Hal Richard Arkes

The Ohio State University | OSU · Department of Psychology

To the Editor, We thank professors Scurich, Morrison, Sinha and Mr Gutierrez for their thoughtful comments on our article (Arkes and Koehler, 2021). We agree with Scurich (2023) that when an examiner knows that he or she is being tested, the results of such a test are highly suspect. If an examiner can avoid making errors by deeming a comparison to...

(Abstracted from JAMA Network Open 2022;5:e2218804) A basic law of probability is that the probability of a conjunction of 2 independent events is the product of both components and cannot exceed the likelihood of either component. When this basic law is violated, it is known as the conjunction fallacy.

In Arkes and Koehler (2022), we proposed that signal detection theory provides a helpful framework for understanding when and why a forensic examiner may wish to call an ‘inconclusive’ rather than offer a binary source conclusion (i.e. exclusion or identification) when deciding whether two samples share a common source. As Dr. Itiel Dror notes in h...

There are times when a forensic scientist may not be comfortable drawing a firm conclusion about whether a questioned sample that appears to contain useful identifying information did or did not come from a particular known source. In such cases, the forensic scientist may call the sample pair ‘inconclusive’. We suggest that signal detection theory...

Importance: The probability of a conjunction of 2 independent events is the product of the probabilities of the 2 components and therefore cannot exceed the probability of either component; violation of this basic law is called the conjunction fallacy. A common medical decision-making scenario involves estimating the probability of a final outcome...

The flaws in social psychological research pointed out by Cesario have societal costs. These include ignoring crucial base rates thereby degrading the effectiveness of policy decisions, generalizing the conclusions derived from experiments on non-professionals thereby distorting the public's view of professional law enforcement personnel, questiona...

Background Physicians who communicate their prognostic beliefs to patients must balance candor against other competing goals, such as preserving hope, acknowledging the uncertainty of medicine, or motivating patients to follow their treatment regimes. Objective To explore possible differences between the beliefs physicians report as their own and...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

We present a consensus-based checklist to improve and document the transparency of research reports in social and behavioural research. An accompanying online application allows users to complete the form and generate a report that they can submit with their manuscript or post to a public repository.

A panel of clinician scientists with expertise in neuromuscular blockade (NMB) monitoring was convened with a charge to prepare a consensus statement on indications for and proper use of such monitors. The aims of this article are to: (a) provide the rationale and scientific basis for the use of quantitative NMB monitoring; (b) offer a set of recom...

People often express political opinions in starkly dichotomous terms, such as “Trump will either trigger a ruinous trade war or save U.S. factory workers from disaster.” This mode of communication promotes polarization into ideological in-groups and out-groups. We explore the power of an emerging methodology, forecasting tournaments, to encourage c...

BACKGROUND: In patients who receive a nondepolarizing neuromuscular blocking drug (NMBD) during anesthesia, undetected postoperative residual neuromuscular block is a common occurrence that carries a risk of potentially serious adverse events, particularly postoperative pulmonary complications. There is abundant evidence that residual block can be...

Laboratory experiments are usually done on individuals, but many business decisions involve groups. Therefore, we ran ultimatum games using individuals and two-person teams. We primed business roles with the labels “labor” and “management,” or we used the generic labels of “proposer” and “responder.” With business labels, individuals offered lower...

Recently there has been spirited disagreement about the merits of dual-system theories of higher cognition. I suggest that this dispute is very similar to the 1970s dispute between two-store theories of memory and levels of processing theory. The two-store or “box” theorists stipulated that short-term memory and long-term memory stores were quite d...

We present data from three experiments examining the effects of objective and subjective expertise on the hindsight bias. In Experiment 1, participants read an essay about baseball or dogs and then answered questions about the baseball essay to the best of their ability, as if they had not read the essay, or to the best of their ability, although t...

Rationality is often defined in terms of coherence, assuming that a single syntactical rule such as consistency, transitivity, or Bayes’ rule suffices to evaluate behavior. Many normative claims made in psychological research follow this assumption. We argue that coherence-based norms are of limited value for evaluating behavior as rational. Specif...

