Christopher K Hsee

• University of Chicago

This research explores a phenomenon that we see nearly every day and has implications for how we view people in other nations: Different media outlets may report the same international events either in terms of the nation (e.g., “Russia invades Ukraine”) or in terms of the leader (e.g., “Putin invades Ukraine”). Five studies, conducted during the 2...

People often judge the quality of selection decisions made by others: The CEO of a firm may judge the quality of hiring decisions made by the firm's HR personnel; the readers of a journal may judge the quality of manuscript‐acceptance decisions by the journal's editor. To accurately judge others' selection decision quality, evaluators should consid...

People are increasingly worried about untruthfulness in news reporting. We distinguish between two types of untruthfulness: apparent untruthfulness (containing false information) and consequential untruthfulness (giving readers a wrong impression of the truth). Consequential untruthfulness can be caused by both the presence of false information and...

How much joy versus pain people choose to experience for the present often inversely affects how much joy versus pain they will experience in the future. Do people make choices that maximize their overall happiness? Prior research suggests that people are generally myopic (i.e., over‐choosing joy for the present). We suggest that the prior research...

Marketers often use messages such as “Stock up and save” to encourage consumers to buy more units of a product. Governments use messages such as “Store at least a two-week supply of water and food” to encourage consumers to stock up on essentials for emergencies. This research finds that these messages may not work as effectively as hoped and intro...

We introduce the idea of deterring undesirable behaviors by raising incivility awareness—sensitivity to when one is violating norms of civil behavior. We demonstrate that this approach is effective in deterring pedestrians from crossing intersections at red lights, which is a serious worldwide safety problem. In three field experiments conducted at...

This research studies repetition decisions, namely, whether to repeat a behavior (e.g., a purchase) after receiving an incentive (e.g., a discount). Can uncertainty drive repetition? Four experiments, all involving real consequences for each individual participant, document a counterintuitive reinforcing-uncertainty effect: individuals repeat a beh...

One way to pursue happiness is to improve the objective levels of external outcomes such as wealth; that is an economic approach. Another way to pursue happiness is to improve the arrangement of and choices among external outcomes without substantively altering their objective levels; that is a hedonomic approach. This chapter reviews research adop...

People often encounter inherently meaningless numbers, such as scores in health apps or video games, that increase as they take actions. This research explored how the pattern of change in such numbers influences performance. We found that the key factor is acceleration-namely, whether the number increases at an increasing velocity. Six experiments...

Can a reward of an uncertain magnitude be more motivating than a reward of a certain magnitude? This research documents the motivating-uncertainty effect and specifies when this effect occurs. People invest more effort, time, and money to qualify for an uncertain reward (e.g., a 50% chance at $2 and a 50% chance at $1) than a certain reward of a hi...

The solicitation of charitable donations costs billions of dollars annually. Here, we introduce a virtually costless method for boosting charitable donations to a group of needy persons: merely asking donors to indicate a hypothetical amount for helping one of the needy persons before asking donors to decide how much to donate for all of the needy...

High productivity and high earning rates brought about by modern technologies make it possible for people to work less and enjoy more, yet many continue to work assiduously to earn more. Do people overearn-forgo leisure to work and earn beyond their needs? This question is understudied, partly because in real life, determining the right amount of e...

This research examines sellers' price-setting behavior and discovers a naturally occurring mismatch between sellers and buyers: Sellers who make a price decision often consider alternative prices and engage in the joint evaluation mode, whereas buyers who make a purchase decision see only the finally set price and are in the single evaluation mode....

As a resource-allocation method, free competition is generally considered more efficient and fairer than binding assignment, yet individuals’ hedonic experiences in these different resource-allocation conditions are largely ignored. Using a minimalistic experimental simulation procedure, we compared participants’ hedonic experiences between a free-...

Standard economic analysis assumes that people make choices that maximize their utility. Yet both popular discourse and other fields assume that people sometimes fail to make optimal choices and thus adversely affect their own happiness. Most social sciences thus frequently describe some patterns of decision as suboptimal. We review evidence of sub...

This research examines whether a low-ranking member in a high-status category (e.g., a low-end model of a high-end brand) or a high-ranking member in a low-status category (e.g., a high-end model of a low-end brand) is favored, holding the objective qualities of the items constant. Brand equity research suggests that the quality of a brand is more...

This research examines whether a low-status member in a high-status category (e.g., a low-end Audi) or a high-status member in a low-status category (e.g., a high-end Volkswagen) is favored when they are evaluated separately, holding the objective value of these items constant. Based on the research on brand equity, one might expect that an option...

When making purchase decisions, consumers want objective product specifications and seek direct product comparison. The present research demonstrates that consumers can make better decisions (i.e., choose what yields a better consumption experience) if objective specifications are removed and direct comparison is inhibited than if not, and this is...

This research examined how one affectively reacts to others' guesses at a value one cares about, such as one's income. Conventional wisdom suggests that people will feel happier upon receiving more favorable guesses (e.g., higher income) than less favorable guesses. We found the opposite pattern. We propose a model to explain the effect and identif...

Simona Botti and Christopher K. Hsee, ‘Dazed and confused by choice: How the temporal costs of choice freedom lead to undesirable outcomes’, Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes 112, no. 2, 2010.

A central question in psychology and economics is the determination of whether individuals react differently to different values of a cared-about attribute (e.g., different income levels, different gas prices, and different ambient temperatures). Building on and significantly extending our earlier work on preference reversals between joint and sepa...

We propose that individuals underestimate the costs of making choices relative to the benefits of finding the best option. Specifically, we demonstrate that research participants make systematic mistakes in predicting the effect of having more, vs. less, choice freedom on task performance and task-induced affect. Even when participants have the inf...

There are many apparent reasons why people engage in activity, such as to earn money, to become famous, or to advance science. In this report, however, we suggest a potentially deeper reason: People dread idleness, yet they need a reason to be busy. Accordingly, we show in two experiments that without a justification, people choose to be idle; that...

A central question in consumer and happiness research is whether happiness depends on absolute or relative levels of wealth and consumption. To address this question, the authors evaluate a finer level than overall happiness and distinguish three specific types of happiness: with money, with the acquisition of an item, and with the consumption of a...

When people are asked to assess or compare the value of experienced or hypothetical events, one of the most intriguing observations is their apparent insensitivity to event duration. The authors propose that duration insensitivity occurs when stimuli are evaluated in isolation because they typically lack comparison information. People should be abl...

Suppose an individual loses an irreplaceable object and someone else is at fault. How much should he be compensated? Normatively, compensation should equal the value (utility) to the victim. Our experiments demonstrate that compensation decisions often ignore value and are instead based on cost (how much the victim originally paid for the item) exc...

We offer a framework about when and how specifications (e.g., megapixels of a camera and number of air bags in a massage chair) influence consumer preferences and report five studies that test the framework. Studies 1-3 show that even when consumers can directly experience the relevant products and the specifications carry little or no new informat...

Abstract Acentral and still open question in consumer and happiness research is whether happiness

While any improvement in wealth and consumption will likely increase happiness, the increased happiness may or may not last long. In this article we offer two recommendations to make the increased happiness sustainable. The first one-to invest resources to promote adaptation-resistant rather than adaptation-prone consumption-seeks to make the incre...

Darwin argued that emotional experience should be affected, in part, by feedback from the skeletal musculature. Since Darwin's time, researchers have documented that emotional experience is shaped by both facial and postural feedback. Two experiments were conducted to determine whether emotional experience and facial expression are influenced by vo...

A field study conducted in Shanghai identified a robust inconsistency between real estate developers' desired sales pattern (selling all apartments in a building at similar rates) and the actual sales pattern (selling good apartments faster). The authors explained this inconsistency with Tversky, Sattath, and Slovic (1988)'s prominence principle, a...

Satisfaction with a dynamic outcome is positively related to its value, the change in the value, and the rate of change. Proposed in this article is another outcome-satisfaction relation: Satisfaction is positively related to the change in the rate, or quasi-acceleration (QA). We tested this proposition (a) in a direct comparison paradigm where Ss...

One way to increase happiness is to increase the objective levels of external outcomes; another is to improve the presentation and choices among external outcomes without increasing their objective levels. Economists focus on the first method. We advocate the second, which we call hedonomics. Hedonomics studies (a) relationships between presentatio...

Most behavioral decision studies are about internal inconsistencies of decisions - that decisions (choices or judgments) made in one condition are different from decisions made in an apparently different but normatively equivalent condition. The present article reviews behavioral decision studies that suggest a more substantive inconsistency - that...

George Loewenstein is one of the pioneers of the rapidly growing field of behavioral economics. For over twenty years he has been working at the intersection of economics and psychology and is one of the few people of whom it can be said that their work is equally respected and well known within both disciplines. This book brings together a selecti...

George Loewenstein is one of the pioneers of the rapidly growing field of behavioral economics. For over twenty years he has been working at the intersection of economics and psychology and is one of the few people of whom it can be said that their work is equally respected and well known within both disciplines. This book brings together a selecti...

To maximize happiness, one could either improve desired external outcomes (e.g., wealth) or optimize the relationship between desired external outcome and happiness without improving the outcome per se. Economics focuses on the first method. The present chapter advocates a science about the second method, which we term hedonomics. With its objectiv...

