Professional judges in traffic courts sentence many hundreds of offenders per year. Using 639 case files from archives, we compared the Matching Heuristic (MH) to compensatory, weighing algorithms (WM). We modeled and cross validated the models on different subsets of the data, and took several...

Auctions, normally considered as devices facilitating trade, also provide a way to probe mechanisms governing one's valuation of some good or action. One of the most intriguing phenomena in auction behavior is the winner's curse --- the strong tendency of participants to bid more than rational...

Three experiments investigated individuals' preferences and affective reactions to negative life experiences. Participants had a more intense negative affective reaction when they were exposed to a highly negative life experience than when they were exposed to two negative events: a highly...

Environmental events such as natural disasters may influence the public's affective reactions and decisions. Shortly after the 2004 Tsunami disaster we assessed how affect elicited by thinking about this disaster influenced risk perceptions and future time perspective in Swedish undergraduates...

Recent research suggesting that people who maximize are less happy than those who satisfice has received considerable fanfare. The current study investigates whether this conclusion reflects the construct itself or rather how it is measured. We developed an alternative measure of maximizing...

We present a motivational account of the impact of emotion on decision making, termed the feeling-is-for-doing approach. We first describe the psychology of emotion and argue for a need to be specific when studying emotion's impact on decision making. Next we describe what our approach entails...

A case study review of a formal decision analysis involving a 10 year old girl. She had just faced the death of a close adult friend, and had become filled with uncertainty and emotion while facing the decision as to whether or not to attend his funeral. The study demonstrates that formal...

Three experiments demonstrate how the processing of negations is contingent on the evaluation context in which the negative information is presented. In addition, the strategy used to process the negations induced different affective reactions toward the stimuli, leading to inconsistency of...

People tend to overestimate emotional responses to future events. This study examined whether such affective forecasting errors occur for feelings of regret, as measured by self-report and subsequent decision-making. Some participants played a pricing game and lost by a narrow or wide margin,...

Humans and other animals are idiosyncratically sensitive to risk, either preferring or avoiding options having the same value but differing in uncertainty. Many explanations for risk sensitivity rely on the non-linear shape of a hypothesized utility curve. Because such models do not place any...