The hindsight bias manifests in the tendency to exaggerate the extent to which a past event could have been predicted beforehand. This bias has particularly detrimental effects in the domain of medical decision making. I present a demonstration of the bias, its contribution to overconfidence, and its involvement in judgments of medical malpractice....

report an unexpectedly high incidence of postoperative resid-ual weakness after using sugammadex for antagonism of rocuronium-induced block in a nonrandomized study conducted at 5 university-affiliated teaching hospitals in Japan. This report represents a “real world” scenario in which anesthesiologists used neither a quantitative train-of-four (TO...

Simonson et al. propose a framework that emphasizes the roles of context and fluency in perception and choice. The importance of context has been emphasized throughout a very long tradition of research, and fluency has been a more recent and active topic of investigation. Simonson et al. combine them in a way that should organize a multitude of stu...

Reviews the book, The Mind Within the Brain: How We Make Decisions and How Those Decisions Go Wrong by A. David Redish (see record 2013-24085-000 ). In the last 20 years there have been three principal types of books on judgment and decision making (JDM) other than edited texts. The first type consists of texts written for a general audience, the s...

Objective: To better understand 1) why patients have a negative perception of the use of computerized clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) and 2) what contributes to the documented heterogeneity in the evaluations of physicians who use a CDSS. Methods: Three vignette-based studies examined whether negative perceptions stemmed directly from...

Although the law assumes a close relation between the probability that a defendant committed the act in question and the ensuing verdict of the jurors, prior research has shown this assumption to be often violated. We present five experiments designed to show that factors that influence probability also influence verdict, but other factors are capa...

In October of 2011, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force released a draft report in which they recommended against using the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test to screen for prostate cancer. We attempt to show that four factors documented by psychological research can help explain the furor that followed the release of the task force's report....

We describe the Aggregative Contingent Estimation System (http://www.forecastingace.com), which is de-signed to elicit and aggregate forecasts from large, di-verse groups of individuals. The Aggregative Contingent Estimation System (ACES; see http://www.forecastingace.com) is a project funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity....

As a general rule, individuals tend to be optimistic in predicting when they will complete an upcoming activity. Building upon the ease of generation theory, we examined how dividing the planning process into multiple steps would impact the magnitude of optimism in “real world” planning. In Experiment 1 we found a decrease in optimistic prediction...

We examined reference point adaptation following gains or losses in security trading using participants from China, Korea, and the US. In both questionnaire studies and trading experiments with real money incentives, reference point adaptation was larger for Asians than for Americans. Subjects in all countries adapted their reference points more af...

We present data from eight experiments in which we explored the effects of source confusion on the hindsight bias; participants' success in disregarding information when they were instructed to do so was affected by participants' level of source confusion. In Experiment 1 we demonstrated participants' failure to disregard Revolutionary War informat...

Physicians are reluctant to use decision aids despite their ability to improve care. A potential reason may be that physicians do not believe decision aid advice. To determine whether internal medicine residents lend more credence to contradictory decision aid or human advice. Randomized controlled trial. Residents read a scenario of a patient with...

Data are presented from six experiments that demonstrate preference reversals for cash versus non-cash incentives. When given a hypothetical choice between cash and non-cash incentives, participants chose the cash incentive (joint evaluation, JE). However when asked to evaluate them separately (separate evaluation, SE), participants gave higher rat...

Three studies explored both the advantages of and subjects' preferences for a disaggregated judgment procedure and a holistic one. The task in our first two studies consisted of evaluating colleges; the third study asked participants to evaluate job applicants. Holistic ratings consisted of providing an overall evaluation while considering all of t...

Physicians are slow to adopt novel therapies, and the reasons for this are poorly understood. The authors sought to determine if the size of the treatment effect of a novel therapy influences willingness to adopt it. We developed 2 experimental vignette pairs describing a trial of a therapy for a hypothetical disease that showed a statistically sig...

Group decision making provides a mechanism for channeling individual members' knowledge into productive organizational outcomes. However, in hidden profile experiments in which group members have common information favoring an inferior choice, with private information favoring a superior choice, groups typically choose an inferior alternative. We r...

The duration of ownership has been shown to increase the valuation of items that people currently own as well as items they have owned in the past, a phenomenon termed the ``length-of-ownership effect.'' We hypothesize that the duration of exposure to an item will foster increased pre-ownership attachment to an item and increased valuations in a ma...

