The cognitive economy: The probabilistic turn in psychology and human cognition

According to the foundations of economic theory, agents have stable and coherent “global” preferences that guide their choices among alternatives. However, people are constrained by information-processing and memory limitations and hence have a propensity to avoid cognitive load. We propose that this in turn will encourage them to respond to “local” preferences and goals influenced by context and memory representations

Choice and human preferences: How accessibility, context and simplicity affect decision prospects

The leading normative (von Neumann & Morgenstern, 1947) and alternative psychological theories (e.g.,Tversky & Kahneman, 1992) of judgment and decision- making share a common representational assumption: people's preferences and decisions under risk and uncertainty are task-independent. For example, these theories assume that all decisions under risk or uncertainty can be represented as gambles with monetary amounts representing the outcomes. In five experiments we studied the extent to which theories of judgment, decision-making and memory can predict people's preferences. We find that (a) the weighting function required to model decisions with 'high-accessible' features in memory exhibits different properties from those required to model choices between monetary gambles and (b) the accessibility (Koriat & Levy-Sadot, 2001) of events in memory affect choices between options, influencing participants' decision weights, risk preferences and choice consistency. These results indicate a failure of the descriptive invariance axiom of Expected Utility Theory and challenge those psychological theories predicting a particular pattern of preferences for all risky prospects. We highlight a need for theories which differentiate between decisions about monetary gambles and other types of decision-making under risk and uncertainty

Memory-Biased Preferences: How Accessibility Affects Judgments and Decision-Making Prospects

The leading normative (von Neumann & Morgen- stern, 1947) and descriptive psychological theories (e.g., Birnbaum, 2008; Brandstätter et al., 2006; Tversky & Kahneman, 1992; Tversky & Koehler, 1994) of judgment and decision making share a common representational assumption: People’s preferences and decisions under risk and uncertainty are task-independent. In five experiments, we studied the extent to which theories of judgment, decision making, and memory can predict people’s preferences. Applying prospect theory and support theory to these data, we find that (1) the weighting function required to model decisions with high-accessible features in memory exhibits different properties than those required to model choices between monetary gambles, and (2) the acces- sibility (Fox & Levav, 2000; Kahneman 2003; Koriat, 2001) of events in memory affects choices between options, influencing participants’ deci- sion weights, but not their judgments of these options. This result indicates a failure of the descriptive invariance axiom of expected utility theory

Moral Decision-Making: How Utilitarian Similarity, Content, and Psychological Ownership Influence Moral Rationality.

Is it acceptable and moral to sacrifice a few people’s lives or jobs to save many others? Research on moral dilemmas has shown that respondents judge personal moral actions as less appropriate than equivalent impersonal moral actions. Accordingly, theorists have argued that judgments of appropriateness in personal moral dilemmas are (i) more emotionally salient and more cognitively demanding than impersonal moral dilemmas (e.g., Greene et al., 2001) and (ii) dependent on utilitarian uncertainty – comprehensive information about moral actions and consequences boost utility maximization in moral choices (Kusev et al., 2016, Psych. Bull. & Rev.). In three experiments, we found that utilitarian similarity, content and ownership inform the psychological mechanisms employed in moral choice, independent of the emotional ‘personal involvement’ effects. Information about utilitarian content, similarity and ownership alter human utilitarian preferences. Our findings highlight a need to investigate how variation in moral descriptions produces variation in utilitarian judgment

