Dissecting the risky-choice framing effect: Numeracy as an individual-difference factor in weighting risky and riskless options
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2008, Vol 3, Issue 6
Abstract
Using five variants of the Asian Disease Problem, we dissected the risky-choice framing effect by requiring each participant to provide preference ratings for the full decision problem and also to provide attractiveness ratings for each of the component parts, i.e., the sure-thing option and the risky option. Consistent with previous research, more risky choices were made by respondents receiving negatively framed versions of the decision problems than by those receiving positively framed versions. However, different processes were evident for those scoring high and low on numeracy. Whereas the choices of the less numerate showed a large effect of frame above and beyond any influence of their evaluations of the separate options, the choices of the highly numerate were almost completely accounted for by their attractiveness ratings of the separate options. These results are consistent with an increased tendency of the highly numerate to integrate complex numeric information in the construction of their preferences and a tendency for the less numerate to respond more superficially to non-numeric sources of information.
Authors and Affiliations
Ellen Peters, and Irwin P. Levin
An IRT forecasting model: linking proper scoring rules to item response theory
This article proposes an Item Response Theoretical (IRT) forecasting model that incorporates proper scoring rules and provides evaluations of forecasters’ expertise in relation to the features of the specific questions t...
Communicating clinical trial outcomes: Effects of presentation method on physicians’ evaluations of new treatments
Physicians expect a treatment to be more effective when its clinical outcomes are described as relative rather than as absolute risk reductions. We examined whether effects of presentation method (relative vs. absolute r...
Evidence for the influence of the mere-exposure effect on voting in the Eurovision Song Contest
The mere exposure, or familiarity, effect is the tendency for people to feel more positive about stimuli to which they have previously been exposed. The Eurovision Song Contest is a two-stage event, in which some contest...
The motivated use of moral principles
Five studies demonstrated that people selectively use general moral principles to rationalize preferred moral conclusions. In Studies 1a and 1b, college students and community respondents were presented with variations o...
Boundary effects in the Marschak-Machina triangle
This paper presents the results of a study that sheds new light on the shape of indifference curves in the Marschak-Machina triangle. The most important observation, obtained non-parametrically, concerns jumps in indiffe...