Thorsten Pachur

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Verified

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• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Technical University of Munich

Decision makers seem to evaluate risky options differently depending on the learning mode—that is, whether they learn about the options’ payoff distributions from a summary description (decisions from description) or by drawing samples from them (decisions from experience). Are there also discrepancies when people choose between a described and an...

The development of formal models of decision making under risk has been shaped largelyby decisions between options with monetary outcomes. The most prominentmodel—cumulative prospect theory (CPT)—is good at describing choices betweenmonetary lotteries, but performs less well with nonmonetary and nonnumerical outcomes(e.g., medications with possible...

Much behaviour and cognition involves choosing between alternatives—whether in the context of consumer decisions, voting, or memory.A fundamental aspect of choice is that it is probabilistic: Anorganism faced with the same evidence will not always make thesame choice. Despite widespread acknowledgement that probabilisticchoice is a necessary elemen...

Accurately estimating and assessing real-world quantities (e.g., how long it will take to get to the train station; the calorie content of a meal) is a central skill for adaptive cognition. To date, theoretical and empirical work on the mental resources recruited by real-world estimation has focused primarily on the role of domain knowledge (e.g.,...

Vaccine hesitancy was a major challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic. A common but sometimes ineffective intervention to reduce vaccine hesitancy involves providing information on vaccine effectiveness, side effects, and related probabilities. Could biased processing of this information contribute to vaccine refusal? We examined the information ins...

While risky decision making is often studied using monetary outcomes, many decisions in the real-world elicit higher levels of affect (e.g., medical decisions). Research suggests that choices systematically diverge between such more “affect-rich” decisions and more typical “affect-poor” monetary decisions, leading to an ‘affect gap’ in risky choice...

Human exploration, a cornerstone of our ability to solve novel problems, is a complex process, posing significant research challenges. Most previous studies simplify tasks to isolate specific variables, creating artificial problems that do not align with those humans have evolved to solve, thus limiting the generalizability of findings. To address...

Younger and older adults often differ in their risky choices. Theoretical frameworks on human aging point to various cognitive and motivational factors that might underlie these differences. Using a novel computational model based on the framework of resource rationality, we find that the two age groups rely on different strategies. Importantly, ol...

Objective: Pediatric asthma management is challenging for parents and guardians (hereafter caregivers). We examined (1) how caregivers mentally represent trigger and symptom management strategies, and (2) how those mental representations are associated with actual management behavior. Methods: In an online survey, N = 431 caregivers of children wit...

In their famous study on risk judgments, Lichtenstein, Slovic, Fischhoff, Layman, and Combs (1978) concluded that people tend to overestimate the frequencies of dramatic causes of death (e.g., homicide, tornado) and underestimate the frequencies of nondramatic ones (e.g., diabetes, heart disease). Further, their analyses of newspapers indicated tha...

People routinely make decisions based on samples of numerical values. A common conclusion from the literature in psychophysics and behavioral economics is that observers subjectively compress magnitudes, such that extreme values have less sway over people’s decisions than prescribed by a normative model (underweighting). However, recent studies hav...

A person’s social network constitutes a rich sampling space for informing judgments about social statistics (e.g., the distribution of preferences, risks, or behaviors in the broader social environment). How is this sampling space searched and used to make inferences? This chapter gives an overview on research on the social-circle model, a computat...

Objective: Parents and guardians (hereafter caregivers) make decisions for their children's medical care. However, many caregivers of children with asthma struggle to understand their child's illness. We used the psychometric paradigm to investigate how caregivers conceptualize, or mentally represent, asthma triggers and symptoms and how these rep...

When people estimate the quantities of objects (e.g., country populations), are then presented with the objects’ actual quantities, and subsequently asked to remember their initial estimates, responses are often distorted towards the actual quantities. This hindsight bias—traditionally considered to reflect a cognitive error—has more recently been...

Probability weighting is one of the most powerful theoretical constructs in descriptive models of risky choice and constitutes a central component of cumulative prospect theory (CPT). Probability weighting has been shown to be related to two facets of attention allocation: one analysis showed that differences in the shape of CPT's probability-weigh...

People often use cognitive and affective heuristics when judging the likelihood of a health outcome and making health decisions. However, little research has examined how heuristics shape risk perceptions and behavior among people who make decisions on behalf of another person. We examined associations between heuristic cues and caregivers’ percept...

