Eduard Brandstätter

• Johannes Kepler University of Linz

The COVID-19 pandemic caused drastic social changes for many people, including separation from friends and coworkers, enforced close contact with family, and reductions in mobility. Here we assess the extent to which people's evolutionarily-relevant basic motivations and goals—fundamental social motives such as Affiliation and Kin Care—might have b...

How does psychology vary across human societies? The fundamental social motives framework adopts an evolutionary approach to capture the broad range of human social goals within a taxonomy of ancestrally recurring threats and opportunities. These motives—self-protection, disease avoidance, affiliation, status, mate acquisition, mate retention, and...

Semantic priming has been studied for nearly 50 years across various experimental manipulations and theoretical frameworks. These studies provide insight into the cognitive underpinnings of semantic representations in both healthy and clinical populations; however, they have suffered from several issues including generally low sample sizes and a la...

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...

What motives do people prioritize in their social lives? Historically, social psychologists, especially those adopting an evolutionary perspective, have devoted a great deal of research attention to sexual attraction and romantic-partner choice (mate seeking). Research on long-term familial bonds (mate retention and kin care) has been less thorough...

An examination of the cognitive tools that the mind uses to grapple with uncertainty in the real world. How do humans navigate uncertainty, continuously making near-effortless decisions and predictions even under conditions of imperfect knowledge, high complexity, and extreme time pressure? Taming Uncertainty argues that the human mind has develope...

What motives do people prioritize in their social lives? Historically, social psychologists, especially those adopting an evolutionary perspective, have devoted a great deal of research attention to sexual attraction and romantic partner choice (mate-seeking). Research on long-term familial bonds (mate retention and kin care) has been less thorough...

What motives do people prioritize in their social lives? Historically, social psychologists, especially those adopting an evolutionary perspective, have devoted a great deal of research attention to sexual attraction and romantic-partner choice (mate-seeking). Research on long-term familial bonds (mate retention and kin care) has been less thorough...

Previous research on the processes involved in risky decisions has rarely linked process data to choice directly. We used a simple measure based on the relative amount of attentional deployment to different components (gains/losses and their probabilities) of a risky gamble during the choice process, and we related this measure to the actual choice...

Although context-based complexity measured as the similarity and conflict across alternatives is dependent on individual preference structures, existing studies investigating the influence of context-based complexity on information search patterns have largely ignored that context-based complexity is user- and preference-dependent. Addressing this...

This article presents a quantitative model comparison contrasting the process predictions of two prominent views on risky choice. One view assumes a trade-off between probabilities and outcomes (or non-linear functions thereof) and the separate evaluation of risky options (expectation models). Another view assumes that risky choice is based on comp...

In this article, we tested two concepts of decision making: expected utility theory and heuristic choice. In Experiment 1, we applied think‐aloud protocols to investigate violations of expected utility theory. In Experiments 2 to 4, we introduced a new process‐tracing method—called predict‐aloud protocols—that has advantages over previously suggest...

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...

An "unprocessed risk" is collection of simple lotteries with a reduction-rule that describes the actual-payoff to the decision-maker as a function of realized lottery outcomes. Experiments reveal that the willingness to pay for unprocessed risks is consistently biased towards the payoff-level in the unprocessed representation. The "anchoring-to-fra...

Bernoulli's framework of expected utility serves as a model for various psychological processes, including motivation, moral sense, attitudes, and decision making. To account for evidence at variance with expected utility, the authors generalize the framework of fast and frugal heuristics from inferences to preferences. The priority, heuristic pred...

Basel, 9. September, 1713. In einem Brief, der an diesem Tag datiert ist, beschreibt Nicholas Bernoulli seinem Freund Pierre de Montmort ein einfaches Glückspiel. Pierre und Paul werfen eine faire Münze. Sollte diese beim ersten Wurf auf „Kopf“ fallen, ist Pierre bereit, Paul zwei Münzen zu bezahlen. Sollte das Ereignis „Kopf“ erst beim zweiten Wur...

Standardization is a cornerstone of any serious psychological test. It is fundamental to a test’s objectivity and reduces subjectivity to a minimum. In this article we demonstrate that standardization alone is a necessary but insufficient condition for a test’s objectivity. By varying the description of test results within a normal curve, we obtain...

Probability judgments are pivotal in guiding human decision making. The prevailing assumption in psychology is that human probability judgments are often biased. We challenge this view and present evidence of humans' remarkable capacities in judging probabilities. In particular, we discuss regression to the mean, probability judgments of conjunctiv...

This article presents a classification method that makes possible the detection of important decision strategies that people use in nonrisky multiattribute decision tasks. The classification method incorporates a multimethod approach that combines elements of both structural modeling and process tracing. We begin with a discussion of nine common ch...