When a patient is too incapacitated to make important end-of-life decisions, doctors may ask a preappointed surrogate to predict the patient's preferences and make decisions on the patient's behalf. The current study investigates whether surrogates project their own views onto what they predict the patients' preferences are. Using data from serious...

Findings from previous studies of individual decision-making behavior predict that losses will loom larger than gains. It is less clear, however, if this loss aversion applies to the way in which individuals attribute value to the gains and losses of others, or if it is robust across a broad spectrum of policy and management decision contexts. Cons...

Background: Mock jurors were more likely to side with the physician-defendant if he recommended an operation when there were many symptoms and refrained when there were few symptoms compared with a physician who did the converse. The use of a decision aid had no influence on this binary standard-of-care decision. Among those physicians deemed liab...

The duration of ownership has been shown to increase the valuation of items that people currently own as well as items they have owned in the past, a phenomenon termed the ``length-of-ownership effect.'' We hypothesize that the duration of exposure to an item will foster increased pre-ownership attachment to an item and increased valuations in a ma...

To ascertain whether a physician who uses a computer-assisted diagnostic support system (DSS) would be rated less capable than a physician who does not. Students assumed the role of a patient with a possible ankle fracture (experiment 1) or a possible deep vein thrombosis (experiment 2). They read a scenario that described an interaction with a phy...

We examined prospect theory and reference point adaptation following gains or losses using participants from China, Korea, and the US. Supporting prospect theory, we found in Studies 1 and 2 that subjects from all three countries generally exhibited loss aversion and a greater propensity for risk seeking in the loss domain than in the gain domain....

The National Institutes of Health refused to switch to disaggregated ratings as a method for evaluating proposals, because no contest between disaggregated and holistic ratings had ever used scientific materials as the to-be-rated stimuli. We designed two studies to fill this research void. Participants rated scientific convention presentations eit...

This paper reports the results of laboratory test of the performance of a non-point source (NPS) water pollution abatement scheme suggested by Pushkarskaya and Randall (2006). The scheme is based on voluntary participation in the non-point source pollution control program, and ties individual payoffs to collective performance of the farmers in the...

Although it is known that many evidence-based therapies are underutilized, the causes of the research-practice gap are not well understood. The authors sought to determine if there is a bias in the evaluation of new evidence that leads to low rates of adoption of beneficial therapies compared to abandonment of harmful ones. Two case vignettes descr...

The goal of this experimental study was to test an effectiveness of a group contract designed to control nonpoint source water pollution from farms' runoff (Pushkarskaya 2003). In particular, the regulator pays for pollution reduction credits earned by the group of the farmers, who voluntary enter the contract, and is concerned only with the total...

Experts in law, psychology, and economics explore the power of "fast and frugal" heuristics in the creation and implementation of law In recent decades, the economists' concept of rational choice has dominated legal reasoning. And yet, in practical terms, neither the lawbreakers the law addresses nor officers of the law behave as the hyperrational...

Experts in law, psychology, and economics explore the power of "fast and frugal" heuristics in the creation and implementation of law In recent decades, the economists' concept of rational choice has dominated legal reasoning. And yet, in practical terms, neither the lawbreakers the law addresses nor officers of the law behave as the hyperrational...

According to prospect theory [Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk, Econometrica, 47, 263–292], gains and losses are measured from a reference point. We attempted to ascertain to what extent the reference point shifts following gains or losses. In questionnaire studies, we asked subjects what stock...

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This article describes three experiments designed to investigate the effects of competition and attachment on auction bidder behavior. For each study, in order to isolate bidders' desire to win the item from bidders' desire to simply win the auction, we constructed survey experiments with participants divided into two groups. Both groups bid on a c...

A large body of research supports the conclusion that decision aids are generally superior to "gut feelings" in a large variety of judgment tasks. However, human judges are still needed to select the cues upon which the decision aids are to be based and to assign the appropriate value to each cue. We suggest that there are two areas in which the us...

Actual possession of an item has been shown to increase an owner's valuation of it, a phenomenon termed the endowment effect (Thaler, 1980). We hypothesize that temporarily being the high bidder during an auction induces a pseudo-endowment effect. This effect may foster attachment to an item during the auction and thus promote overbidding. We exami...

