Judgment and Decision Making

PART IV

Evaluation

If people know what they what, then figuring out what they can get is the difficult part of decision making. Assuming that to be the case, behavioral decision research initially focused on judgment, trusting people to have well-articulated preferences. That strategy is consistent with psychology’s long tradition of expecting people to have attitudes for whatever topics researchers raise. However, attitude research also has an undercurrent of context effects, in which seemingly minor changes in how questions are posed produces seemingly large changes in how they are answered. For example, people will sometimes not forbid an activity (e.g., profane speech) that they will also not allow. Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory ...