Irwin P Levin

Irwin P Levin
University of Iowa | UI

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162
Publications
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Publications

Publications (162)
Article
Despite evidence often showing differences between groups with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and neurotypical controls in moral judgment, the precise nature of these differences has been difficult to establish. At least two reasons for this are (1) that ASD (and its associated characteristics) is difficult to define and (2) that morality, and the...
Article
In this study, we focus on the role of social functioning on consumer behavior, exploring social media use as a mediating factor. In order to facilitate our identification of social functioning competence as a factor, we increased the range by including a subgroup of respondents who identified themselves as being on the autism spectrum. Indeed, thi...
Article
The purpose of this paper is to examine whether strong arguments provided in a commercial perform the same for exciting and sincere brands. Across three experiments, we vary brand personality (exciting versus sincere brands) and supporting argument quality (strong vs. weak), and find that consumers have more favorable attitudes toward sincere brand...
Chapter
In this chapter we describe research done by our group and others comparing the decision making of persons identified with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with controls. In this research a variety of tasks and measures were used to create a profile of similarities and differences between groups. In particular, the differences were related to dual pr...
Article
We compare the impact of round and non-round numbers used in a communication message on consumers’ evaluations and judgments towards the associated target entity. We find that the use of non-round numbers, in contrast to round numbers, in a message frame results in increased attention to numerical values, which further leads to a comparison of the...
Article
Decisions vary. They may vary in both content and complexity. People also vary. An important way that people vary is how much they think. Some prior research investigating thinking and decision making largely conflicts with most traditional decision theories. For example, if considering an array of products to choose from, thinking more about the a...
Article
Travelers are often faced with a booking dilemma-to book early or to wait until the last minute.Two studies were undertaken to examine how different ways of framing the booking options canaffect choice. Message framing was used in Study 1 and goal framing in Study 2. Study 1 participantswere given the choice of a trade-off between a cheap but possi...
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Emerging Trends in Product Bundling: Investigating Consumer Choice and Firm Behavior Bundling is the practice of selling two or more products together, often at a discounted price. In this article, we extend the concept of bundling to a wide variety of choice settings. We argue that bundle choice covers consumer decision scenarios which differ with...
Article
This paper investigates how the numerosity bias influences individuals’ allocation of resources between themselves and others, using the backdrop of the traditional dictator game. Across four studies including both hypothetical and real exchanges of money, we show that the form of the numerical value representing the quantity of the resource (e.g.,...
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We focus on the everyday decision making challenges faced by high functioning adults across the Autism Spectrum using both between- andwithin-group comparisons. We usedMturk, backed by a combination of recruiting and screening procedures, to recruit large samples using an online survey. The main differences between groups were: greater relationship...
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Background: Identifying characteristics of HIV-infected adults likely to have poor treatment outcomes can be useful for targeting interventions efficiently. Research in economics and psychology suggests that individuals' intertemporal time preferences, which indicate the extent to which they trade-off immediate vs. future cost and benefits, can in...
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The area of decision making has much to offer in our effort to understand special populations. This pilot study is an example of just such a project, where we illustrate how traditional decision making tools and tasks can be used to uncover strengths and weaknesses within a growing population of young adults with autism. In this pilot project we ex...
Article
Recent research has demonstrated that decision-making competence (DMC), a latent construct reflecting individual differences in rational thought, is predictive of real-world decision outcomes at various stages of life. This construct has been shown to be associated with concurrent and retrospective accounts of health-risking behavior, but its predi...
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It is important to understand the impact of individual differences in decision making from childhood to adulthood. This cohort-based study extends our knowledge by comparing decision making of children across the age range of 8 to 17 years and their parents. Based on prior research and theory focusing on different types of framing effects, we uncov...
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SUMMARY To represent the state-of-the-art in an effort to understand the relation between personality and risk taking, we selected a popular decision task with characteristics that parallel risk taking in the real world and two personality traits commonly believed to influence risk taking. A meta-analysis is presented based on 22 studies of the Bal...
