PSYCHOLOGY OF PREFERENCES

By Student. 1982

Recent investigations of the psychology of preferences have demonstrated several intriguing discrepancies between subjective and objective conceptions of decisions. For example, the threat of a loss has a greater impact on a decision than the possibility of an equivalent gain. Most people are also very sensitive to the difference between certainty and high probability and relatively insensitive to intermediate gradations of probability. The regret associated with a loss that was incurred by an action tends to be more intense than the regret associated with inaction or a missed opportunity. These observations and others of a similar character contribute to the understanding of how people make decisions and to the elucidation of some puzzles of rational choice . . . . We asked a large number of physicians to consider the following problem: Imagine that the U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of a rare Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimates of the consequences of the programs are as follows: If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved. If Program B is adopted, there is a 1/3 probability that 600 people will be saved and a 2/3 probability that no people will be saved. Which of the two programs would you favor. The majority response to this problem is a risk-averse preference for Program A over Program B. Other respondents were presented with the same problem but a different formulation of the programs: If Program C is adopted, 400 people will die.

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Citations in the corpus

Regret in Decision Making (2002, unknown): “Perhaps the best-known of the early regret studies is by Kahneman and Tversky (1982).”
TO S PIN O R N OT TO SPIN? N ATURAL AND LABORATORY E XPERIMENTS FROM THE PRICE I S R IGHT * (2002, unknown): “26 Landman (1987) replicates and extends the study by Kahneman and Tversky (1982) and demonstrates that subjects may experience greater joy when a good outcome occurs through an action rather than inaction.”
Regret and its avoidance: a neuroimaging study of choice behavior (2005, unknown): “Regrets are what we experience when this comparison is to our disadvantage 3–6 , and it can be defined as a cognitively enriched emotion embodying a feeling of responsibility for negative outcomes of choices 7,8 .”
Postdecisional Counterfactual Thinking by Actors and Readers (2007, background): “The finding that the determinants of counterfactual content depend on individuals' roles supports Kahneman and Tversky's (1982b) focus rule: That is, both readers and actors modify an outcome by”
Choosing What I Want versus Rejecting What I Do Not Want: An Application of Decision Framing to Product Option Choice Decisions (2000, background): “A major finding in regret theory is that people experience greater regret and responsibility for decisions that deviate from default options (Kahneman and Tversky 1982).”
Are perseverance and self‐efficacy costless? Assessing entrepreneurs' regretful thinking (2005, background): “Indeed, people are generally risk-averse and this tendency is stronger under conditions of possible gains than possible losses (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982).”
Decision speed and choice regret: When haste feels like waste (2011, background): “…& Fischhoff, 1980; Shafir, Simonson, & Tversky, 1993), regret entails a specific process by which thedecisionmaker engages in unfavorable comparisons between the chosen and the forgone options either during or after the decision process (Bell, 1982; Kahneman & Tversky, 1982; Loomes & Sugden, 1982).”
Dangerous decisions: the impact of first impressions of trustworthiness on the evaluation of legal evidence and defendant culpability (2010, background): “DDT suggests that motivated assessments of guilt or innocence may be influenced by facial appearance biases to such an extent that the ensuing decisions are largely irrational (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982).”
Consequences, Action, and Intention as Factors in Moral Judgments: An fMRI Investigation (2006, background): “Psychological studies have documented omission bias (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982) and intention bias (Hauser, 2006) in moral judgment, substantiating the impact of action and intention on law and religion.”
Climate Change as a Predictable Surprise (2006, unknown): “However, the psychological tendency to pay more attention to losses than to gains will lead many to turn down the job, preserve the status quo, and forego a net gain (Kahneman and Tversky, 1982).”
What you are is what you like—similarity biases in venture capitalists' evaluations of start-up teams (2006, background): “A particularly important class of factors that inhibit perfectly rational decision making consists of biases and heuristics of decision makers (Kahneman and Tversky 1982, Kahneman et al. 1982, Hogarth and Makridakis 1981, Schwenk 1988).”
On bad decisions and disconfirmed expectancies: The psychology of regret and disappointment (2000, background): “Kahneman and Tversky (1982) were the ® rst to show that people tend to regret actions with bad outcomes more than inactions with identical outcomes.”
Attitudes and the Attitude-Behavior Relation: Reasoned and Automatic Processes (2000, background): “The way in which an issue is framed (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982), the linguistic context in which the evaluation is expressed (Schwarz, Strack, & Mai, 1991), as well as processing goals (Chaiken, Liberman, & Eagly, 1989) can all bias evaluations in a positive or negative direction without a person’s…”
A wonderful life: experiential consumption and the pursuit of happiness (2015, background): “Regrets fall into the two main categories of action and inaction (Gilovich & Medvec, 1995; Gleicher et al., 1990; Kahneman & Tversky, 1982a; Zeelenberg, Van den Bos, Van Dijk, & Pieters, 2002).”