Making decisions one drink at a time and the "just one drink" effect: A fuzzy-trace theory model of harmful drinking.

Background: Understanding the decision factors that drive harmful alcohol use among young adults is of practical and theoretical importance. We apply fuzzy-trace theory (FTT) to investigate a potential danger that may arise from the arguably correct notion that a single drink carries no meaningful risk. Decisions that are mentally represented as one drink at a time could contribute to excessive drinking.

The power of meaningful numbers: Attorney guidance and jury deliberation improve the reliability and gist validity of damage awards.

Objective: A mock jury experiment tested the effects of attorney guidance and jury deliberation to mitigate the challenges that civil juries face in assessing damages.

Hypotheses: We hypothesized that two types of attorney guidance (per diem, per diem + lump sum), theoretically based in the Hans-Reyna model of jury decision making, would improve jury decision making compared with no guidance against five key benchmarks: injury assessment, validity, reliability, verbatim-gist coherence, and metacognitive experience. We expected that deliberation would increase reliability of, confidence in, and polarization of awards compared with predeliberation.

Providing the Gist of Medical Expertise in the Context of Laws, Rules, and Guidelines: Fuzzy-Trace Theory's Alternative Approach to Improve Patient Communication.

Current guidelines and regulatory frameworks create a dilemma that threatens the effectiveness of much needed communication between patients and medical providers: How can patients be presented with detailed facts without creating cognitive "overload"? We explain how this is a false dichotomy and illustrate, using three examples, how fuzzy-trace theory offers a third way of informing patients.

Giving information strategically and transparently: A pilot trial of the Oncolo-GIST intervention to promote patients' prognostic understanding.

Purpose: Most patients with cancer lack the prognostic understanding necessary to make informed decisions. We tested the feasibility and acceptability of the Oncolo-GIST ("Giving Information Strategically and Transparently, GIST") intervention and explored its associations with patients' improved prognostic understanding.

Methods: The Oncolo-GIST intervention distills prognostic discussions into easy-to-understand talking points.

Numeracy, gist, literal thinking and the value of nothing in decision making.

The onus on the average person is greater than ever before to make sense of large amounts of readily accessible quantitative information, but the ability and confidence to do so are frequently lacking. Many people lack practical mathematical skills that are essential for evaluating risks, probabilities and numerical outcomes such as survival rates for medical treatments, income from retirement savings plans or monetary damages in civil trials. In this Review, we integrate research on objective and subjective numeracy, focusing on cognitive and metacognitive factors that distort human perceptions and foment systematic biases in judgement and decision making.

Social media: Why sharing interferes with telling true from false.

Sharing on social media decreases true-false discrimination but focusing on accuracy helps people recognize what they already know. Process-oriented research offers hope in combatting misinformation.

Critical tests of fuzzy trace theory in brain and behavior: uncertainty across time, probability, and development.

Uncertainty permeates decisions from the trivial to the profound. Integrating brain and behavioral evidence, we discuss how probabilistic (varied outcomes) and temporal (delayed outcomes) uncertainty differ across age and individuals; how critical tests adjudicate between theories of uncertainty (prospect theory and fuzzy-trace theory); and how these mechanisms might be represented in the brain. The same categorical gist representations of gains and losses account for choices and eye-tracking data in both value-allocation (add money to gambles) and risky-choice tasks, disconfirming prospect theory and confirming predictions of fuzzy-trace theory.

Adapting a Theoretically-Based intervention for underserved clinical populations at increased risk for hereditary Cancer: Lessons learned from the experience.

Background: Minorities at increased risk for Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer (HBOC) frequently have low awareness and use of genetic counseling and testing (GCT). Making sure that evidence-based interventions (EBIs) reach minorities is key to reduce disparities. is a theory-informed EBI that has been proven to be efficacious in mostly non-Hispanic White non-clinical populations.

Supporting Health and Medical Decision Making: Findings and Insights from Fuzzy-Trace Theory.

Fuzzy-trace theory (FTT) supports practical approaches to improving health and medicine.FTT differs in important respects from other theories of decision making, which has implications for how to help patients, providers, and health communicators.Gist mental representations emphasize categorical distinctions, reflect understanding in context, and help cue values relevant to health and patient care.

Understanding the landscape of web-based medical misinformation about vaccination.

Given the high rates of vaccine hesitancy, web-based medical misinformation about vaccination is a serious issue. We sought to understand the nature of Google searches leading to medical misinformation about vaccination, and guided by fuzzy-trace theory, the characteristics of misinformation pages related to comprehension, inference-making, and medical decision-making. We collected data from web pages presenting vaccination information.

Individual differences in numerical representations of risk in health decision making: A fuzzy-trace theory approach.

