Recent research suggests that when people retrieve information from memory they tend to fixate on the location where the information had appeared during encoding. We used this phenomenon to investigate if different information is activated in memory when people use a rule- versus a similarity-based decision strategy. In two studies, participants first memorized multiple pieces of information about various job candidates (exemplars).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious research has developed a variety of theories explaining when and why people's decisions under risk deviate from the standard economic view of expected utility maximization. These theories are limited in their predictive accuracy in that they do not explain the probabilistic nature of preferential choice, that is, why an individual makes different choices in nearly identical situations, or why the magnitude of these inconsistencies varies in different situations. To illustrate the advantage of probabilistic theories, three probabilistic theories of decision making under risk are compared with their deterministic counterparts.
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