Kinneret Teodorescu

• PhD behavioral science
• Professor (Assistant) at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

Exploring new ideas is a fundamental aspect of research and development (R\&D), which often occurs in competitive environments. Most ideas are subsequent, i.e. one idea today leads to more ideas tomorrow. According to one approach, the best way to encourage exploration is by granting protection on discoveries to the first innovator. Correspondingly...

Honesty, defined as freedom from fraud or deception, is widely valued in many aspects of life, from personal relationships to professional settings. Yet acts of dishonesty remain widespread, including political and corporate scandals, misinformation, personal betrayal, and so on. Understanding honesty and the factors that influence it provides insi...

Many social challenges stem from individuals' tendency to prefer immediately rewarding but suboptimal behaviors ("Give-Up" options) over more costly endeavors that yield much better outcomes in the long run ("Try" options). For example, many people forgo the long-term benefits of formal education, healthy diets, learning new technologies, and even...

The authors argue that a wise use of big data technology can facilitate the enforcement of laws and regulations in two ways: it can reduce the necessity of severe and costly punishments, and can reduce invasion of privacy. This suggestion rests on two key observations. First, examining basic decision research reveals that experience leads people to...

Dishonesty has become a trending topic in the behavioral sciences. To quantify dishonest behavior, various experimental paradigms have been introduced. These experimental paradigms differ along several methodological dimensions. We analyze three such dimensions: Elasticity - the resolution with which facts can be misreported, Traceability - whether...

Intertemporal trade-offs between small, temporally proximate benefits and larger, delayed benefits are frequent in our everyday lives. Most research on intertemporal choices has been focused on “one-shot” descriptive and hypothetical scenarios which involve large scales of both money and time. Yet, in daily life, many small intertemporal decisions...

Insufficient exploration of one’s surroundings is at the root of many real-life problems, as demonstrated by many famous biases (e.g., the status quo bias, learned helplessness). The current work focuses on the emergence of this phenomenon at the strategy level: the tendency to under-explore the set of available choice strategies. We demonstrate th...

Significance Ramifications of seemingly small violations, such as not adhering to COVID-19 regulations, accumulate fast with dire social consequences. The high costs of close monitoring and severe sanctions often lead policymakers to prioritize either the probability of inspection or the severity of punishments. Using common one-shot, descriptive s...

Many real-life choices are based on previous experiences. Research devoted to these decisions from experience has typically employed static settings, where the probability of a given outcome is constant across trials. However, recent studies of repeated choice suggest that people tend to follow perceived patterns of outcomes even when true patterns...

Incentive-based intervention programs aimed at promoting healthy eating behaviors usually focus on incentivizing repeating the desired behavior. Unfortunately, even when effective, these interventions are often short-lived and do not lead to a lasting behavioral change. We present a new type of intervention program focused on incentivizing explorat...

External enforcement policies aimed to reduce violations differ on two key components: the probability of inspection and the severity of punishments. Different lines of research offer competing predictions regarding the relative importance of each component. In three incentive compatible studies, students and Prolific crowdsourcing participants (Nt...

Background Most existing research on medical clowns in health care services has investigated their usefulness mainly among child health consumers. In this research we examined multiple viewpoints of medical staff, clowns, and health consumers aiming to identify the optimal audience (adult or child health consumers) for which medical clowns are most...

Background – Most existing research on medical clowns in health care service has investigated their usefulness among child health consumers. In a 360-degree research stream, we aim to identify the optimal audience (adults or children health consumers), for which medical clowns are most useful in enhancing health consumers’ satisfaction and, in turn...

Background – Most existing research on medical clowns in health care services has investigated their usefulness mainly among child health consumers. In this research we examined multiple viewpoints of medical staff, clowns, and health consumers aiming to identify the optimal audience (adult or child health consumers) for which medical clowns are mo...

After making decisions, we often get feedback concerning forgone outcomes (what would have happened had we chosen differently). Yet, many times, our exposure to such feedback is systematically biased. For example, your friends are more likely to tell you about a party you missed if it was fun than if it was boring. Despite its prevalence, the effec...

David Over has made seminal contributions to the study of human rationality, most memorably in the now-classic distinction, made in collaboration with Jonathan Evans, between normative and instrumental rationality. In this chapter, we discuss an under-explored aspect born of the tension between the two: the rationality of searching for further choi...

