Anton Kühberger

Anton Kühberger
University of Salzburg · Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience

PhD

About

72
Publications
40,923
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3,819
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Introduction
I am Professor at the University of Salzburg, at the Dept. of Psychology. My research areas are Judgment and decision making: framing; risk, ambiguity and uncertainty; decision aiding Thinking and Reasoning: counterfactual thinking; rationality Social Cognition: explanation and understanding of self and other; Theory of mind; Theory theory vs. Simulation theory Methods: statistical method, meta-analysis; verbal protocol analysis
Additional affiliations
January 1995 - December 2007
University of Salzburg

Publications

Publications (72)
Article
Full-text available
Classic decision theory requires that rational agents show description invariance: which description is chosen should not matter for judgments, preferences, or choices given the descriptions are co-extensive. Framing research has amply demonstrated a failure of description invariance by showing that the choice of the description has a systematic ef...
Article
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In classic research on judgment and decision making under risk, risk is described by providing participants with the respective outcomes and probabilities in a summary format. Recent research has introduced a different paradigm – decisions-by-experience – where participants learn about risk by sampling from the outcomes, rather than by summary desc...
Article
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We investigate the citation frequency of retracted scientific papers in science. For the period of five years before and after retraction, we counted the citations to papers in a sample of over 3,000 retracted, and a matched sample of another 3,000 non-retracted papers. Retraction led to a decrease in average annual citation frequency from about 5...
Article
When communication is not disinterested, seemingly inconsistent preferences are predictable from language pragmatics and information non-equivalence. In addition, the classic risky choice framing effect found in the Asian disease task – risk-aversion with gains and risk-seeking with losses – applies to gambles, but tends to be overgeneralized to no...
Article
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The study of moral judgements often centres on moral dilemmas in which options consistent with deontological perspectives (that is, emphasizing rules, individual rights and duties) are in conflict with options consistent with utilitarian judgements (that is, following the greater good based on consequences). Greene et al. (2009) showed that psychol...
Chapter
Unter dem Begriff Kognitionswissenschaft untersuchen Disziplinen wie Psychologie, künstliche Intelligenz, Linguistik, Neurowissenschaft und Philosophie, wie sich mentale Repräsentationen im Zuge der Informationsverarbeitung verändern. Aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven und mit unterschiedlichen methodischen Zugängen werden grundsätzliche Fragen nac...
Article
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This study aimed at evaluating the extent of benzodiazepine (BZD) consumption among nursing home residents and examining additional mental health problems. Urine samples were collected in nursing homes in a border region between Austria and Germany and analyzed for BZD using a liquid chromatographic-tandem mass spectrometric method (LC–MS/MS). In a...
Preprint
Full-text available
Much research on moral judgment is centered on moral dilemmas in which deontological perspectives (i.e., emphasizing rules, individual rights and duties) are in conflict with utilitarian judgements (i.e., following the greater good defined through consequences). A central finding of this field Greene et al. showed that psychological and situational...
Article
Randomness in the selection process of to-be-replicated target papers is critical for replication success or failure. If target papers are chosen because of the ease of doing a replication, or because replicators doubt the reported findings, replications are likely to fail. To date, the selection of replication targets is biased.
Article
Background There is little research on how to best introduce children to stochastics. In general, demonstration and concrete experience seem to be necessary to establish good understanding of stochastics in children. Pupils seem to be able to develop an intuition on stochastic thinking when they actively solve probabilistic problems and carry out p...
Article
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Online media and especially social media are becoming more and more relevant to our everyday life. Reflecting this tendency in the scientific community, alternative metrics for measuring scholarly impact on the web are increasingly proposed, extending (or even replacing) traditional metrics (e.g., citations, journal impact factor, etc.). This paper...
Preprint
Randomness in the selection process of the to-be-replicated target papers is of critical importance for replication success or failure. If target papers are chosen due to ease of doing a replication, or because replicators doubt the reported findings, replications are likely to fail. To date, the selection of replication targets is biased.
Article
Full-text available
We reevaluated and reanalyzed the data of Kühberger's (1998) meta-analysis on framing effects in risky decision making by using p-curve. This method uses the distribution of only significant p-values to correct the effect size, thus taking publication bias into account. We found a corrected overall effect size of d = 0.52, which is considerably hig...
Article
Background: Because of physiological changes, elderly people are much more exposed to the adverse effects of alcohol. Therefore, hazardous drinking is defined at lower levels as compared to younger adults. This work aims to evaluate the validity of the current cut off levels of the Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test - Consumption questions (...
