Terry Connolly

• PhD
• Jessup Professor of Management and Organizations at University of Arizona

Do people become greedier when interacting with others they perceive to be greedy? It has been speculated that greed contagion exits and may have influenced the 2008 financial collapse. We examined this possibility in four experimental studies using a common pool resource dilemma. Specifically, whether participants' second‐round (R2) withdrawal fro...

Purpose The authors propose that angry individuals are much more likely to consider the emotional state of their partner than are neutral individuals. They then apply a lay theory dictating that anger decreases cooperation and react accordingly by lowering their own level of cooperation. Design/methodology/approach The authors report four experime...

In interactive decisions, cues to what others will do are important in forming a strategy. Information about others' personalities appears to be potentially valuable for this purpose. We report a series of four studies examining how information about another actor's personality influences people's own choices in interactive decisions. The studies f...

The present study examined people’s expectations of how incidental emotions could shape others’ reciprocity in trusting situations, whether these expectations affect people’s own behavior, and how accurate these expectations are. Study 1 explored people’s beliefs about the effects of different incidental emotions on another person’s trustworthiness...

Two experiments examined the impact on the decoy effect of making salient the possibility of post-decision regret, a manipulation that has been shown in several earlier studies to stimulate critical examination and improvement of decision process. Experiment 1 (N = 62) showed that making regret salient eliminated the decoy effect in a personal pref...

We examined the effects of two emotions, fear and anger, on risk-taking behavior in two types of tasks: Those in which uncertainty is generated by a randomizing device (“lottery risk”) and those in which it is generated by the uncertain behavior of another person (“person-based risk”). Participants first completed a writing task to induce fear or a...

Vaccination decisions, as in choosing whether or not to immunize one's small child against specific diseases, are both psychologically and computationally complex. The psychological complexities have been extensively studied, often in the context of shaping convincing or persuasive messages that will encourage parents to vaccinate their children. T...

Mercier and Sperber (M&S) argue that reasoning has evolved primarily as an adjunct to persuasive communication rather than as a basis for consequential choice. Recent research on decision-related regret suggests that regret aversion and concomitant needs for justification may underpin a complementary mechanism that can, if appropriately deployed, c...

Two distinct theoretical views explain the effects of action/inaction and social normality on anticipated regret. Norm theory (Kahneman & Miller, 1986) emphasises the role of decision mutability, the ease with which one can imagine having made a different choice. Decision justification theory (Connolly & Zeelenberg, 2002) highlights the role of dec...

Employers often enjoy some discretion in how quickly they extend job offers following candidate interviews. Applicant reactions research suggests that quicker offers are more likely to be accepted. This paper reports an archival study investigating the effect of offer timing on offer acceptance and employment outcomes with field data (N = 3,012) fr...

This research examines the moderating role of regret aversion in reason-based choice. Earlier research has shown that regret aversion and reason-based choice effects are linked through a common emphasis on decision justification, and that a simple manipulation of regret salience can eliminate the decoy effect, a well-known reason-based choice effec...

Research in judgment and decision making (JDM) has recently started to take a serious interest in decision‐related emotions, after largely ignoring them in its theoretical models and empirical studies for many years. This interest converges with, and partially overlaps, a growing interest in moral philosophy in the mental processes involved in huma...

Decision makers can become trapped by myopic regret avoidance in which rejecting feedback to avoid short-term outcome regret (regret associated with counterfactual outcome comparisons) leads to reduced learning and greater long-term regret over continuing poor decisions. In a series of laboratory experiments involving repeated choices among uncerta...

Contrary to rational Expected Monetary Value (EMV) predictions that no money will be transferred in Trust Games, in experiments players make positive transfers. Theorists have proposed modifying the Sender's utility function while retaining utility-maximization assumptions to account for this behavior. Such accounts assume that Senders can grasp th...

Herbert Simon introduced the notion of satisficing to explain how boundedly rational agents might approach difficult sequential decision problems. His satisficing decision makers were offered as an alternative to optimizers, who need impressive computational capacities in order to maximize their payoffs. In this chapter, we present a simplified seq...

This text is devoted to examining new research at the interface of operations research, behavioral and cognitive sciences, and decision analysis. In these 14 self-contained chapters, four themes emerge, providing the reader with a variety of perspectives both theoretic and applied to meet the challenges of devising models to understand the decision...

Despite rapid technological advances in computer hardware and software, insecure behavior by individual computer users continues to be a significant source of direct cost and productivity loss. Why do individuals, many of whom are aware of the possible grave consequences of low-level insecure behaviors such as failure to backup work and disclosing...

