When does a referent problem affect willingness to pay for a public good?

In two studies we examined the willingness to support action to remedy a public problem. In Study 1 people were asked whether they would financially contribute to solution of a public problem. In Study 2, people were asked whether they would sign a petition to support a public action. The aim was to test whether the willingness to support solution of a public problem is affected by the type of problem that is used as the referent. We hypothesized that the willingness to support a public action is lower when evaluated in the context of a high - as opposed to a low - importance referent problem (importance contrast effect). We also hypothesized that the importance contrast effect is tied to the perceived relatedness between the target and referent problems. The importance contrast effect should be found only when the two problems relate to different category domains. The findings bear out this prediction.Willingness to support, joint evaluation, referent problem, category-bound thinking.

How far is the suffering? The role of psychological distance and victims\u2019 identifiability in donation decisions

We are regularly told about people at various locations around the globe, both near and far, who are in distress or in dire need. In the present research, we examined how the prospective donor\u2019s psychological distance from a given victim may interact with the victim\u2019s identification to determine the donor\u2019s willingness to accede to requests for donations to help the victim in question. In three studies, we measured willingness to donate (Studies 1 & 2) and actual donations (Study 3) to identified or unidentified victims, while measuring (Study 1) or manipulating (Studies 2 & 3) the psychological distance between prospective donors and the recipients. Results indicate that increasing the psychological distance between prospective donors and victims decreases willingness to help \u2014 but only when the victims are unidentified, not when they are identified. This suggests that victim\u2019s identification mitigates the effect of distance on donor\u2019s willingness to help

Seeing is Believing: The Anti-Inference Bias

A large body of studies suggests that people are reluctant to impose liability on the basis of circumstantial evidence alone, even when this evidence is more reliable than direct evidence. Current explanations for this pattern of behavior focus on factors such as the tendency of fact finders to assign low subjective probabilities to circumstantial evidence, the statistical nature of such evidence, and the fact that direct evidence can rule out with greater ease any competing factual theory regarding liability. This Article describes a set of four new experiments demonstrating that even when these factors are controlled for, the disinclination to impose liability based on indirect evidence remains. While these findings do not necessarily refute the existing theories, they indicate that these theories are incomplete and point to the existence of a deep-seated bias against basing liability on inferences—an antiinference bias. The Article discusses the potential policy implications of the new findings for procedural and substantive legal norms

Action bias among elite soccer goalkeepers: The case of penalty kicks

In soccer penalty kicks, goalkeepers choose their action before they can clearly observe the kick direction. An analysis of 286 penalty kicks in top leagues and championships worldwide shows that given the probability distribution of kick direction, the optimal strategy for goalkeepers is to stay in the goal's center. Goalkeepers, however, almost always jump right or left. We propose the following explanation for this behavior: because the norm is to jump, norm theory (Kahneman and Miller, 1986) implies that a goal scored yields worse feelings for the goalkeeper following inaction (staying in the center) than following action (jumping), leading to a bias for action. The omission bias, a bias in favor of inaction, is reversed here because the norm here is reversed - to act rather than to choose inaction. The claim that jumping is the norm is supported by a second study, a survey conducted with 32 top professional goalkeepers. The seemingly biased decision making is particularly striking since the goalkeepers have huge incentives to make correct decisions, and it is a decision they encounter frequently. Finally, we discuss several implications of the action/omission bias for economics and management.Decision Making; Uncertainty; Choice Behavior; Sport Psychology; Behavioral Economics; Action Bias; Omission Bias; Commission Bias; Action Effect; Inaction Effect; Actor Effect; Economic Psychology; Heuristics and Biases; Soccer; Goalkeepers; Penalty Kicks; Risk; Norms

Predictably Incoherent Judgments

When people make moral or legal judgments in isolation, they produce a pattern of outcomes that they would themselves reject, if only they could see that pattern as a whole. A major reason is that human thinking is category-bound. When people see a case in isolation, they spontaneously compare it to other cases that are mainly drawn from the same category of harms. When people are required to compare cases that involve different kinds of harms, judgments that appear sensible when the problems are considered separately often appear incoherent and arbitrary in the broader context. Another major source of incoherence is what we call the translation problem: The translation of moral judgments into the relevant metrics of dollars and years is not grounded in either principle or intuition, and produces large differences among people.. The incoherence produced by category-bound thinking is illustrated by an experimental study of punitive damages and contingent valuation. We also show how category-bound thinking and the translation problem combine to produce anomalies in administrative penalties. The underlying phenomena have large implications for many topics in law, including jury behavior, the valuation of public goods, punitive damages, criminal sentencing, and civil fines. We consider institutional reforms that might overcome the problem of predictably incoherent judgments. Connections are also drawn to several issues in legal theory, including valuation of life, incommensurability, and the aspiration to global coherence in adjudication

The role of actively open-minded thinking in information acquisition, accuracy, and calibration

Errors in estimating and forecasting often result from the failure to collect and consider enough relevant information. We examine whether attributes associated with persistence in information acquisition can predict performance in an estimation task. We focus on actively open-minded thinking (AOT), need for cognition, grit, and the tendency to maximize or satisfice when making decisions. In three studies, participants made estimates and predictions of uncertain quantities, with varying levels of control over the amount of information they could collect before estimating. Only AOT predicted performance. This relationship was mediated by information acquisition: AOT predicted the tendency to collect information, and information acquisition predicted performance. To the extent that available information is predictive of future outcomes, actively open-minded thinkers are more likely than others to make accurate forecasts