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Evolutionary theory reveals that punishment is effective in promoting cooperation and maintaining social norms. Although it is accepted that emotions are connected to punishment decisions, there remains substantial debate over why humans use costly punishment. Here we show experimentally that constraints on emotion expression can increase the use of costly punishment. We report data from ultimatum games, where a proposer offers a division of a sum of money and a responder decides whether to accept the split, or reject and leave both players with nothing. Compared with the treatment in which expressing emotions directly to proposers is prohibited, rejection of unfair offers is significantly less frequent when responders can convey their feelings to the proposer concurrently with their decisions. These data support the view that costly punishment might itself be used to express negative emotions and suggest that future studies will benefit by recognizing that human demand for emotion expression can have significant behavioral consequences in social environments, including families, courts, companies, and markets.

A high luminance contrast between windows and surrounding surfaces can increase the risk of discomfort glare, which can diminish office workers' satisfaction and productivity. Accordingly, it can lead to occupant interventions, such as drawing window blinds or increasing electric light levels, which are intended to enhance indoor visual comfort but counterproductively act to increase energy consumption. Increasing the luminance of the areas surrounding the windows using a supplementary lighting system, such as wall-washing with light emitting diode (LED) linear luminaires, could reduce discomfort glare arising from windowed walls. This paper reports on the results of a study in a typical office room in Brisbane, Australia. The outcomes of this study indicate that creating a luminance contrast of between 11:1 and 12:1 on the window wall in an office room with a 45% window-to-exterior-wall ratio using a supplementary LED system leads to improved subjective assessments of window appearance. The results suggest that such an enhancement could significantly reduce discomfort glare from windows, as well as diminishing the likelihood of the users intending to turn on the ceiling lights or to move the blinds. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Systematic studies that evaluate the quality of decision-making processes are relatively rare. Using the literature on decision quality, this research develops a framework to assess the quality of decision-making processes for resolving boundary conflicts in the Philippines. The evaluation framework breaks down the decision-making process into three components (the decision procedure, the decision method, and the decision unit) and is applied to two ex-post (one resolved and one unresolved) and one ex-ante cases. The evaluation results from the resolved and the unresolved cases show that the choice of decision method plays a minor role in resolving boundary conflicts whereas the choice of decision procedure is more influential. In the end, a decision unit can choose a simple method to resolve the conflict. The ex-ante case presents a follow-up intended to resolve the unresolved case for a changing decision-making process in which the associated decision unit plans to apply the spatial multi criteria evaluation (SMCE) tool as a decision method. The evaluation results from the ex-ante case confirm that the SMCE has the potential to enhance the decision quality because: a) it provides high quality as a decision method in this changing process, and b) the weaknesses associated with the decision unit and the decision procedure of the unresolved case were found to be eliminated in this process.

Experiments provide a controlled setting where factors can be isolated and studied more easily than in the field, but they often do not allow participants to sort into or out of en-vironments based on their preferences, beliefs, and skills. We conduct an experiment to dem-onstrate the importance of sorting in the context of social preferences. When individuals are constrained to play a dictator game, 74% of the subjects share. But when subjects are allowed to avoid the situation altogether, less than one third share. This reversal of proportions illus-trates that the influence of sorting limits the generalizability of experimental findings that do not allow sorting. Moreover, institutions designed to entice pro-social behavior may induce adverse se-lection. We find that increasing the dictator-game surplus prevents foremost those subjects from opting out who shared the least initially. Thus the impact of social preferences remains much lower than in a mandatory dictator game, even if sharing is subsidized by higher pay-offs. Our experiment also sheds light on the motives for sharing. While much sharing is con-sistent with other-regarding preferences, the majority of subjects share without really wanting to, as evidenced by their willingness to avoid the dictator game and to even pay to avoid do-ing so.

It is often difficult for donors to predict the value of charitable giving because they know little about the persons who receive their help. This concern is particularly acute when making contributions to organizations that serve heterogeneous populations. While we have considerable evidence that donors are more generous if they know their assistance benefits a preferred group, we know little about the demand for such information. To start closing this gap, we study transfers of income to real-world poor people in the context of dictator games. Our dictators can purchase signals about why the recipients are poor. We find that a third of the dictators are willing to pay a dollar to learn more about their recipient. Dictators who devote resources to acquiring information are individuals whose giving is particularly responsive to recipient type. They use the information mainly to withhold resources from “undeserving” types, leading to a drastic decline in aggregate transfers. With endogenous information about recipients, we find that all types of poor subjects are worse off. Our results suggest that the effects of truth-in-giving policies are highly responsive to recipient heterogeneity and biased against more generous giving.