Most happiness researchers use semantic differential or Likert scales to assess happiness. Such conventionally used scales are susceptible to scale renorming (interpretation of scales differently in different contexts) and can produce a specious relativism effect (e.g., rating a low-income person happier than a high-income person in situations wher...

This research explores whether there are systematic cross-national differences in choice-inferred risk preferences between Americans and Chinese. Study 1 found(a) that the Chinese were signi®cantly more risk seeking than the Americans, yet(b) that both nationals predicted exactly the opposite Ð that the Americans wouldbe more risk seeking. Study 2...

Intellectual property piracy is a significant global problem and an enormous problem for U.S. companies and policymakers. This article examines why typically law-abiding people are more inclined to steal intellectual property products than more tangible, material products. The authors propose that the inclination to pay for certain types of goods a...

In a field study, we identified an intriguing inconsistency between real estate developers' desired sales pattern (selling all apartments at the same rate) and the actual sales pattern (selling good apartments faster). We explained this inconsistency with Tversky, Sattath and Slovic (1988)'s prominence principle, according to which buyers, who were...

One of the main themes that has emerged from behavioral decision research during the past three decades is the view that people's preferences are often constructed in the process of elicitation. This idea is derived from studies demonstrating that normatively equivalent methods of elicitation (e.g., choice and pricing) give rise to systematically d...

One of the main themes that has emerged from behavioral decision research during the past three decades is the view that people's preferences are often constructed in the process of elicitation. This idea is derived from studies demonstrating that normatively equivalent methods of elicitation (e.g., choice and pricing) give rise to systematically d...

One of the main themes that has emerged from behavioral decision research during the past three decades is the view that people's preferences are often constructed in the process of elicitation. This idea is derived from studies demonstrating that normatively equivalent methods of elicitation (e.g., choice and pricing) give rise to systematically d...

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest among psychologists and other social scientists in subjective well-being and happiness. Here we review selected contributions to this development from the literature on behavioral-decision theory. In particular, we examine many, somewhat surprising, findings that show people systematically fail to pred...

This research investigates an understudied decision heuristic, the majority rule. By using the rule, decision makers choose the option superior on most of the available cues. Cues are broadly defined, including advisors and attributes. We propose that decision makers are more likely to use the majority rule when encouraged to employ intra-cue compa...

We examine three determinants of the relationship between the magnitude of a stimulus and a person's subjective value of the stimulus: the process by which value is assessed (either by feeling or by calculation),the evaluability of the relevantmagnitude variable (whether the desirability of a given level of that variable can be evaluated independen...

This research examines whether a low-ranking member in a high-status category (e.g., a low-end model of a high-end brand) or a high-ranking member in a low-status category (e.g., a high-end model of a low-end brand) is favored, holding the objective qualities of the items constant. Brand equity research suggests that the quality of a brand is more...

This research identifies a new source of failure to make accurate affective predictions or to make experientially optimal choices. When people make predictions or choices, they are often in the joint evaluation (JE) mode; when people actually experience an event, they are often in the single evaluation (SE) mode. The "utility function" of an attrib...

This research investigated the relationship between the magnitude or scope of a stimulus and its subjective value by contrasting 2 psychological processes that may be used to construct preferences: valuation by feeling and valuation by calculation. The results show that when people rely on feeling, they are sensitive to the presence or absence of a...

Decision-makers are sometimes depicted as impulsive and overly influenced by ‘hot’, affective factors. The present research suggests that decision-makers may be too ‘cold’ and overly focus on rationalistic attributes, such as economic values, quantitative specifications, and functions. In support of this proposition, we find a systematic inconsiste...

A medium-for example, points or money-is a token people receive as the immediate reward of their effort. It has no value in and of itself, but it can be traded for a desired outcome. Experiments demonstrate that, when people are faced with options entailing different outcomes, the presence of a medium can alter what option they choose. This effect...

Although both cognitive and motivational factors can influence the communication of uncertain information, most of the work investigating the communication of uncertainty has focused on cognitive factors. In this article, we demonstrate that motivational factors influence the communication of private, uncertain information and we describe the relat...

Prospect theory's S-shaped weighting function is often said to reflect the psychophysics of chance. We propose an affective rather than psychophysical deconstruction of the weighting function resting on two assumptions. First, preferences depend on the affective reactions associated with potential outcomes of a risky choice. Second, even with monet...

Virtually all current theories of choice under risk or uncertainty are cognitive and consequentialist. They assume that people assess the desirability and likelihood of possible outcomes of choice alternatives and integrate this information through some type of expectation-based calculus to arrive at a decision. The authors propose an alternative t...

