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When choosing between immediate and future rewards, how do people deal with uncertainty about the value of the future outcome or the delay until its occurrence? Skylark et al. (2020) suggested that people employ a delay-reward heuristic: the inferred value of an ambiguous future reward is a function of the stated delay, and vice-versa. The present paper investigates the role of this heuristic in choice behaviour. In Studies 1a–2b, participants inferred the value of an ambiguous future reward or delay before the true value was revealed and a choice made. Preference for the future option was predicted by the discrepancy between the estimated and true values: the more pleasantly surprising the delayed option, the greater the willingness to choose it. Studies 3a–3c examined the association between inference and preference when the ambiguous values remained unknown. As predicted by the use of a delay-reward heuristic, inferred delays and rewards were positively related to stated rewards and delays, respectively. More importantly, choices were associated with inferred rewards and, in some circumstances, delays. Critically, estimates and choices were both order-dependent: when estimates preceded choices, estimates were more optimistic (people inferred smaller delays and larger rewards) and were subsequently more likely to choose the delayed option than when choices were made before estimates. These order effects argue against a simple model in which people deal with ambiguity by first estimating the unknown value and then using their estimate as the basis for decision. Rather, it seems that inferences are partly constructed from choices, and the role of inference in choice depends on whether an explicit estimate is made prior to choosing. Finally, we also find that inferences about ambiguous delays depend on whether the estimate has to be made in \"days\" or in a self-selected temporal unit, and replicate previous findings that older participants make more pessimistic inferences than younger ones. We discuss the implications and possible mechanisms for these findings.

When comparing a pair of attribute values, English speakers can use a \"larger\" comparative (\"A is larger/longer/higher/more than B\") or a \"smaller\" comparative (\"B is smaller/shorter/lower/less than A\"). This choice matters because it affects people's inferences about the absolute magnitudes of the compared items, and influences the perceived truthfulness of the comparative sentence itself. In 4 studies (total N = 2335), we investigated the language that people use to describe ordinal relations between attributes. Specifically, we examined whether demography, emotion, and personality predict the tendency to use \"larger\" comparatives rather than \"smaller\" ones. Participants viewed pairs of items differing in a single attribute and indicated the word they would use to describe the relationship between them; they also completed a series of self-report measures. Replicating previous work, we found a robust tendency to use \"larger\" comparatives, both when people chose between two adjectives and when they freely produced their own words in a sentence completion task. We also found that this tendency was more pronounced in older participants, those with positive mood or outlook, and among people high in agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability. However, these effects were very small, with meta-analytic effect sizes indicating they explain less than 1% of the variance. We conclude that, although people's use of comparative adjectives is influenced by properties of the items that are being compared, the way that people describe magnitude relations is relatively stable across variation in a range of important traits and dispositions, protecting decision-makers from a potentially undesirable source of bias in their inferences and representations of described options.

Do people think that there is such a thing as too much money? The present research investigated this question in the context of hypothetical lottery wins. By employing a mental simulation approach, we were able to examine how people respond to increasing envisioned jackpot amounts, and whether there are individual differences in people’s reactions. Across five empirical studies (total N = 1,504), we consistently found that, overall, the relationship between imagined lottery wins and expected happiness is characterized by an inverted U-shaped curve, with expected happiness being highest around an envisioned win of roughly 10 million pounds. Both lower and higher envisioned wins reduced participants’ overall expected happiness. In addition to this overall pattern, we identified three clusters of participants who react differently to expected increases in wealth. These clusters mainly differed in terms of how soon the top of the expected happiness curve was reached, and if and when the curve started to drop. Finally, we also found some interesting cluster differences in terms of participants’ prosocial and proself motivations.

Online, social media communication is often ambiguous, and it can encourage speed and inattentiveness. We investigated whether Actively Open Minded Thinking (AOT), a dispositional willingness to seek out new or potentially threatening information, may help users avoid these pitfalls. In Study 1, we determined that correctly assessing social media authors’ traits was positively predicted by raters’ AOT. In Study 2, we used data-driven methods to devise a three-dimensional picture of online behaviors of people high or low in AOT, finding that AOT is associated with thoughtful, nuanced, idiosyncratic actions and with resisting the typically fast pace of online interactions. AOT may be an important factor in accurate, socially responsible online behavior.