The use of information technologies for the public interest, such as COVID-19 tracking apps that aim to reduce the spread of COVID-19 during the pandemic, involve a dilemma between public interest benefits and privacy concerns. Critical in resolving this conflict of interest are citizens’ trust in the government and the risks posed by COVID-19. How...

Decision making often involves a choice between options whose outcomes are probabilistic and thus cannot be predicted with certainty. A common methodology for understanding such risky choices is to develop formal models of people's responses to monetary gambles, usually collected in lab experiments. The quest for veridical models of risky choice ha...

For a long time, the dominant approach to studying decision making under risk has been to use psychoeconomic functions to account for how behavior deviates from the normative prescriptions of expected value maximization. While this neo-Bernoullian tradition has advanced the field in various ways—such as identifying seminal phenomena of risky choice...

Ecological rationality represents an alternative to classic frameworks of rationality. Extending on Herbert Simon’s concept of bounded rationality, it holds that cognitive processes, including simple heuristics, are not per se rational or irrational, but that their success rests on their degree of fit to relevant environmental structures. The key i...

The assumption of an inverse S-shaped probability weighting function allows cumulative prospect theory to explain several well-established regularities in risky choice between monetary lotteries. Empirical evidence indicates that in choices between options with nonmonetary outcomes, the shape of the weighting function is strongly influenced by the...

Decision makers can infer social statistics (e.g., the relative frequency of health risks or consumer preferences in the population) by drawing on samples from their personal social networks. In light of the growing use of the Internet, much of people's social interactions occur online (e.g., via social media) rather than offline (e.g., via face-to...

It is commonly assumed that there are qualitatively distinct cognitive strategies that underlie decision making. Because cognitive strategies differ in how information is processed, predecisional information search offers a window onto these strategies. Using a bottom-up approach, we examine whether predecisional information search actually reflect...

People deciding between options have at their disposal a toolbox containing both compensatory strategies, which take into account all available attributes of those options, and noncompensatory strategies, which consider only some of the attributes. It is commonly assumed that noncompensatory strategies play only a minor role in decisions from given...

People routinely make decisions based on samples of numerical values. A common conclusion from the literature in psychophysics and behavioral economics is that observers subjectively compress magnitudes, such that extreme values have less sway over choice than prescribed by a normative model (underweighting). However, recent studies have reported e...

The willingness to take a risk is shaped by temperaments and cognitive abilities, both of which develop rapidly during childhood. In the adult developmental literature, a distinction is drawn between description-based tasks, that provide explicit choice-reward information, and experience-based tasks, that require decisions from past experience, eac...

Almost 40% of global mortality is attributable to an unhealthy diet, and adolescents and young adults are particularly affected by growing obesity rates. How do (young) people conceptualize healthy foods and how is this conceptualization embedded in their mental representations of the food ecology? We asked respondents to rate a large range of comm...

Statistical concepts (e.g., mean, variance, correlation) offer powerful ways to characterize the structure of the environment. To what extent do statistical concepts also play a role for people assessing the environment? Previous work on the mind as "intuitive statistician" has mainly focused on the judgment of means and correlations (Peterson & Be...

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen one of the first large-scale uses of digital contact tracing to track a chain of infection and contain the spread of a virus. The new technology has posed challenges both for governments aiming at high and effective uptake and for citizens weighing its benefits (e.g., protecting others’ health) against the potential r...

Most influential descriptive theories of decision-making under risk, such as cumulative prospect theory (CPT; Tversky & Kahneman, 1992), were developed around people's responses to monetary gambles. Monetary gamble tasks often (but not always) consist of numerical information, such as the monetary amount that can be won or lost, and the probability...

Recent findings suggest that the commonly observed preference for a safe over a risky option, which is more pronounced in older than in younger adults, is largely driven by differences in the complexity of those options. Here we examine whether option complexity also contributes to the emergence of the framing effect and loss aversion in risky choi...

Nonlinear probability weighting allows cumulative prospect theory (CPT) to account for key phenomena in decision making under risk (e.g., certainty effect, fourfold pattern of risk attitudes). It describes the impact of risky outcomes on preferences in terms of a rank-dependent nonlinear transformation of their objective probabilities. The attentio...

Online platforms’ data give advertisers the ability to “microtarget” recipients’ personal vulnerabilities by tailoring different messages for the same thing, such as a product or political candidate. One possible response is to raise awareness for and resilience against such manipulative strategies through psychological inoculation. Two online expe...

