The influence of numeracy on information processing of two risk communication formats (percentage and pictograph) was examined using an eye tracker. A sample from the general population (N = 159) was used. In intuitive and deliberative decision conditions, the participants were presented with a...

The letter of the law is its literal meaning. Here, the spirit of the law is its perceived intention. We tested the hypothesis that violating the spirit of the law accounts for culpability above and beyond breaking the mere letter. We find that one can incur culpability even when the letter of...

Past research has shown that people consistently believe that others are more easily manipulated by external influences than they themselves are---a phenomenon called the ``third-person effect'' (Davison, 1983). The present research investigates whether support for public policies aimed at...

In optimal stopping problems, decision makers are assumed to search randomly to learn the utility of alternatives; in contrast, in one-shot multi-attribute utility optimization, decision makers are assumed to have perfect knowledge of utilities. We point out that these two contexts represent the...

It is often the case that one can choose a mix of alternative options rather than have to select one option only. Such an opportunity to diversify may blunt the risk involved in all-or-none choice. Here we investigate repeated investment decisions in two-valued options that differ in their...

I report a new judgment task designed to investigate the subjective weights allotted to experience and description when integrating information from the two sources. Subjects estimated the percentage of red balls in a bag containing red and blue balls based on two samples from the bag. They...

It is known that presentation of a meaningful label (e.g., "The Teamwork Game") can influence decisions in economic games. A common view is that such labels cue associations to preexisting mental models of situations, a process here called frame selection. In the absence of such cues,...

This paper explored how frames influence people's evaluation of others' probabilistic predictions in light of the outcomes of binary events. Most probabilistic predictions (e.g., ``there is a 75% chance that Denver will win the Super Bowl'') can be partitioned into two components: A qualitative...

This paper provides a novel interpretation of focal point responses (0, 50, 100 percent) in terms of ambiguous beliefs dynamics that arise in new developments of decision theory such as Choquet expected utility theory. In particular, focal point responses that have been updated from nonfocal...

Rational trust decisions depend on potential outcomes and expectations of reciprocity. In the trust game, outcomes and expectations correspond to the structural factors of risk and temptation. Two experiments investigated how risk and temptation influenced information search and final decisions...