Risky choice and memory for effort : hard work stands out

When deciding between different courses of action, both the potential outcomes and the costs of making a choice should be considered. These costs include the cognitive and physical effort of the different options. In many decision contexts, the outcome of the choice is guaranteed but the amount of effort required to achieve that outcome is unknown. Here, we studied choices between options that varied in the riskiness of the effort (number of responses) required. People made repeated choices between pairs of options that required them to click different numbers of sequentially presented response circles. Easy-effort options led to small numbers of response circles, whereas hard-effort options led to larger numbers of response circles. For both easy- and hard-effort options, fixed options led to a consistent effort, whereas risky options led to variable effort that, with a 50/50 chance, required either more effort or less effort than the fixed option. Participants who showed a preference for easier over harder options were more risk averse for decisions involving hard options than for decisions involving easy options. On subsequent memory tests, people most readily recalled the hardest outcome, and they overestimated its frequency of occurrence. Memory for the effort associated with each risky option strongly correlated with individual risky preferences for both easy-effort and hard-effort choices. These results suggest a relationship between memory biases and risky choice for effort similar to that found in risky choice for reward. With effort, the hardest work seems to particularly stand out

Rare and extreme outcomes in risky choice

Many real-world decisions involving rare events also involve extreme outcomes. Despite this confluence, decisions-from-experience research has only examined the impact of rarity and extremity in isolation. With rare events, people typically choose as if they underestimate the probability of a rare outcome happening. Separately, people typically overestimate the probability of an extreme outcome happening. Here, for the first time, we examine the confluence of these two biases in decisions-from-experience. In a between-groups behavioural experiment, we examine people’s risk preferences for rare extreme outcomes and for rare non-extreme outcomes. When outcomes are both rare and extreme, people’s risk preferences shift away from traditional risk patterns for rare events: they show reduced underweighting for events that are both rare and extreme. We simulate these results using a small-sample model of decision-making that accounts for both the underweighting of rare events and the overweighting of extreme events. These separable influences on risk preferences suggest that to understand real-world risk for rare events we must also consider the extremity of the outcomes

Embracing policy paradoxes:EU’s Just Transition Fund and the aim “to leave no one behind”

Abstract With the adoption of the 2030 Agenda, UN Member States pledge “to leave no one behind” and “endeavour to reach the furthest behind first”. The EU Just Transition Fund (JTF) was designed to meet these policy objectives. It is one of three pillars of the Just Transition Mechanism, aiming at fair delivery of the European Green Deal and reducing adverse social and economic impacts of the transition towards a climate-neutral Europe. We examine the formulation of the JTF Regulation, from January 2020 until July 2021 and analyse seven topics of importance during the JTF formulation. Based on the results, we identify and discuss four paradoxes related to governance scales, offsetting exclusion, equity illusion, and eligibility criteria. The paradoxes arise from tension between the all-inclusive objective to leave no one behind, and selective affirmative actions, seeking to reach the furthest behind first. Results of the analysis enabled us to put forward plausible strategies to embrace these policy paradoxes to offer important lessons learned for the JTF and also to future policies that seek to leave no one behind

Biased confabulation in risky choice

When people make risky decisions based on past experience, they must rely on memory. The nature of the memory representations that support these decisions is not yet well understood. A key question concerns the extent to which people recall specific past episodes or whether they have learned a more abstract rule from their past experience. To address this question, we examined the precision of the memories used in risky decisions-from-experience. In three pre-registered experiments, we presented people with risky options, where the outcomes were drawn from continuous ranges (e.g., 100-190 or 500-590), and then assessed their memories for the outcomes experienced. In two preferential tasks, people were more risk seeking for high-value than low-value options, choosing as though they overweighted the outcomes from more extreme ranges. Moreover, in two preferential tasks and a parallel evaluation task, people were very poor at recalling the exact outcomes encountered, but rather confabulated outcomes that were consistent with the outcomes they had seen and were biased towards the more extreme ranges encountered. This common pattern suggests that the observed decision bias in the preferential task reflects a basic cognitive process to overweight extreme outcomes in memory. These results highlight the importance of the edges of the distribution in providing the encoding context for memory recall. They also suggest that episodic memory influences decision-making through gist memory and not through direct recall of specific instances

Risky Choice and Memory for Effort: Hard Work Stands Out

When deciding between different courses of action, both the potential outcomes and the costs of making a choice should be considered. To date, most studies of risk-sensitive choice have focused on the probability of different reward amounts. Here we studied choice between options that varied in the riskiness of the effort (number of responses) required. People made repeated choices between pairs of options that required them to click different numbers of sequentially presented response circles. Easy (low effort) options led to small numbers of response circles, whereas hard (high effort) options led to larger numbers of response circles. For both easy and hard options, safe options led to a fixed effort, whereas risky options led to variable effort that, with a 50/50 chance, required more or less effort. Participants who showed a preference for easier over harder options (63% in Experiment 1 and 93% in Experiment 2) were risk averse overall. Participants were more risk averse for decisions involving hard options than for decisions involving easy options. On subsequent memory tests, people most readily recalled the hardest outcome, and they overestimated its frequency of occurrence. Strikingly, memory for the effort associated with each risky option strongly correlated with risky choices for both easy-effort and hard-effort choices, suggesting that the memory may determine choices based on risky effort

Risky choice and memory for effort: Hard work stands out

When deciding between different courses of action, both the potential outcomes and the costs of making a choice should be considered. These costs include the cognitive and physical effort of the different options. In many decision contexts, the outcome of the choice is guaranteed but the amount of effort required to achieve that outcome is unknown. Here, we studied choices between options that varied in the riskiness of the effort (number of responses) required. People made repeated choices between pairs of options that required them to click different numbers of sequentially presented response circles. Easy-effort options led to small numbers of response circles, whereas hard-effort options led to larger numbers of response circles. For both easy- and hard-effort options, fixed options led to a consistent effort, whereas risky options led to variable effort that, with a 50/50 chance, required either more effort or less effort than the fixed option. Participants who showed a preference for easier over harder options were more risk averse for decisions involving hard options than for decisions involving easy options. On subsequent memory tests, people most readily recalled the hardest outcome, and they overestimated its frequency of occurrence. Memory for the effort associated with each risky option strongly correlated with individual risky preferences for both easy-effort and hard-effort choices. These results suggest a relationship between memory biases and risky choice for effort similar to that found in risky choice for reward. With effort, the hardest work seems to particularly stand out

Reconstructive social innovation cycles in women-led initiatives in rural areas

Abstract Social innovations can tackle various challenges related to gender equity in rural areas, especially when such innovations are initiated and developed by women themselves. We examine cases located in rural areas of Canada, Italy, Lebanon, Morocco, and Serbia, where women are marginalized by gender roles, patriarchal values, male dominated economy and policy, and lack of opportunities for education and employment. Our objective is to analyze five case studies on how women-led social innovation processes can tackle gender equity related challenges manifested at the levels of everyday practice, institutions, and cognitive frames. The analyses are based on interviews, workshops, literature screening, and are examined via the qualitative abductive method. Results summarize challenges that rural women are facing, explore social innovation initiatives as promising solutions, and analyze their implications on gender equity in the five case studies. Based on our results we propose a new concept: reconstructive social innovation cycle. It refers to is defined as cyclical innovation processes that engage women via civil society initiatives. These initiatives reconstruct the existing state of affairs, by questioning marginalizing and discriminative practices, institutions, and cognitive frames that are often perceived as normal. The new concept helps with to assessing the implications that women-led social innovations have for gender equity