Decision Science News

2011 CALL FOR ABSTRACTS ANNUAL MEETING OF THE SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING

The Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) invites abstracts for symposia, oral presentations, and posters on any interesting topic related to judgment and decision making. Completed manuscripts are not required. Details are available here: http://www.sjdm.org/programs/2011-cfp.html

LOCATION, DATES, AND PROGRAM
SJDM’s annual conference will be held in the Sheraton Seattle Hotel, Seattle, Washington, during November 5-7, 2011. Early registration and welcome reception will take place the evening of Friday, November 4. Hotel reservations at the $186/night. Psychonomic convention rate will be available.

SUBMISSIONS
The deadline for submissions is July 1, 2011. Submissions for symposia, oral presentations, and posters should be made through the SJDM website at http://sql.sjdm.org. Technical questions can be addressed to the webmaster at www@sjdm.org. All other questions can be addressed to the program chair, Nathan Novemsky, at nathan.novemsky@yale.edu.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Nathan Novemsky (Chair), Michel Regenwetter, Bernd Figner, Robyn LeBoeuf, Gretchen Chapman, Ulf Reips, Wandi Bruine de Bruin, Ellie Kyung, Anuj Shah.

EXECUTIVE BOARD
Eldar Shafir (shafir@princeton.edu), President
Valerie Reyna (vr53@cornell.edu), Past President
George Wu (wu@chicagobooth.edu), President Elect (and Elected Member, 2008-2011)
Gal Zauberman (gal@wharton.upenn.edu), Elected Member, 2010-2011 (replacing George Wu)
Ellen Peters (peters.498@osu.edu), Elected Member, 2009-2012
Gretchen Chapman (gbc@rci.rutgers.edu), Elected Member 2010-2013)
Bud Fennema (fennema@fsu.edu), Secretary-Treasurer
Jon Baron (baron@psych.upenn.edu), Webmaster
Dan Goldstein (dan@dangoldstein.com), Newsletter Editor and Co-webmaster
Nathan Novemsky (nathan.novemsky@yale.edu), 2011 Program Committee Chair

Photo credit:http://www.flickr.com/photos/guy_incognito/63774780/

INGREDIENTS OF THE DECISION-FREE DIET

Last week, Decision Science News posted about a “no-decision diet” in which its editor followed, for one week and without exceptions, a healthy diet designed by someone else. Since then, a number of people have written in asking to have a look at the diet. If you were hoping to find out what the diet included, today is your lucky day.

We note that this diet was not customized for you, it was customized for the Decision Science News Editor. We also reinforce that we are not nutritionists, so consider this document as merely curiosity-appeasing information, not a recommendation.

The No-Decision Diet (XSLX format. Note that the spreadsheet has 3 tabs “Menu”, “Recipes” and “Grocery List”)

Also coming in over the wire this week was this poster on how people think complex diets are more effective than simple diets, while this may not be the case: Costs and Benefits of Simplifying Diet and Exercise Rule Complexity.

See also: Mata, J., Todd, P. M., & Lippke, S. (2010). When weight management lasts: Lower rule complexity increases adherence. Appetite, 54,. 37-43

HOW ELIMINATING DECISION-MAKING LOST ME 15 POUNDS

I wanted to see what would happen if I made no decisions about what to eat for a week.

So, I emailed my friend Dan Reeves, who has a fitness-expert sister named Melanie Reeves Wicklow, to request a healthy diet I could follow for seven days with no exceptions.

(I knew Dan’s sister had this expertise because I use Beeminder, Dan’s behavioral-economics company, which sends you nagging emails requesting you to report back on how much progress you have made towards various self-imposed goals. The emails sometimes contain nutrition / fitness tips from Melanie.)

Melanie sent the diet. It was great; it even had recipes and a shopping list. I’m very thankful for the help in cooking these provided by my lovely wife Dominique.

So this is what went down:

DAY ONE
Discovered that if you eat oatmeal with an egg in it instead of just oatmeal, you feel full for much longer. A protein effect?

