Barbara A. Mellers

Emotion-based choice.

In this article the authors develop a descriptive theory of choice using anticipated emotions. People are assumed to anticipate how they will feel about the outcomes of decisions and use their predictions to guide choice. The authors measure the pleasure associated with monetary outcomes of gambles and offer an account of judged pleasure called decision affect theory. Then they propose a theory of choices between gambles based on anticipated pleasure. People are assumed to choose the option with greater subjective expected pleasure. Similarities and differences between subjective expected pleasure theory and subjective expected utility theory are discussed. Emotions have powerful effects on choice. Our actual feelings of happiness, sadness, and anger both color and shape our decisions. In addition, our imagined feelings of

Choice and the Relative Pleasure of Consequences

Although pleasure played a central role in early theories of decision making, it gradually became peripheral, largely because of measurement concerns. Normative theories became more mathematical, and descriptive theories emphasized cognition over emotion. In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in emotions and choice. This article examines attempts to model pleasure and pain in terms of utilities, decision weights, and counterfactual comparisons. Research on disappointment and regret has provided both empirical and theoretical insights. Many researchers now realize that the predictability of the emotions that follow from decisions is as important as the predictability of choice.

Anticipated Emotions as Guides to Choice

When making decisions, people often anticipate the emotions they might experience as a result of the outcomes of their choices. In the process, they simulate what life would be like with one outcome or another. We examine the anticipated and actual pleasure of outcomes and their relation to choices people make in laboratory studies and real-world studies. We offer a theory of anticipated pleasure that explains why the same outcome can lead to a wide range of emotional experiences. Finally, we show how anticipated pleasure relates to risky choice within the framework of subjective expected pleasure theory.

The Agony of Victory and Thrill of Defeat: Mixed Emotional Reactions to Disappointing Wins and Relieving Losses

Because of counterfactual comparisons, good outcomes that could have been better (i.e., disappointing wins) and bad outcomes that could have been worse (i.e., relieving losses) elicit relatively middling ratings on bipolar emotion scales. We conducted two experiments with gambles to examine whether such outcomes elicit neutral emotions, sequentially mixed emotions of positive and negative affect, or simultaneously mixed emotions. In Experiment 1, static unipolar measures of positive and negative affect revealed that disappointing wins and relieving losses elicit mixed emotions, rather than relatively neutral emotions. In Experiment 2, participants provided continuous unipolar measures of positive and negative affect by pressing one button whenever they felt good and another button whenever they felt bad. Results revealed that disappointing wins and relieving losses elicit positive and negative affect simultaneously, rather than in alternation.

Do Frequency Representations Eliminate Conjunction Effects? An Exercise in Adversarial Collaboration:

The present article offers an approach to scientific debate called adversarial collaboration. The approach requires both parties to agree on empirical tests for resolving a dispute and to conduct these tests with the help of an arbiter. In dispute were Hertwigs claims that frequency formats eliminate conjunction effects and that the conjunction effects previously reported by Kahneman and Tversky occurred because some participants interpreted the word “and” in “bank tellers and feminists” as a union operator. Hertwig proposed two new conjunction phrases, “and are” and “who are,” that would eliminate the ambiguity. Kahneman disagreed with Hertwigs predictions for “and are,” but agreed with his predictions for “who are.” Mellers served as arbiter. Frequency formats by themselves did not eliminate conjunction effects with any of the phrases, but when filler items were removed, conjunction effects disappeared with Hertwigs phrases. Kahneman and Hertwig offer different interpretations of the findings. We discuss the benefits of adversarial collaboration over replies and rejoinders, and present a suggested protocol for adversarial collaboration.

Racial Prejudice and Attitudes Toward Affirmative Action

Theory: We examine the relationship between blatant racial prejudice and anger toward affirmative action. Hypotheses: (1) Blatantly prejudiced attitudes continue to pervade the white population in the United States. (2) Resistance to affirmative action is more than an extension of this prejudice. (3) White resistance to affirmative action is not unyielding and unalterably fixed. Methods: Analysis of experiments embedded in a national survey of racial attitudes. Some of these experiments are designed to measure racial prejudice unobtrusively. Results: Racial prejudice remains a major problem in the United States, but this prejudice alone cannot explain all of the anger toward affirmative action among whites. Although many whites strongly resist affirmative action, they express support for making extra efforts to help African-Americans.

