We undertake a series of tests examining the extent to which the affect heuristic (Slovic et al., 2002) is or is not triggered by changes in the framing and hence context of assessments of hypothetical gamble tasks using a rating scale response mode. Our initial investigations examine the...

This paper reports an experiment designed to test whether prior consultation within a group affects subsequent individual decision making in tasks where demonstrability of correct solutions is low. In our experiment subjects considered two paintings created by two different artists and were...

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...

Donation requests often convey numerical information about the people in need. In two studies we investigated the effects of numeracy and presentation format on the underlying affective and cognitive mechanisms of donation decisions. In Study 1, participants were presented with information about...

Measuring reaction times to number comparisons is thought to reveal a processing stage in elementary numerical cognition linked to internal, imprecise representations of number magnitudes. These intuitive representations of the mental number line have been demonstrated across species and human...

The conventional explanation for controversy over climate change emphasizes impediments to public understanding: Limited popular knowledge of science, the inability of ordinary citizens to assess technical information, and the resulting widespread use of unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess...