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This study compares husbands' and wives' views on the person in a couple who should be responsible for preparing for hurricane hazards; it also examines whether the varying levels of agreement reached by husbands and wives regarding this responsibility are associated with actual preparedness behaviors. An online survey targeting married, heterosexual couples living in Sarasota County, Florida, USA was sent out between March and May, 2015. Both the husbands and the wives were asked to fill out the survey. A total of 170 surveys were used for analysis. Results suggested that husbands and wives felt that they had shared responsibility for most of the 19 preparedness behaviors considered. However, a few stereotypically masculine preparedness behaviors were found to typically fall to husbands. Husbands' and wives' views of perceived responsibility were not statistically different, but husbands tended to favor individual responsibility, while wives tended to favor joint responsibility. Higher levels of agreement were significantly associated with greater engagement in planning-related preparedness behaviors. Policy implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predicting and analyzing behaviors of investors is of great value to financial institutions. This paper uses survey data from about 9,000 individual investors across China to explore the predictability of decision behaviors by studying demographic characteristics that are relatively easy to obtain. After applying Pearson’s chi-squared test, Spearman rank correlation test, and several data mining methods, we verified that demographic characteristics are closely linked to decision behaviors, and it would be an economical and feasible solution for financial organizations to build initial behavioral prediction models especially when investors’ behavioral data are insufficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important theoretical question in decision making concerns the nature of cue-generation: What mechanism drives the generation of cues used to make inferences? Most models of decision making assume that the properties of cues, often cue validity, initiate a set of dynamic pre-decision processes. In two studies, we test how memory accessibility affects cue use by manipulating both ecological cue validity and cue accessibility in a stock-forecasting task. Cue accessibility was manipulated by the pattern of accurate cue discriminations within experiment blocks of the learning phase of the experiments. Specifically, we manipulated the serial positions in which the cues accurately discriminated while holding overall cue validity constant. At test, participants preferred cues that discriminated early in the learning phase—a kind of primacy effect. The findings suggest that cue use is influenced by memory retrieval mechanisms and that cue use is not solely determined by cue validity. The results have implications for the development of computational models of heuristic decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A typical rule that has been used for the endorsement of new medications by the Food and Drug Administration is to have two trials, each convincing on its own, demonstrating effectiveness. “Convincing” may be subjectively interpreted, but the use of p-values and the focus on statistical significance (in particular with p < .05 being coined significant) is pervasive in clinical research. Therefore, in this paper, we calculate with simulations what it means to have exactly two trials, each with p < .05, in terms of the actual strength of evidence quantified by Bayes factors. Our results show that different cases where two trials have a p-value below .05 have wildly differing Bayes factors. Bayes factors of at least 20 in favor of the alternative hypothesis are not necessarily achieved and they fail to be reached in a large proportion of cases, in particular when the true effect size is small (0.2 standard deviations) or zero. In a non-trivial number of cases, evidence actually points to the null hypothesis, in particular when the true effect size is zero, when the number of trials is large, and when the number of participants in both groups is low. We recommend use of Bayes factors as a routine tool to assess endorsement of new medications, because Bayes factors consistently quantify strength of evidence. Use of p-values may lead to paradoxical and spurious decision-making regarding the use of new medications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We implemented a Choice Blindness Paradigm containing political statements in Argentina to reveal the existence of categorical ranges of introspective reports, identified by confidence and agreement levels, separating easy from very hard to manipulate decisions. CBP was implemented in both live and web-based forms. Importantly, and contrary to what was observed in Sweden, we did not observe changes in voting intentions. Also, confidence levels in the manipulated replies where significantly lower than in non-manipulated cases even in undetected manipulations. We name this phenomenon unconscious detection of self-deception. Results also show that females are more difficult to manipulate than men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous researches support that graphs are relevant decision aids to tasks related to the interpretation of numerical information. Moreover, literature shows that different types of graphical information can help or harm the accuracy on decision making of accountants and financial analysts. We conducted a 4×2 mixed-design experiment to examine the effects of numerical information disclosure on financial analysts’ accuracy, and investigated the role of overconfidence in decision making. Results show that compared to text, column graph enhanced accuracy on decision making, followed by line graphs. No difference was found between table and textual disclosure. Overconfidence harmed accuracy, and both genders behaved overconfidently. Additionally, the type of disclosure (text, table, line graph and column graph) did not affect the overconfidence of individuals, providing evidence that overconfidence is a personal trait. This study makes three contributions. First, it provides evidence from a larger sample size (295) of financial analysts instead of a smaller sample size of students that graphs are relevant decision aids to tasks related to the interpretation of numerical information. Second, it uses the text as a baseline comparison to test how different ways of information disclosure (line and column graphs, and tables) can enhance understandability of information. Third, it brings an internal factor to this process: overconfidence, a personal trait that harms the decision-making process of individuals. At the end of this paper several research paths are highlighted to further study the effect of internal factors (personal traits) on financial analysts’ accuracy on decision making regarding numerical information presented in a graphical form. In addition, we offer suggestions concerning some practical implications for professional accountants, auditors, financial analysts and standard setters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we conducted a laboratory experiment to assess preemptive striking by and towards individuals or groups. In the framework of a preemptive strike game, we set the following four conditions: one person faced another person, one person faced a three-person group, a three-person group faced an individual, and a three-person group faced another three-person group. Previous studies have revealed that greed is activated when participants belong to a group, while fear is activated when participants interact with a group, and further, that attacking behaviors in the preemptive strike game are driven by fear. These observations led to a hypothesis that high attack rates would be realized when participants interact with a group, regardless of whether the participants make decisions as individuals or a group. The results of our experiment, however, rejected this hypothesis. Among the four conditions, the attack rate was highest when a three-person group faced an individual. As possible reasons for our observation, we discuss the potential threat stemming from the imbalance in the effectiveness of attack between individuals and groups, and the (incorrect) belief by groups that single individuals would be more likely to attack out of fear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jumping to conclusions (JTC) during probabilistic reasoning is a cognitive bias repeatedly demonstrated in people with schizophrenia and shown to be associated with delusions. Little is known about the neurochemical basis of probabilistic reasoning. We tested the hypothesis that catecholamines influence data gathering and probabilistic reasoning by administering intravenous methamphetamine, which is known to cause synaptic release of the catecholamines noradrenaline and dopamine, to healthy humans whilst they undertook a probabilistic inference task. Our study used a randomised, double-blind, cross-over design. Seventeen healthy volunteers on three visits were administered either placebo or methamphetamine or methamphetamine preceded by amisulpride. In all three conditions participants performed the “beads” task in which participants decide how much information to gather before making a probabilistic inference, and which measures the cognitive bias towards jumping to conclusions. Psychotic symptoms triggered by methamphetamine were assessed using Comprehensive Assessment of At-Risk Mental States (CAARMS). Methamphetamine induced mild psychotic symptoms, but there was no effect of drug administration on the number of draws to decision (DTD) on the beads task. DTD was a stable trait that was highly correlated within subjects across visits (intra-class correlation coefficients of 0.86 and 0.91 on two versions of the task). The less information was sampled in the placebo condition, the more psychotic-like symptoms the person had after the methamphetamine plus amisulpride condition (p = 0.028). Our results suggest that information gathering during probabilistic reasoning is a stable trait, not easily modified by dopaminergic or noradrenergic modulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]