To successfully navigate an uncertain world, one has to learn the relationship between cues (e.g., wind speed, atmospheric pressure) and outcomes (e.g., rain). When learning, it is possible to actively manipulate the cue values to test hypotheses about this relationship directly. Across two studies, we investigated how 5- to 7-year-olds actively le...

Computational modeling of cognition allows latent psychological variables to be measured by means of adjustable model parameters. The estimation and interpretation of the parameters is impaired, however, if parameters are strongly intercorrelated within the model. We point out that strong parameter interdependencies are especially likely to emerge...

Nonlinear probability weighting allows cumulative prospect theory (CPT) to account for key phenomena in decision making under risk (e.g., certainty effect, fourfold pattern of risk attitudes). It describes the impact of risky outcomes on preferences in terms of a rank-dependent nonlinear transformation of their objective probabilities. The attentio...

Digital contact-tracing technologies are being used for epidemiological purposes at scale for the first time in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This poses challenges for governments aiming at high and efficient uptake and for people weighing the advantages (e.g., public health) against the potential risks (e.g., loss of data privacy) of these un...

Efforts to model boundedly rational risky choice have generated two influential but separate lines of research: cumulative prospect theory (CPT) and heuristics. Each approach has pursued its own research questions, and both have made important contributions to the study of decision making under risk, but these contributions have hardly been connect...

With nearly 40% of global mortality attributable to dietary factors, citizens are encouraged to eat more healthily. But how do people conceptualize healthy foods-and how is this conceptualization embedded in their cognitive representations of food ecology? Adolescents, lay adults, and nutritional experts rated a large, heterogeneous set of food pro...

Online platforms collect and infer detailed information about people and their behaviour, giving advertisers an unprecedented ability to reach specific groups of recipients. This ability to "microtarget" messages contrasts with people's limited knowledge of what data platforms hold and how those data are used. Two online experiments (total N = 828...

How do people decide which risks they want to get informed about? The present study examines the role of the availability and affect heuristics on these decisions. Participants (N = 100, aged 19-72 years) selected for which of 23 cancers they would like to receive an information brochure, reported the number of occurrences of each type of cancer in...

Psychologists, economists, historians, computer scientists, sociologists, philosophers, and legal scholars explore the conscious choice not to seek information. The history of intellectual thought abounds with claims that knowledge is valued and sought, yet individuals and groups often choose not to know. We call the conscious choice not to seek or...

Multinomial processing tree (MPT) models are commonly used in cognitive psychology to disentangle and measure the psychological processes underlying behavior. Various estimation approaches can be used to estimate the parameters of MPT models for a group of participants. These approaches are implemented in various programs (e.g., MPTinR, TreeBUGS) a...

The social environment provides a sampling space for making informed inferences about features of the world at large, such as the distribution of preferences, risks, or events. How do people search this sampling space and make inferences based on the instances sampled? Inspired by existing models of bounded rationality and in accord with research o...

To successfully navigate in an uncertain world, one has to learn the relationship between cues (e.g., symptoms) and an outcome (e.g., disease). During this learning, it is sometimes possible to actively manipulate the cue values, allowing one to test hypotheses about this relationship directly. Across two studies, we investigated how 5- to 7-year-o...

Value-based decisions often involve comparisons between benefits and costs that must be retrieved from memory. To investigate the development of value-based decisions, 9-to-10-year-olds (N=30), 11-to-12-year-olds (N=30), and young adults (N=30) first learned to associate gain and loss magnitudes with symbols. In a subsequent decision task, particip...

The canonical conclusion from research on age differences in risky choice is that older adults are more risk averse than younger adults, at least in choices involving gains. Most of the evidence for this conclusion derives from studies that used a specific type of choice problem: choices between a safe and a risky option. However, safe and risky op...

The high rewards people desire are often unlikely. Here, we investigated whether decision makers exploit such ecological correlations between risks and rewards to simplify their information processing. In a learning phase, participants were exposed to options in which risks and rewards were negatively correlated, positively correlated, or uncorrela...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Bei fast allen Entscheidungen liegt uns nur begrenztes Wissen darüber vor, welche Konsequenzen unser Verhalten haben wird—wir entscheiden unter Risiko. Ob wir dabei eher vorsichtig oder eher mutig entscheiden, wird von einer Reihe kognitiver und emotionaler Mechanismen beeinflusst. In diesem Kapitel lege ich dar, wie sich diese entscheidungsrelevan...