Chapter
This chapter discusses risky decision-making, and gives an overview of relevant concepts, such as value and utility, risk and ambiguity, affect and emotion. It reviews the empirical research that informs the development of theory, and also discusses relevant developments and interactions. The chapter also guides to calculate the utility of a prospe...
Article
The challenge in inferring cognitive processes from observational data is to correctly align overt behavior with its covert cognitive process. To improve our understanding of the overt-covert mapping in the domain of decision making we collected eye-movement data during decisions between gamble-problems. Participants were either free to choose, or...
Article
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Summarizing and organizing research in narrative reviews is a classic procedure for cumulating research. In recent years narrative reviews have been increasingly, though not completely, replaced by meta-analyses. Using a case study of a prominent narrative review of the behavioral priming literature (Bargh, Schwader, Hailey, Dyer, & Boothby, 2012),...
Article
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When predicting thoughts and behavior of other people, we use either the self as the basis for predictions (i.e., we simulate others), or theoretical knowledge (i.e., we use knowledge about others). To find out whether the prediction of complex choices is possible we asked participants to predict the choice of a well-known or unknown target person...
Article
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We asked participants to predict which of two colors a similar other (student) and a dissimilar other (retiree) likes better. We manipulated if color-pairs were two hues from the same color-category (e.g. green) or two conceptually different colors (e.g. green versus blue). In the former case, the mental state that has to be represented (i.e., the...
Article
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Background Statistical significance is an important concept in empirical science. However the meaning of the term varies widely. We investigate into the intuitive understanding of the notion of significance. Methods We described the results of two different experiments published in a major psychological journal to a sample of students of psycholog...
Article
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Background The p value obtained from a significance test provides no information about the magnitude or importance of the underlying phenomenon. Therefore, additional reporting of effect size is often recommended. Effect sizes are theoretically independent from sample size. Yet this may not hold true empirically: non-independence could indicate pub...
Article
Background: There are few studies about the prevalence of alcohol and benzodiazepine use among elderly employing besides self reports and third party reports also objective biomarkers. Therefore an EU funded INTERREG study was conducted in the county of Salzburg and 2 rural districts of Bavaria, Germany. Aim: The aim of this study was to assess th...
Article
We investigate whether risky choice framing, i.e., the preference of a sure over an equivalent risky option when choosing among gains, and the reverse when choosing among losses, depends on redundancy and density of information available in a task. Redundancy, the saliency of missing information, and density, the description of options in one or mu...
Article
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In a comment on our paper, Bradley and Brand (2013) argue that effect sizes are exaggerated owing to low power and publication bias. They propose to correct these exaggerations by application of a specific formula leading to a better estimate of the true effect size. In a simulation we test the effect of this formula and find this corrective approa...
Article
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The endowment effect is the finding that possession of an item adds to its value. We introduce a new procedure for testing this effect: participants are divided into two groups. Possession group participants inspect a numbered lottery ticket and know it is theirs, while inspection group participants only inspect a lottery ticket without being endow...
Article
In a typical risky choice framing task, people have to choose among two options, which are either positively or negatively framed. Choices in the two framing conditions are then compared. However, different preferences between the conditions can be due to changes in the evaluation of the single constituent options or due to specific processes trigg...
Article
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Over-reliance on significance testing has been heavily criticized in psychology. Therefore the American Psychological Association recommended supplementing the p value with additional elements such as effect sizes, confidence intervals, and considering statistical power seriously. This article elaborates the conclusions that can be drawn when these...
Article
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Empathy gaps occur when people are in one fleeting state and try to predict how they would behave in a different state. Research shows consistently that people underestimate those current influences. An empathy gap has also been shown for curiosity such that people underestimate the influence curiosity has on their decisions. We successfully replic...
Article
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In a commentary to our article on the role of theory and simulation in social predictions, Krueger (2012) argues that the role of theory is neglected in social psychology for a good reason. He considers evidence indicating that people readily generalize from themselves to others. In response, we stress the role of theoretical knowledge in predictin...
Article
