David Andersson’s research while affiliated with Linköping University and other places

Many disciplines rely on economic games to measure prosocial behavior. However, there is a concern that participants may misunderstand these games, complicating interpretation of results. This study combines online and laboratory data (total n = 1568) to assess subject comprehension of five standard economic games: the Dictator Game, Ultimatum Game, Trust Game, Public Goods Game, and Prisoner's Dilemma. The online and lab data collections are carried out separately and for the online data collection we collect data for two separate platforms (Prolific and Clou-dResearch's MTurk Toolkit). Within each data collection participants carry out all five games, and are randomized to comprehension questions with or without incentives for correct answers. Results indicate that misunderstanding is common: the proportion of participants who misunderstood ranged from 22 % (Dictator Game) to 70 % (Trust Game) in the online samples and from 22 % (Dictator Game) to 53 % (Public Goods Game) in the lab sample. Incentivizing the comprehension questions had no significant impact on misunderstanding, but numeracy was associated with lower misunderstanding. Misunderstanding also predicted increased prosocial behavior in several of the games. Our findings suggest that misunderstanding may be important in explaining prosocial behavior, making it more complicated to draw clear inferences about social preferences from experimental data.

Decision fatigue is the idea that making decisions is mentally demanding and eventually leads to deteriorated decision quality. Many studies report results that appear consistent with decision fatigue. However, most of this evidence comes from observed sequential patterns using retrospective designs, without preregistration or external validation and with low precision in how decision fatigue is operationalized. Here we conducted an empirical test of decision fatigue using large-scale, high-resolution data on healthcare professionals’ medical judgments at a national telephone triage and medical advice service. This is a suitable setting for testing decision fatigue because the work is both hard and repetitive, yet qualified, and the variation in scheduling produced a setting where level of fatigue could be regarded as near random for some segments of the data. We hypothesized increased use of heuristics, more specifically convergence toward personal defaults in case judgments, and higher assigned urgency ratings with fatigue. We tested these hypotheses using one-sided Bayes Factors computed from underlying Bayesian generalized mixed models with random intercepts. The results consistently showed relative support for the statistical null hypothesis of no difference in decision-making depending on fatigue (BF 0+ > 22 for all main tests). We thus found no evidence for decision fatigue. Whereas these results don’t preclude the existence of a weaker or more nuanced version of decision fatigue or more context-specific effects, they cast serious doubt on the empirical relevance of decision fatigue as a domain general effect for sequential decisions in healthcare and elsewhere.

Background The use of policies in medical treatment reimbursement decisions, in which only future patients are affected, prompts a moral dilemma: is there an ethical difference between withdrawing and withholding treatment? Design Through a preregistered behavioral experiment involving 1,067 participants, we tested variations in public attitudes concerning withdrawing and withholding treatments at both the bedside and policy levels. Results In line with our first hypothesis, participants were more supportive of rationing decisions presented as withholding treatments compared with withdrawing treatments. Contrary to our second prestated hypothesis, participants were more supportive of decisions to withdraw treatment made at the bedside level compared with similar decisions made at the policy level. Implications Our findings provide behavioral insights that help explain the common use of policies affecting only future patients in medical reimbursement decisions, despite normative concerns of such policies. In addition, our results may have implications for communication strategies when making decisions regarding treatment reimbursement. Highlights We explore public’ attitudes toward withdrawing and withholding treatments and how the decision level (bedside or policy level) matters. People were more supportive of withholding medical treatment than of withdrawing equivalent treatment. People were more supportive of treatment withdrawal made at the bedside than at the policy level. Our findings help clarify why common-use policies, which impact only future patients in medical reimbursement decision, are implemented despite the normative concerns associted with thesepolicies.

Background Worldwide, there is a large and growing group of older adults. Frailty is known as an important dis‑criminatory factor for poor outcomes. The Clinical Frailty Scale (CFS) has become a frequently used frailty instrument in diferent clinical settings and health care sectors, and it has shown good predictive validity. The aims of this study were to describe and validate the translation and cultural adaptation of the CFS into Swedish (CFS-SWE), and to test the inter-rater reliability (IRR) for registered nurses using the CFS-SWE. Methods An observational study design was employed. The ISPOR principles were used for the translation, linguis‑tic validation and cultural adaptation of the scale. To test the IRR, 12 participants were asked to rate 10 clinical case vignettes using the CFS-SWE. The IRR was assessed using intraclass correlation and Krippendorf’s alpha agreement coefcient test. Results The Clinical Frailty Scale was translated and culturally adapted into Swedish and is presented in its final form. The IRR for all raters, measured by an intraclass correlation test, resulted in an absolute agreement value among the raters of 0.969 (95% CI: 0.929–0.991) and a consistency value of 0.979 (95% CI: 0.953–0.994), which indicates excellent reliability. Krippendorf’s alpha agreement coefcient for all raters was 0.969 (95% CI: 0.917–0.988), indicating near-perfect agreement. The sensitivity of the reliability was examined by separately testing the IRR of the group of specialised registered nurses and non-specialised registered nurses respectively, with consistent and similar results. Conclusion The Clinical Frailty Scale was translated, linguistically validated and culturally adapted into Swedish following a well-established standard technique. The IRR was excellent, judged by two established, separately used, reliability tests. The reliability test results did not difer between non-specialised and specialised registered nurses. However, the use of case vignettes might reduce the generalisability of the reliability fndings to real-life settings. The CFS has the potential to be a common reference tool, especially when older adults are treated and rehabilitated in different care sectors.