Fuzzy-trace theory predicts that decisionmakers process numerical information about risk at multiple levels in parallel: the simplest level, nominal (categorical some-none) gist, and at more fine-grained levels, involving relative comparison (ordinal less-more gist) and exact quantities (verbatim representations). However, little is known about how individual differences in these numerical representations relate to judgments and decisions, especially involving health tradeoffs and relative risks. To investigate these differences, we administered measures of categorical and ordinal gist representations of number, objective numeracy, and intelligence in two studies (Ns = 978 and 956).

The influence of verbatim versus gist formatting on younger and older adults' information acquisition and decision-making.

Fuzzy-Trace Theory suggests that decision makers encode gist representations (bottom-line meaning) and verbatim representations (details) of information but rely more on gist, a tendency that increases with age. The present study examined implications for age differences in information seeking and decision-making by presenting gist and verbatim formatted choice scenarios. Participants comprised 68 younger and 66 older adults.

Viruses, Vaccines, and COVID-19: Explaining and Improving Risky Decision-making.

Risky decision-making lies at the center of the COVID-19 pandemic and will determine future viral outbreaks. Therefore, a critical evaluation of major explanations of such decision-making is of acute practical importance. We review the underlying mechanisms and predictions offered by expectancy-value and dual-process theories.

How Fuzzy-trace Theory Predicts Development of Risky Decision Making, with Novel Extensions to Culture and Reward Sensitivity.

Comprehensive meta-analyses of risky decision making in children, adolescents, and adults have revealed that age trends in disambiguated laboratory tasks confirmed fuzzy-trace theory's prediction that preference for risk decreases monotonically from childhood to adulthood. These findings are contrary to predictions of dual systems or neurobiological imbalance models. Assumptions about increasing developmental reliance on mental representations of the gist of risky options are essential to account for this developmental trend.

Compliance with mass marketing solicitation: The role of verbatim and gist processing.

Introduction: Mass marketing scams threaten financial and personal well-being. Grounded in fuzzy-trace theory, we examined whether verbatim and gist-based risk processing predicts susceptibility to scams and whether such processing can be altered.

Methods: Seven hundred and one participants read a solicitation letter online and indicated willingness to call an "activation number" to claim an alleged $500,000 sweepstakes prize.

Explaining risky choices with judgments: Framing, the zero effect, and the contextual relativity of gist.

Contemporary theories of decision-making are compared with respect to their predictions about the judgments that are hypothesized to underlie risky choice framing effects. Specifically, we compare predictions of psychophysical models, such as prospect theory, to the cognitive representational approach of fuzzy-trace theory in which the presence or absence of zero is key to framing effects. Three experiments implemented a high-power design in which many framing problems were administered to participants, who rated the attractiveness of either the certain or risky options.

To illuminate and motivate: A fuzzy-trace model of the spread of information online.

We propose, and test, a model of online media platform users' decisions to act on, and share, received information. Specifically, we focus on how of message content drive its spread. Our model is based on Fuzzy-Trace Theory (FTT), a leading theory of decision under risk.

Development of the Oncolo-GIST ("Giving Information Strategically & Transparently") Intervention Manual for Oncologist Skills Training in Advanced Cancer Prognostic Information Communication.

Context: Patient prognostic understanding is improved by oncologists' discussions of life expectancy. Most patients deem it important to discuss prognosis with their oncologists, but a minority of cancer patients within months of death report that they had such a discussion with their oncologist.

Objectives: To query stakeholders about their perspectives on the clinical approach and utility of an Oncolo-GIST manualized communication intervention, designed to enhance oncologists' ability to convey the gist of prognostic information simply, clearly, and effectively in the setting of progressing solid tumors and limited life expectancy.

Enhancing Patient Understanding of Medication Risks and Benefits.

Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of 2 interventions, including the DrugFactsBox format for presenting written medication information and the SMART (Strategic Memory Advanced Reasoning Training) program designed to enhance gist (i.e., "bottom-line" meaning) reasoning ability.

Abstraction: An alternative neurocognitive account of recognition, prediction, and decision making.

Gilead et al. offer a thoughtful and much-needed treatment of abstraction. However, it fails to build on an extensive literature on abstraction, representational diversity, neurocognition, and psychopathology that provides important constraints and alternative evidence-based conceptions.

Of Viruses, Vaccines, and Variability: Qualitative Meaning Matters.

Deaths from COVID-19 depend on millions of people understanding risk and translating this understanding into risk-reduction behaviors. Although numerical information about risk is helpful, numbers are surprisingly ambiguous, and there are predictable mismatches in risk perception between laypeople and experts. Hence, risk communication should convey the qualitative, contextualized meaning of risk.