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• In this chapter, we illustrate how framing effects can be used to examine the complementary contributions of behavioral and neuroscience research in understanding neuroeconomic decision processes, particularly those involving risk. Framing effects are ubiquitous in everyday life, yet they can be studied under controlled conditions with simple man...
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This study was designed to develop a methodology for measuring economic satisfaction and showing how individuals form intuitive impressions of economic satisfaction. Hypothetical economic situations were created by factorially manipulating salary level, raise, and inflation rate. Subjects rated each situation on an impersonal scale of financial wel...
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Each of 37 college students was asked to rate and indicate how many times he had seen each movie in a list of 54 popular old movies to be used for assembling a college film festival. The student was then shown a set of ratings said to have been supplied by a committee selecting movies for the festival. Finally, he was asked to rerate each movie, gi...
Article
In one verbal discrimination transfer paradigm, the incorrect items from List 1 were used as the incorrect items on Last 2 and paired with new correct items. In another paradigm, the correct items from List 1 were used as the incorrect items on List 2 and paired with new correct items. Subjective frequency carryover from List 1 to List 2 was assume...
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A mediation paradigm employing a “double-function” paired-associate list for the acquisition of the A-B and B-C chaining associations was investigated. Following acquisition of the double-function list, Ss received four multiple-choice test trials on a list containing “chaining” items for which one alternative could be chosen on the basis of a medi...
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Ss were presented with person-descriptions each consisting of five positive (P) or five negative (N) adjectives supplied by a source of assumed low (L) credibility and one to five adjectives of opposite value supplied by a source of high (H) credibility. Mean impression responses were incremented or decremented by equal amounts as the number of P o...
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Many real-life decisions in complex and changing environments are guided by the decision maker's beliefs, such as her perceived control over decision outcomes (i.e., agency), leading to phenomena like the "illusion of control". However, the neural mechanisms underlying the "agency" effect on belief-based decisions are not well understood. Using fun...
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New experimental designs and analytic techniques are presented for investigating serial effects in verbal discrimination. These designs and techniques derive from earlier studies of serial information integration. On a given study trial, feedback is presented for a fixed percentage of the items. Across items in the list, feedback-nonfeedback sequen...
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Mediated facilitation was found in the A-B, B-C, C-D, A-D chaining paradigm using methods that closely paralleled those of prior three-stage experiments that reliably produced inferred mediation effects. The A terms were paralogs, the B and C terms were highly associated nouns, and the D terms were CVCs. All four stages were executed in the laborat...
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Recent research on human judgment and decision making has shown that subjects can use their perception of the relation between stimulus dimensions to infer or impute a value for missing information. Considerable individual differences have been evident. The present study tested the hypothesis that individual differences in the magnitude of the infe...
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Numeracy or one's ability to appropriately process and use numerical information has been shown to be an important individual difference factor in decision making. The current study utilized a risky decision-making task (called the “cups task”) in which choices are made to both earn and avoid losing hypothetical money. Critically, this design allow...
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Forty Ss received 160 presentations of each of four word-pairs in a variation of the noncontingent binary-choice probability learning paradigm. Successive presentations of any given word-pair were separated by the interpolated presentations of other word-pairs. For each pair, one of the words was designated as correct on a randomly-chosen 70% of th...
Article
Information integration theory was used to study how qualitatively different job characteristics (salary, work load, and prestige) combine to influence occupational desirability in a task requiring the rating of unidentified occupations. In a second task, subjects were asked to rate overall desirability and component factors for a series of actual...
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The set-size effect in impression formation has been a highly reliable phenomenon when set size was varied as a within-S factor, but this effect has often been absent in between-S designs. Researchers have questioned the use of one or the other of these design techniques and have consequently labeled as artifactual either the presence or absence of...
