Ryan O. Murphy

Message Framing and Perinatal Decisions

OBJECTIVES. The purpose of this study was to explore the effect of information framing on parental decisions about resuscitation of extremely premature infants. Secondary outcomes focused on elucidating the impact of other variables on treatment choices and determining whether those effects would take precedence over any framing effects. METHODS. This confidential survey study was administered to adult volunteers via the Internet. The surveys depicted a hypothetical vignette of a threatened delivery at gestational age of 23 weeks, with prognostic outcome information framed as either survival with lack of disability (positive frame) or chance of dying and likelihood of disability among survivors (negative frame). Participants were randomly assigned to receive either the positively or negatively framed vignette. They were then asked to choose whether they would prefer resuscitation or comfort care. After completing the survey vignette, participants were directed to a questionnaire designed to test the secondary hypothesis and to explore possible factors associated with treatment decisions. RESULTS. A total of 146 subjects received prognostic information framed as survival data and 146 subjects received prognostic information framed as mortality data. Overall, 24% of the sample population chose comfort care and 76% chose resuscitation. A strong trend was detected toward a framing effect on treatment preference; respondents for whom prognosis was framed as survival data were more likely to elect resuscitation. This framing effect was significant in a multivariate analysis controlling for religiousness, parental status, and beliefs regarding the sanctity of life. Of these covariates, only religiousness modified susceptibility to framing; participants who were not highly religious were significantly more likely to be influenced to opt for resuscitation by the positive frame than were participants who were highly religious. CONCLUSIONS. Framing bias may compromise efforts to approach prenatal counseling in a nondirective manner. This is especially true for subsets of participants who are not highly religious.

Social Value Orientation: Theoretical and Measurement Issues in the Study of Social Preferences

What motivates people when they make decisions and how those motivations are potentially entangled with concerns for others are central topics for the social, cognitive, and behavioral sciences. According to the postulate of narrow self-interest, decision makers have the goal of maximizing personal payoffs and are wholly indifferent to the consequences for others. The postulate of narrow self-interest—which has been influential in economics, psychology, and sociology—is precise and powerful but is often simply wrong. Its inadequacy is well known and efforts have been made to develop reliable and valid measurement methods to quantify the more nuanced social preferences that people really have. In this paper, we report on the emergence and development of the predominant conceptualization of social preferences in psychology: social value orientation (SVO). Second, we discuss the relationship between measurement and theory development of the SVO construct. We then provide an overview of the literature regarding measurement methods that have been used to assess individual variations in social preferences. We conclude with a comparative evaluation of the various measures and provide suggestions regarding the measures’ constructive use in building psychologically realistic theories of people’s social preferences.

A Review and Critique of the Sexual Experiences Questionnaire (SEQ)

This paper reviews and critiques the Sexual Experiences Questionnaire (SEQ), “...a self-report inventory representing the first attempt to assess the prevalence of sexual harassment in a manner that met traditional psychometric standards” (Fitzgerald, Gelfand, & Drasgow, 1995, p. 427). Widely used by its developers and others as a measure of sexual harassment, the SEQ is not a finished product, has a number of problems, and has weak psychometric properties. Because of inconsistencies (e.g., in time frame, number of items, wording of items), the SEQ lacks the advantages of standardized measures, such as the ability to assess changes over time. It defines sexual harassment very broadly, having the effect of distorting findings about sexual harassment. Most importantly, it is not clear what or whose definition of sexual harassment the SEQ assesses.

Decision Biases in Revenue Management: Some Behavioral Evidence

We study a problem of selling a fixed number of goods over a finite and known horizon. After presenting a procedure for computing optimal decision policies and some numerical results of a simple heuristic policy for the problem, we describe results from three experiments involving financially motivated subjects. The experiments reveal that decision makers employ decision policies of the same form of the optimal policy. However, they show systematic biases to demand too much when they have many units to sell and too little when they have few to sell, resulting in significant revenue losses.

