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Decision-making involves weighing up the outcome likelihood, potential rewards, and effort needed. Previous research has focused on the trade-offs between risk and reward or between effort and reward. Here we bridge this gap and examine how risk in effort levels influences choice. We focus on how two key properties of choice influence risk preferences for effort: changes in magnitude and probability. Two experiments assessed people's risk attitudes for effort, and an additional experiment provided a control condition using monetary gambles. The extent to which people valued effort was related to their pattern of risk preferences. Unlike with monetary outcomes, however, there was substantial heterogeneity in effort-based risk preferences: People who responded to effort as costly exhibited a "flipped" interaction pattern of risk preferences. The direction of the pattern depended on whether people treated effort as a loss of resources. Most, but not all, people treat effort as a loss and are more willing to take risks to avoid potentially high levels of effort., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

When people make risky decisions based on past experience, they must rely on memory. The nature of the memory representations that support these decisions is not yet well understood. A key question concerns the extent to which people recall specific past episodes or whether they have learned a more abstract rule from their past experience. To address this question, we examined the precision of the memories used in risky decisions-from-experience. In three pre-registered experiments, we presented people with risky options, where the outcomes were drawn from continuous ranges (e.g., 100-190 or 500-590), and then assessed their memories for the outcomes experienced. In two preferential tasks, people were more risk seeking for high-value than low-value options, choosing as though they overweighted the outcomes from more extreme ranges. Moreover, in two preferential tasks and a parallel evaluation task, people were very poor at recalling the exact outcomes encountered, but rather confabulated outcomes that were consistent with the outcomes they had seen and were biased towards the more extreme ranges encountered. This common pattern suggests that the observed decision bias in the preferential task reflects a basic cognitive process to overweight extreme outcomes in memory. These results highlight the importance of the edges of the distribution in providing the encoding context for memory recall. They also suggest that episodic memory influences decision-making through gist memory and not through direct recall of specific instances., (Copyright © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Structural racism, evidenced in practices like residential racial segregation, has been linked to health inequities. We examined the relationship between an adverse environmental factor (alcohol outlet overconcentration), segregated neighborhoods, and county alcohol policy in Louisiana and Alabama to investigate this link. Multilevel analysis revealed high outlet density associated with segregated counties and predominantly black census tracts in counties with restrictive alcohol policy. This inverse association between policies designed to limit alcohol availability and overconcentration of outlets in black neighborhoods warrants consideration by policymakers given links between outlet density and health inequities. Consideration of these findings in historical context suggests these policies may function as a contemporary actualization of the historical use of alcohol policy to subjugate black people in the South, now over-concentrating instead of prohibiting access., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Many previous studies have suggested a link between alcohol outlets and assaultive violence rates. In 1997 the City of New Orleans adopted a series of policies, e.g., increased license fee, additional enforcement staff, and expanded powers for the alcohol license board. The policies were specifically enacted to address the proliferation of problem alcohol outlets believed to be the source of a variety of social problems including assaultive violence. In this research, we evaluate the impact of a city level policy in New Orleans to address the problem alcohol outlets and their influence on assaultive violence. The spatial association between rates of assaultive violence at the census tract level (n=170) over a ten year period raises a challenge in statistical analysis. To meet this challenge we developed a hierarchical change-point model that controls for important covariates of assaultive violence and accounts for unexplained spatial and temporal variability. While our model is somewhat complex, its hierarchical Bayesian analysis is accessible via the WinBUGS software program. Keeping other effects fixed, the implementation of the new city level policy was associated with a decrease in the positive association between census tract level rates of assaultive violence and alcohol outlet density. Comparing several candidate change-point models using the DIC criterion, the positive association began decreasing the year of the policy implementation. The magnitude of the association continued to decrease for roughly two years and then stabilized. We also created maps of the fitted assaultive violence rates in New Orleans, as well as spatial residual maps which, together with Moran's I's, suggest that the spatial variation of the data is well accounted for by our model. We reach the conclusion that the implementation of the policy is associated with a significant decrease in the positive relationship between assaultive violence and the off-sale alcohol outlet density., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The strongest evidence that monunsaturated fat may influence breast cancer risk comes from studies of southern European populations, in whom intake of oleic acid sources, particularly olive oil, appears protective. No previous study has examined the relation of adipose tissue fatty acid content to breast cancer in such a population. We used adipose biopsies with diverse fat intake patterns gathered in 5 European centers, including southern Europe (Malaga, Spain), to test the hypothesis that stores of oleic acid or other monounsaturates are inversely associated with breast cancer. Gluteal fat aspirates were obtained from 291 postmenopausal incident breast cancer patients and 351 control subjects, frequency-matched for age and catchment area. Logistic regression was used to model breast cancer by monounsaturates, with established risk factors controlled for. Oleic acid showed a strong inverse association with breast cancer in the Spanish center. The odds ratio for the difference between 75th and 25th percentiles was 0.40 (95% CI: 0.28, 0.58) in Malaga and 1.27 (0.88, 1.85) in all other centers pooled, with a peak at 2.36 (1.01, 5.50) for Zeist. Palmitoleic and myristoleic acids showed evidence of an inverse association outside Spain, and cis-vaccenic acid showed a positive association in 3 centers. These data do not support the hypothesis that increasing tissue stores of oleic acid are protective against breast cancer in non-Spanish populations. This finding implies that the strong protective associations reported for olive oil intake in dietary studies may be due to some other protective components of the oil and not to the direct effect of oleic acid uptake. Alternatively, high olive oil intake may indicate some other protective aspect of the lifestyle of these women.