The General Decision-Making Styles (GDMS) scale measures five decision-making styles: rational, intuitive, dependent, avoidant and spontaneous. GDMS has been related to coping and some personality factors and sex-differences has been described. In spite of its usefulness, there is not a validated Spanish translation. The aim of this study is to translate to Spanish and provide psychometric evidence considering sex differences and the relationships between GDMS, personality and coping variables. Two samples were used for this study; the first sample composed by 300 participants who completed the GDMS and the Rational-Experiential Inventory (REI), and the second sample of 361 participants who completed the GDMS, the Ten Item Personality Trait Inventory and the brief COPE scales. Participants from second sample filled in GDMS a second time (137 participants) after eight weeks from the first data collection. Confirmatory factor analyses showed a five-factor composition of GDMS with equivalence across sex using invariance analyses. Moreover, GDMS showed acceptable internal consistency and temporal stability. Finally, rational and intuitive styles were related to healthier coping patterns and emotional stability, while dependent, avoidant and spontaneous styles were associated with unhealthy coping patterns and emotional instability.

I present a novel way to conceptualize Turiel and colleagues’ Social Domain Theory (SDT), and Haidt and colleagues’ Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), as theories of how concepts of moral violations are mentally represented. I argue that SDT is best viewed as a theory of the features that are associated with concepts of moral violations, including wrongness, generalizability across cultures, and intrinsic harmfulness, and that MFT, in contrast, is best viewed as a theory of individual differences in what kinds of acts are categorized as moral violations (i.e., of category membership). This perspective generates a novel prediction: the same individual difference variables that predict variation in moral values according to MFT should predict ascription of the features predicted by SDT. That is, judgments of wrongness, generalizability, and intrinsic harmfulness should covary with the same predictors as do endorsed moral values, specifically, political orientation and analytic thinking. Three studies supported this hypothesis.

Decision making is a multifaceted process but studies of individual differences in decision behavior typically use only the proportions of choices from different options as behavioral indices. I examine whether the probability of choice switching in decisions from experience, reflecting one’s exploration strategy, is consistent across sessions and tasks. In Study 1, I re-analyzed an experiment in which participants performed six decision tasks in two sessions that were 45 days apart. Choice switching rates were highly consistent across sessions and tasks, and their consistency exceeded that of rates of risky choices. In Study 2 I conducted a similar analysis for the Technion Prediction Tournament, and also found higher consistency across tasks in switching rates than in choice rates. Additionally, in both studies, there were moderate to high correlations between switching rates at the beginning and towards the end of the task. The results thus highlight an often overlooked but highly consistent and independent aspect of human behavior.

The present paper examines the effectiveness of financial overcompensation as a means to enhance customer loyalty after a product failure. Overcompensation implies that customers are entitled to a refund that is larger than the purchase price. It is, however, still unclear whether large overcompensations entail saturation effects, or alternatively, result in an actual drop in customer loyalty. We predicted that the overcompensation-loyalty relationship is generally characterized by an inverted U-shaped function. In line with this prediction, the results of four studies showed that mild overcompensations had, on average, a positive effect on customer loyalty beyond equal compensation, but only up to compensation levels of approximately 150% of the purchase price of faulty products. Beyond this level, the effectiveness of overcompensation diminished, eventually leading to a general drop in customer loyalty. Despite this overall pattern, two studies revealed robust individual differences in how customers react to increasing overcompensation. A majority of customers increased their loyalty when the overcompensation enlarged, but the curve flattened out in the high range. However, there was also a smaller portion of customers who reacted negatively to every form of overcompensation. A practical implication of these findings, therefore, is that companies should not offer compensations that are greater than 150% of the initial price, as these do not contribute to greater loyalty in any category of customers.