This paper reports an extension of valence-instrumentality-expectancy (VIE) type models of organizational choice to the decision process of high school students selecting undergraduate colleges. Using questionnaire data from 714 respondents, interactive vatence-instrumentality models correctly predicted 68% of actual choices. A number of alternativ...

This article describes empirical and theoretical results from two multi-attribute sequential search tasks. In both tasks, the DM sequentially encounters options described by two attributes and must pay to learn the values of the attributes. In the continuous version of the task the DM learns the precise numerical value of an attribute when she pays...

Research in judgment and decision making generally ignores the distinction between factual and subjective feelings of ownership, tacitly assuming that the two correspond closely. The present research suggests that this assumption might be usefully reexamined. In two experiments on the endowment effect we examine the role of subjective ownership by...

Despite rapid technological advances in computer hardware and software, insecure behavior by individual computer users continues to be a significant source of direct cost and productivity loss. Why do individuals, many of whom are aware of the possible grave consequences of low-level insecure behaviors such as failure to backup work and disclosing...

Numerous studies have shown that choice can be influenced by expectations of regret or disappointment (or, for positive outcomes, of rejoicing or elation). Psychological researchers measure these expectations with self-report instruments, economists infer them from observed choice behavior. The present study examines whether the emotion postulates...

Regret is often symptomatic of the defective decisions associated with “temporary preference” problems. It may also help overcome these defects. Outcome regret can modify the relative utilities of different payoffs. Process regret can motivate search for better decision processes or trap-evading strategies. Heightened regret may thus be functional...

Decision-related regret is a negative emotion associated with thinking about a past or future choice. The thinking component generally takes the form of a wish that things were otherwise and involves a comparison of what actually did or will take place with some better alternative—a “counterfactual thought.” For predecisional (anticipated) regret,...

The Psychology of Decision Making provides an overview of decision making as it relates to management, organizational behavior issues, and research. This engaging book examines the way individuals make decisions as well as how they form judgments privately and in the context of the organization. It also discusses the interplay of group and institut...

Despite rapid technological advances in computer hardware and software, insecure behavior by individual computer users continues to be a significant source of direct cost and productivity loss. Why do individuals, many of whom are aware of the possible grave consequences of low-level insecure behaviors such as failure to backup work and disclosing...

Despite rapid technological advances in computer hardware and software, insecure behavior by individual computer users continues to be a significant source of direct cost and productivity loss. Why do individuals, many of whom are aware of the possible grave consequences of low-level insecure behaviors such as failure to backup work and disclosing...

Judgment and decision-making (JDM) research embraces a broad interdisciplinary array of topics concerned with human choice. It includes both descriptive studies, aimed at understanding what real decision makers actually do and normative (or prescriptive) work, aimed at advising people how they might make better choices. Core processes include makin...

Several studies have reported that parents are often reluctant to vaccinate their own or other people’s children, even when the balance of health risks and benefits clearly favors vaccination. This reluctance has been interpreted as a manifestation of “omission bias”, a general tendency to prefer inactive to active options even when inaction leads...

Decision research has only recently started to take seriously the role of emotions in choices and decisions. Regret is the emotion that has received the most attention. In this article, we sample a number of the initial regret studies from psychology and economics, and trace some of the complexities and contradictions to which they led. We then ske...

Regret Theory postulates that choices may be influenced by the chooser's expectation that certain outcomes will be associated with an experience of regret (or, for positive outcomes, rejoicing), and a desire to avoid or experience these emotions. In a laboratory study (N = 50) of student subjects evaluating and actually playing real-money lotteries...

In decisions under uncertainty, decision makers confront two uncertainties: the uncertain linkage between actions and outcomes and the uncertain linkage between these outcomes and his or her affective responses to them. The two studies reported here examine affective responses to expected and unexpected outcomes in various settings. In Study 1, a s...

Most studies of reference point effects have used a single referent, such as a price, a salary, or a target. There is considerable evidence that the judged fairness of, or satisfaction with, an outcome is significantly influenced by discrepancies from such single referents. In many settings, however, more than one reference point may be available,...

M. Zeelenberg, W. W. van Dijk, and A. S. R. Manstead (1998, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 74, 254-272) recently reported an altered replication of our earlier study (T. Connolly, L. D. Ordóñez, & R. Coughlan, 1997, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 70, 73-85) concerning the effects of decision agency on r...