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The literature on social cognition reports many instances of a phenomenon titled 'social projection' or 'egocentric bias'. These terms indicate egocentric predictions, i.e., an over-reliance on the self when predicting the cognition, emotion, or behavior of other people. The classic method to diagnose egocentric prediction is to establish high corr...
Article
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We investigate the role of salient regulatory focus for risk attitude in framed gambles. In Experiment 1 we measured regulatory focus by collecting verbal protocols and found that people avoided risk under prevention focus and preferred risk under promotion focus. In Experiment 2 the same result was found when measuring people's regulatory focus wi...
Article
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Abstract In four experiments we investigate over- and underweighting of probabilitiesin decisions under risk. To account for this phenomenon,we propose a view of the probab ility weighting function as a composite of cognitive and emotional processes and suggest that there is no single weighting function but two separate weighting functions for each...
Article
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The aim of this article is to evaluate the contribution of process tracing data to the development and testing of models of judgment and decision making (JDM). We draw on our experience of editing the ``Handbook of process tracing methods for decision research'' recently published in the SJDM series. After a brief introduction we first describe cla...
Article
Empirical research on counterfactual thinking has found a closeness effect: people report higher negative affect if an actual outcome is close to a better counterfactual outcome. However, it remains unclear what actually is a “close” miss. In three experiments that manipulate close counterfactuals, closeness effects were found only when closeness w...
Article
Framing effects are said to indicate irrationality in decision making because they illustrate that linguistically different descriptions of equivalent options lead to inconsistent choices. A review of the literature on the effects of adding, or subtracting, implicated complements of the sure option shows that this leads to a classic framing effect,...
Article
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In einer Untersuchung an 121 Tätern mit Tötungsdelikten im Normalvollzug wurde erhoben, wie viele Fälle von psychiatrisch „unauffälligen“ Tätern vorliegen, also Täter ohne psychiatrische Störungen. Knapp 30% des Probandengutes waren psychiatrisch unauffällige Täter; bei etwa 40% wurde eine Persönlichkeitsstörung diagnostiziert, bei einigen wenigen...
Article
Full-text available
Framing effects are said to indicate irrationality in decision making because they illustrate that linguistically different descriptions of equivalent options lead to inconsistent choices. A review of the literature on the effects of adding, or subtracting, implicated complements of the sure option shows that this leads to a classic framing effect,...
Article
The discussion of whether people understand themselves and others by using theories of behaviour (theory theory) or by simulating mental states (simulation theory) lacks conclusive empirical evidence. Nichols et al. (1996) have proposed the Langer effect (Langer, 1975) as a critical test. From people's inability accurately to predict the difference...
Article
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The diversification bias in repeated lotteries is the finding that a majority of participants fail to select the option offering the highest probability. This phenomenon is systematic and immune to classical manipulations (e.g. monetary rewards). We apply dual process theories and argue that the diversification bias is a consequence of System 1 (au...
Article
We contribute to the empirical debate on whether we understand and predict mental states by using simulation (simulation theory) or by relying on a folk psychological theory (theory theory). To decide between these two fundamental positions, it has been argued that failure to predict other people’s choices would be challenging evidence against the...
Chapter
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Der hiermit charakterisierte zeitpsychologische Zug, der sich in so entschiedenen Gegensatz zu dem mehr impulsiven, auf das Ganze gehenden, gefühlsmäßigen Wesen früherer Epochen stellt, scheint mir in enger kausaler Verbindung mit der Geldwirtschaft zu stehen. Sie bewirkt von sich aus die Notwendigkeit fortwährender mathematischer Operationen im tä...
Article
Ambiguity avoidance denotes people's preference for gambling situations with known over unknown, or ambiguous, probability distributions. In four experiments we provide evidence for the interaction between competitiveness and knowledge in Ellsberg's task, in which people have a choice between a risky box (distribution of balls known) and an ambiguo...
Article
A method is presented for deciding whether correct predictions about other people are based on simulation or theory use. The differentiating power of this method was assessed with cognitive estimation biases (e.g. estimating the area of Brazil) in two variations. Experiments 1 and 2 operated with the influence of response scales of different length...
Article
Full-text available
Corruption in the public sector erodes tax compliance and leads to higher tax evasion. Moreover, corrupt public officials abuse their public power to extort bribes from the private agents. In both types of interaction with the public sector, the private agents are bound to face uncertainty with respect to their disposable incomes. To analyse effect...
Article
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Over the years research in risky decision making has diagnosed variable degrees of irrationality in people's judgements and choices. In the 1960s an optimistic view dominated of a widely rational decision maker. The work of Tversky and Kahneman at the beginning of the 1970s led to a pessimistic view of basically flawed decision processes that frequ...
