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People's values provide a decision-making framework that helps guide their everyday actions. Most popular methods of assessing values show tenuous relationships with everyday behaviors. Using a new Amazon Mechanical Turk dataset(N = 767) consisting of people's language, values, and behaviors, we explore the degree to which attaining "ground truth" is possible with regards to such complicated mental phenomena. We then apply our findings to a corpus of Facebook user (N = 130; 828) status updates in order to understand how core values influence the personal thoughts and behaviors that users share through social media. Our findings suggest that self-report questionnaires for abstract and complex phenomena, such as values, are inadequate for painting an accurate picture of individual mental life. Free response language data and language modeling show greater promise for understanding both the structure and content of concepts such as values and, additionally, exhibit a predictive edge over self-report questionnaires.

An intrapersonal externality exists when an individual's decisions affect the outcomes of her future decisions. It can result in decreasing or increasing average returns to the rate of consumption, as occurs in addiction or exercise. Experimentation using the Harvard Game, which models intrapersonal externalities, has found differences in decision making between drug users and control subjects, leading to the argument that these externalities influence the course of illicit drug use. Nevertheless, it is unclear how participants who behave optimally conceptualise the problem. We report two experiments using a simplified Harvard Game, which tested the differences in contingency knowledge between participants who chose optimally and participants who did not. Those who demonstrated optimal performance exhibited both a pattern of correct responses and systematic errors to questions about the payoff schedules. The pattern suggested that they learned explicit knowledge of the change in reinforcement on a trail-by-trial basis. They did not have, or need, a full knowledge of the historical interaction leading to each payoff. We also found no evidence of choice differences between participants who were given a guaranteed payment and participants who were paid contingent on their performance, but those given a guaranteed payment were able to report more contingency knowledge as the experiment progressed, suggesting that they explored more rather than settling into a routine. Experiment 2 showed that using a fixed inter-trial interval did not change the results.

Intrapersonal Externalities are outcomes from a decision which affect the payoffs from future decisions. Positive intrapersonal externalities represent self-investment in one's future self, such as learning a musical instrument or exercising. Negative intrapersonal externalities represent a disinvestment in one's future self, such as eating sugary food or smoking a cigarette. An individual who succumbs to the lure of an immediate payoff in lieu of future potential earnings is considered to be choosing myopically, and it is hypothesised that addictions are one such situation. This failure of the decision-making system to optimise its choices contrasts with delay discounting, in which an individual is assumed to choose rationally but to discount the future, and impulsive disinhibition, in which an individual is assumed to be unable to control their actions even while they state a preference for an action they do not take. This thesis starts by measuring the relationship between delay discounting and impulsive disinhibition with a range of addictive behaviours in a large online study, and finds that while they are consistent predictors there is further variance to explain. It then examines the validity of the intrapersonal externalities model, and finds that it adds independent variance beyond delay discounting and impulsivity in predicting smoking behaviour; there is no evidence that performance in intrapersonal externalities tasks is related to trait impulsivity. It also uses intrapersonal externalities in the laboratory to study advice seeking and taking in an impulsive decision-making context, which would be incompatible with delay discounting or impulsive disinhibition theory. This thesis concludes that the intrapersonal externalities model has been shown to be a viable third model to understand addictive decisions, and suggests that it could be extended to study social addictions.

Intrapersonal Externalities are outcomes from a decision which affect the payoffs from future decisions. Positive intrapersonal externalities represent self-investment in one's future self, such as learning a musical instrument or exercising. Negative intrapersonal externalities represent a disinvestment in one's future self, such as eating sugary food or smoking a cigarette. An individual who succumbs to the lure of an immediate payoff in lieu of future potential earnings is considered to be choosing myopically, and it is hypothesised that addictions are one such situation. This failure of the decision-making system to optimise its choices contrasts with delay discounting, in which an individual is assumed to choose rationally but to discount the future, and impulsive disinhibition, in which an individual is assumed to be unable to control their actions even while they state a preference for an action they do not take. This thesis starts by measuring the relationship between delay discounting and impulsive disinhibition with a range of addictive behaviours in a large online study, and finds that while they are consistent predictors there is further variance to explain. It then examines the validity of the intrapersonal externalities model, and finds that it adds independent variance beyond delay discounting and impulsivity in predicting smoking behaviour; there is no evidence that performance in intrapersonal externalities tasks is related to trait impulsivity. It also uses intrapersonal externalities in the laboratory to study advice seeking and taking in an impulsive decision-making context, which would be incompatible with delay discounting or impulsive disinhibition theory. This thesis concludes that the intrapersonal externalities model has been shown to be a viable third model to understand addictive decisions, and suggests that it could be extended to study social addictions.