Article
Recent research using late adolescent (18–19 years) and adult samples suggests that within‐subject performance on a variety of standard, controlled laboratory tasks reflects a higher‐order positive manifold of decision‐making competence. The present paper extends this important work by testing whether preadolescent children (10‐ to 11‐year‐olds, n...
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Affective neuroscience has helped guide research and theory development in judgment and decision-making by revealing the role of emotional processes in choice behavior, especially when risk is involved. Evidence is emerging that qualitatively and quantitatively different processes may be involved in risky decision-making for gains and losses. We st...
Chapter
In conclusion, rather than present a summary of the preceding chapters, we invited nine eminent past presidents of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) to provide personal perspectives on the concept of JDM as a dynamic skill. These scholars were not asked to comment on the chapters in this book, but rather to highlight their persona...
Article
The ability to make advantageous decisions in the face of uncertainty is an essential human skill, yet the development of such abilities over the lifespan is still not well understood. In the current study, from childhood through older adulthood, we tracked the developmental trajectory of risk taking for gains and losses, and expected value (EV) se...
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A within-subjects study investigated several different risky-choice framing problems patterned after Kahneman and Tversky’s classic economic game, the Asian Disease problem, but included variations to increase generality. Risk-style and thinking-style were utilized to predict individual differences in response to the framing problems. Significant f...
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This manuscript is a review of recent research related to individual differences and message framing. Message framing is the manipulation of the language in a communication in an attempt to alter attitudes or behavior. Message frames refer to whether a persuasive appeal emphasizes the positive consequences of adapting a particular behavior (gain-fr...
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Traditional attribute framing effects occur when the same object is evaluated differently depending on whether a particular attribute is labeled or framed in positive or negative terms. For example, in one of our earlier studies, "80% lean ground beef" was evaluated more favorably and was "worth" 8 cents more per pound than "20% fat ground beef." I...
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Human decision-making involving independent events is often biased and affected by prior outcomes. Using a controlled task that allows us to manipulate prior outcomes, the present study examined the effect of prior outcomes on subsequent decisions in a group of young adults. We found that participants were more risk-seeking after losing a gamble (r...
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Using a sample of 43 7–8-year olds and their parents, we examined the extent to which children's judgments about food products are influenced by the same factors as their parents'. The factors manipulated were healthiness of product, brand name familiarity, and use of licensed cartoon characters (children) or celebrity endorsers (parents). Brand na...
Article
The current research identifies and deals with country-specific survey response biases. In Study 1 survey responses concerning the use of sugar and sweeteners in food products were compared across large samples of respondents in 10 countries. In Study 2 ratings based on actual taste tests of a soft drink were compared across 3 countries. Evidence o...
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Risky decision-making is significantly affected by homeostatic states associated with different prior risk experiences, yet the neural mechanisms have not been well understood. Using functional MRI, we examined how gambling decisions and their underlying neural responses were modulated by prior risk experiences, with a focus on the insular cortex s...
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Several lines of functional neuroimaging studies have attributed a role for the insula, a critical component of the brain's emotional circuitry, in risky decision-making. However, very little evidence yet exists as to whether the insula is necessary for advantageous decision-making under risk, specifically decisions involving uncertain gains and lo...
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We relate performance on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), a widely used, but complex, neuropsychological task of executive function in which mixed outcomes (gains and losses) are experienced together, to performance on a relatively simpler descriptive task, the Cups task, which isolates adaptive decision making for achieving gains and avoiding losses....
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Making a risky decision is a complex process that involves evaluation of both the value of the options and the associated risk level. Yet the neural processes underlying these processes have not so far been clearly identified. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and a task that simulates risky decisions, we found that the dorsal region of t...
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Using five variants of the Asian Disease Problem, we dissected the risky-choice framing effect by requiring each participant to provide preference ratings for the full decision problem and also to provide attractiveness ratings for each of the component parts, i.e., the sure-thing option and the risky option. Consistent with previous research, more...
