C McAndrew

Understanding Preferences in Experience-Based Choice A Study of Cognition in the “Wild”

The objective of this article is to improve our understanding of preferences in experienced-based choice. Positioned within the framework of naturalistic decision making, this article responds to the recent call to complement the examination of experience-based choice with studies of cognition in the “wild.” We document an exploratory field study that uses applied cognitive task analysis (ACTA) to examine financial day traders’ preferences. Providing real-world examples, our study illustrates how day traders construct their understanding of gains relative to losses and emphasizes the relevance of prospect theory for understanding the asymmetry of human choice. The fourfold pattern of preferences as studied in the wild is risk seeking for medium- and high-probability gains, risk averse for small-probability gains, risk averse for small-probability losses, and risk averse for medium- and high-probability losses. Our results differ from the fourfold pattern of preferences exhibited by experience-based choice when studied in the laboratory. The implications of this work for prospect theory and the distinction between “experience through learning” and “experience through professional training” are discussed alongside the merits of the ACTA technique for professional expert domain-based knowledge elicitation.

Conceptual approaches to wellbeing in buildings: a scoping review

ABSTRACT Several industry-led initiatives in various countries demonstrate a new interest in wellbeing and buildings. This paper adopts a scoping review method aiming to establish the most prevalent and insightful definitions and dimensions of wellbeing in buildings applied in the recent published literature. The paper adopts a two-step method for identifying and categorizing the conceptual approaches to wellbeing encountered in the current literature. First, an overview is presented of the term ‘wellbeing’ and its development over time. Second, the broad wellbeing categories identified are further refined and complemented via a deductive approach, drawing the final set of conceptual themes informed by the papers reviewed in this study. Nine themes were identified, two of which deductively emerged from the papers included in this study: environmental satisfaction/comfort and cognitive performance/productivity. The findings emphasize the heterogeneity of conceptual approaches to research concerning ‘wellbeing in buildings’, an ambiguity between wellbeing outcomes or determinants, and the need for greater clarity on the relative contributions of different wellbeing dimensions to overall individual or population wellbeing. Based on these findings, future work could be carried out to provide guidance on how to evaluate claims of evidence-based building design which foster individual or population wellbeing.