Intrapersonal Externalities are outcomes from a decision which affect the payoffs from future decisions. Positive intrapersonal externalities represent self-investment in one's future self, such as learning a musical instrument or exercising. Negative intrapersonal externalities represent a disinvestment in one's future self, such as eating sugary food or smoking a cigarette. An individual who succumbs to the lure of an immediate payoff in lieu of future potential earnings is considered to be choosing myopically, and it is hypothesised that addictions are one such situation. This failure of the decision-making system to optimise its choices contrasts with delay discounting, in which an individual is assumed to choose rationally but to discount the future, and impulsive disinhibition, in which an individual is assumed to be unable to control their actions even while they state a preference for an action they do not take. This thesis starts by measuring the relationship between delay discounting and impulsive disinhibition with a range of addictive behaviours in a large online study, and finds that while they are consistent predictors there is further variance to explain. It then examines the validity of the intrapersonal externalities model, and finds that it adds independent variance beyond delay discounting and impulsivity in predicting smoking behaviour; there is no evidence that performance in intrapersonal externalities tasks is related to trait impulsivity. It also uses intrapersonal externalities in the laboratory to study advice seeking and taking in an impulsive decision-making context, which would be incompatible with delay discounting or impulsive disinhibition theory. This thesis concludes that the intrapersonal externalities model has been shown to be a viable third model to understand addictive decisions, and suggests that it could be extended to study social addictions.

Intrapersonal Externalities are outcomes from a decision which affect the payoffs from future decisions. Positive intrapersonal externalities represent self-investment in one's future self, such as learning a musical instrument or exercising. Negative intrapersonal externalities represent a disinvestment in one's future self, such as eating sugary food or smoking a cigarette. An individual who succumbs to the lure of an immediate payoff in lieu of future potential earnings is considered to be choosing myopically, and it is hypothesised that addictions are one such situation. This failure of the decision-making system to optimise its choices contrasts with delay discounting, in which an individual is assumed to choose rationally but to discount the future, and impulsive disinhibition, in which an individual is assumed to be unable to control their actions even while they state a preference for an action they do not take. This thesis starts by measuring the relationship between delay discounting and impulsive disinhibition with a range of addictive behaviours in a large online study, and finds that while they are consistent predictors there is further variance to explain. It then examines the validity of the intrapersonal externalities model, and finds that it adds independent variance beyond delay discounting and impulsivity in predicting smoking behaviour; there is no evidence that performance in intrapersonal externalities tasks is related to trait impulsivity. It also uses intrapersonal externalities in the laboratory to study advice seeking and taking in an impulsive decision-making context, which would be incompatible with delay discounting or impulsive disinhibition theory. This thesis concludes that the intrapersonal externalities model has been shown to be a viable third model to understand addictive decisions, and suggests that it could be extended to study social addictions.

Intrapersonal Externalities are outcomes from a decision which affect the payoffs from future decisions. Positive intrapersonal externalities represent self-investment in one's future self, such as learning a musical instrument or exercising. Negative intrapersonal externalities represent a disinvestment in one's future self, such as eating sugary food or smoking a cigarette. An individual who succumbs to the lure of an immediate payoff in lieu of future potential earnings is considered to be choosing myopically, and it is hypothesised that addictions are one such situation. This failure of the decision-making system to optimise its choices contrasts with delay discounting, in which an individual is assumed to choose rationally but to discount the future, and impulsive disinhibition, in which an individual is assumed to be unable to control their actions even while they state a preference for an action they do not take. This thesis starts by measuring the relationship between delay discounting and impulsive disinhibition with a range of addictive behaviours in a large online study, and finds that while they are consistent predictors there is further variance to explain. It then examines the validity of the intrapersonal externalities model, and finds that it adds independent variance beyond delay discounting and impulsivity in predicting smoking behaviour; there is no evidence that performance in intrapersonal externalities tasks is related to trait impulsivity. It also uses intrapersonal externalities in the laboratory to study advice seeking and taking in an impulsive decision-making context, which would be incompatible with delay discounting or impulsive disinhibition theory. This thesis concludes that the intrapersonal externalities model has been shown to be a viable third model to understand addictive decisions, and suggests that it could be extended to study social addictions.