Shenghua Luan

• PhD
• Professor at Chinese Academy of Sciences

Impulsivity is a personality construct frequently employed to explain and predict important human behaviors. Major inconsistencies in its definition and measurement, however, have led some researchers to call for an outright rejection of impulsivity as a psychological construct. We address this highly unsatisfactory state with a large-scale, prereg...

Why successful leaders must embrace simple strategies in an increasingly uncertain and complex world. Making decisions is one of the key tasks of managers, leaders, and professionals. In Smart Management, Jochen Reb, Shenghua Luan, and Gerd Gigerenzer demonstrate how business leaders can utilize heuristics—simple decision-making strategies adapted...

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has impacted society in many aspects. Alongside this progress, concerns such as privacy violation, discriminatory bias, and safety risks have also surfaced, highlighting the need for the development of ethical, responsible, and socially beneficial AI. In response, the concept of trustworthy AI h...

Heuristics are simple rules that experts and laypeople rely on to make decisions under uncertainty as opposed to situations with calculable risk. The research program on fast‐and‐frugal heuristics studies formal models of heuristics and is motivated by Herbert Simon's seminal work on bounded rationality and satisficing. In this article, we first in...

We propose a novel approach, which we call machine learning strategy identification (MLSI), to uncovering hidden decision strategies. In this approach, we first train machine learning models on choice and process data of one set of participants who are instructed to use particular strategies, and then use the trained models to identify the strategi...

Heuristics are fast, frugal, and accurate strategies that enable rather than limit decision making under uncertainty. Uncertainty, as opposed to calculable risk, is characteristic of most organizational contexts. We review existing research and offer a descriptive and prescriptive theoretical framework to integrate the current patchwork of heuristi...

Controlling the spread of an infectious disease depends critically on the general public’s adoption of preventive measures. Theories of health behavior suggest that risk perceptions motivate preventive behavior. The supporting evidence for this causal link is, however, of questionable validity. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a rare opportunity to e...

We assess the Situational Intelligence (SQ) component of the MirMe assessment system for 21st century skills. MirMe is an online, game-based psychometric instrument developed by LogicMills. The SQ component measures skills related to decision-making and critical thinking. It does so via AI-driven heuristic engines that deploy analogs of “fast and f...

We assess the Situational Intelligence (SQ) component of the MirMe assessment system for 21st century skills. MirMe is an online, game-based psychometric instrument developed by LogicMills. The SQ component measures skills related to decision-making and critical thinking. It does so via AI-driven heuristic engines that deploy analogs of “fast and f...

Reward and punishment change the payoff structures of social interactions and therefore can potentially play a role in promoting prosocial behavior. Yet, there are boundary conditions for them to be effective. We review recent work that addresses the conditions under which rewards and punishment can enhance prosocial behavior, the proximate and ult...

Rationale Tracking the trajectory of people's emotional and behavioral reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic sheds light on how people cope with the emerging crisis, evaluates the impact of emotional reactions on preventive behaviors, and provides insights into how preventive behaviors can be encouraged and maintained in the long term. Objective We a...

Social misalignment occurs when a person’s attitudes and opinions deviate from those of others. We investigated how individuals react to social misalignment in risky (outcome probabilities are known) or ambiguous (outcome probabilities are unknown) decision contexts. During each trial, participants played a forced-choice gamble, and they observed t...

Objective Stroke and ischaemic heart disease have become the leading causes of death in China. We evaluated recognition of stroke and heart attack symptoms and stroke treatment-seeking behaviour in a large representative sample of the Chinese adult population and explored characteristics associated with recognition rates. Design Cross-sectional sur...

Terrorist attacks can occur anywhere. As the threat of terrorism develops, the China-Eurasia Expo held in Ürümqi, China is attracting fewer potential visitors. A nationwide survey of 2034 residents from 31 provinces and municipalities in China was conducted to examine the relation between the distance to respondents’ city of residence from Ürümqi a...