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that people's overconfidence in the quality of their intuitive judgment strategies contributes to their reluctance to use helpful actuarial judgment aids. Participants engaged in a judgment task that required them to use five cues to decide whether a prospective juror favored physician-assisted suicide. Parti...

Some commentators dismiss Arkes and Tetlock (this issue) on two grounds that we regard as specious, namely that we are either (a) political apologists for covert bigotry - the soft-on-racism charge raised by Sears (this issue) or (b)psychological naïfs who cling to obsolete definitions of attitudes and prejudice - the scientific incompetence charge...

Measures of implicit prejudice are based on associations between race-related stimuli and valenced words. Reaction time (RT) data have been characterized as showing implicit prejudice when White names or faces are associated with positive concepts and African-American names or faces with negative concepts, compared to the reverse pairings. We offer...

Measures of implicit prejudice are based on associations between race-related stimuli and valenced words. Reaction time (RT) data have been characterized as showing implicit prejudice when White names or faces are associated with positive concepts and African-American names or faces with negative concepts, compared to the reverse pairings. We offer...

In 1994 the Government Accounting Office (GAO) issued a report critical of some features of the proposal review processes at the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. I provide two examples of procedures the agencies could have adopted to address the GAO's criticisms. I also relate the history of the two agencies' reluc...

Surveys of public opinion indicate that people have high expectations for juries. When it comes to serious crimes, most people want errors of convicting the innocent (false positives) or acquitting the guilty (false negatives) to fall well below 10%. Using expected utility theory, Bayes' Theorem, signal detection theory, and empirical evidence from...

In three experiments we sought to determine the cause of the “inaction inertia” effect, which occurs when bypassing an initial opportunity decreases the likelihood that a subsequent similar action will be taken. Experiment 1 required some participants to estimate their likelihood of buying shoes as a function of the magnitude and geographical locat...

Overconfidence is a common finding in the forecasting research literature. Judgmental overconfidence leads people (1) to neglect decision aids, (2) to make predictions contrary to the base rate, and (3) to succumb to “groupthink.” To counteract overconfidence forecasters should heed six principles: (1) Consider alternatives, especially in new situa...

The sunk cost effect is manifested in a tendency to continue an endeavor once an investment has been made. Arkes and Blumer (1985) showed that a sunk cost increases one's estimated probability that the endeavor will succeed [p(s)]. Is this p(s) increase a cause of the sunk cost effect, a consequence of the effect, or both? In Experiment 1 participa...

The aim of the Study to Understand Prognoses and Preferences for Outcomes and Risks of Treatments -- SUPPORT -- was to improve the care of seriously ill patients by improving decision-making for patients with life-threatening illnesses. Several theories have been proposed to explain why the SUPPORT intervention was unsuccessful at improving outcome...

The intervention in SUPPORT, the Study to Understand Prognoses and Preferences for Outcomes and Risks of Treatments, was ineffective in changing communication, decision-making, and treatment patterns despite evidence that counseling and information were delivered as planned. The previous paper in this volume shows that modest alterations in the int...

BACKGROUND: The intervention in SUPPORT, the Study to Understand Prognoses and Preferences for Outcomes and Risks of Treatments, was ineffective in changing communication, decision‐making, and treatment patterns despite evidence that counseling and information were delivered as planned. The previous paper in this volume shows that modest alteration...

Research by Wilson suggests that examining the bases of one’s decision can lower satisfaction with the outcome of that decision. However, several investigators have found that using decision aids that cause people to consider the bases of their decisions leads to greater satisfaction with the decision. In the present study, high school students use...

The sunk cost effect is a maladaptive economic behavior that is manifested in a greater tendency to continue an endeavor once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made. The Concorde fallacy is another name for the sunk cost effect, except that the former term has been applied strictly to lower animals, whereas the latter has been applie...

The sunk cost effect is a maladaptive economic behavior that is manifested in a greater tendency to continue an endeavor once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made. The Concorde fallacy is another name for the sunk cost effect, except that the former term has been applied strictly to lower animals, whereas the latter has been applie...

The necessity of understanding and improving judgment and decision making is being addressed by a growing number of researchers in a growing range of fields—public policy, law, business, medicine, psychology, engineering, and others. This book, which presupposes no formal training, brings together many of the most crucial articles on judgment and d...