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Using five variants of the Asian Disease Problem, we dissected the risky-choice framing effect by requiring each participant to provide preference ratings for the full decision problem and also to provide attractiveness ratings for each of the component parts, i.e., the sure-thing option and the risky option. Consistent with previous research, more...
Article
Do decisions about potential gains and potential losses require different neural structures for advantageous choices? In a lesion study, we used a new measure of adaptive decision making under risk to examine whether damage to neural structures subserving emotion affects an individual's ability to make adaptive decisions differentially for gains an...
Article
The relation between decision making under ambiguity and risky decision making was examined. In Studies 1 and 2, choices under ambiguity were measured for a large sample receiving an Ellsberg-type Ambiguity-Probability Tradeoff Task. Participants with extreme scores were recruited for Part 2 of each study which consisted of a risky decision making...
Article
In a 3-year follow-up to Levin and Hart's (2003) study, we observed the same children, now 9–11 years old, and their parents in the same risky decision-making task. At the aggregate level the same pattern of means was observed across time periods. At the individual level the key variables were significantly correlated across time periods for both c...
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While previous research has found that children make more risky decisions than their parents, little is known about the developmental trajectory for the ability to make advantageous decisions. In a sample of children, 5--11 years old, we administered a new risky decision making task in which the relative expected value (EV) of the risky and riskles...
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This article presents an introduction to and analysis of an emerging area of research, namely decision neuroscience, whose goal is to integrate research in neuroscience and behavioral decision making. The article includes an exposition of (1) how the exponential accumulation of knowledge in neuroscience can potentially enrich research on decision m...
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In this paper, we stress the contribution to basic knowledge of consumer behavior through Decision Neuroscience which combines the methods and theories of Behavioral Decision Making and Neuroscience. We will conclude by describing a planned cross-cultural study of consumer decision making using this approach. Decision Neuroscience represents a more...
Article
Two hundred and forty research participants of varying ages completed a two-part procedure in which framing experiments were conducted and personality factors were assessed. We operationally defined information framing according to the attribute-, goal-, and risky choice-framing paradigms and made our tasks as similar as possible to everyday risky...
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In order to develop the optimal mix of online and offline services for a particular product, marketers must determine which key attributes are perceived by their target market to be delivered better online or offline. A multi-part survey was administered to assess how product attribute evaluations drive differences in online/offline shopping prefer...
Article
A two-stage procedure (consideration set formation and final choice) was used to track the emergence of gender biases in hiring and firing decisions. Participants were allowed to select their own strategy for narrowing choice options (which candidates to retain or which candidates to delete). Each of the two experiments included a condition where j...
Article
Using a pull-down menu search technique, we study how ability (knowledge level) and motivation (accountability) interact with decision phase (consideration vs. choice) to affect consumers' search costs (amount of search), benefit (confidence) and efficiency (benefit for a given amount of search). We find that consumers adapt their search strategies...
Article
New methods were developed for studying risky decision making in children as young as age five. Each child was given a block of ‘gain’ trials, for example, a choice between a sure gain of one prize and a 50:50 chance of gaining either two prizes or no prize, and a block of ‘loss’ trials, for example, a choice between a sure loss of one prize and a...
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This paper addresses the question of how to combine online and offline services in the most complementary way for different product classes. In a series of surveys conducted for Experiment 1 it was determined that consumers' preferences for online and offline services differ for different products at different stages of th e shopping experience. Th...
Article
Consumers in the U.S. and Italy were asked to either build up from a consumable base product (pizza) by adding components or scale down from a fully-loaded product by subtracting components. In each country consumers ended up with significantly more ingredients, and a pizza for a higher cost, in the Scale Down Condition than in the Build Up Conditi...
Article
To investigate whether patients are influenced by the order in which they learn the risks and benefits of a treatment and whether this effect is attenuated by a treatment's associated risk and/or benefit. Subjects were randomized to review 1 of 6 medical treatment information brochures. Waiting rooms of primary care physicians at an academic health...