The cultural theory pioneered by Dame Mary Douglas has been tested with a range of research methods, but it has not yet been made subject to a ‘structured observation’. This method has been developed in psychology and management studies, and is especially useful for testing cultural theory’s prediction that fatalistic, hierarchical, egalitarian, an...

Judging an object's value based on relevant cues can be challenging. We propose a simple method to improve judgment accuracy: Instead of estimating a value after seeing all available cues simultaneously, individuals view cues sequentially, one after another, making and adjusting their estimate at each step. The sequential procedure may alleviate co...

We investigated the forgiveness decision as an error-management task and demonstrated how tools from decision science can facilitate testing precise predictions about bias and its cognitive implementation. We combined decision modeling (using a weighting-and-adding model and a lexicographic heuristic) with process-tracing tools that track response...

This study explores how the age (adult vs. peer) and the suggestion (to be fair vs. unfair) of models affect the sharing decisions of 9- and 12-year-olds (N = 365) from Italy and Singapore. Results demonstrate a developmental shift in the influence of models on children's and adolescents’ sharing decisions in both cultures: Children's decisions wer...

Employees' performance provides the basis for many personnel decisions, and to make these decisions, managers often need to integrate information from different performance-related cues. We asked college students and experienced managers to make a series of performance-based personnel decisions and tested how well weighting-and-adding, compensatory...

Whether to forgive is a key decision supporting cooperation. Like many other evolutionarily recurrent decisions, it is made under uncertainty and requires the trade-off of costs and benefits. This decision can be conceptualized as a signal detection or error management task: Forgiving is adaptive if a relationship with the “harmdoer” will be fitnes...

Rationale, aims and objectives: Theories of decision making are divided between those aiming to help decision makers in the real, 'large' world and those who study decisions in idealized 'small' world settings. For the most part, these large- and small-world decision theories remain disconnected. Methods: We linked the small-world decision theor...

In a lexicographic semiorders model for preference, cues are searched in a subjective order, and an alternative is preferred if its value on a cue exceeds those of other alternatives by a threshold Δ, akin to a just noticeable difference in perception. We generalized this model from preference to inference and refer to it as Δ-inference. Unlike wit...

In the last few decades, a perspective on how to resolve wicked social problems has become increasingly prominent: the cultural theory pioneered by anthropologist Dame Mary Douglas. So far, the empirical evidence garnered in support of this approach has mostly been of a qualitative nature. Cultural theory has fared less well in survey-based, statis...

This reprinted article originally appeared in Psychological Review, 2011 (Apr), 118 (2), 316-338. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2011-04652-001). Models of decision making are distinguished by those that aim for an optimal solution in a world that is precisely specified by a set of assumptions (a so-called “small...

If each member of a group makes less accurate decisions than those of another group, can the former actually make more accurate decisions collectively than the latter? Through four simulation studies, the chapter shows conditions under which such "less-ismore" effect may occur. In each study, a group member adopted either the take-thebest or the mi...

It is often unclear which factor plays a more critical role in determining a group's performance: the diversity among members of the group or their individual abilities. In this study, we addressed this "diversity vs. ability" issue in a decision-making task. We conducted three simulation studies in which we manipulated agents' individual ability (...

Diversity Results. The results are shown in three sheets in the Excel file, corresponding to the results in Study 1, 2, and 3, respectively. (XLS)

This symposium highlighted the relevance of the cultural theory (CT) pioneered by anthropologists Mary Douglas, Steve Rayner, and Michael Thompson and political scientists Aaron Wildavsky and Richard Ellis for explaining political phenomena. In this concluding article, we suggest ways in which CT can be further tested and developed. First, we descr...

Models of decision making are distinguished by those that aim for an optimal solution in a world that is precisely specified by a set of assumptions (a so-called "small world") and those that aim for a simple but satisfactory solution in an uncertain world where the assumptions of optimization models may not be met (a so-called "large world"). Few...

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How do people utilize information from outside sources in their decisions? Participants observed a signal-plus-noise or noise-alone event and then made a yes–no decision about whether a signal had occurred. Participants were provided with two information sources to aid decision making. Each source consisted of four components that provided estimate...