Don't Give-Up: Why some intervention schemes encourage suboptimal behavior.

Many social challenges stem from individuals' tendency to prefer immediately rewarding but suboptimal behaviors ("Give-Up" options) over more costly endeavors that yield much better outcomes in the long run ("Try" options). For example, many people forgo the long-term benefits of formal education, healthy diets, learning new technologies, and even finding true love. This paper examines various incentivization programs that combine external rewards and punishments to discourage such counterproductive behaviors, which often result in only temporary behavioral change.

Measuring dishonest behavior: Hidden dimensions that matter.

Dishonesty has become a trending topic in the behavioral sciences. To quantify dishonest behavior, various experimental paradigms have been introduced. These experimental paradigms differ along several methodological dimensions.

On the Effect of Practice on Exploration and Exploitation of Options and Strategies.

Insufficient exploration of one's surroundings is at the root of many real-life problems, as demonstrated by many famous biases (e.g., the status quo bias, learned helplessness).

Frequency of enforcement is more important than the severity of punishment in reducing violation behaviors.

External enforcement policies aimed to reduce violations differ on two key components: the probability of inspection and the severity of the punishment. Different lines of research offer different insights regarding the relative importance of each component. In four studies, students and Prolific crowdsourcing participants (N = 816) repeatedly faced temptations to commit violations under two enforcement policies.

Promoting Healthy Eating Behaviors by Incentivizing Exploration of Healthy Alternatives.

Incentive-based intervention programs aimed at promoting healthy eating behaviors usually focus on incentivizing repeating the desired behavior. Unfortunately, even when effective, these interventions are often short-lived and do not lead to a lasting behavioral change. We present a new type of intervention program focused on incentivizing exploration of new healthy alternatives rather than incentivizing repeated healthy behaviors.

Exploring the usefulness of medical clowns in elevating satisfaction and reducing aggressive tendencies in pediatric and adult hospital wards.

Background: Most existing research on medical clowns in health care services has investigated their usefulness mainly among child health consumers. In this research we examined multiple viewpoints of medical staff, clowns, and health consumers aiming to identify the optimal audience (adult or child health consumers) for which medical clowns are most useful. We focused on exploring their usefulness in enhancing health consumers' satisfaction and, in turn, reducing their aggressive tendencies.

Perceived patterns in decisions from experience and their influence on choice variability and policy diversification: A response to Ashby, Konstantinidis, & Yechiam, 2017.

Searching for and acting upon perceived patterns of regularity is a fundamental learning process critical for adapting to changes in the environment. Yet in more artificial, static settings, in which patterns do not exist, this mechanism could interfere with choice maximization and manifest as unexplained choice variability in later trials. Recently however, Ashby et al.

The effect of switching costs on choice-inertia and its consequences.

In two studies we provide a novel investigation into the effects of monetary switching costs on choice-inertia (i.e., selection of the same option on consecutive choices).

The truth about lies: A meta-analysis on dishonest behavior.

Over the past decade, a large and growing body of experimental research has analyzed dishonest behavior. Yet the findings as to when people engage in (dis)honest behavior are to some extent unclear and even contradictory. A systematic analysis of the factors associated with dishonest behavior thus seems desirable.

Reliance on small samples, the wavy recency effect, and similarity-based learning.

Many behavioral phenomena, including underweighting of rare events and probability matching, can be the product of a tendency to rely on small samples of experiences. Why would small samples be used, and which experiences are likely to be included in these samples? Previous studies suggest that a cognitively efficient reliance on the most recent experiences can be very effective. We explore a very different and more cognitively demanding process explaining the tendency to rely on small samples: exploitation of environmental regularities.

Learned helplessness and learned prevalence: exploring the causal relations among perceived controllability, reward prevalence, and exploration.

Exposure to uncontrollable outcomes has been found to trigger learned helplessness, a state in which the agent, because of lack of exploration, fails to take advantage of regained control. Although the implications of this phenomenon have been widely studied, its underlying cause remains undetermined. One can learn not to explore because the environment is uncontrollable, because the average reinforcement for exploring is low, or because rewards for exploring are rare.

Training haptic stiffness discrimination: time course of learning with or without visual information and knowledge of results.

Objective: In this study, we explored the time course of haptic stiffness discrimination learning and how it was affected by two experimental factors, the addition of visual information and/or knowledge of results (KR) during training.

Background: Stiffness perception may integrate both haptic and visual modalities. However, in many tasks, the visual field is typically occluded, forcing stiffness perception to be dependent exclusively on haptic information.