Replies to comments by E. J. Johnson, M. Schulte-Mecklenbeck, and M. C. Willemsen (see records 2008-00265-019 and 2008-00265-020) and M. H. Birnbaum (see records 2008-00265-017 and 2008-00265-018) on the original article by E. Brandstätter, G. Gigerenzer, and R. Hertwig (see record 2006-04733-008). Whereas Johnson et al may have disagreed with...

This study tested the distinction between knowledge-based choices and gambling decisions. Gambling decisions contain stated probabilities, and success depends on chance only. In knowledge-based decisions, in contrast, the probabilities are usually unknown and the outcomes of a choice depend on a person's ability or knowledge. Three different theore...

E. Brandstätter, G. Gigerenzer, and R. Hertwig (2006) showed that the priority heuristic matches or outperforms modifications of expected utility theory in predicting choice in 4 diverse problem sets. M. H. Birnbaum (2008) argued that sets exist in which the opposite is true. The authors agree—but stress that all choice strategies have regions of g...

Ein zentrales Ziel der psychologischen Entscheidungsforschung ist die Identifi kation der kognitiven Strategien von Entscheidungsträgern. Die Kenntnis der von einer Person angewendeten Entscheidungsstrategie erleichtert einerseits die Prognose künftigen Verhaltens und andererseits ermöglicht sie die zielgerichtete Gestaltung von Entscheidungsunters...

Bernoulli's framework of expected utility serves as a model for various psychological processes, including motivation, moral sense, attitudes, and decision making. To account for evidence at variance with expected utility, the authors generalize the framework of fast and frugal heuristics from inferences to preferences. The priority heuristic predi...

Mit der Währungsumstellung in zwölf europäischen Staaten ist das Interesse von Sozialwissenschaftlerinnen an der Preiswahrnehmung gestiegen. Aus ökonomischer Perspektive war der 1. Januar 2002 - der Tag, an welchem der Euro als Bargeld eingeführt wurde - ein irrelevantes Datum. Als Buchgeld galt der Euro bereits seit drei Jahren , die nationalen Wä...

Alle wichtigen Entscheidungstheorien nehmen an, dass sich riskante Entscheidungen mittels Wahrscheinlichkeiten, den möglichen Ausgängen einer Entscheidung sowie einer Funktion, welche Wahrscheinlichkeiten und mögliche Ausgänge zueinander in Beziehung setzt, abbilden lassen. Die bisherige Forschung hat gezeigt, dass Personen sowohl Wahrscheinlichkei...

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...

Much research within decision-making has used the standard gambling paradigm, where decision outcomes depend only on chance. Many real life decisions, however, imply personal control over decision outcomes. This paper addressed the question of how internal controllability influences decision-making. Internal controllability is assumed (i) to enhanc...

The article investigates specific affective reactions to social comparison outcomes within the framework of the contrast-empathy model (Brandstatter, 1998, 2000). One hundred and one participants received vignettes that described social income comparisons between a target person and a comparison other. In these vignettes comparison direction, relat...

This research is an investigation of the hedonic intensities of elation and disappointment following the outcomes of risky gambles using two principles: disappointment aversion and the principle of limited emotion processing. Disappointment aversion implies a stronger impact of disappointment compared with elation; the principle of limited emotion...

The paper (1) presents a new contrast–empathy model to capture affective reactions following a social comparison, and (2) supports the applicability of the value function to social comparisons. Relationship quality and relevance of the comparison dimension are assumed to influence the interplay between contrast and empathy effects. The application...

The article argues to replace null hypothesis significance testing by confidence intervals. Correctly interpreted, confidence intervals avoid the problems associated with null hy-pothesis statistical testing. Confidence intervals are formally valid, do not depend on a-priori hypotheses and do not result in trivial knowledge. The first part presents...

This study with 181 subjects, 79 women and 102 men, randomly chosen from the local area of Upper Austria, is aimed at two major questions, (a) whether or not the validity of Stevens' power function can be replicated (Galanter, 1990) for money utility scaling, and (b) which of three possible determinants (monthly net income, attitudes towards money...

The objectives of this study were to evaluate whether age, sex, underlying renal disease, or the performing surgeon is of prognostic relevance to the patency of the vascular access. In a routine clinical setting, 139 first and 144 further fistula operations were done in 139 patients during 5 yr and were analyzed in retrospect. Within a group of 108...

Pancreas transplantation with systemic venous drainage of the graft causes elevated plasma levels of insulin, known to be a potent regulator of plasma lipoprotein metabolism. We studied 11 post-type I diabetic pancreas-kidney transplant recipients, 9 type I diabetic kidney transplant recipients displaying peripheral hyperinsulinemia due to subcutan...

In 16 members of two Austrian families affected by a missense mutation at codon 188 of the lipoprotein lipase (LPL) gene (8 heterozygous and 8 normal subjects), carrier status for the mutation as determined by DNA analysis was related to LPL activity in postheparin plasma, to the magnitude of postprandial lipemia, and to concentration, composition,...