Imagine standing in an isle of cereals and you want to find THE cereal that has been advertised to you as exceptionally yummy and at the same time, exceptionally healthy—and all that for a great price! What will influence your decision regarding what cereal box you’ll eventually place into your cart, and how could companies […]
Decision Making
“Time is what we want most, but what, alas! we use worst.” —William Penn There are many dimensions of human behavior. Consider a typical recognition memory task in which a participant is given a list of words to remember. A little while later, suppose this participant is shown the word “bear” and asked whether it […]
You are in the cognitive laboratory to participate in an experiment. A tight cluster of 300 lines at various orientations is projected onto the screen in front of you. Are they predominantly tilted to the left or to the right? The experimenter has instructed you to respond as quickly as possible by pressing one of […]
You are an intern in the premier hospital in Tierra del Fuego and you are seeing about 240 patients daily, who always suffer from one of two possible diseases (things are a little different in Tierra del Fuego), namely meowism or barkosis. The tricky thing is that the same symptoms are associated with both diseases, […]
When today’s grass is greener than tomorrow’s gold: Modeling temporal discounting We value the present more than the future. When given the choice, very few people would prefer to wait a month to receive $51 if the alternative were to receive $50 today, even though the accrual during this delay would correspond to a whopping […]
Dictators are dictators but they are not all equally dictatorial—at least in the laboratory, when participants are given an amount of money to allocate between themselves and a recipient. In the classic dictator game, recipients are powerless and have to settle for whatever amount the “dictator” allocates to them. In sharp contrast to the expectations of […]
Living in a world suffused with news about violent conflict around the world, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that humans are, by and large, averse to harming others. Even in war, the reluctance of soldiers to fire at their opponents is legendary, and overcoming this reluctance is a cornerstone of military training. […]
Mavis has aged gracefully. With the beneficent smile of the ailurophile she exits the attorney’s office of Smith & Jones after signing her will, which bequeaths her estate to the local cat sanctuary. Mavis leaves behind a crisp $100 bill to pay for Mr. Smith’s services. A short while later, Mr. Smith discovers that the $100 bill […]
You push the elevator button and you start waiting on the 4th Floor, in a rush to grab a sandwich before your lunch time is over. You wait. And you wait some more. At what point do you stop waiting and take the stairs? We make countless such decisions every day, where we need to predict […]