The Effect of Transparency on Framing Effects in Within-Subject Designs

Changing Decisions: The Interaction between Framing and Decoy Effects

BACKGROUND

Cognitive biases are popular topics in psychology and marketing, as they refer to systematic cognitive tendencies in human thinking that deviate from logical and rational reasoning. The framing effect (FE) and the decoy effect (DE) are examples of cognitive biases that can influence decision making and consumer preferences. The FE involves how options are presented, while the DE involves the addition of a third option that influences the choice between the other two options.

METHODS

We investigated the interaction between the FE and the DE in the case of both incongruent (ID) and congruent (CD) decoys in a sample of undergraduates (n = 471). The study had a two (positive vs. negative valence) × three (original, congruent decoy, incongruent decoy) within-subject design.

RESULTS

The ID option reduces the FE in both positive- and negative-framed conditions compared to the controls, while adding the CD option increases the FE only in the positive-framed condition. Additionally, the inclusion of the CD option enhances the level of decision confidence, whereas no significant differences were found in the ID condition.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings gave new insights into the interplay between two of the most frequent cognitive biases.

A reassessment of the Resistance to Framing scale

Risky-choice and attribute framing effects are well-known cognitive biases, where choices are influenced by the way information is presented. To assess susceptibility to these framing types, the Resistance to Framing scale is often used, although its performance has rarely been extensively tested. In an online survey among university students from Bulgaria (N = 245) and North America (N = 261), we planned to examine the scale's psychometric properties, structural validity, and measurement invariance. However, some of these examinations were not possible because the scale displayed low and mostly non-significant inter-item correlations as well as low item-total correlations. Followingly, exploratory item response theory analyses indicated that the scale's reliability was low, especially for high levels of resistance to framing. This suggests problems with the scale at a basic level of conceptualization, namely that the items may not represent the same content domain. Overall, the scale in its current version is of limited use, at least in university student samples, due to the identified problems. We discuss potential remedies to these problems, as well as provide open code and data ( https://osf.io/j5n6f ) which facilitates testing the scale in other samples (e.g., general population, different languages and countries) to obtain a comprehensive picture of its performance.

The heuristics-and-biases inventory: An open-source tool to explore individual differences in rationality

Over the last two decades, there has been a growing interest in the study of individual differences in how people’s judgments and decisions deviate from normative standards. We conducted a systematic review of heuristics-and-biases tasks for which individual differences and their reliability were measured, which resulted in 41 biases measured over 108 studies, and suggested that reliable measures are still needed for some biases described in the literature. To encourage and facilitate future studies on heuristics and biases, we centralized the task materials in an online resource: The Heuristics-and-Biases Inventory (HBI; https://sites.google.com/view/hbiproject). We discuss how this inventory might help research progress on major issues such as the structure of rationality (single vs. multiple factors) and how biases relate to cognitive ability, personality, and real-world outcomes. We also consider how future research should improve and expand the HBI.

Individual differences moderate effects in an Unusual Disease paradigm: A psychophysical data collection lab approach and an online experiment

We report two studies investigating individual intuitive-deliberative cognitive-styles and risk-styles as moderators of the framing effect in Tversky and Kahneman's famous Unusual Disease problem setting. We examined framing effects in two ways: counting the number of frame-inconsistent choices and comparing the proportions of risky choices depending on gain-loss framing. Moreover, in addition to gain-loss frames, we systematically varied the number of affected people, probabilities of surviving/dying, type of disease, and response deadlines. Study 1 used a psychophysical data collection approach and a sample of 43 undergraduate students, each performing 480 trials. Study 2 was an online study incorporating psychophysical elements in a social science approach using a larger and more heterogeneous sample, i.e., 262 participants performed 80 trials each. In both studies, the effect of framing on risky choice proportions was moderated by risk-styles. Cognitive-styles measured on different scales moderated the framing effect only in study 2. The effects of disease type, probability of surviving/dying, and number of affected people on risky choice frequencies were also affected by cognitive-styles and risk-styles but different for both studies and to different extents. We found no relationship between the number of frame-inconsistent choices and cognitive-styles or risk-styles, respectively.

How Stable are Moral Judgments?