The Intergroup Prisoner’s Dilemma with Intragroup Power Dynamics (IPD^2) is a new game paradigm for studying human behavior in conflict situations. IPD^2 adds the concept of intragroup power to an intergroup version of the standard Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma game. We conducted a laboratory study in which individual human participants played the game against computer strategies of various complexities. The results show that participants tend to cooperate more when they have greater power status within their groups. IPD^2 yields increasing levels of mutual cooperation and decreasing levels of mutual defection, in contrast to a variant of Intergroup Prisoner’s Dilemma without intragroup power dynamics where mutual cooperation and mutual defection are equally likely. We developed a cognitive model of human decision making in this game inspired by the Instance-Based Learning Theory (IBLT) and implemented within the ACT-R cognitive architecture. This model was run in place of a human participant using the same paradigm as the human study. The results from the model show a pattern of behavior similar to that of human data. We conclude with a discussion of the ways in which the IPD^2 paradigm can be applied to studying human behavior in conflict situations. In particular, we present the current study as a possible contribution to corroborating the conjecture that democracy reduces the risk of wars.

In order to improve our understanding of situation awareness (SA) in teams performing in technologically advanced command, control, and communications (C3) operations, researchers need to develop valid approaches to assess both individual and shared SA. We investigated SA in an interdisciplinary military rescue operation training exercise. For this study, we developed procedures to measure the degree of shared SA between two team members and to improve the accuracy of their shared SA scores. We suggest that SA scores that are calculated using many existing methods may be inflated because they often fail to account for error in terms of both the amount of information that is thought to be relevant and in the accuracy of a person's knowledge of it. We calculated true SA scores that account for both of these types of error. The measures were then used to evaluate five potential predictors of shared SA. Our analysis suggested that failure to compensate for error in SA may lead to overestimation of performance in a situation. The results also revealed a significant relationship between shared SA and participants' distance from a central, joint service team, which acted as the organizational hub within the C3 structure. Shared SA was better the further away from the hub people were, which suggests that a person's role and position within an organization affects the level of shared SA that can be achieved with other individuals.

Accumulation is a fundamental process in dynamic systems: inventory accumulates production less ship- ments; the national debt accumulates the federal deficit. Effective decision making in such systems requires an understanding of the relationship between stocks and the flows that alter them. However, highly educated people are often unable to infer the behavior of simple stock-flow systems. In a series of experiments we demonstrate that poor understanding of accumulation, termed stock-flow failure ,i s a fundamental reasoning error. Persistent poor performance is not attributable to an inability to interpret graphs, lack of contextual knowledge, motivation, or cognitive capacity. Rather, stock-flow failure is a robust phenomenon that appears to be rooted in failure to appreciate the most basic principles of accu- mulation, leading to the use of inappropriate heuristics. We show that many people, including highly educated individuals with strong technical training, use what we term the ''correlation heuristic", erro- neously assuming that the behavior of a stock matches the pattern of its flows. We discuss the origins of stock-flow failure and implications for management and education.

Behavioral decision research offers a general approach to studying cognitive aspects of decision making, as well as a platform for studying their interplay with social and affective processes. Applied to any decision, behavioral decision research involves three interrelated tasks: (a) normative analysis, identifying the expected impacts of possible choices; (b) descriptive study, characterizing how individuals view the decision, in terms comparable to the normative analysis; and (c) prescriptive interventions, helping people to bridge critical gaps in their understanding. Applied to adolescents’ decisions, behavioral decision research provides analytical and empirical procedures for clarifying the challenges that young people face and their success in addressing them. It recognizes that competence varies by individual and by decision, leading to domain-specific policies and interventions, affording teens as much autonomy as they can manage.