Decision making is usually viewed as involving a period of thought, while the decision maker assesses options, their likely consequences, and his or her preferences, and selects the preferred option. The process ends in a terminating action. In this view errors of thought will inevitably show up as errors of action; costs of thinking are to be bala...

Physicians who provide obstetrical care in rural areas face exposure to liability action and confront a critical decision--whether to continue to offer these services. This paper draws upon social-psychological and decision theories to investigate this decision. Ninety-four percent of all obstetricians and family and general physicians practicing i...

In January 1990, a well-established heart transplant program added a psychosocial evaluation procedure to its medical evaluation of potential transplant recipients. To determine the predictive value of psychosocial evaluation for decisions to list patients for a transplant and for ultimate clinical outcomes, we reviewed records of 191 patients who...

We examine decision analysis' central "decomposition principle" in the context of work-time estimates of software writers. Two experiments examined the abilities of advanced programming students to estimate how long they would take to complete specific software projects. They estimated their own work times both for entire projects and for their con...

The negative affect associated with bad decision outcomes is often thought to involve feelings of remorse or self-blame. For example, studies showing greater regret associated with active than with passive choice are interpreted as the active chooser piling self-recrimination on top the disappointment of a poor outcome. Corresponding rejoicing is p...

One aspect of brainstorming that has received little research attention is how the brainstorming problem should be presented to the group, whether as one all-encompassing question or as a series of separate questions each focsusing on one aspect of the problem. This paper reports the results of two experiments in which subjects (MBAs in the first,...

The base rate fallacy is directly dependent on a particular judgment paradigm in which information may be unambiguously designated as either “base rate” or “individuating,” and in which subjects make two-stage sequential judgments. The paradigm may be a poor match for real world settings, and the fallacy may thus be undefined for natural ecologies...

Interactive, anonymous, computer-supported brainstorming has been shown to be useful for a variety of forms of group work. Brainstorming software helps students work together to generate and evaluate ideas together effectively and efficiently. A laboratory experiment was used to evaluate the effects of group member interaction frequency—a major com...

Multiattribute additive evaluation models largely ignore the causal structure connecting attributes and overall evaluations. We propose here a distinction between two such causal structures. In "cue-type" tasks, attributes reflect or indicate the value of a distal variable measuring all or part of the entity′s worth. In "component-type" tasks, attr...

We compared both attribute weights and overall evaluations for students′ preferences among apartments described to them in terms of nine independent attributes. Methods used for eliciting attribute weights were (a) 7-point scales; (b) value hierarchy; (c) swing weights; and two methods using importance rankings only: (d) rank order centroid and (e)...

Previous research on brainstorming and related idea-generating techniques has generally found interacting groups to produce fewer ideas than equivalent numbers of individuals working alone whose ideas are later pooled (i.e., nominal groups). In this paper we report four experiments. The first three contrast groups of various sizes using a computer-...

Recent studies suggest that group brainstorming, in its electronic form, can be an effective method of generating ideas, if the group is sufficiently large. We report here an experiment probing the mechanism underlying this good performance. Because larger groups are more likely than small ones to generate rare ideas, we hypothesized that rare idea...

We examined status effects in face-to-face and computer-mediated three-person groups. Our expectation that low status members in computer-mediated group discussions would participate more equally, and have more influence over decisions, than their counterparts in face-to-face groups was not confirmed. The results suggest that knowledge of status di...

Drivers' decision on whether or not to speed are only partially predicted by attitudes towards speeding, beliefs about the consequences of speeding, and police efforts to enforce speed restrictions. We propose that a significant role may be played by drivers' comparisons of their own speed with that of other, nearby drivers. Such comparisons may le...

A laboratory experiment was used to evaluate the effects of interaction frequency on computer-mediated groups using a group support system to perform an idea-generation task. Group interaction is defined as the length of time group members are allowed to form and input their contributions and the related rate at which group members exchange their c...

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This study addresses the dilemma of physicians to act both as an agent of their patients and as an agent of society. We contrasted the perceptions of physicians, citizens at large, and state legislators about 11 topics related to physician decision making regarding the management of care for seriously ill patients. Significant and interpretable dif...

presents three scenarios typical of naturalistic decision making / reviews eight characteristics common to them / discusses how these characteristics differ from ones encountered in traditional decision research (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

This study examines the influence of anonymity on group process in groups using a group decision support system (GDSS) with an idea-generating task. Group members whose contributions were anonymous generated more comments, were more critical and probing, and were more likely to embellish ideas proposed by others than were those whose contributions...