We use insurance behavior as a context to study affective influences in seemingly purely monetary decisions. We report two related findings. First, people are more willing to purchase insurance for an object at stake, the more affection they have for the object, holding the amount of compensation constant. Second, if the object is damaged, people a...

In this research, it is proposed that, when making a choice between consumption goods, people do not just think about which option will deliver the highest consumption utility but also think about which choice is most consistent with rationales--beliefs about how they should make decisions. The present article examines a specific rationale, value s...

In this article, we describe a multistudy project designed to explain observed cross-national differences in risk taking between respondents from the People's Republic of China and the United States. Using this example, we develop the following recommendations for cross-cultural investigations. First, like all psychological research, cross-cultural...

Au cours des deux dernie`res de´cennies, on a beaucoup publie´ sur la culture et la psychologie interculturelle d’une part, sur le jugement et la prise de de´cision d’autre part (judgment and decision making: J/DM). Ces deux domaines ont e´te´ rapproche´s par peu de chercheurs dont on passe ici en revue les travaux. On s’inte´resse plus particulie`...

The evaluability hypothesis posits that when two objects are evaluated separately, whether a given attribute of the objects can differentiate the evaluations of these objects depends on whether the attribute is easy or difficult to evaluate independently. The article discusses how the evaluability hypothesis explains joint-separate evaluation rever...

Arguably, all judgments and decisions are made in 1 (or some combination) of 2 basic evaluation modes-joint evaluation mode (JE), in which multiple options are presented simultaneously and evaluated comparatively, or separate evaluation mode (SE), in which options are presented in isolation and evaluated separately. This article reviews recent lite...

In this study, respondents from the P.R.C., U.S.A., Germany, and Poland were found to differ in risk preference, as measured by buying prices for risky financial options. Chinese respondents were significantly less risk-averse in their pricing than Americans when risk preference was assessed in the traditional expected-utility framework. However, t...

This research demonstrates a less-is-better e€ect in three contexts: (1) a person giving a $45 scarf as a gift was perceived to be more generous than one giving a $55 coat; (2) an over®lled ice cream serving with 7 oz of ice cream was valued more than an under®lled serving with 8 oz of ice cream; (3) a dinnerware set with 24 intact pieces was judge...

This research examines whether each of two different options of comparable overall quality will be perceived more positively when presented in isolation and evaluated separately (separate evaluation) or when juxtaposed and evaluated side by side (joint evaluation). Six studies, involving either judgment or choice as the dependent variable, reveal a...

Two studies attempted to discriminate between a situationaleconomic and a cultural explanation for the recently reported finding that Chinese from the People's Republic of China (PRC) are more risk-seeking than Americans. Both studies compared American and Chinese proverbs related to risk and risk-taking. The first study added Germany as a control...

This research examined whether people can accurately predict the risk preferences of others.Three experiments featuring different designs revealed a systematic bias: that participants predicted others to be more risk seeking than themselves in risky choices, regardless of whether the choices were between options with negative outcomes or with posit...

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...

When making judgments, one may encounter not only justifiable factors, i.e., attributes which the judge thinks that he/she should take into consideration, but also unjustifiable factors, i.e, attributes which the judge wants to take into consideration but knows he/she should not. It is proposed that the influence of an unjustifiable fact on one's j...

This research is concerned with task-oriented decision situations where the decision maker faces two options, one superior on a factor directly related to the given task (called the A factor) and the other superior on a factor not central to the accomplishment of the task but tempting to the decision maker (called the B factor). According to the el...

explores how individuals try to control their own feelings and the feelings of other people / discuss a framework for understanding emotional regulation . . . called emotional intelligence / [discusses] individual differences in people's abilities to exert effective control over their emotional lives / look at some behavioral strategies employed to...

Reports an error in the original article by C. K. Hsee and R. P. Abelson ( Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 1991[Mar], Vol 60[3], 341–347). The note to Table 2 on Page 345 is incorrect. Instead of greater numbers in the table indicating greater satisfaction, smaller numbers in the table indicate greater satisfaction. (The following ab...

Reports an error in the original article by C. K. Hsee and R. P. Abelson ( Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 1991[Mar], Vol 60[3], 341–347). The note to Table 2 on Page 345 is incorrect. Instead of greater numbers in the table indicating greater satisfaction, smaller numbers in the table indicate greater satisfaction. (The following ab...

Social scientists have found that satisfaction with an outcome is positively related not just to the position (i.e., actual level) of the outcome, but also to the displacement (i.e., directional difference) between the current level and a reference level. Extending the displacement notion, the present research hypothesized that satisfaction is posi...