between perceptual encoding and decision making.

The authors report 9 new experiments and reanalyze 3 published experiments that investigate factors affecting the time course of perceptual processing and its effects on subsequent decision making. Stimuli in letter-discrimination and brightness-discrimination tasks were degraded with static and dynamic noise. The onset and the time course of decision making were quantified by fitting the data with the diffusion model. Dynamic noise and, to a lesser extent, static noise, produced large shifts in the leading edge of the response-time distribution in letter discrimination but had little effect in brightness discrimination. The authors interpret these shifts as changes in the onset of decision making. The different pattern of shifts in letter discrimination and brightness discrimination implies that decision making in the 2 tasks was affected differently by noise. The changes in response-time distributions found with letter stimuli are inconsistent with the hypothesis that noise increases response times to letter stimuli simply by reducing the rate at which evidence accumulates in the decision process. Instead, they imply that noise also delays the time at which evidence accumulation begins. The delay is shown not to be the result of strategic processes or the result of using different stimuli in different tasks. The results imply, rather, that the onset of evidence accumulation in the decision process is time-locked to the perceptual encoding of the stimulus features needed to do the task. Two mechanisms that could produce this time-locking are described. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Ethnic diversity and distributed information in group decision making: The importance of information elaboration.

Ethnic diversity may impede groups' use of distributed information in decision making. This is not so much because diversity interferes with groups' ability to reach agreement, but because ethnic diversity may disrupt the elaboration (exchange and integration) of distributed information. The authors find evidence for this proposition in an experiment (N = 63 groups) in which ethnically diverse groups are shown to benefit more from instructions emphasizing information integration than ethnically homogeneous groups when dealing with distributed information, whereas neither ethnic diversity nor information integration instruction affected decision making performance in groups with fully shared information. These effects were mediated by a behavioral measure of group information elaboration. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Making trade-offs: A probabilistic and context-sensitive model of choice behavior.

The stochastic difference model assumes that decision makers trade normalized attribute value differences when making choices. The model is stochastic, with choice probabilities depending on the normalized difference variable, d, and a decision threshold, delta. The decision threshold indexes a person's sensitivity to attribute value differences and is a free estimated parameter of the model. Depending on the choice context, a person may be more or less sensitive to attribute value differences, and hence delta may be used to measure context effects. With proportional difference used as the normalization, the proportional difference model (PD) was tested with 9 data sets, including published data (e.g., J. L. Myers, M. M. Suydam, & B. Gambino, 1965; A. Tversky, 1969). The model accounted for individual and group data well and described violations of stochastic dominance, independence, and weak and strong stochastic transitivity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Learning from others to cope with biting flies: Social learning of fear-induced conditioned analgesia and active avoidance.

Although fear conditioning has received extensive attention, little is known about the roles of social learning whereby an individual may learn and acquire the fear responses of another. The authors examined individually and socially mediated acquisition of fear and analgesia to the natural aversive stimulus of biting flies. Exposure to biting flies elicited in individual naive mice analgesia and active self-burying to avoid the flies. When exposed 24 hr later to flies whose biting parts were removed, but not to nonbiting house flies, these mice displayed conditioned analgesia and self-burying. This "one-trial" conditioned analgesia and avoidance was also acquired through social learning without direct individual experience with biting flies. Naive "observer" mice that witnessed other "demonstrator" mice being attacked by biting flies exhibited analgesia and self-burying 24 hr later to altered flies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Consumer credit card use: The roles of creditor disclosure and anticipated emotion.

In response to federal legislative reform aimed, in part, at reducing consumer bankruptcy filings, the authors conducted 2 experiments examining the role of affect in purchasing behavior. In Experiment 1, they examined consumer debtors, and in Experiment 2, they examined nondebtors. In both experiments, they investigated purchasing decisions made during a simulated online shopping trip, with some participants receiving standard disclosures of interest rates and money owed and with other participants receiving information under the new enhanced disclosure regulations. Results demonstrated support for the influence of anticipated affect in credit card use among both debtors and nondebtors and indicated that anticipated emotion may moderate the impact of the enhanced disclosure regulations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Threat and selective exposure: The moderating role of threat and decision context on confirmatory information search after decisions.

Previous studies on the impact of perceived threat on confirmatory information search (selective exposure) in the context of decision making have yielded mixed results. Some studies have suggested that confirmatory information search is reduced, yet others have found contradictory effects. The present series of 5 studies consistently found that the crucial moderator for these inconsistent findings was whether the induced threat was contextually related to the subsequent decision and information search tasks. Contextual incongruence (e.g., an induction of terrorist threat followed by an economic decision case) results in reduced levels of confirmatory information search, whereas a congruent threat (e.g., an induction of terrorist threat followed by a decision case on terrorism) results in increased levels of confirmatory information search. Analyses of the underlying psychological processes revealed that decision-unrelated threat inductions increase decision makers' experienced decision uncertainty, thus reducing confirmatory information search. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The prepared emotional reflex: Intentional preparation of automatic approach and avoidance tendencies as a means to regulate emotional responding.

Advance preparation of action courses toward emotional stimuli is an effective means to regulate impulsive emotional behavior. Our experiment shows that performing intentional acts of approach and avoidance in an evaluation task influences the unintended activation of approach and avoidance tendencies in another task in which stimulus valence is irrelevant. For the evaluation-relevant blocks, participants received either congruent (positive-approach, negative-avoidance) or incongruent (positive-avoidance, negative-approach) mapping instructions. In the evaluation-irrelevant blocks, approach- and avoidance-related lever movements were selected in response to a stimulus feature other than valence (affective Simon task). Response mapping in the evaluation task influenced performance in the evaluation-irrelevant task: An enhanced affective Simon effect was observed with congruent mapping instructions; in contrast, the effect was reversed when the evaluation task required incongruent responses. Thus, action instructions toward affective stimuli received in one task determined affective response tendencies in another task where these instructions were not in effect. These findings suggest that intentionally prepared short-term links between affective valence and motor responses elicit associated responses without a deliberate act of will, operating like a “prepared reflex.” (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Minority dissent and team innovation: The importance of participation in decision making.

This study integrates research on minority dissent and individual creativity, as well as team diversity and the quality of group decision making, with research on team participation in decision making. From these lines of research, it was proposed that minority dissent would predict innovation in teams but only when teams have high levels of participation in decision making. This hypothesis was tested in 2 studies, 1 involving a homogeneous sample of self-managed teams and 1 involving a heterogeneous sample of cross-functional teams. Study 1 suggested that a newly developed scale to measure minority dissent has discriminant validity. Both Study 1 and Study 2 showed more innovations under high rather than low levels of minority dissent but only when there was a high degree of participation in team decision making. It is concluded that minority dissent stimulates creativity and divergent thought, which, through participation, manifest as innovation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Majority and minority influence in group negotiation: The moderating effects of social motivation and decision rules.

In organizational groups, often a majority has aligned preferences that oppose those of a minority. Although such situations may give rise to majority coalitions that exclude the minority or to minorities blocking unfavorable agreements, structural and motivational factors may stimulate groups to engage in integrative negotiation, leading to collectively beneficial agreements. An experiment with 97 3-person groups was designed to test hypotheses about the interactions among decision rule, the majority's social motivation, and the minority's social motivation. Results showed that under unanimity rule, minority members block decisions, thus harming the group, but only when the minority has proself motivation. Under majority rule, majority members coalesce at the minority's expense, but only when the majority has a proself motivation. Implications for negotiation research and group decision making are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)