Searching for and acting upon perceived patterns of regularity is a fundamental learning process critical for adapting to changes in the environment. Yet in more artificial, static settings, in which patterns do not exist, this mechanism could interfere with choice maximization and manifest as unexplained choice variability in later trials. Recentl...

In two studies we provide a novel investigation into the effects of monetary switching costs on choice-inertia (i.e., selection of the same option on consecutive choices). Study 1 employed a static decisions-from-feedback task and found that the introduction of, as well as larger, monetary switching costs led to increases in choice-inertia. While e...

Over the past decade, a large and growing body of experimental research has analyzed dishonest behavior. Yet the findings as to when people engage in (dis)honest behavior are to some extent unclear and even contradictory. A systematic analysis of the factors associated with dishonest behavior thus seems desirable. This meta-analysis reviews four of...

When faced with a decision, people collect information to help them decide. Though it may seem unnecessary, people often continue to search for information about alternatives after they have already chosen an option, even if this choice is irreversible (e.g., checking out other cars after just purchasing one). While previous post-decision search st...

Dishonest behavior is a widespread phenomenon. In the United States alone, tax fraud constitutes lost revenues of $458 billion per year. Over the past decade, a vast body of experimental research has examined dishonest behavior. We meta-integrated 470 of these experiments (with N = 30,043 participants), focusing on the most widely used experimental...

Many behavioral phenomena, including underweighting of rare events and probability matching, can be the product of a tendency to rely on small samples of experiences. Why would small samples be used, and which experiences are likely to be included in these samples? Previous studies suggest that a cognitively efficient reliance on the most recent ex...

Many behavioral phenomena, including underweighting of rare events and probability matching, can be the product of a tendency to rely on small samples of experiences. Why would small samples be used, and which experiences are likely to be included in these samples? Previous studies suggest that a cognitively efficient reliance on the most recent ex...

Does visual fidelity and cognitive fidelity affect learning in a video game? In this paper we present data collected from 65 participants who played one of four different versions of a 3D video game, Heurística, designed to train decision making. We analyzed learning using a 2 cognitive fidelity × 2 visual fidelity between subjects analysis of vari...

Exposure to uncontrollable outcomes has been found to trigger learned helplessness, a state in which the agent, because of lack of exploration, fails to take advantage of regained control. Although the implications of this phenomenon have been widely studied, its underlying cause remains undetermined. One can learn not to explore because the enviro...

The decision whether to explore new alternatives or to choose from familiar ones is implicit in many of our daily activities. How is this decision made? When will deviation from optimal exploration be observed? The current paper examines exploration decisions in the context of a multi-alternative “decisions from experience” task. In each trial, par...

In this study, we explored the time course of haptic stiffness discrimination learning and how it was affected by two experimental factors, the addition of visual information and/or knowledge of results (KR) during training. Stiffness perception may integrate both haptic and visual modalities. However, in many tasks, the visual field is typically o...

Previous research highlights four distinct contributors to the experience-description gap (the observation that people exhibit oversensitivity to rare events in decisions from description and the opposite bias in decisions from experience). These contributors include the nature of small samples, the mere presentation effect, the belief that the env...

The stiffness properties of an environment are perceived during active manual manipulation primarily by processing force cues and position-based tactile, kinesthetic, and visual information. Using a two alternative forced choice (2AFC) stiffness discrimination task, we tested how the perceiver integrates stiffness-related information based on senso...

We submitted three models to the competition which were based on the I-SAW model. The models introduced four new assumptions. In the first model an adjustment process was introduced through which the tendency for exploration was higher at the beginning and decreased over time in the exploration stage. Another new assumption was that surprise as a f...

Perception of compliant objects demands integration of haptic and visual position information with force information. Multisensory interactions are ubiquitous in perception, even at early processing stages, and thus can potentially play a role in learning. In this study we explored humans' improvement on uni-sensory stiffness discrimination as a fu...

Perception of vibration during drilling demands integration of haptic and auditory information with force information. In this study we explored the ability to detect and discriminate changes in vibrotactile stimuli amplitude based either on purely haptic feedback or together with congruent synthesized auditory cues in groups of naive subjects and...