This paper explores the psychology of conflict of interest by investigating how conflicting interests affect both public statements and private judgments. The results suggest that judgments are easily influenced by affiliation with interested partisans, and that this influence extends to...

When people learn to make decisions from experience, a reasonable intuition is that additional relevant information should improve their performance. In contrast, we find that additional information about foregone rewards (i.e., what could have gained at each point by making a different choice)...

The sunk cost fallacy is the tendency to continue an endeavour once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made. We studied how people's chronic orientation to cope with failing projects (i.e., action vs. state orientation) influences the occurrence of this sunk cost effect. We found...

An important open problem is how values are compared to make simple choices. A natural hypothesis is that the brain carries out the computations associated with the value comparisons in a manner consistent with the Drift Diffusion Model (DDM), since this model has been able to account for a...

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned against administering over-the-counter cough and cold medicines to children under 2. This study evaluated whether experienced parents show poorer adherence to the FDA warning, as safe experiences are predicted to reduce the impact of warnings, and...

Economist Frank H. Knight (1885--1972) is commonly credited with defining the distinction between decisions under ``risk'' (known chance) and decisions under ``uncertainty'' (unmeasurable probability) in his 1921 book Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. A closer reading of Knight (1921) reveals a host...

Participants drank either regular root beer or sugar-free diet root beer before working on a probability-learning task in which they tried to predict which of two events would occur on each of 200 trials. One event (E1) randomly occurred on 140 trials, the other (E2) on 60. In each of the last...

The paper extends research on fixed-pie perceptions by suggesting that disputants may prefer proposals that are perceived to be equally attractive to both parties (i.e., balanced) rather than one-sided, because balanced agreements are seen as more likely to be successfully implemented. We test...

Diener and colleagues (2001) illustrated that individuals rely heavily on endings to evaluate the quality of a life. Two studies investigated the potential for posthumous events to affect rated life quality, calling into question the intuitive ``ending'' of a life at death. Undergraduates read a...