Subjects in economic experiments are often generous. This behavior is often interpreted as reflecting a preference for equitable, efficient, or otherwise desirable social outcomes. We show that a considerable proportion of such fair behavior may be driven by a desire to appear fair without actually wanting a fair outcome. To do so, we first demonstrate a high frequency of fair behavior in a modification of the standard dictator game, but then show that fairness decreases substantially when the connection between choices and outcomes is obfuscated. Specifically, we show that in a binary version of the dictator game, a majority of subjects choose the fair and efficient outcome. We then show that subjects playing the same game instead choose to maximize their own payoffs, at the expense of fairness and efficiency, when the recipients’ payoffs are uncertain, even if this uncertainty can be costlessly resolved. We also find that when either of two subjects can sacrifice to implement a fair and efficient outcome, but neither can ensure fairness or inefficiency, selfishness prevails. Finally, we also find less fair behavior when unfair outcomes can plausibly result from an external factor rather than just the dictator’s choice. Our results indicate that much fair behavior may reflect motivations other than simply a preference for desirable social outcomes. Instead, much of the behavior in our experiments is consistent with a desire to pursue self-interest, while maintaining the illusion of behaving fairly. Do people share with others because they want to, or because they feel they have to in certain situations? This paper explores the motivation for fair behavior. In particular, we explore whether experimental demonstrations of people sacrificing monetary payoffs to benefit others truly represent evidence of concern for others’ welfare or for desirable social outcomes. To do so, we use experimental manipulations that allow subjects to leave the relationship between their actions and others’ outcomes uncertain. These manipulations thus allow subjects to choose selfishly without knowing whether they negatively impact others’ payoffs. However, in our manipulations subjects may always implement the fair outcome with certainty if they so desire. We find significantly less generous behavior in these manipulations relative to a baseline in which the relationship between actions and others’ outcomes is certain, as in the standard dictator game. This finding occurs in spite of the fact that the recipients are anonymous and cannot retaliate. We conclude that people are often fair because they intrinsically dislike appearing unfair, either to themselves or others.

The research reported here is relevant to human decision making in disaster, emergency, and generally dynamic and changing conditions. In emergency conditions, both external resources and cognitive capabilities are limited. A decision maker must manage his/her cognitive load, that of others in the situation, and allocate the often limited resources in a short period oftime. The main job of a decision maker in an emergency situation is to allocate resources wisely where the situation changes constantly, outcomes are delayed, decisions are interdependent, priorities change over time, and there is high uncertainty of outcomes.

This chapter presents a general introduction to basic concepts in cognitive science. This chapter provides a common framework to organize the basic knowledge: the human information processing (HIP) system. The HIP is a framework that represents different subsystems including the perceptual system, the motor system, and the cognitive system. The perceptual and motor systems are briefly discussed first. Then, the cognitive systems and its different subsystems including memory and attention, learning, problem solving, and decision making are discussed. This chapter is not intended to be a comprehensive review of the current knowledge in cognitive science, but rather a general introduction of the most fundamental processes and the well-known findings about HIP’s different subsystems. It is expected that this introduction would help readers to obtain a general overview of cognitive science and of cognitive psychology topics that are relevant for cardiovascular interventions.

One form of inertia is the tendency to repeat the last decision irrespective of the obtained outcomes while making decisions from experience (DFE). A number of computational models based upon the Instance-Based Learning Theory (IBLT), a theory of decisions from experience, have included different inertia implementations and have shown to simultaneously account for both risk-taking and alternations between alternatives. The role that inertia plays in these models, however, is unclear as the same model without inertia is also able to account for observed risk-taking quite well. This paper demonstrates the predictive benefits of incorporating one particular implementation of inertia in an existing IBL model. We use two large datasets, estimation and competition, from the Technion Prediction Tournament (TPT) involving a repeated binary-choice task to show that incorporating an inertia mechanism in an IBL model enables it to account for the observed average risk-taking and alternations. Including inertia, however, does not help the model to account for the trends in risk-taking and alternations over trials compared to the IBL model without the inertia mechanism. We generalize the two IBL models, with and without inertia, to the competition set by using the parameters determined in the estimation set. The generalization process demonstrates both the advantages and disadvantages of including inertia in an IBL model.