The breakdown of cooperation in iterative real-time trust dilemmas

We study a class of trust-based cooperation dilemmas that evolve in continuous time. Characteristic of these dilemmas is that as long as all n players continue to cooperate, their payoffs increase monotonically over time. Simultaneously, the temptation to defect increases too, as the first player to defect terminates the interaction and receives the present value of the payoff function whereas each of the other n−1 players only receives a proportion δ (0 > δ > 1) of the defecting player’s payoff. We introduce a novel experimental institution that we call the Real-Time Trust Game (RTTG) to examine this class of interactions. We then report the results from an iterated RTTG in which the values of n and δ are varied in a between-subjects design. In all conditions, cooperation breaks down in the population over iterations of the game. The rate of breakdown sharply increases as n increases and more slowly decreases as δ increases. Copyright Economic Science Association 2006

Reciprocity as an Individual Difference

There is accumulating evidence that decision makers are sensitive to the distribution of resources among themselves and others, beyond what is expected from the predictions of narrow self-interest. These social preferences are typically conceptualized as being static and existing independently of information about the other people influenced by a DM’s allocation choices. In this paper we consider the reactivity of a decision makers’s social preferences in response to information about the intentions or past behavior of the person to be affected by the decision maker’s allocation choices (i.e., how do social preferences change in relation to the other’s type). This paper offers a conceptual framework for characterizing the link between distributive preferences and reciprocity, and reports on experiments in which these two constructs are disentangled and the relation between the two is characterized.

Default options and neonatal resuscitation decisions.

Objective To determine whether presenting delivery room management options as defaults influences decisions to resuscitate extremely premature infants. Materials and methods Adult volunteers recruited from the world wide web were randomised to receive either resuscitation or comfort care as the delivery room management default option for a hypothetical delivery of a 23-week gestation infant. Participants were required to check a box to opt out of the default. The primary outcome measure was the proportion of respondents electing resuscitation. Data were analysed using χ2 tests and multivariate logistic regression. Results Participants who were told the delivery room management default option was resuscitation were more likely to opt for resuscitation (OR 6.54 95% CI 3.85 to 11.11, p<0.001). This effect persisted on multivariate regression analysis (OR 7.00, 95% CI 3.97 to 12.36, p<0.001). Female gender, being married or in a committed relationship, being highly religious, experiences with prematurity, and favouring sanctity of life were significantly associated with decisions to resuscitate. Discussion Presenting delivery room options for extremely premature infants as defaults exert a significant effect on decision makers. The information structure of the choice task may act as a subtle form of manipulation. Further, this effect may operate in ways that a decision maker is not aware of and this raises questions of patient autonomy. Conclusion Presenting delivery room options for extremely premature infants as defaults may compromise autonomous decision-making.

Explaining Behavior in Public Goods Games: How Preferences and Beliefs Affect Contribution Levels

There is a large body of evidence showing that a substantial proportion of people contribute positive amounts in public goods games, even if the situation is one-shot and completely anonymous. Clearly, this is in conflict with the prediction of neoclassic economic theory. One of the most promising explanations of why people contribute anything in this context draws upon an interaction between positive social preferences and beliefs about the preferences and anticipated behavior of others. We follow this line of thinking and investigate the predictive power of social preferences and beliefs on contribution levels in both a one-shot and a repeated linear public goods game. We report on the degree to which individual contributions can be explained when individual preferences and beliefs are taken into account, and additionally how preferences and beliefs change in response to the behavior of others.

Population Learning of Cooperative Behavior in a Three-Person Centipede Game

We consider mixed populations (N 1/4 21) of genuine (humans) and arti.cial (robots) agents repeatedly interacting in small groups whose composition is changed randomly from round to round. Our purpose is to study the spread of cooperative or non-cooperative behavior over time in populations playing a 3-person centipede game by manipulating the behavior of the robots (cooperative vs. noncooperative) and their proportion in the population. Our results convey a positive message: adding a handful of cooperative robots increases the propensity of the genuine subjects to cooperate over time, whereas adding a handful of non-cooperative agents does not decrease this propensity. If there are enough hard-core cooperative subjects in the population, they not only negate the behavior of the non-cooperative robots but also induce other subjects to behave more cooperatively.

Hierarchical Maximum Likelihood Parameter Estimation for Cumulative Prospect Theory: Improving the Reliability of Individual Risk Parameter Estimates

An individual’s tolerance of risk can be quantified by using decision models with tuned parameters that maximally fit a set of risky choices the individual has made. A goal of this model fitting procedure is to identify parameters that correspond to stable underlying risk preferences. These preferences can be modeled as an individual difference, indicating a particular decision maker’s tastes and willingness to accept risk. Using hierarchical statistical methods, we show significant improvements in the reliability of individual risk preference parameter estimates over other common methods for cumulative prospect theory. This hierarchical procedure uses population-level information (in addition to an individual’s choices) to break “ties” (or near ties) in the fit quality for sets of possible risk preference parameters. By breaking these statistical ties in a sensible way, researchers can avoid overfitting choice data and thus more resiliently measure individual differences in people’s risk preferences. Thi...