DAY TWO
The diet said nothing about coffee. I tend to do things all the way, so I kicked my five-cup-per-day coffee habit. Was starting to feel the effects.

DAY THREE
Got a coffee-withdrawal headache that was so bad I had to take half a day off work. I vow never to get so addicted again.

DAY FOUR
I start to wonder if eating 2200 calories is making me gain weight. Needless to say, I was the opposite of hungry. I start to wonder if everyone in Dan’s family is as hyper-athletic as Dan and thus capable of eating tons. However, I stick exactly to the diet because that is how I roll.

DAY FIVE
Notice that skin and hair are less oily.

DAY SIX
Notice the absence of tired stretches during the workday, which is surprising since I haven’t had any coffee in about a week.

DAY SEVEN
Sorry to see it end.

SPILLOVER EFFECTS
With diet week over, I go back to making decisions about what to eat. However, I notice the following spillover effects

* I switched to decaf coffee as a kind of Methadone. I feel less tired without coffee than I did while on coffee.
* I took an interest in guesstimating the caloric content of foods. Started entering everything eaten on fitday.com. (Dan, Sharad and I will soon launch a giant research project / game on calorie estimation).
* I scaled back to about 1800 calories per day
* I frequently get off the subway one stop early and walk an extra ten minutes

NET RESULT
I lost 15 pounds in about a couple months after the “no-decision” diet. (I lost no weight during the week of the diet).

POSSIBLE INTERPRETATIONS
A) The imposed diet changed my cravings, gave me new-found discipline, and this caused me to lose weight
B) Some latent state changed deep within me, and this caused me to both i) conceive of requesting the diet and ii) commit to eating better and exercising more
C) Some mixture of both

POSTSCRIPT

After reading a draft of this, Melanie asked me “Did the thought and motivation for [exercising more] come from being more aware of calories in/out or just from having more energy and an overall desire to engage in healthier behaviors?”

I replied. “I think it comes from the energy you get from eating better and from the momentum effect of exerting willpower. Once you start following the diet, it is easy to keep following it and pick up other healthy behaviors along the way. Of course, something needs to change within you to make you start following the diet in the first place, so it is hard to know. However, you can get insight from cases in which you exhibit willpower when it is not really your decision, e.g., a lot of Jewish folks fast every year on Yom Kippur. It’s not really a decision to do it if you are raised that way. But once you get through the fast, on the next day, you realize it is not that hard to eat less. You had just done it, so you know. I guess this gives some weight to the ‘momentum of willpower’ explanation.”

TWO RECENT ARTICLES THAT QUESTION ACCOUNTS OF INFLUENCE IN SOCIAL NETWORKS

UPDATE: Two months after this was published here in DSN, the New York Times ran this article on the same topic.

In a short span of time, two articles have emerged that question some notable claims of influence in social networks. This does seem important, so we list them here.

ARTICLE ONE
Citation: Shalizi, C. R., & Thomas, A. C. (2011). Homophily and Contagion Are Generically Confounded in Observational Social Network Studies. Sociological Methods Research, 40(2), 211-239
Link: http://smr.sagepub.com/content/40/2/211.full.pdf+html
Abstract: The authors consider processes on social networks that can potentially involve three factors: homophily, or the formation of social ties due to matching individual traits; social contagion, also known as social influence; and the causal effect of an individual’s covariates on his or her behavior or other measurable responses. The authors show that generically, all of these are confounded with each other. Distinguishing them from one another requires strong assumptions on the parametrization of the social process or on the adequacy of the covariates used (or both). In particular the authors demonstrate, with simple examples, that asymmetries in regression coefficients cannot identify causal effects and that very simple models of imitation (a form of social contagion) can produce substantial correlations between an individual’s enduring traits and his or her choices, even when there is no intrinsic affinity between them. The authors also suggest some possible constructive responses to these results.

