Is there a description-experience gap in choices between a described and an experienced option?

Decision makers seem to evaluate risky options differently depending on the learning mode-that is, whether they learn about the options' payoff distributions from a summary description () or by drawing samples from them (). Are there also discrepancies when people choose between a described and an experienced option? In two experiments, we compared people's behavior in a condition with mixed learning modes (i.e.

The Evidence Effect: How Fact Boxes Shift Perceptions of Lung Cancer Screening in Austrian Medical Practice.

Background: Recent results from the Dutch NELSON study have rekindled debates about the benefit-to-harm ratio of lung cancer screening and the comprehension of this by physicians.

Methods: This research surveyed the perception and understanding of 136 Austrian physicians regarding the advantages and risks of lung cancer screening, examining the impact of educational data visualization tools, including fact box and icon array. Physicians participated in an online survey about their understanding before and after exposure to either a fact box alone or combined with an icon array.

Do children match described probabilities? The sampling hypothesis applied to repeated risky choice.

One way in which children can learn about probabilities of different outcomes before making a decision is from description, for instance, by observing graphical representations of frequency distributions. But how do repeated risky choices develop in early childhood when outcome probabilities are learned from description? Integrating previous findings from children's sampling processes in causal learning and adults' repeated choice behavior, we investigated repeated choices from 201 children aged 3 to 7 years and 100 adults in a child-friendly risky choice task. We expected young children to probability match and predicted that the perceived dependency between choices would shape the underlying choice process.

Bridging theory and data: A computational workflow for cultural evolution.

Cultural evolution applies evolutionary concepts and tools to explain the change of culture over time. Despite advances in both theoretical and empirical methods, the connections between cultural evolutionary theory and evidence are often vague, limiting progress. Theoretical models influence empirical research but rarely guide data collection and analysis in logical and transparent ways.

Predecisional information search adaptively reduces three types of uncertainty.

How do people search for information when they are given the opportunity to freely explore their options? Previous research has suggested that people focus on reducing uncertainty before making a decision, but it remains unclear how exactly they do so and whether they do so consistently. We present an analysis of over 1,000,000 information-search decisions made by over 2,500 individuals in a decisions-from-experience setting that cleanly separates information search from choice. Using a data-driven approach supported by a formal measurement framework, we examine how people allocate samples to options and how they decide to terminate search.

The psychology of life's most important decisions.

Research on judgment and decision making typically studies "small worlds"-highly simplified and stylized tasks such as monetary gambles-among homogenous populations rather than big real-life decisions made by people around the globe. These transformative life decisions (e.g.

Susceptibility to online misinformation: A systematic meta-analysis of demographic and psychological factors.

Nearly five billion people use and receive news through social media and there is widespread concern about the negative consequences of misinformation on social media (e.g., election interference, vaccine hesitancy).

Public attitudes towards social media field experiments.

The growing use of social media field experiments demands a rethink of current research ethics in computational social science and psychological research. Here, we provide an exploratory empirical account of key user concerns and outline a number of critical discussions that need to take place to protect participants and help researchers to make use of the novel opportunities of digital data collection and field studies. Our primary contention is that we need to elicit public perceptions to devise more up-to-date guidelines for review boards whilst also allowing and encouraging researchers to arrive at more ethical individual study design choices themselves.

Real-world estimation taps into basic numeric abilities.

Accurately estimating and assessing real-world quantities (e.g., how long it will take to get to the train station; the calorie content of a meal) is a central skill for adaptive cognition.

Youths' sensitivity to social media feedback: A computational account.

While it is often argued that continuous exposure to social feedback is specifically challenging for the hypersensitive developing brain, empirical evidence is lacking. Across three studies, we reveal the developmental differences and computational mechanisms that underlie the social media engagement and feedback processing of adolescents and adults. First, using a reinforcement learning model on a large Instagram trace dataset ( = 16,613, 1.

Boosting: Empowering Citizens with Behavioral Science.

Behavioral public policy came to the fore with the introduction of nudging, which aims to steer behavior while maintaining freedom of choice. Responding to critiques of nudging (e.g.

Opt-out defaults do not increase organ donation rates.

Objectives: To increase organ donation rates, many countries have switched from an opt-in ('explicit consent') default for organ donation to an opt-out ('presumed consent') default. This study sought to determine the extent to which this change in default has led to an increase in the number of deceased individuals who become organ donors.

Study Design: Longitudinal retrospective analysis.

How large language models can reshape collective intelligence.

Collective intelligence underpins the success of groups, organizations, markets and societies. Through distributed cognition and coordination, collectives can achieve outcomes that exceed the capabilities of individuals-even experts-resulting in improved accuracy and novel capabilities. Often, collective intelligence is supported by information technology, such as online prediction markets that elicit the 'wisdom of crowds', online forums that structure collective deliberation or digital platforms that crowdsource knowledge from the public.