In the original publication of the article, the author’s correction was missed in Table 1. The original article has been corrected and the correct table is given below.

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...

Higher cognitive functions are the product of a dynamic interplay of perceptual, mnemonic, and other cognitive processes. Modeling such interplaying processes and generating predictions about both behavioral and neural data can be achieved with cognitive architectures. However, such architectures are still relatively rarely used, likely because wor...

Uncertainty about the waiting time before obtaining an outcome is integral to intertemporal choice. Here, we showed that people express different time preferences depending on how they learn about this temporal uncertainty. In two studies, people chose between pairs of options: one with a single, sure delay and the other involving multiple, probabi...

Risks and rewards, or payoffs and probabilities, are inversely related in many choice environments. We investigated people's psychological responses to uncommon combinations of risk and reward that deviate from learned regularities (e.g., options that offer a high payoff with an unusually high probability) as they evaluated risky options. In two ex...

Loss aversion is often assumed to be a basic and far-reaching psychological regularity in behavior. Yet empirical evidence is accumulating to challenge the assumption of widespread loss aversion in choice. We suggest that a key reason for the apparently elusive nature of loss aversion may be that its manifestation in choice is state-dependent and d...

In judgment and categorization, the task is to infer the criterion value of an object based on cues. The cognitive mechanisms underlying such inferences are often distinguished in terms of whether they rely on an abstracted cue–criterion rule or on retrieving exemplars. The use of cue-based and exemplar-based strategies (and the associated generali...

Although process data indicates that people often rely on various (often heuristic) strategies to choose between risky options, our models of heuristics cannot predict people's choices very accurately. To address this challenge, it has been proposed that people adaptively choose from a toolbox of simple strategies. But which strategies are containe...

Older adults often face decline in cognitive resources. How does this impact their decision making—especially under high cognitive demands from concurrent activities? Do older adults’ decision processes uniformly decline with increasing mental strain relative to younger adults, or do they compensate for decline by strategically reallocating resourc...

Computational modeling of cognition allows measurement of latent psychological variables, such as risk aversion or attention, by means of free model parameters. The estimation and interpretation of these variables is impaired, however, if parameters strongly correlate with each other. We suggest that strong parameter intercorrelations are especiall...

After people have learned a fact or the outcome of an event, they often overestimate their ability to have known the correct answer beforehand. This hindsight bias has two sources: an impairment in direct recall of the original (i.e., uninformed) judgment after presentation of the correct answer (recollection bias) and a reconstruction of the origi...

Fallacies? Since antiquity, we have wondered about the foundations of our (apparent) intellectual superiority. A way to approach this issue is to seek rational standards in decision making and examine convergence between such standards and behavior. However, establishing a rational framework is not straightforward. One of the most unique contributi...

This project is aimed at replicating and extending the results of the project Intertemporal choice under temporal uncertainty.

The high rewards people desire are often unlikely. Here, we investigated whether decision makers exploit such ecological correlations between risks and rewards to simplify their information processing. In a learning phase, participants were exposed to options in which risks and rewards were negatively correlated, positively correlated, or uncorrela...

The cognitive mechanism underlying decisions based on sequential samples has been found to be affected by whether multiple alternatives are evaluated together or whether each alternative is evaluated individually. In this experiment, we examined whether evaluation format can also lead to different preference orders among risky alternatives. We hypo...

Analyses of the evolution of cooperation often rely on two simplifying assumptions: (i) individuals interact equally frequently with all social network members and (ii) they accurately remember each partner's past cooperation or defection. Here, we examine how more realistic, skewed patterns of contact-in which individuals interact primarily with o...

The investigation of decisions under risk has mainly followed one of two approaches.One relies on observing choices between lotteries in which economic primitives (outcome magnitudes, probabilities, and domains (i.e., gains and losses)) are varied systematically, and this information is described to participants. The systematic variation of the eco...

To fit models like prospect theory or expected utility theory to choice data, a stochastic model is needed to turn differences in values into choice probabilities. In these models, the parameter measuring risk aversion is strongly correlated with the parameter measuring the sensitivity to differences in value. We use dimensional analysis from the p...

Objective: Medical decisions made on behalf of another person-particularly those made by adult caregivers for their minor children-are often informed by the decision maker's beliefs about the treatment's risks and benefits. However, we know little about the cognitive and affective mechanisms influencing such "proxy" risk perceptions and about how...