Summary: This study investigated the ability to generalize acquired skills from training conditions to novel conditions, in a complex perceptual and cognitive task of luggage screening. We examined category and exemplar diversity during training for preparing learners to detect novel items during transfer. Category diversity was manipulated in terms of heterogeneity of training categories: Participants either trained with targets from one category or with targets from several categories. Exemplar diversity was manipulated between participants by presenting either a few or many exemplars for both category diversity conditions. Seventy-two participants were trained to identify threats in pieces of luggage. Thereafter they were transferred to novel stimuli. Results can be summarized in support for the diversity of training hypothesis for preparing for novelty: To the best training for novel luggage screening situations is achieved using fewer items in a variety of categories. Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Target detection and decision-making tasks are pervasive. They are as common as finding flaws as a quality inspector, and as important and relevant for our health and society, such as a physician identifying a tumour on an X-ray image, a soldier determining the presence of a combatant in unfamiliar terrain, and an airport security officer looking for threats in passenger luggage. The terrorist attacks of 11 September changed the way security is addressed in American airports. However, much of the threat detection in luggage screening is still done by visual inspection rather than by automated methods. This is partly due to the complexity of visual images, the uncertainty and variability of what constitutes a threat, and the intricacies of the human decision-making process. Research that improves human accuracy of detecting potential threats and optimizes detection time has become a priority. Our applied research goal in the airport security context is to find ways to transfer skills acquired during training to the accurate detection of unfamiliar, novel targets. This implies the need to prepare security officers to identify novel items of known categories. For instance, they should be able to detect not only images of guns or knives they have encountered during training but also novel images of guns and knives that they have not yet seen before. We will refer to this as exemplar diversity in the following. As we describe below, there exists some evidence that humans can indeed learn to detect novel items of familiar categories. More challenging, security officers have to prepare for another kind of novelty that we call category diversity. They have to detect not only novel items of familiar categories, but also novel items of categories that by definition cannot be practiced during training and that will potentially not look like any weapons encountered in previous training. However, we would not expect luggage screeners to be prepared to detect any novel object but a novel exemplar of a novel category within a meta-category such as weapons or threats. For example, the meta-category of ‘cutting instruments’ that are not allowed in an aircraft includes knives, box cutters, machetes, etc. For this category, luggage screeners are likely to be trained on a subset of objects. This subset of objects should help screeners to detect other members of the metacategory of ‘cutting instruments’. Similarly, we would expect that when screeners are trained in multiple categories of weapons or threats, they would be able to detect other members of a more generic meta-category of ‘threats’. In this research we investigated how to best train to detect this kind of novel items. To do so, we focused on category diversity and exemplar diversity of stimuli presented during training in a luggage screening task to facilitate detection of novel exemplars of a novel category. There exist several research areas relevant to the goal of preparing luggage screeners for detecting novel items, but none of those provide sufficient and theoretically sound advice to solve this problem. In the following, we will briefly review the literature on skill acquisition, especially for perceptual learning, transfer of skills and category learning, and the implications for preparing for exemplar and category diversity.

Inequality aversion is a key motive for punishment, with many prominent studies suggesting people use punishment to reduce or eliminate inequality. Punishment in laboratory games, however, is nearly always designed to promote equality (e.g., rejections in standard ultimatum games) and the marginal cost of punishment is typically non-trivially positive. As a consequence, individual preferences over punishment outcomes remain largely uninformed. We here report data from a laboratory experiment using dictator games. We find that when people are treated unfairly they systematically prefer to use punishment to create advantageous inequality. Our results shed new light on human preferences over punishment outcomes, and have important implications for the design of mechanisms to deter misconduct.

This paper develops a North-South product model in which Southern imitation and the North-South flow of foreign direct investment (FDI) are endogenously determined. In the model, a strengthening of IPR protection in the South reduces the rate of imitation, which, in turn, increases the flow of FDI. The increase in FDI more than offsets the decline in production undertaken by Southern imitators, so that the South’s share of goods produced by the global economy increases. Furthermore, real wages of Southern workers increase even though prices of goods produced by multinationals exceed those of Southern imitators. The preceding results hold when Northern innovation is endogenously determined; in addition, the rate of innovation increases with a strengthening of Southern IPR protection.

In the standard economic analysis of the principal-agent relationship, principals are assumed to hire agents because delegation confers efficiencies, as the agent either possesses special ability or has a lower opportunity cost of time or effort. The central focus of the literature on principal agent relationships has been on how to design monitoring and incentive schemes that enable these advantages to be realized despite the fact that agents typically face different incentives and possess different information than the principals who employ them (Paul R. Milgrom and John Roberts 1992; Patrick Bolton and Mathias F. Dewatripont 2005). This paper examines whether the principal-agent relationship might in some cases serve a function unrelated to efficiency. Specifically, a principal may hire an agent to take self-interested or immoral actions that the principal would be reluctant to take more directly. The principal may feel more detached, and hence less responsible, for such an action if it is delegated, while the agent may feel that he or she was "just carrying out orders" or merely fulfilling the requirement of an employment contract. Through the use of agents, therefore, accountability for morally questionable behavior can become vertically diffused, with no individual taking responsibility. While this function of agency has not been fully investigated in the economics literature, it is commonplace in popular accounts of behavior in domains as diverse as politics, business, war, and everyday social interaction. Companies are often accused of outsourcing production and other functions to outside firms that act less ethically than the company would act itself?for example, by treating workers less generously.1 Executives and stockholders of the outsourcing company may turn a blind eye toward the actions of the outside firms, remaining deliberately uninformed, or at least pretending to be. Recent press stories have noted the increasing use of "firing consultants," who often serve little role other than carrying out the act of firing employ ees2. Moreover, firm managers who act unethically may justify such behavior through their role as shareholders' agents (Tara J. Radin and Martin Calkins 2006). Within firms or other organizations, high-level decision makers are often accused of tacitly encouraging unethical or illegal behaviors, while shielding themselves from knowledge and