Recent developments in information systems technology have made it possible for individ- uals to work together anonymously using networked personal computers. Use of one such technology, the Group Decision Support System, is growing quickly. However, empirical GDSS research is only beginning to emerge, and, as of yet, this literature lacks a sound...

Both motivational and cognitive accounts have been proposed for hindsight bias. In an experiment three groups of subjects analyzed a complex business case. One group received no outcome information. The other groups were told the outcome of the decisions made in the case. One group believed that the outcome they were given was real, the other saw t...

A laboratory experiment was used to evaluate the effects of anonymity and evaluative tone on computer-mediated groups using a group decision support system to perform an idea-generation task. Evaluative tone was manipulated through a confederate group member who entered supportive or critical comments into the automated brainstorming system. Groups...

In this paper, we attempt to extend Grudin’s important analysis of CSCW application failure in two ways. First, we demonstrate that failure may occur even when: 1) there are no asymmetries between those who benefit from an application and those who do extra work, and 2) decision makers do not confuse their own personal benefits with the collective...

Information for forecasting databases is often initially under the control of individuals who have no compelling reason to contribute, and who face various significant costs if they do. Such discretionary databases are subject to public goods problems, and are likely to be undersupplied, even when all participants agree that the overall benefits ou...

The question of whether general systems theory is able to contribute to organizational development, is discussed in this paper. It is misleading to assess an organization's effectiveness against some single set of criteria, and the application of external forces in attempting to change the system is put forward.

In contrast to a large body of goal-setting research, recent findings suggest that challenging goals may not be beneficial when effective task strategies are not readily identifiable. In such settings goals may stimulate excessive strategy search, degrading overall performance. Two alternative aids to developing effective task strategies (restricti...

Specific, difficult goals enhance performance in many tasks. We hypothesize, however, that this effect disappears or reverses for novel tasks that allow multiple alternative strategies. We report findings from three laboratory experiments using a stock market prediction task with these characteristics. In the first study, 34 students made predictio...

This chapter reviews and attempts to integrate several recent lines of research on information purchase and related phenomena. It also evaluates the main formal models of the process that guided laboratory work, and placed them within a general Brunswikian framework. The chapter also describes some of the main empirical results from laboratory stud...

Numerous studies of predecisional information purchase indicate that humans are often seriously suboptimal in balancing the costs and benefits of the information they purchase. Underpurchase is reported in some tasks, over-purchase in others, but no convincing account has been offered of the mechanisms producing these patterns of error. The present...

Organizational members routinely have access to information that may benefit other employees and that may be shared through new information technologies. This discretionary information can be viewed as having the properties of a public good, enabling the development of a number of powerful propositions from a few simple assumptions. Generally, disc...

Effective overall performance in judgment tasks generally involves both acquisition of information and integration of the information acquired. When information is costly the decision maker must balance acquisition costs against improved decisional accuracy, a complex balancing problem in which, laboratory evidence suggests, humans often do poorly....

A criminal-trial juror votes to convict or acquit a defendant in the knowledge that the vote may be in error: False convictions and false acquittals are unavoidable in human fact-finding systems. We show here that rigorous consistency relationships exist between the juror's assessments of the relative desirability of the four possible trial outcome...

: The broad question addressed by this research is: How good are humans at balancing the costs and benefits of their information acquisition? Do they buy those, and only those, sources of information whose acquisition cost is outweighed by the improvement in decision quality that their use makes possible? The evidence reported here, together with t...

Previous studies of predecisional information search have predominantly drawn on Bayesian models for normative guidance. An analogous model for the continuous-variable case, in which the judge may purchase one or more items of costly but imperfect information to guide a decision in which errors are also costly, is presented. Results are reported fo...

Multiple linear regression is widely used in empirically-based policy analysis. The central argument of the present paper is that much of this use is inappropriate, not because of the multiple linear regression methodology, but because of the nature of the data used. Too often analysts are carried beyond justified inferences into assertions for whi...

Descriptive decision theory generally treats decisions as single events, with final action preceded by greater or less analysis. However, action after little analysis can also be a powerful decision strategy. The paper argues the power of such "active" strategies, and suggests a contingency model for when they will be used.

It is proposed that the present low level of utilization of evaluation findings is traceable in part to their failure to address directly the information needs of a clearly specified decision maker. An alternative model proceeding from such specification is proposed here, with evaluation closely interwoven with the on-going innovation process. The...