There is a lot of evidence on the variation of human experience and that economic, social and linguistic environments strongly shape people’s behaviour, motivations and preferences. Despite this, these topics have not received a lot of attention in decision making psychology. In this article, I shed some light on the background of why this is the case.
As the enthusiasm for applied behavioural science spreads across the globe, it is time to think how well "irrationality" travels. This is the start of an article series exploring the impact of factors such as cultural context on decision making - and how our understanding of the human mind is based on a thin slice of humanity.
Consumers often use online reviews as a source of information in their decisions to purchase products and services. In our research, we examine a novel cue that consumers use to infer whether a review is effortful and credible: an indication that the review was written on a mobile device. Implications of this research may impact how brands and online platforms choose to encourage and disseminate consumer-generated-content.
How much information do you need to make up your mind? Our research in various domains of decision making shows that we make decisions more quickly and based on less information than we think. This has important implications in an age in which information is plentiful.
Heuristics play an important role in daily judgments and decision-making, but a scientific debate has been ongoing as to whether heuristics result in systematic errors or make us smarter. Both approaches have resulted in tools to support decision-making. Nudges address systematic errors and biases, while boosts support informed decision-making under uncertainty. But can these two opposing approaches be integrated into one framework?
New research shows that being similar to a previous winner can have radically different effects on people’s participation likelihood in sweepstakes – it all depends on the attributions people make for the winning outcome.
Every year, millions of people invest money in projects they may not fully understand and, by choosing to do so, they reveal one of the most important values that holds our society and our economy together: trust. What do we know about trust? Read this post to find out.
Emerging insights on “temporal contagion” explain the unusual contours of limited-edition markets.
Behavioural science has contributed much to the understanding of decision-making in the last few decades. We now understand how heuristics and biases can influence our thinking, perceptions, choices and behaviour. Yet, many of the frequently cited studies from behavioural science have been conducted on students, typically in their early twenties. Consequently, people often ask whether these findings still hold in other generations: Does our decision making process differ as we get older? Do we become more or less ‘rational’? And if minds do differ, how does the 20 year old mind differ to the 70 or 80 year old mind?
Historically, most of us have been concerned about information privacy on the internet. But when it comes to our actual behavior, many of us liberally share personal information online, a finding termed the ‘privacy paradox’ in the academic literature. Why this apparent gap between attitudes and behavior?