Altered learning from positive feedback in adolescents with anorexia nervosa.

Objective: Anorexia nervosa (AN) is characterized by severe restriction of calorie intake, which persists despite serious medical and psychological sequelae of starvation. Several prior studies have identified impaired feedback learning among individuals with AN, but whether it reflects a disturbance in learning from positive feedback (i.e.

COVID-19 vaccine refusal is driven by deliberate ignorance and cognitive distortions.

Vaccine hesitancy was a major challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic. A common but sometimes ineffective intervention to reduce vaccine hesitancy involves providing information on vaccine effectiveness, side effects, and related probabilities. Could biased processing of this information contribute to vaccine refusal? We examined the information inspection of 1200 U.

Deliberately ignoring inequality to avoid rejecting unfair offers.

Why do people punish experienced unfairness if it induces costs for both the punisher and punished person(s) without any direct material benefits for the punisher? Economic theories of fairness propose that punishers experience disutility from disadvantageous inequality and punish in order to establish equality in outcomes. We tested these theories in a modified Ultimatum Game (N = 1370) by examining whether people avoid the urge to reject unfair offers, and thereby punish the proposer, by deliberately blinding themselves to unfairness. We found that 53% of participants deliberately ignored whether they had received an unfair offer.

Counteracting deliberate ignorance of academic bullying and harassment.

Bullying and harassment are pervasive in academia, with many cases going unreported. One possible factor may be deliberate ignorance among perpetrators and bystanders. A number of interventions counteracting deliberate ignorance could contribute to thriving research environments.

A framework for promoting online prosocial behavior via digital interventions.

Digital interventions for prosocial behavior are increasingly being studied by psychologists. However, academic findings remain largely underutilized by practitioners. We present a practical review and framework for distinguishing three categories of digital interventions--proactive, interactive, and reactive--based on the timing of their implementation.

Reconstructing Spatiotemporal Trajectories of Visual Object Memories in the Human Brain.

How the human brain reconstructs, step-by-step, the core elements of past experiences is still unclear. Here, we map the spatiotemporal trajectories along which visual object memories are reconstructed during associative recall. Specifically, we inquire whether retrieval reinstates feature representations in a copy-like but reversed direction with respect to the initial perceptual experience, or alternatively, this reconstruction involves format transformations and regions beyond initial perception.

Stochastic heuristics for decisions under risk and uncertainty.

Models of heuristics are often predicated on the desideratum that they should possess no free parameters. As a result, heuristic implementations are usually deterministic and do not allow for any choice errors, as the latter would require a parameter to regulate the magnitude of errors. We discuss the implications of this in light of research that highlights the evidence supporting stochastic choice and its dependence on preferential strength.

Children Sustain Cooperation in a Threshold Public-Goods Game Even When Seeing Others' Outcomes.

Many societal challenges are threshold dilemmas requiring people to cooperate to reach a threshold before group benefits can be reaped. Yet receiving feedback about others' outcomes relative to one's own () can undermine cooperation by focusing group members' attention on outperforming each other. We investigated the impact of relative feedback compared to (only seeing one's own outcome) on cooperation in children from Germany and India (6- to 10-year-olds, = 240).

Attentional dynamics of evidence accumulation explain why more numerate people make better decisions under risk.

In decisions under risk, more numerate people are typically more likely to choose the option with the highest expected value (EV) than less numerate ones. Prior research indicates that this finding cannot be explained by differences in the reliance on explicit EV calculation. The current work uses the attentional Drift Diffusion Model as a unified computational framework to formalize three candidate mechanisms of pre-decisional information search and processing-namely, attention allocation, amount of deliberation, and distorted processing of value-which may differ between more and less numerate people and explain differences in decision quality.

Intersecting perspectives: Advocating for sustainable family meals across generations.

Adolescents in Germany eat fewer animal products than their parents, often for sustainability reasons. We investigated how adolescents differ from their parents' generation in sustainability food-choice motives, consumption of animal products, and corresponding behaviors such as advocating for and influencing decisions towards more sustainable family meals. In an online questionnaire, an educationally diverse sample of 500 adolescents (M = 17.

The political (a)symmetry of metacognitive insight into detecting misinformation.

Political misinformation poses a major threat to democracies worldwide, often inciting intense disputes between opposing political groups. Despite its central role for informed electorates and political decision making, little is known about how aware people are of whether they are right or wrong when distinguishing accurate political information from falsehood. Here, we investigate people's metacognitive insight into their own ability to detect political misinformation.