The better-than-average effect refers to the tendency to rate oneself as better than the average person on desirable traits and skills. In a classic study, Svenson (1981) asked participants to rate their driving safety and skill compared to other participants in the experiment. Results showed that the majority of participants rated themselves as far above the median, despite the statistical impossibility of more than 50% of participants being above the median. We report a preregistered, well-powered (total N = 1,203), very close replication and extension of the Svenson (1981) study. Our results indicate that the majority of participants rated their driving skill and safety as above average. We added different response scales as an extension and findings were stable across all three measures. Thus, our findings are consistent with the original findings by Svenson (1981). Materials, data, and code are available at https://osf.io/fxpwb/

Most disciplines rely on economic games to measure prosocial behavior in controlled experimental settings. However, participants’ comprehension of these games might be lower than desirable, which complicates interpretation of results. We here assess subject comprehension of the payoff structure of five standard economic games commonly used to study prosocial behavior: the Dictator Game, Ultimatum Game, Trust Game, Public Goods Game, and Prisoner’s Dilemma. Participants were recruited from two online platforms: Prolific (n = 528) and CloudResearch (using the CloudResearch MTurk toolkit; n = 540). The Trust Game had the highest level of misunderstanding (70%), followed by the Public Goods Game and the Prisoner’s Dilemma (each at 52%), the Ultimatum Game (27%), and the Dictator Game (24%). Study platform was a significant predictor of misunderstanding in the Dictator Game, Ultimatum Game, and Public Goods Game, with greater misunderstanding on Prolific than CloudResearch. Incentivizing the comprehension questions had no significant impact on misunderstanding in any of the games. The only variable that significantly predicted misunderstanding across all games was numeracy, which was associated with lower misunderstanding. Finally, we found suggestive evidence in exploratory analyses that misunderstanding predicts greater contributions in the Public Goods Game (in line with previous studies) and in the Dictator Game, increased the likelihood to choose the option that maximizes total payoff in the Prisoner’s Dilemma and reduced back transfers in the Trust Game. These findings suggest that misunderstanding may be an important factor in explaining prosocial behavior and that reliance on standard one-shot games may lead researchers to overestimate the importance of social preferences.

The better-than-average effect refers to the tendency to rate oneself as better than the average person on desirable traits and skills. In a classic study, Svenson (1981) asked participants to rate their driving safety and skill compared to other participants in the experiment. Results showed that the majority of participants rated themselves as far above the median, despite the statistical impossibility of more than 50% of participants being above the median. We report a preregistered, well-powered (total N = 1,203), very close replication and extension of the Svenson (1981) study. Our results indicate that the majority of participants rated their driving skill and safety as above average. We added different response scales as an extension and findings were stable across all three measures. Thus, our findings are consistent with the original findings by Svenson (1981). Materials, data, and code are available at https://osf.io/fxpwb/.

We study the effects of experimental manipulation of decision mode (rational "brain" vs. affective "heart") and individual difference in processing styles (intuition vs. deliberation) on prosocial behavior. In a survey experiment with a diverse sample of the Swedish population (n = 1,828), we elicited the individuals' processing style and we experimentally manipulated reliance on affect or reason, regardless of subjects' preferred mode. Prosocial behavior was measured across a series of commonly used and incentivized games (prisoner's dilemma game, public goods game, trust game, dictator game). Our results show that prosocial behavior increased for the affective ("heart") decision mode. Further, individual differences in processing style did not predict prosocial behavior and did not interact with the experimental manipulation.

Are people more likely to (mis)interpret information so that it aligns with their ideological identity when relying on feelings compared to when engaging in analytical thinking? Or is it the other way around: Does deliberation increase the propensity to (mis)interpret information to confirm existing political views? In a behavioral experiment, participants ( n = 1207, Swedish sample) assessed numerical information concerning the effects of gender quotas and immigration either under time pressure or under no time pressure. To measure trait differences in cognitive sophistication, we also collected data on numeric ability. We found clear evidence of motivated reasoning when assessing both the effects of gender quotas on companies’ financial results and the effect of refugee intake on crime rates. Subjects who prioritized equality over liberty on the labor market were 13 percentage points less likely to correctly assess numerical information depicting that companies that used gender quotas when hiring made less profit. Subjects who classified themselves as ‘Swedes’ rather than ‘World citizens’ were 14 percentage points less likely to correctly assess numerical information depicting that crime rates decreased following immigration. Time pressure did not affect the likelihood to engage in motivated reasoning, while subjects with higher numeric ability were less likely to engage in motivated reasoning when analyzing information concerning refugee intake, but more likely to engage in motivated reasoning when analyzing information regarding the effect of gender quotas. Together these results indicate that motivated reasoning is primarily driven by individual differences in analytical thinking at the trait level and not by situational factors such as time pressure, and that whether motivated reasoning is primarily driven by analysis or feelings depends on the topic at hand.

Motivated numeracy refers to the idea that people with high reasoning capacity will use that capacity selectively to process information in a manner that protects their own valued beliefs. This concept was introduced in a now classic article by Kahan, Peters, Dawson, & Slovic [2017, Behavioral Public Policy 1, 54–86], who used numeracy to index reasoning capacity, and demonstrated that the tendency to engage in ideologically congruent interpretation of facts increased substantially with people's numeracy. Despite the importance of this finding, both from a theoretical and practical point of view, there is yet no consensus in the literature about the factual strength of motivated numeracy. We therefore conducted a large-scale replication of Kahan, Peters, Dawson, and Slovic (2017), using a pre-specified analysis plan with strict evaluation criteria. We did not find good evidence for motivated numeracy; there are distinct patterns in our data at odds with the core predictions of the theory, most notably (i) there is ideologically congruent responding that is not moderated by numeracy, and (ii) when there is moderation, ideologically congruent responding occurs only at the highest levels of numeracy. Our findings suggest that the cumulative evidence for motivated numeracy is weaker than previously thought, and that caution is warranted when this feature of human cognition is leveraged to improve science communication on contested topics such as climate change or immigration.