Psychological perspectives on justice : theory and applications

1. Introductory remarks Part I. Psychological Perspectives: 2. Equality as a decision heuristic David Messick 3. Two insights occasioned by attempts to pin down the equity formula Richard Harris 4. Judgments of justice Maya Bar-Hillel and Menahem Yaari Part II. Economic Perspectives: 5. Justice in organised groups: comparing the self-interest and social identity perspectives Tom Tyler and Robyn Dawes 6. Heuristics and biases in equity judgments: a utilitarian approach Jonathan Baron 7. Tradeoffs in fairness and preference judgments Lisa Ordonez and Barbara Mellers 8. Information, fairness, and efficiency in bargaining Colin Camerer and George Loewenstein Part III. Variations in Perspectives of Justice: 9. The unfolding of justice: a developmental perspective on reward allocations Colleen Moore, Sheri E. Hembree, and Robert D. Enright 10. Of Ants and Grasshoppers: the political psychology of allocating scarce resources Linda Skitka and Philip E. Tetlock 11. Liberal and conservative approaches to justice: conflicting psychopolitical perspectives Philip E. Tetlock and Gregory Mitchell Part IV. Policy Perspectives: Justice and the allocation of scarce resources Jon Elster 12. Models of equity in public risk Rakesh Sarin 13. Fairness of distributions of risks with applications to Antarctica Ivy Broder and Robin Keller Part V: Postscript.

Strong Claims and Weak Evidence: Reassessing the Predictive Validity of the IAT

The authors reanalyzed data from 2 influential studies-A. R. McConnell and J. M. Leibold and J. C. Ziegert and P. J. Hanges-that explore links between implicit bias and discriminatory behavior and that have been invoked to support strong claims about the predictive validity of the Implicit Association Test. In both of these studies, the inclusion of race Implicit Association Test scores in regression models reduced prediction errors by only tiny amounts, and Implicit Association Test scores did not permit prediction of individual-level behaviors. Furthermore, the results were not robust when the impact of rater reliability, statistical specifications, and/or outliers were taken into account, and reanalysis of A. R. McConnell & J. M. Leibold (2001) revealed a pattern of behavior consistent with a pro-Black behavioral bias, rather than the anti-Black bias suggested in the original study.

A change-of-process theory for contextual effects and preference reversals in risky decision making

Abstract Three experiments were conducted to investigate contextual effects and response mode effects (e.g., preference reversals) in risky decision making. Judgments of the worth of binary gambles were examined using two different contexts (positively and negatively skewed distributions of expected values) and two different response modes (attractiveness ratings and buying prices). Changes in the response mode affected the preference order of gambles, and changes in the context due to variations in skewing influenced the metric properties of the judgments but had a minimal effect on preference orders. Data were inconsistent with contingent weighting theory (Tversky, Sattath, & Slovic, 1988) and expression theory (Goldstein & Einhorn, 1987) . Results could be described by a change-of-process theory which assumes that the method of elicitation influences the manner in which people combine information and arrive at judgments. Under certain conditions, attractiveness ratings could be described by an additive combination of subjective probability and utility ( s and u ), whereas pricing judgments were accounted for by a multiplicative function, with the same scales of s and u in both tasks. When the range of outcomes included zero and negative values, preference orders for attractiveness ratings of gambles changed. This change in rank order was consistent with the hypothesis that inclusion of these levels caused more subjects to use a multiplicative rule for combining u and s when rating the attractiveness of gambles. Thus, preference reversals can be explained by the theory that the combination rule changes, while utilities and subjective probabilities remain constant.

Psychological Strategies for Winning a Geopolitical Forecasting Tournament

Five university-based research groups competed to recruit forecasters, elicit their predictions, and aggregate those predictions to assign the most accurate probabilities to events in a 2-year geopolitical forecasting tournament. Our group tested and found support for three psychological drivers of accuracy: training, teaming, and tracking. Probability training corrected cognitive biases, encouraged forecasters to use reference classes, and provided forecasters with heuristics, such as averaging when multiple estimates were available. Teaming allowed forecasters to share information and discuss the rationales behind their beliefs. Tracking placed the highest performers (top 2% from Year 1) in elite teams that worked together. Results showed that probability training, team collaboration, and tracking improved both calibration and resolution. Forecasting is often viewed as a statistical problem, but forecasts can be improved with behavioral interventions. Training, teaming, and tracking are psychological interventions that dramatically increased the accuracy of forecasts. Statistical algorithms (reported elsewhere) improved the accuracy of the aggregation. Putting both statistics and psychology to work produced the best forecasts 2 years in a row.