The field of clinical decision making is polarized by two predominate views. One holds that treatment recommendations should conform with guidelines; the other emphasizes clinical expertise in reaching case-specific judgments. Previous work developed a test for a proposed alternative, that...

Subjects who judged speed in a driving scenario overestimated how fast they could decelerate when speeding compared to when keeping within the speed limit (Svenson, 2009). The purpose of the present studies were to replicate studies conducted in Europe with subjects in the U.S., to study the...

A recent survey of inequality (Norton and Ariely, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 9-12) asked respondents to indicate what percent of the nation's total wealth is---and should be---controlled by richer and poorer quintiles of the U.S. population. We show that such measures lead to...

This paper develops tests of independence and stationarity in choice data collected with small samples. The method builds on the approach of Smith and Batchelder (2008). The technique is intended to distinguish cases where a person is systematically changing ``true'' preferences (from one group...

In three studies, we examined factors that may temporarily attenuate information search. People are generally curious and dislike uncertainty, which typically encourages them to look for relevant information. Despite these strong forces that promote information search, people sometimes...

Affective forecasting skills have important implications for decision making. However, recent research suggests that immune neglect---the tendency to overlook coping strategies that reduce future distress---may lead to affective forecasting problems. Prior evidence for immune neglect has been...

According to the deliberation without attention (DWA) hypothesis, people facing a difficult choice will make a better decision after a period of distraction than after an equally long period of conscious deliberation, an effect referred to as the unconscious thought advantage (UTA). The status...

We introduce the Berlin Numeracy Test, a new psychometrically sound instrument that quickly assesses statistical numeracy and risk literacy. We present 21 studies (n=5336) showing robust psychometric discriminability across 15 countries (e.g., Germany, Pakistan, Japan, USA) and diverse samples...

Mathematics is a fundamental tool of research. Although potentially applicable in every discipline, the amount of training in mathematics that students typically receive varies greatly between different disciplines. In those disciplines where most researchers do not master mathematics, the use...

The impact of default options on choice is a reliable, well-established behavioral finding. However, several different effects may lend to choosing defaults in an often indistinguishable manner, including loss aversion, inattention, information leakage, and transaction costs associated with...