Most experimental investigations of risky choice provide participants with a description of the probabilities and outcomes for each option, and observe that small probabilities are overweighted. However, when payoffs are learned from repeated experience of outcomes (as in many real-world...

Highly relational contexts can have costs as well as benefits. Researchers theorize that negotiating dyads in which both parties hold highly relational goals or views of themselves are prone to relational accommodation, a dynamic resulting in inefficient economic outcomes yet high levels of...

People often experience tension over certain choices (e.g., they should reduce their gas consumption or increase their savings, but they do not want to). Some posit that this tension arises from the competing interests of a deliberative "should" self and an affective "want" self. We show that...

The current research extends three research areas in relational demography: considering deep-level dissimilarity in theory building, assessing dissimilarity perceptions directly in theory testing, and examining the antecedents of dissimilarity perceptions. The results, based on two field studies...

In two-stage choices, decision makers often compare a new (isolated) option with the winner from the first stage. Previous research has identified a choice advantage for an isolated option, ostensibly due to loss aversion. We propose an alternative mechanism suggesting that instability of the...

Valuation of goods often proceeds from a series of hypothetical pairwise choices. We examine reference dependence on the outcome of such evaluations in a large-scale study in which respondents make a series of choices between areas that differ on cost of living and the quality of lakes and...

Being in the numeric minority (e.g., being a solo woman in a group of men) influences how well a person performs within a work group. But being the solo member is only one way in which people can be atypical in a group; a person can also represent a social or demographic category that has not...

In many contexts we are warned against engaging in risky behavior only after having past safe experience. We examine the effect of safe experience on a warning's impact by comparing warnings received after having safe personal experience with those received before people start making choices. A...

Everyday, millions of decision makers receive advice from one or more sources. Although research has addressed some of the issues concerning how people take and use advice that they are given, less is known about the psychological processes that underlie decision makers' willingness to pay for...