ARTICLE TWO
Citation: Lyons, Russell (2011) The Spread of Evidence-Poor Medicine via Flawed Social-Network Analysis, Statistics, Politics, and Policy, 2(1)
Link: http://www.bepress.com/spp/vol2/iss1/2
Abstract: The chronic widespread misuse of statistics is usually inadvertent, not intentional. We find cautionary examples in a series of recent papers by Christakis and Fowler that advance statistical arguments for the transmission via social networks of various personal characteristics, including obesity, smoking cessation, happiness, and loneliness. Those papers also assert that such influence extends to three degrees of separation in social networks. We shall show that these conclusions do not follow from Christakis and Fowler’s statistical analyses. In fact, their studies even provide some evidence against the existence of such transmission. The errors that we expose arose, in part, because the assumptions behind the statistical procedures used were insufficiently examined, not only by the authors, but also by the reviewers. Our examples are instructive because the practitioners are highly reputed, their results have received enormous popular attention, and the journals that published their studies are among the most respected in the world. An educational bonus emerges from the difficulty we report in getting our critique published. We discuss the relevance of this episode to understanding statistical literacy and the role of scientific review, as well as to reforming statistics education.

HOW DO PEOPLE MAKE DECISIONS WHEN TIME IS LIMITED, INFORMATION UNRELIABLE, AND THE FUTURE UNCERTAIN?

A new reader on heuristics, Heuristics: The Foundations of Adaptive Behavior, has just been released. Full disclosure, your Decision Science News editor is author on two of the book’s chapters:

CITATION:

Gigerenzer, G., Hertwig, R., & Pachur, T. (Eds.). (2011). Heuristics: The Foundations of Adaptive Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press.

PRECIS:

How do people make decisions when time is limited, information unreliable, and the future uncertain?

Based on the work of Nobel laureate Herbert Simon and with the help of colleagues around the world, the Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) Group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin has developed a research program on simple heuristics, also known as fast and frugal heuristics. In the social sciences, heuristics have been believed to be generally inferior to complex methods for inference, or even irrational.

Although this may be true in “small worlds” where everything is known for certain, we show that in the actual world in which we live, full of uncertainties and surprises, heuristics are indispensable and often more accurate than complex methods. Contrary to a deeply entrenched belief, complex problems do not necessitate complex computations. Less can be more.  Simple heuristics exploit the information structure of the environment, and thus embody ecological rather than logical rationality.

Simon (1999) applauded this new program as a “revolution in cognitive science, striking a great blow for sanity in the approach to human rationality.” By providing a fresh look at how the mind works as well as the nature of rationality, the simple heuristics program has stimulated a large body of research, led to fascinating applications in diverse fields from law to medicine to business to sports, and instigated controversial debates in psychology, philosophy, and economics.

In a single volume, the present reader compiles key articles that have been published in journals across many disciplines. These articles present theory, real-world applications, and a sample of the large number of existing experimental studies that provide evidence for people’s adaptive use of heuristics.

Review:
“This volume makes a powerful case for the importance of fast and frugal heuristics in explaining a wide range of aspects of cognition. It brings together the latest developments in one of the most influential research programs in the decision sciences, and will provide a valuable stimulus for, and a challenge to, research across the field.”
— Nick Chater, Professor of Cognitive and Decision Sciences, University College London

LINK
Amazon link to: Heuristics: The Foundations of Adaptive Behavior

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Appetizer

1. Homo heuristicus: Why Biased Minds Make Better Inferences.
Gerd Gigerenzer, and Henry Brighton

Part I: Theory

Opening the adaptive toolbox

2. Reasoning the Fast and Frugal Way: Models of Bounded Rationality.
Gerd Gigerenzer, and Daniel G. Goldstein

3. Models of Ecological Rationality: The Recognition Heuristic.
Daniel G. Goldstein and Gerd Gigerenzer

4. How Forgetting Aids Heuristic Inference.
Lael J. Schooler and R. Hertwig

5. Simple Heuristics and Rules of Thumb: Where Psychologists and Behavioral Biologists Might Meet.
John M.C. Hutchinson and Gerd Gigerenzer