Options that sound too good to be true often are too good to be true. How can decision makers detect if something is too good to be true, and what are their psychological responses to such options? Here, we argue that they know about and compare them against a regularity present in many domains in the environment: Risks and rewards are typically in...

Several theories of cognition distinguish between strategies that differ in the mental effort that their use requires. But how can the effort—or cognitive costs—associated with a strategy be conceptualized and measured? We propose an approach that decomposes the effort a strategy requires into the time costs associated with the demands for using sp...

There is a disconnect in the literature between analyses of risky choice based on cumulative prospect theory (CPT) and work on predecisional information processing. One likely reason is that for expectation models (e.g., CPT) it is often assumed that people only behaved as if they conducted the computations leading to the predicted choice, and that...

Analyses of the evolution of cooperation often rely on two simplifying assumptions: (i) individuals interact equally frequently with all social network members and (ii) they accurately remember each partner's past cooperation or defection. Here, we examine how more realistic, skewed patterns of contact—in which individuals interact primarily with o...

People often have to make decisions under uncertainty – that is, in situations where the probabilities of obtaining a reward are unknown or at least difficult to ascertain. Because outside the laboratory payoffs and probabilities are often correlated, one solution to this problem might be to infer the probability from the magnitude of the potential...

There is a disconnect in the literature between analyses of risky choice based on cumulativeprospect theory (CPT) and work on predecisional information processing. One likely reason is that for expectation models (e.g., CPT) it is often assumed that people only behaved as if they conducted the computations leading to the predicted choice, and that...

People often indicate a higher price for an object when they own it (i.e., as sellers) than when they do not (i.e., as buyers)—a phenomenon known as the endowment effect. We develop a cognitive modeling approach to formalize, disentangle, and compare alternative psychological accounts (e.g., loss aversion, loss attention, strategic misrepresentatio...

In many natural domains, risks and rewards are inversely related (Pleskac & Hertwig, 2014). We sought to understand how people might use this relationship in choosing among risky gambles. To do so we, manipulated risk-reward structures of monetary gambles to be either negatively or positively correlated, or uncorrelated. After substantial exposure...

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is one of the most popular experimental paradigms for comparing complex decision-making across groups. Most commonly, IGT behavior is analyzed using frequentist tests to compare performance across groups, and to compare inferred parameters of cognitive models developed for the IGT. Here, we present a Bayesian alternativ...

The delay discounting perspective, which assumes an alternative-wise processing of attribute information, has long dominated research on intertemporal choice. Recent studies, however, have suggested that intertemporal choice is based on attribute-wise comparison. This line of research culminated in the tradeoff model (Scholten & Read, 2010; Scholte...

To make inferences about the frequency of events in the world (e.g., the prevalence of diseases or the popularity of consumer products), people often exploit observations of relevant instances sampled from their personal social network. How does this ability to infer event frequencies by searching and relying on personal instance knowledge develop...

Objective: To gain insight into patients’ medical decisions by exploring the content of laypeople’s spontaneous mental associations with the term “side effect.” Methods: An online cross-sectional survey asked 144 women aged 40-74, “What are the first three things you think of when you hear the words ‘side effect?’” Data were analyzed using content...

We separate for the first time the roles of cognitive and motivational factors in shaping age differences in decision making under risk. Younger and older adults completed gain, loss, and mixed-domain choice problems as well as measures of cognitive functioning and affect. The older adults’ decision quality was lower than the younger adults’ in the...

Previous work comparing pricing decisions by buyers and sellers has primarily focused on the endowment effect, the phenomenon that selling prices exceed buying prices. Here we examine whether pricing decisions by buyers and sellers also vary in sensitivity to differences between objects’ expected value (EV). Both a loss-aversion account (which posi...

To measure a person's risk-taking tendency, research has relied interchangeably on self-report scales (e.g., “Indicate your likelihood of engaging in the risky behavior”) and more direct measures, such as behavioral tasks (e.g., “Do you accept or reject the risky option?”). It is currently unclear, however, how the two approaches map upon each othe...

Background: Side effects prompt some patients to forego otherwise-beneficial therapies. This study explored which characteristics make side effects particularly aversive. Methods: We used a psychometric approach, originating from research on risk perception, to identify the factors (or components) underlying side effect perceptions. Women (N = 1...

Objective: Shared decision-making involves the participation of patient and dental practitioner. Well-informed decision-making requires that both parties understand important concepts that may influence the decision. This fourth article in a series of 4 aims to discuss the importance of patients' values when a clinical decision is made. Methods:...