Anuj K. Shah

Heuristics Made Easy: An Effort-Reduction Framework.

In this article, the authors propose a new framework for understanding and studying heuristics. The authors posit that heuristics primarily serve the purpose of reducing the effort associated with a task. As such, the authors propose that heuristics can be classified according to a small set of effort-reduction principles. The authors use this framework to build upon current models of heuristics, examine existing heuristics in terms of effort-reduction, and outline how current research methods can be used to extend this effort-reduction framework. This framework reduces the redundancy in the field and helps to explicate the domain-general principles underlying heuristics.

Some Consequences of Having Too Little

Poor Choices Two categories of reasons for why poor people make economically unsound choices, such as obtaining a payday loan at an extraordinarily high rate of interest, reflect, first, the environment: Poor people are more likely to be living in poor neighborhoods with higher rates of crime and lower rates of social services. Second, they reflect the individual: People are poor in part because of their own psychological dispositions toward impatience and impulsiveness. For both cases, obtaining causal evidence in controlled experiments has been challenging. Shah et al. (p. 682; see the Perpective by Zwane) propose a third category of reasons whereby being poor exerts a bias on cognitive processes and provide evidence for it in laboratory experiments performed in scenarios of scarcity. Being poor means that resources such as time and money are scarce, and this changes how people who are poor behave. Poor individuals often engage in behaviors, such as excessive borrowing, that reinforce the conditions of poverty. Some explanations for these behaviors focus on personality traits of the poor. Others emphasize environmental factors such as housing or financial access. We instead consider how certain behaviors stem simply from having less. We suggest that scarcity changes how people allocate attention: It leads them to engage more deeply in some problems while neglecting others. Across several experiments, we show that scarcity leads to attentional shifts that can help to explain behaviors such as overborrowing. We discuss how this mechanism might also explain other puzzles of poverty.

Scarcity Frames Value

Economic models of decision making assume that people have a stable way of thinking about value. In contrast, psychology has shown that people’s preferences are often malleable and influenced by normatively irrelevant contextual features. Whereas economics derives its predictions from the assumption that people navigate a world of scarce resources, recent psychological work has shown that people often do not attend to scarcity. In this article, we show that when scarcity does influence cognition, it renders people less susceptible to classic context effects. Under conditions of scarcity, people focus on pressing needs and recognize the trade-offs that must be made against those needs. Those trade-offs frame perception more consistently than irrelevant contextual cues, which exert less influence. The results suggest that scarcity can align certain behaviors more closely with traditional economic predictions.

On the Provenance of Judgments of Conditional Probability.

In standard treatments of probability, Pr(A|B) is defined as the ratio of Pr(A intersectionB) to Pr(B), provided that Pr(B)>0. This account of conditional probability suggests a psychological question, namely, whether estimates of Pr(A|B) arise in the mind via implicit calculation of Pr(A intersectionB)/Pr(B). We tested this hypothesis (Experiment 1) by presenting brief visual scenes composed of forms, and collecting estimates of relevant probabilities. Direct estimates of conditional probability were not well predicted by Pr(A intersectionB)/Pr(B). Direct estimates were also closer to the objective probabilities defined by the stimuli, compared to estimates computed from the foregoing ratio. The hypothesis that Pr(A|B) arises from the ratio Pr(A intersectionB)/[Pr(A intersectionB)+Pr(A intersectionB)] fared better (Experiment 2). In a third experiment, the same hypotheses were evaluated in the context of subjective estimates of the chance of future events.

The Path of Least Resistance Using Easy-to-Access Information

Recent work on judgment and decision making has focused on how people preferentially use cues, or pieces of relevant information, that are easy to access when making decisions. In this article, we discuss a framework for understanding the ways that cues become accessible. We begin by identifying two components of cues and show how these components can become accessible during different parts a decision process. We highlight evidence for the use of accessible information and discuss implications for future research on heuristics.

Grouping Information for Judgments

Models of cue weighting in judgment have typically focused on how decision-makers weight cues individually. Here, the authors propose that people might recognize and weight groups of cues. They examine how judgments change when decision-makers focus on cues individually or as parts of groups. Several experiments demonstrate that people can spontaneously pack information into cue groups. Moreover, group-level weighting depends on how people assess similarity or how they think of categorical hierarchies.

An opportunity for self-replication

To the Editor — We appreciate the Social Sciences Replication Project (SSRP) team’s work on these replications1. Naturally, we were disappointed to learn that our study 1 (ref. 2) did not replicate. Nevertheless, this is part of science and how it moves forward. Our paper was motivated by a question about why individuals in conditions of scarcity engage in certain financial behaviours, such as excessive borrowing. Previous explanations suggested these behaviours stemmed from the personality traits of the poor or structural barriers they face. We tested a different explanation — that resource scarcity itself can lead to these behaviours. We suggested that various forms of resource scarcity would have similar effects, and that a scarcity mindset would lead to attentional shifts that might drive behaviours such as over-borrowing. When the SSRP team contacted us, we welcomed the opportunity to have an independent replication of our study. We invited them to replicate all studies in the paper, but this was beyond the scope of their efforts. Their decision to replicate study 1 from each paper, they explained, was that “the first experiment typically provide[s] the first evidence of an hypothesized effect and the robustness of this effect is then typically demonstrated in the additional experiments.” In our paper, study 2 filled that role. While study 1 tested a peripheral hypothesis about cognitive fatigue, study 2 was the first to test the central hypothesis that scarcity leads to over-borrowing and all subsequent studies replicated that effect. The replication efforts made us want to revisit all of our results. We therefore conducted pre-registered replications of all five studies3. We invite other research teams to independently replicate these studies. We replicated three key results in this replication3. (1) Scarcity itself leads to overborrowing (the motivating hypothesis for the paper). (2) This is true for multiple kinds of resources. (3) Scarcity leads to greater focus. But we found weaker evidence for the hypothesis that scarcity-induced focus leads to neglect. Finally, we found no evidence that scarcity-induced focus leads to cognitive fatigue on subsequent tasks (study 1). Based on the SSRP’s findings1 and our own3, we believe that the original result2 was a false positive. Replication efforts that focus on a cross-section of studies provide useful overviews of the literature. However, they do not permit a deeper dive into individual research projects. Furthermore, the criteria used to select studies can overlook the most central hypotheses in a paper, as was the case with ours. Ultimately, to build a more reproducible social science, we need to understand which hypotheses and theories are robust. The SSRP highlights the need to replicate studies before publication. We replicated the most central findings, but were less vigilant about the introductory study. Today, we would have attempted to replicate that study as well — especially as it tests a hypothesis that was not central to our paper. Greater awareness and care of the kind raised by the SSRP should help more carefully balance central and peripheral claims in ways that increase publications’ reliability. ❐

Social class and scarcity: understanding consumers who have less

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