Article
Research has shown a tendency of decision makers to overweight small probabilities and to underweight moderate and large probabilities. In standard treatments this is graphically modeled by an inverse S-shaped probability weighting function. The authors suggest that emotions play a significant role in the shaping of the probability weighting functi...
Article
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We introduce a particular way of drawing the distinction between the use of theory and simulation in the prediction of people's decisions and describe an empirical method to test whether theory or simulation is used in a particular case. We demonstrate this method with two effects of decision making involving the choice between a safe option (take...
Article
One of the basic axioms of the rational theory of decision under uncertainty is Savage's (1954) Sure Thing Principle. It states that if Prospect x is preferred to Prospect y knowing that Event A occurred, and if x is preferred to y knowing that A did not occur, then x should also be preferred to y when it is not known whether A occurred. Tversky an...
Article
Decision making can be studied using hypothetical payoffs because it is hypothetical to its very core. However, the core process can be influenced by contextual features. As there is no theory for these contextual features, a “do-it-both-ways” rule amounts to a waste of money. If we had such a theory, doing it both ways would be unnecessary.
Article
In their use of correlations as a means to distinguish between different views on the normative/descriptive gap, Stanovich & West discuss the competence component but neglect the activation-utilization component of performance. Different degrees of motivation may introduce systematic variation that is confounded with the variation explained by cogn...
Article
A meta-analysis of Asian-disease-like studies is presented to identify the factors which determine risk preference. First the confoundings between probability levels, payoffs, and framing conditions are clarified in a task analysis. Then the role of framing, reflection, probability, type, and size of payoff is evaluated in a meta-analysis. It is sh...
Article
Research has shown that, when an alternative is described incompletely, people may make inferences in order to form an overall evaluation of the alternative. In a multi-attribute personnel choice context, we investigated the influence of the number and subjective importance of missing attributes, and the framing of the task, on inferences. A verbal...
Article
In framing studies, logically equivalent choice situations are differently described and the resulting preferences are studied. A meta-analysis of framing effects is presented for risky choice problems which are framed either as gains or as losses. This evaluates the finding that highlighting the positive aspects of formally identical problems does...
Article
The formal model of Dynamic programming (Mangel & Clark, 1988) describes optimal behavior in behavioral ecology. We apply this model to human decision making. The relevant variables (payoff, probability of payoff, current state of the system, time horizon) are incorporated in an experimental gamble and the influence of important characteristics (e....
Article
We analyzed psychiatric and criminological data from 103 arsonists. The following criticisms of the definition of pyromania according to DSM-III-R and IDC-10 seem appropriate. First, the categoric exclusion of aggressive motives does not seem very promising, since approximately one fourth of arsonists whose firesetting is based on motives quoted in...
Article
Zusammenfassung Anhand von 103 Brandstiftern wurden psychiatrische wie kriminologische Daten im Hinblick auf die Definition in DSM-III-R und ICD-10 analysiert. Bezglich des Pyromaniebegriffs erscheint die kategorische Ausgrenzung aggressiver Motive wenig sinnvoll, weil bei ca. einem Viertel der Tter, die aus Motiven, wie im DSM-III-R genannt, Brnd...
Article
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Most of the experimental results on the risky decision behavior of individuals have been in reference to simple gambles. An investigation was conducted to determine whether those results can be generalized to more natural situations; 32 participants were required to make choices in one gambling task and three natural-decision tasks. Half were train...
Article
The role played by alcohol in pyromania and arson was examined. We had a total of 103 arsonists, 95 of which were men and 8 women. 69 of the offenders had only started one fire, 34 had started more than one. 70 offenders were under the influence of alcohol at the time of the arson, 54 were alcoholics altogether. Adults were usually under the influe...
Article
The term framing is used to refer to the various ways decision situations are presented that lead decision makers to construct markedly different representations of such situations. In two experiments using Asian disease-like decision problems, we tested for the persistence of framing effects dependent on the amount and quality of information prese...
Article
In the course of 25 years we examined 103 arsonists psychiatrically. In 10 of these cases the firesetting was accompanied by a suicidal attempt, or was inspired by a suicidal motive. These arsonists differ from arsonists with other motives: typically suicidal arsonists are older, have a higher share of women, higher values of psychosocial burden, a...
Article
Full-text available
Die Arbeit befaßt sich mit dem Stellenwert des Subjective Expected Utility-Modells (SEU)für Ent-scheiden unter Risiko und Unsicherheit. Zentrale Themen sind das Paradigma der psychologischen Entscheidungstheorie (Behavioral Decision Theo-ry), der theoretische und empirische Stellenwert des SEU-Modells, die Kontextabhängigkeit von Ent-scheidungsproz...

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