Readers of the article “A new way to ask the experts: Rating radioactive waste risks” by Richard A. Kerr (News & Comment, [8 Nov., p. 913][1]) may be left with the impression that the elicitation and mathematical combination of expert opinion is a technique invented by earth scientists. In fact

In order to avoid the appearance of wastefulness people may be motivated to make choices that compromise their own self-interest. In Experiment 1 subjects learned that Mr Munn didn't take advantage of a ‘three-pack’ which would have enabled him to see three movies for $12, the regular price being $5 per movie. Most subjects predicted that after hav...

Management folklore sometimes leads to unprofitable decision making. Thus, studies of the value of such folklore should be of interest to managers, especially when they identify unprofitable procedures. I reviewed empirical research on scientific publishing and concluded that studies supporting management folklore are likely to be favorably reviewe...

The probability score (PS) or Brier score has been used in a large number of studies in which physician judgment performance was assessed. However, the covariance decomposition of the PS has not previously been used to evaluate medical judgment. The authors introduce the technique and demonstrate it by analyzing prognostic estimates of three groups...

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books , 1995, Vol 40(4), 314-315. Reviews the book "The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making" by Scott Plous (covered in its original form in record 1993-97429-000 ). According to the author's statement in the preface, this book is intended for nonspecialists who would like an int...

Hypothesized that windfall gains are spent more readily than other types of assets. Three questionnaire studies supported this hypothesis and led to the conclusion that the unanticipated nature of windfall gains is responsible for their heightened proclivity to be spent. This hypothesis was then tested in 2 studies using actual money. In both studi...

Prior to right-heart catheterization of 846 patients, 198 study physicians estimated values of pulmonary capillary wedge pressure (WP), cardiac index (Cl), and systemic vascular resistance index (VRI). The physicians also expressed their confidence in these estimates. Actual values of WP, Cl, and VRI as determined by catheterization enabled the aut...

Prior research has shown that repeating a statement results in an increase in its judged validity. One explanation that has been advanced to account for this finding is that familiarity is used as a basis to assess validity. Another explanation is that when subjects dissociate a statement from its true source, that statement is judged to be more va...

Questioned the ecological validity of judgmental biases demonstrated in the laboratory. One objection to these demonstrations is that evolutionary pressures would have rendered such maladaptive behaviors extinct if they had any impact in the "real world." The author attempts to show that even beneficial adaptations may have costs. This argument is...

Some authors questioned the ecological validity of judgmental biases demonstrated in the laboratory. One objection to these demonstrations is that evolutionary pressures would have rendered such maladaptive behaviors extinct if they had any impact in the "real world." I attempt to show that even beneficial adaptations may have costs. I extend this...

We conducted a national survey of psychologists who offer neuropsychological services to determine levels of training, current practices, and views on professional issues. All subjects were listed in the National Register of Health Service Providers in Psychology and/or the American Psychological Association Directory as having some affiliation wit...

Responds to the comments by J. P. Schmidt (see record 2010-03278-001) on the current authors' original article, Neuropsychologists' capacity to detect adolescent malingerers (see record 1989-09946-001). In the latter study, the neuropsychologists were presented with actual test results, a fabricated history, but neither collateral reports nor di...

Principles in the judgment/decision making literature relevant to the legal community are reviewed. These principles are divided into four areas: the decision process itself, communicating a judgment to others, evaluating a decision, and possible ways of “debiasing.” Several influences on the decision process are enumerated, among them being insuff...

Using factual information of uncertain truth value as the stimulus material, previous investigators have found that repeated statements are rated more valid than non-repeated statements. Experiments 1 and 1A were designed to determine if this effect would also occur for opinion statements and for statements initially rated either true or false. Sub...

Although clinicopathologic conferences (CPCs) have been valued for teaching differential diagnosis, their instructional value may be compromised by hindsight bias. This bias occurs when those who know the actual diagnosis overestimate the likelihood that they would have been able to predict the correct diagnosis had they been asked to do so beforeh...

Malingering on neuropsychological testing is little studied but increasingly relevant, given the growth of forensic neuropsychology. We performed a two-part study on neuropsychologists' capacity to detect adolescent simulators. Three teenagers were instructed to "fake bad" on neuropsychological testing. In Study 1, test results and a fabricated his...