6. Naive and Yet Enlightened: From Natural Frequencies to Fast and Frugal Decision Trees.
Laura Martignon, Oliver Vitouch, Masinori Takezawa, and Malcolm R. Forster

7. The Priority Heuristic: Making Choices without Trade-Offs.
Eduard Brandstätter, Gerd Gigerenzer, and Ralph Hertwig

8. One-Reason Decision making: Modeling Violations of Expected Utility Theory.
Konstantinos V. Katsikopoulos and Gerd Gigerenzer

9. The Similarity Heuristic.
Daniel Read and Yael Grushka-Cockayne

10. Hindsight Bias: A By-Product of Knowledge Updating?
Ulrich Hoffrage, Ralph Hertwig, and Gerd Gigerenzer

How are heuristics selected?

11. SSL: A Theory of How People Learn to Select Strategies.
Jörg Rieskamp and Philipp E. Otto

Part II: Tests

When do heuristics work?

12. Fast, Frugal, and Fit: Simple Heuristics for Paired Comparison.
Laura Martignon and Ulrich Hoffrage

13. Heuristic and Linear Models of Judgment: Matching Rules and Environments.
Robin M. Hogarth and Natalia Karelaia

14. Categorization with Limited Resources: A Family of Simple Heuristics.
Laura Martignon, Konstantinos V. Katsikopoulo, and Jan K. Woike

15. A Signal Detection Analysis of the Recognition Heuristic.
Timothy J. Pleskac

16. The Relative Success of Recognition-Based Iinference in Multichoice Decisions.
Rachel McCloy, C. Philip Beaman, and Philip T. Smith

When do people rely on one good reason?

17. The Quest for Take-the-Best.
Arndt Bröder

18. Empirical Tests of a Fast and Frugal Heuristic: Not Everyone “Takes-the-Best.”
Ben R. Newell, Nicola J. Weston, and David R. Shanks

19. A Response-Time Approach to Comparing Generalized Rational and Take-the-Best Models of Decision Making.
F. Bryan Bergert and Robert M. Nosofsky

20. Sequential Processing of Cues in Memory-Based Multi-Attribute Decisions.
Arndt Bröder and Wolfgang Gaissmaier

21. Does Imitation Benefit Cue-OrderLlearning?
Rocio Garcia-Retamero, Masanori Takezawa, and Gerd Gigerenzer

22. The Aging Decision Maker: Cognitive Aging and the Adaptive Selection of Decision Strategies.
Rui Mata, Lael J. Schooler, and Jörg Rieskamp

When do people rely on name recognition?

23. On the Psychology of the Recognition Heuristic: Retrieval Primacy as a Key Determinant of its Use.
Thorsten Pachur and Ralph Hertwig

24. The Recognition Heuristic in Memory-Based Inference: Is Recognition a Non-Compensatory Cue?
Thorsten Pachur, Arndt Bröder, and Julian N. Marewski

25. Why You Think Milan is Larger than Modena: Neural Correlates of the Recognition Heuristic.
Kirsten G. Volz, Lael J. Schooler, Ricarda I. Schubotz, Markus Raab, Gerd Gigerenzer, and D. Yves von Cramon

26. Fluency Heuristic: A Model of How the Mind Exploits a By-Product of Information Retrieval.
Ralph Hertwig, Stefan M. Herzog, Lael J. Schooler, and Torsten Reimer

27. The Use of Recognition in Group Decision Making.
Torsten Reimer and Konstantinos V. Katsikopoulos

Part III: Heuristics in the Wild

Crime

28. Psychological Models of Professional Decision Making.
Mandeep K. Dhami

29. Geographic Profiling: The Fast, Frugal, and Accurate Way.
Brent Snook, Paul J. Taylor, and Craig Bennel

30. Take-the-Best in Expert-Novice Decision Strategies for Residential Burglary.
Rocio Garcia-Retamero and Mandeep K. Dhami

Sports

31. Predicting Wimbledon Tennis Results 2005 by Mere Player Name Recognition.
Benjamin Scheibehenne and Arndt Bröder

32. Heuristics in Sports That Help Ws Win.
W.M. Bennis and Torsten Pachur

33. How Dogs Navigate to Catch Frisbees.
Dennis M. Shaffer, Scott M. Krauchunas, Marianna Eddy, and Michael K. McBeath

Investment

34. Optimal versus Naïve Diversification: How Inefficient is the 1/N Portfolio Strategy?
Victor DeMiguel, Lorenzo Garlappi, and Raman Uppal

35. Parental Investment: How an Equity Motive Can Produce Inequality.
Ralph Hertwig, Jennifer Nerissa Davis, and Frank J. Sulloway

36. Instant Customer Base analysis: Managerial Heuristics Often “Get It Right.”
Markus Wübben and Florian v. Wangenheim

Everyday things

37. Green Defaults: Information Presentation and Pro-Environmental Behavior.
Daniel Pichert and Konstantinois V. Katsikopoulos

38. “If …”: Satisficing Algorithms for Mapping Conditional Statements onto Social Domains.
Alejandro López-Rousseau and Timothy Ketelaar

39. Applying One-Reason Decision Making: The Prioritisation of Literature Searches
Michael D. Lee, Natasha Loughlin, and Ingrid B. Lundberg

40. Aggregate Age-at-Marriage Patterns from Individual Mate-Search Heuristics.
Peter M. Todd, Francesco C. Billari, and Jorge Simão

SUBJECTIVE PROBABILITY, UTILITY, AND DECISION MAKING CONFERENCE (SPUDM) 2011

What: SPUDM23 Conference 21st – 25th August 2011
When: Sunday, August 21, 2011 at 2:00 PM – Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 6:00 PM (GMT)
Where: Kingston University London, Kingston Upon Thames, United Kingdom

Online registration for the SPUDM23 conference in Kingston University London is now OPEN. Please visit: http://spudm23conference.eventbrite.com and select your tickets. Early bird fees will be available until the 15th of June 2011.

Note that, due to logistics restrictions, we are only able to offer 175 tickets for each of the Keynote lectures. We strongly encourage you to register early to secure a seat. Those without tickets will be able to follow the keynote lectures via a live video stream in an adjacent room.

Instructions for poster presentations are also available at:
http://spudm23.eadm.eu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=26&Itemid=100022

2011 CALL FOR ABSTRACTS ANNUAL MEETING OF THE SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING

The Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) invites abstracts for symposia, oral presentations, and posters on any interesting topic related to judgment and decision making. Completed manuscripts are not required.

LOCATION, DATES, AND PROGRAM
SJDM’s annual conference will be held in the Sheraton Seattle Hotel, Seattle, Washington, during November 5-7, 2011. Early registration and welcome reception will take place the evening of Friday, November 4.

Hotel reservations at the $186/night Psychonomic convention rate will be available.

Ed Diener will be the keynote speaker.

SUBMISSIONS
The deadline for submissions is July 1, 2011. Submissions for symposia, oral presentations, and posters should be made through the SJDM website at http://sql.sjdm.org. Technical questions can be addressed to the webmaster at www@sjdm.org. All other questions can be addressed to the program chair, Nathan Novemsky, at nathan.novemsky at yale.edu.

ELIGIBILITY
At least one author of each presentation must be a member of SJDM. Joining at the time of submission will satisfy this requirement. To join, see http://www.sjdm.org/join.html. An individual may submit only one talk (podium presentation) as presenter and only one poster, but may be a co-author on multiple talks and/or posters.

AWARDS

The Best Student Poster Award is given for the best poster presentation whose first author is a student member of SJDM.

The Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award is intended to encourage outstanding work by new researchers. Applications are due July 1, 2011. Further details are available at http://www.sjdm.org.

The Jane Beattie Memorial Fund subsidizes travel to North America for a foreign scholar in pursuits related to judgment and decision research, including attendance at the annual SJDM meeting. Further details will be available at http://www.sjdm.org.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Nathan Novemsky (Chair), Michel Regenwetter, Bernd Figner, Robyn LeBeouf, Gretchen Chapman, Ulf Reips, Wandi Bruine de Bruin, Ellie Kyung, Anuj Shah

Photo credit: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/SeattleMontage.png

JOIN DECISION SCIENCE NEWS IN BOULDER THIS SUMMER

What: Second Annual Boulder Summer Conference on Consumer Financial Decision Making
When: June 26-28, 2011
Where: St. Julien Hotel and Spa, Boulder, Colorado

You are invited JDMers to attend the 2011 Boulder Summer Conference on Consumer Financial Decision Making — to be held at the St. Julien Hotel and Spa in Boulder, Colorado, June 26-28, 2011.

http://leeds.colorado.edu/event/bouldersummerconference#overview
Consumer welfare is strongly affected by household financial decisions large and small: choosing mortgages; saving to fund college education or retirement; using credit cards to fund current consumption; choosing how to “decumulate” savings in retirement; deciding how to pay for health care and insurance; and investing in the stock market. In all of these domains, consumers are often poorly informed and susceptible to making serious errors that have large personal and societal consequences.

The Boulder Summer Conference is truly an exceptional opportunity to discuss cutting edge research on consumer financial decision making by scholars across diverse fields: JDM, economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, marketing, finance, consumer behavior, social work, and family consumer sciences. We have lively discussion of this research by scholars, regulators, consumer advocates, and financial services professionals. Registration is limited to 120 conference participants.

FINANCIAL ADVISERS AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE ADVISED

Your future self wants you to save, a series of rather labor-intensive studies carried out by Hal Ersner-Hershfield (pictured), Dan Goldstein, and Russ Smith suggest.

Shlomo Benartzi (UCLA), Nick Barberis (Yale), Kent Daniel (Columbia), Dan Goldstein (Yahoo and London Business School), Noah Goldstein (UCLA), John Payne (Duke) and Richard Thaler (Chicago) make up the Academic Advisory Board of the Allianz Global Investors Center for Behavioral Finance. Based on interviews with this set, the Center has released a white paper entitled “Behavioral Finance in Action Psychological challenges in the financial advisor/client relationship, and strategies to solve them“. It is basically advice for financial advisers, written with the conviction that if advisers know more about psychology, they’ll be able to provide better advice.

The paper, available at the Center’s Web site, was recently highlighted in a New York Times article, The Benefits of Telling the Ugly Truth by Jeff Sommer.

LINKS

• NY Times article
• Allianz Global Investors Center for Behavioral Finance
• White paper: Behavioral Finance in Action

DAN ARIELY, JAMES ANDREONI KEYNOTE SPEAKING. DEADLINE JUNE 1, 2011

“If only I could find paper and envelopes to match my skirt and jacket”

(This photo has little to do with behavioral economics,
but that didn’t stop them from using it on the TIBER Web site)

Join Ilja van Beest, Rik Pieters, Jan Potters, Diederik Stapel, and Marcel Zeelenberg in one of DSN’s favorite places this summer as …

You are invited to attend the 10th Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economics Research (TIBER) symposium on Psychology and Economics, to be held at Tilburg University, August 19th, 2011.

We are happy to announce that Dan Ariely and James Andreoni are confirmed keynote speakers.

We invite contributions from the fields of psychology, economics, and marketing.

If you would like to present your work (in a 20-30 minute talk), please send an abstract (max. 300 words) to tibersymposium@uvt.nl before June 1st, 2011. You are also very much welcome to attend the symposium if you do not present your work.

Further information will soon be available from the website.