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Levin, Schneider, and Gaeth (1998) identified three distinct types of framing effects in the literature: attribute framing effects, goal framing effects, risky choice framing effects. While most previous framing studies used between-subjects manipulations of frame, the present study used two sessions, spaced one week apart, to give each of 102 part...
Article
This study investigates the antecedents (task and decision maker characteristics) and consequences (set size and decision quality) of prescreening strategy selection. In Experiment 1 we investigated which strategy, inclusion or exclusion, is more natural for narrowing choices in tasks with a single correct answer; about 70% of the participants sele...
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In this paper, we describe two experiments in which we assessed the validity of phased narrowing, a new process tracing technique designed to help researchers better understand multiattribute evaluation processes. Specifically, in Experiment 1 we examined the distribution of choices across successive decision stages and the attitudes and perception...
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Research on prescreening processes in decision making was extended by manipulating task valence in a series of three experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2, half the subjects had the ‘positive’ task of screening and then selecting someone to hire for a job and half had the ‘negative’ task of screening and then selecting someone to fire, where the choi...
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This paper first discusses historic differences in the way that personality psychologists and decision-making researchers have studied risk-taking, and then describes a preliminary study that combines elements of the two approaches. Using an Italian sample of varying age levels, this study examined the relations among personality traits (the Big-Fi...
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Cites the existence of information framing effects as an interesting phenomenon in the area of human judgements and decision-making. Uses three distinct types of framing effect and the hypothesis identified by Leven et al (1998). Studies the reliability of these effects across samples of subjects in the USA and Australia. Shows that, for two of the...
Article
Subjects (76 adult Italians of varying ages) completed a two-part procedure. One part used an Ellsberg-type task which allowed for both aggregate and individual level analysis of Attitude toward Ambiguity. The other part used an expanded risky choice task to assess the same subjects' Attitude toward Risk. While there was an overall tendency for sub...
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This study investigated the accuracy benefit of incorporating patients' preferences for domains of functioning into health-related quality of life (HRQOL) measurement. Using policy-capturing techniques, 102 medical outpatients judged the HRQOL of 16 scenarios describing varying levels of functioning in 3 domains. For each participant, regression an...
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In this article we examine the impact of asking hypothetical questions on respondents' subsequent decision making. Across several experiments we find that even though such questions are purely hypothetical, respondents are unable to prevent a substantial biasing effect on their behavior. Further, we find that an increase in cognitive elaboration in...
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A model of context effects in product evaluations is tested in which brand alliances play a key role. This three-part study examined the extent to which evaluations of two restaurants are assimilated by virtue of their dual-branding strategic linkage. Key factors in the assimilation process are thought to be the ambiguity of the target restaurant's...
Article
Levin and Jasper's (1995) phased narrowing technique for tracking changes in information usage across successive stages of the decision-making process was combined with Huneke's (1996) “pull-down menu” extension of Payne, Bettman, and Johnson's (1988) software package for generating measures of information processing. Because this technique provide...
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A questionnaire was mailed to 300 Iowa family physicians to determine the influence of a prior psychiatric history on decision making. The response rate was 77%. Respondents were less likely to believe that a patient had serious illness when presenting with a severe headache or abdominal pain if the patient had a prior history of depression ( P <.0...
Article
In each of two experiments respondents were asked to narrow a given set of multiattribute options to a final choice in three successive stages. Some participants were asked to record which options they would include at each stage while others were asked to record which options they would exclude at each stage. The choice options in Experiment 1 wer...
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Accentuate the positive or accentuate the negative? The literature has been mixed as to how the alternative framing of information in positive or negative terms affects judgments and decisions. We argue that this is because different studies have employed different operational definitions of framing and thus have tapped different underlying process...
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This paper explores how consideration of the medical context can add newelements to marketing thought. Differences between the medical context andother consumer contexts are reviewed. The effects that the medical contexthas on the way traditional constructs such as involvement, affect andstress, uncertainty and satisfaction affect choice are discus...