Psychologists and philosophers often work hand in hand to investigate many aspects of moral cognition. In this paper, we want to highlight one aspect that to date has been relatively neglected: the stability of moral judgment over time. After explaining why philosophers and psychologists should consider stability and then surveying previous research, we will present the results of an original three-wave longitudinal study. We asked participants to make judgments about the same acts in a series of sacrificial dilemmas three times, 6-8 days apart. In addition to investigating the stability of our participants' ratings over time, we also explored some potential explanations for instability. To end, we will discuss these and other potential psychological sources of moral stability (or instability) and highlight possible philosophical implications of our findings.

Actively Open-Minded Thinking, Bullshit Receptivity, and Susceptibility to Framing

Abstract. The framing effect occurs when different presentations of the same problem lead to predictably different preferences. The dual-process framework of higher cognition assumes that the effect violates rational principles, but alternative accounts and recent evidence have contested this interpretation. Contributing to this debate, we tested the dual-process assumption by investigating associations between susceptibility to framing and the willingness and ability to think in line with rational norms, conceptualized as actively open-minded thinking and pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity. We conducted two online studies among North American ( N = 259) and Bulgarian ( N = 248) university students and administered several framing problems within-subjects, presumably necessary for the associations to appear. Confirmatory factor analyses showed that susceptibility to framing was associated with decreased actively open-minded thinking and increased bullshit receptivity in both sites. Exploratory multi-group analyses demonstrated partial strong invariance and showed that the findings generalize across both sites in terms of direction and partially in terms of magnitude. These results broadly support the dual-process account of the framing effect. Our study further contributes to adapting existing measures to a novel setting and expanding the findings across borders and populations.

Do We Become More Cautious for Others When Large Amounts of Money Are at Stake?

A considerable proportion of financial decisions are made by agents acting on behalf of other people. Although people are more cautious for others when making medical decisions, this does not seem to be the case for economic decisions. However, studies with large amounts of money are particularly absent from the literature, which precludes a clear comparison to studies in the medical domain. To address this gap, we investigated the effect of outcome magnitude in two experiments where participants made choices between safe and risky options. Decision-makers were not more cautious for others over large amounts. In fact, risk-taking was accentuated for large amounts in the gain domain. We did not find self-other differences in the loss domain for either outcome magnitude. This suggests that the caution observed in medical decisions does not replicate in financial decisions with large amounts, or at least not in the same way. These results echo the concerns that have been raised about excessive risk-taking by financial agents.

Valence framing effects on moral judgments: A meta-analysis

Valence framing effects occur when participants make different choices or judgments depending on whether the options are described in terms of their positive outcomes (e.g. lives saved) or their negative outcomes (e.g. lives lost). When such framing effects occur in the domain of moral judgments, they have been taken to cast doubt on the reliability of moral judgments and raise questions about the extent to which these moral judgments are self-evident or justified in themselves. One important factor in this debate is the magnitude and variability of the extent to which differences in framing presentation impact moral judgments. Although moral framing effects have been studied by psychologists, the overall strength of these effects pooled across published studies is not yet known. Here we conducted a meta-analysis of 109 published articles (contributing a total of 146 unique experiments with 49,564 participants) involving valence framing effects on moral judgments and found a moderate effect (d = 0.50) among between-subjects designs as well as several moderator variables. While we find evidence for publication bias, statistically accounting for publication bias attenuates, but does not eliminate, this effect (d = 0.22). This suggests that the magnitude of valence framing effects on moral decisions is small, yet significant when accounting for publication bias.

Testing the adaptability of people's use of attribute frame information

The informational leakage account of attribute framing effects proposes that a communicator's choice of frame provides informational value, such that different frames are not informationally equivalent. Across five studies communicating food risks, we investigated the adaptability of communication recipients' (our participants) use of frame information by manipulating the degree to which the communicator ostensibly had a choice over how the information was framed. Within-participants framing effects were observed across all conditions of all studies. Only in Study 4 (the only study in which communicator choice was manipulated within-participants) was there any evidence for an attenuation of framing effects where the communicator was not responsible for how the information was framed. Overall, regardless of whether or not framing effects are driven by the informational value contained in a communicator's choice of frame, people show little sensitivity to situations where that choice is removed.