Learning Non-Utilitarian Moral Rules: Preference Reversals in Utilitarian Choice

Previous decision- making research has investigated factors that influence moral utilitarian choice involving human life including: personal involvement (Greene et al., 2001), accessibility to utilitarian information (Kusev et al., 2016), utility content (Gold et al., 2013), and utility ratio (Martin & Kusev, 2016). However, no experimental studies have investigated the influence of associative learning on moral choice, despite associative learning having been found to influence rational choice in non-morally sensitive decision- making tasks (Kusev et al., 2017). Accordingly, we devised an associative learning method/task in order to investigate whether newly learned moral rules induce rational utilitarian choice. Our results revealed that respondents who learned non-utilitarian moral rules were less utilitarian/rational than respondents who did not receive moral rule learning. We further demonstrated a preference reversal in utilitarian choice - from utilitarian- rational to utilitarian-irrational. The results therefore indicate that respondents follow learned non-utilitarian moral rules as opposed to utilitarian rules and strategy

Decision Network Context: Dynamics and Learning in Preference Formation

Recently, there has been a debate in decision-making about whether people integrate attributes such as money and probabilities into subjective values or they employ somewhat different psychological processing, without integration of attributes and decision trade-offs. In the latter decision-making is accounted for by experience with sequential events, simple binary comparisons and a threshold mechanism. Despite all the differences offered in these theories of utility formation and decisions from experience/descriptions, they share common assumption - decision makers have stable and coherent preferences, informed by consistent use of psychological processing (computational or sampling) that guide their choices between alternatives varying in risk and reward. In this research we pursued the opposite idea: people do not have underlying preferences for risk; decision-makers gate strategy selection from current context (decision-network context) and learn to select decision strategies that are most successful (effort and reward) for a given context

Preferences induced by accessibility: Evidence from priming

In one experiment, we studied risky preferences using a semantic-priming paradigm where accessibility is manipulated independently of beliefs about the frequencies of risky events. We compared the risks taken for precautionary decisions primed by relevant information (enhancing accessibility to relevant events) with those taken for unprimed decisions and decisions primed by irrelevant information. We found that both priming and the subjective frequency of beliefs independently influence decision making. The results indicate that decisions are the result of an integration of influences derived from both the description (specified probability) and experience (accessibility to pre-experiment beliefs about event frequencies and temporarily activated relevant events) of risks. People's risk preferences are influenced by the accessibility of events in memory, such that increasing accessibility causes risk aversion to a potential loss to increase. Our research findings are not anticipated by the descriptive invariance axiom of expected utility theory, which states that equivalent formulations of a choice problem give rise to the same preference order

Autonomous Self-Driving Cars: How Enhanced Utilitarian Accessibility Alters Consumer Purchase Intentions

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are anticipated to prevent approximately 90% of road accidents (Fagnant & Kockelman, 2015), however, there will still be occasions where AVs face unavoidable collisions. Yet, AVs can be pre-programmed to make split-second life- saving decisions. Nonetheless, the question remains as to whether they should be programmed to maximise the number of lives saved (utilitarian) or protect the passenger at all costs. Importantly, experimental research by Bonnefon et al. (2016) revealed a ‘social dilemma’ – where respondents exhibit a preference for other people to own utilitarian cars but want to purchase protective cars for themselves. Here we argue that this result was simply an artefact of limited accessibility to utilitarian information (Kusev et al., 2016; Martin et al., 2017). Accordingly, our research reveals that accessibility (agency involvement) to utilitarian information predicts respondents moral and purchasing judgments about utilitarian and passenger protective AVs for others and themselves (agency type)

Learning to Choose: Associative Learning and Preference Formation in Risky Choice

Theories of decision-making preferences and utility formation (e.g., normative, descriptive and experience- based) share common assumptions and predictions. Despite all their differences, normative (utilitarian), psychological descriptive and experience-based decision theories predict that human agents have stable and coherent preferences, informed by consistent use of psychological strategy/processing (computational or non-computational sampling) that guide their choices between alternatives varying in risk and reward. Rather than having fixed preferences/strategies (utilitarian or non-utilitarian) for risky choice, we argue that decision preferences are constructed dynamically based on strategy selection as a reinforcement-learning model. Accordingly, we found that associative learning (supervised learning tasks) predicts strategy selection (probability-bet and dollar-bet strategies) and govern decision makers’ risky preferences