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In two experiments we examine how consumers are affected by a sequence composed of an initial product-failure experience followed by a success experience. Our interest is to assess how consumers' evaluation of the product and of their own performance change after the second experience. A preliminary experiment used hypothetical scenarios describing...
Article
Two experiments tested the hypothesis that framing biases in decision making would affect more strongly individuals with relatively low levels of need for cognition (NC). Participants were classified as high or low NC based on responses to a standard scale and subsequently were exposed to one of two framings of a choice problem. Different choice pr...
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Participants evaluated pairs of hypothetical hybrid products varying in the percentage of American workers employed in manufacturing each product (50% vs. 80%) and the company nationality (American vs. Japanese, German, or Taiwanese). For each pair, participants indicated a preference and reasons for their preference. Employing American workers was...
Article
In a series of three experiments, subjects made risky decisions under conditions of hypothetical or real consequences. Task variations across experiments included: (1) type of risk (monetary gambles or investments of time and effort), (2) within-subject and between-subjects manipulations of consequence condition, and (3) single or multiple decision...
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One appeal to consumer nationalism is to communicate infor-mation about the use of American workers in manufacturing a particular product. Phased narrowing, a newty devetoped process tracing technique, was used to modet how the impact of this information, "framed" differentty across expérimentât conditions, changes over successive decision stages i...
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This paper reports the development with 95 undergraduates of a new method for altering Positive Affect in the laboratory. The method consists of assigning persons to complete a boring task for a specific amount of time and shortly after beginning the task, informing them that the assigned time period has either been increased or reduced. The advant...
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A new process tracing technique is presented which combines elements of traditional process tracing methods and methods designed to study the pre-screening of choice options and the formation of consideration sets. To demonstrate its usefulness, we provide data from a consumer decision making task in which subjects were asked to narrow the number o...
Article
The current study tests for the presence of differential order effects in evaluation tasks with consistent and inconsistent evidence as predicted by the Hogarth and Einhorn (1992) belief-adjustment model. The results, based on both between-subjects and within-subjects experiments, demonstrate that there were significant recency effects with inconsi...
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Traditional judgment and decision-making paradigms were expanded to include differential reactions to persons with leukemia or AIDS. Experiments 1 and 2 adopted Tversky and Kahneman's risky-decision-making task and found support for different value functions for the 2 patient groups when choosing between treatment programs. From these results, the...
Article
Traditional judgment and decision-making paradigms were expanded to include differential reactions to persons with leukemia or AIDS. Experiments 1 and 2 adopted Tversky and Kahneman's risky-decision-making task and found support for different value functions for the 2 patient groups when choosing between treatment programs. From these results, the...
Article
Subjects were asked to judge interevent relations exhibited in 2 × 2 contingency tables such as the following: number of plants which bloomed when given a fertilizer (Cell A), number of plants which did not bloom when given the fertilizer (Cell B), number of plants which bloomed when not given the fertilizer (Cell C), and number of plants which did...
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Subjects rank-ordered their likelihood of purchasing an auto-mobile from each of six companies described by country of origin (America or Japan) and percoitage of Amoican and Japanese woiicers. Additional questions measured p«-ceived differences in quality between Am^ican and Japanese cars and workers, and reactions to "Buy America First." Subjects...
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Consumers' reactions to multi-product bundles — two different products sold for one price — were obtained by systematically varying the attributes of both the primary product (e.g., VCRs) and the tie-in product (e.g., videocassette tapes). Respondents were given written product descriptions as well as the opportunity to inspect the actual products...
Article
Subjects' frame of reference was manipulated in a hypothetical medical decision-making task patterned after Tversky and Kahneman's (1981) “Asian disease task”. Subjects in the positive framing condition received an option of definitely saving one-third of the lives of potential victims of a new outbreak of AIDS and an option with a one-third probab...
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