Taking a Disagreeing Perspective Improves the Accuracy of People's Quantitative Estimates.

Many decisions rest on people's ability to make estimates of unknown quantities. In these judgments, the aggregate estimate of a crowd of individuals is often more accurate than most individual estimates. Remarkably, similar principles apply when multiple estimates from the same person are aggregated, and a key challenge is to identify strategies that improve the accuracy of people's aggregate estimates.

How risk-prone are people when facing a sure loss? Negative interest rates as a convenient conceptual framework.

People occasionally face sure loss prospects. Do they seek risk in search of better outcomes or contend with the sure loss and focus on what is left to be saved? We addressed this question in three experiments akin to a negative interest rate framework. Specifically, we asked participants to allocate money (Experiments 1 and 2) or choose (Experiment 3) between two options: (i) a loss option where, for sure, they would end up with less, or (ii) a mixed gamble with a positive expected outcome, but also the possibility of an even larger loss.

How do People Judge Risk? Availability may Upstage Affect in the Construction of Risk Judgments.

When making risk judgments, people rely on availability and affect as convenient heuristics. The two heuristics share many similarities and yet there have been no or few attempts to ascertain their causal impact on risk judgments. We present an experiment (N = 143) where we varied availability-by-recall (thinking of less or more occurrences of someone from one's social network dying) and the affective impact of certain risks (using images).

Sacrificing Oneself or Another: The Difference Between Prescriptive and Normative Judgments in Moral Evaluation.

When asked whether to sacrifice oneself or another person to save others, one might think that people would consider sacrificing themselves rather than someone else as the right and appropriate course of action-thus showing an other-serving bias. So far however, most studies found instances of a self-serving bias-people say they would rather sacrifice others. In three experiments using trolley-like dilemmas, we tested whether an other-serving bias might appear as a function of judgment type.