Social cooperation often relies on individuals' spontaneous norm obedi- ence when there is no punishment for violation or reward for compliance. However, people do not consistently follow pro-social norms. Previous studies have suggested that an individual's tendency toward norm conformity is affected by empirical infor- mation (i.e., what others did or would do in a similar situation) as well as by normative information (i.e., what others think one ought to do). Yet little is known about whether people have an intrinsic desire to obtain norm-revealing information. In this paper, we use a dictator game to investigate whether dictators actively seek norm-revealing information and, if so, whether they prefer to get empirical or normative information. Our data show that although the majority of dictators choose to view free information before making decisions, they are equally likely to choose empirical or normative information. However, a large majority (more than 80%) of dictators are not willing to incur even a very small cost for getting information. Our findings help to understand why norm compliance is context-dependent, and highlight the importance of making norm-revealing information salient in order to promote conformity.

Motivation - This study was conducted to determine how people frame decisions naturally. Research Approach - Decision framing was analyzed in the computer mediated Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission planning process. Outcomes of proposed actions were coded as positively or negatively framed, with rates of framing compared relative to action specificity and expertise. Findings - It was found that positive framing was preferred in general, and that increased expertise led to more balanced consideration of positive and negative outcomes. Research Limitations/Implications - This study was exploratory and experimentation is necessary to formalize the observed patterns further. Originality/Value - The findings suggest that providing decision-makers additional information about the costs of using technology may more rapidly lead to better mental representations in technology-supported decisionmaking. Take away message - Different kinds of expert behavior promote different patterns of decision framing relative to how technology is used for decision-making.

If the United States were subject to a terrorist nuclear attack, its president would face overwhelming political pressure to respond decisively. A well-prepared response could help both to prevent additional attacks and to bring the perpetrators to justice. An instinctive response could be cataclysmically ineffective, inflicting enormous collateral damage without achieving either deterrence or justice. An international security doctrine of Mutually Assured Support can make the response to such attacks more effective as well as less likely—by requiring preparations that reduce the threat. The doctrine requires all subscribing nations to mobilize fully in support of the attacked nation, in return for a promise of nonretaliation. It provides a vehicle for domestic and international leadership, allowing the president to engage the American people, from a position of strength, around an issue that has had little public discussion. The authors describe its rationale, implications, and implementation.

Social norms play an important role in individual decision making. Bicchieri (2006) argues that two different expectations influence our choice to obey a norm: what we expect others to do (empirical expectations) and what we believe others think we ought to do (normative expectations). Little is known about the relative importance of these two types of expectation in individuals’ decisions, an issue that is particularly important when normative and empirical expectations are in conflict (e.g., systemic corruption, high crime cities). In this paper, we report data from Dictator game experiments where we exogenously manipulate dictators’ expectations in the direction of either selfishness or fairness. When normative and empirical expectations are in conflict, we find that empirical expectations about other dictators’ choices significantly predict a dictator’s own choice. However, dictators’ expectations regarding what other dictators think ought to be done do not have a significant impact on their decisions after controlling for empirical expectations. Our findings about the crucial influence of empirical expectations are important for designing institutions or policies aimed at discouraging undesirable behavior.

Narrative approaches to analyzing risks seek to identify the variables critical to creating and controlling a risk, then to instantiate them in terms of coherent themes (e.g., organizational failure, strategic surprise). Computational approaches to analyzing risks seek to identify the same critical variables, then to instantiate them in terms of their probability. Disaster risk analysis faces complex, novel processes that strain the capabilities of both approaches. We propose an approach that integrates elements of each, relying on what we call structured scenarios and computable models. It is illustrated by framing the analysis of plans for a possible avian flu pandemic.

Do individuals believe that an election victory by their favored candidate will improve their personal economic well-being? Previous work has either adopted an approach that is not well suited to determining this relationship, or ignored this question to focus on perceptions of macroeconomic conditions. In this paper we adopt a new approach that allows us to determine the relationship individuals perceive between elections and personal economic welfare, examining the relationship between vote choice, the election outcome, and post-election expectations for personal economic well-being. We find that economic individualism plays an important role in shaping the relationship individuals perceive between election outcomes and their personal economic well-being. Individuals who reject economic individualism do perceive a relationship, with those viewing an election outcome as favorable more optimistic in their expectations for personal economic well-being than those who view the election outcome as unfavorable. Conversely, election outcomes do not influence the expectations of economic individualists.