The overall aim of this study was to investigate the stability of the affect heuristic, both in terms of methodological elicitation (joint vs. separate evaluation) and in terms of cognitive abilities. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0025405, Hsee, C. K. (1996). Still, the only abilities that were linked to individual RBI were general intelligence, arithmetic performance, numeracy/risk literacy, and cognitive reflection. Bull. If your emotional state is negative, on the other hand, you are more inclined to see the activity as being lo… The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. "Affect", in this context, is simply a feeling—fear, pleasure, humorousness, etc. All conditions become increasingly more difficult in terms of the number of digits there are to be repeated. Slovic, P., and Peters, E. (2006). If so, we would expect that individuals with better cognitive abilities, which are dependent upon System 2 processes, would display a weaker or even absent inverse correlation between risk and benefit judgments. The theory of affect heuristic is that a human being's affect … Technical Report C-1, The Center for Research in Psychophysiology. We examine whether the affect heuristic in risk judgment can be captured using activities from various different domains (e.g., social domain, sensation-seeking domain, health domain, economic domain, etc.) Although this is primarily an explorative study, we suspect that certain cognitive dispositions, say, high cognitive reflection ability, will allow individuals to utilize cognitive resources to reflect upon the risk and benefits judgments to be made. How Do We Form Impressions of Other People? Sci. For example, it does not necessarily follow that someone with superior attention span (i.e., executive functions) is more apt at overriding or bypassing System 1 processes in favor of more controlled and perhaps rational cognitive processes. Cognitive reflection and intuition in traders, bankers, and financial non-experts. The following questions are part of the CRT: (1) “A bat and a ball cost $1.10. Copyright © 2020 Skagerlund, Forsblad, Slovic and Västfjäll. (2000), where they manipulated the amount of information given to the participants about various scenarios. You give greater credence to this information and tend to overestimate the probability and likelihood of similar things happening in the future. The digit span subtest of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale IV (WAIS-IV; Wechsler, 2011) was used to measure working memory ability. Rationality and the Reflective Mind. The participants then completed the 64-item questionnaire if being assigned to a separate condition or both 64-item questionnaires if being assigned to the joint RB condition. Cogn. It might help you stay calm, collected, and level-headed, a strategy that may prevent bad decisions made in the heat of the moment. Scatterplot of the relationship between risk and benefit judgments in (A) separate evaluation and in panel (B) joint evaluation. The color in which the words were written and the color the words signified were incongruent (e.g., the word “blue” written in red letters). to answer the question. Behav. Descriptive data and correlation matrix. The mean response time of the two sheets was used as the index of inhibition ability. To investigate this possibility, we administered a set of tests tapping general cognitive abilities that could plausibly be tied to the propensity to use the affect heuristic. Evidence has amassed for the significance of affect in judgment and decision-making , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , leading Kahneman to state that, “The idea of an affect heuristic…is probably the most important development in the study of…heuristics in the past few decades. Prima facie, executive functions and working memory capacity would plausibly be associated with the affect heuristic insofar as having poor cognitive capacities may undermine the ability to reflect deliberately and disregard discrepant affective reactions during judgments of risks and benefits. 58, 382–398. 125, 576–590. The participants had 20 min at their disposal to solve as many problems as possible. In other words, it is a type of heuristic in which emotional response, or "affect" in psychological terms, plays a lead role. Out of these 500 members in the choir, 100 are men. What is the probability that a randomly drawn man is a member of the choir?). Risk Res. Across two studies we find that (1) the risk–benefit correlation is stable across different elicitation methods and for different domains (e.g., social domain, sensation-seeking domain, health domain, economic domain) and (2) the strength of the inverse correlation is tied to individual cognitive abilities—primarily cognitive reflection ability. If the affect heuristic in risk and benefit judgments is indeed primarily a System 1 process, we hypothesize that we could relate the individual (inverse) correlation coefficient (i.e., an index of affect heuristic) to individual cognitive abilities. In Study 2, we find that this affect heuristic index can be tied to individual cognitive abilities, primarily cognitive reflection ability. doi: 10.1177/0013164498058003002. Investigating the operation of the affect heuristic: is it an associative construct? For the purposes of the psychological heuristic, affect is often judged on a simple diametric scale of "good" or "bad". KS and DV together conceptualized the study and contributed to the study design. Siegrist, M., and Sutterlin, B. Established measures of general cognitive abilities are inherently about mental capacities although cognitive reflection may also involve a general tendency or inclination to identify and resists responses that first come to mind (Frederick, 2005). The risk and benefit judgments of all activities can be found in Table 1. The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. Moreover, traders also displayed higher risk-taking behavior than the other groups, which could suggest a link between cognitive reflection and the inclination to take risks despite possibly negative emotional reactions that accompany those risks. Is the propensity to use the affect heuristic in risk and benefit judgments linked to specific cognitive abilities? J. Exper. The reliance on feelings when judging risks and benefits is one of the most fundamental valuation processes in risk perception. This is important because research has shown that people make different evaluations about preferences depending on whether the options are presented in isolation or not (Hsee, 1996; Hsee et al., 1999). Representative heuristic is where people use existing memories to identify associated characteristics of an object or a person. Lay rationalism: individual differences in using reason versus feelings to guide decisions. The rationale is that the value of a given alternative, which may be difficult to quantify, is more readily materialized when presented with a second alternative allowing for direct comparison. (1996). Simply being aware of the phenomenon might be helpful. The affect heuristic is closely linked to the availability heuristic (Tversky and Kahneman, 1982), and it has been suggested that the affect heuristic is essentially a type of availability process in which emotionally charged events quickly spring to mind (Slovic et al., 2004). A longitudinal study also examined the stability of the risk and benefit judgments (Connor and Siegrist, 2016). Organ. (2000) found that the inverse correlation increased under time pressure (a situational manipulation), it is important to examine whether individual differences in reliance on System 1 versus System 2 processing produce a similar effect. Stanovich, K. E., and West, R. F. (2000). “The role of affect in decision making,” in Handbook of Affective Sciences, ed. Adv. The correlation between judged risk and judged benefit across the 64 items was then calculated for the joint RB-group as well as for the separate RO and BO groups. Anchoring and adjustment 4. Strong inverse correlations were observed for all domains except the recreation domain. Therefore, future studies should employ comprehensive test batteries in which both performance measures as well as measures of individual dispositions are included to get a full picture of how, when, and by whom the affect heuristic is used. Sci. Psychol., 12 June 2020 If your emotional state is negative, on the other hand, you are more inclined to see the activity as being low in benefits and high in risk. Sign up to find out more in our Healthy Mind newsletter. Thinking dispositions, such as “need for cognition” (e.g., Epstein et al., 1996) or “lay rationality” (Hsee et al., 2015) are undoubtedly influential determinants of whether one engages in various heuristics and biases. 19, 461–475. The finding from Study 1 establishes that the affect heuristic in risk judgments is indeed a robust phenomenon that is reproducible in both joint and separate conditions. Empirical support for this claim was first established by Alhakami and Slovic (1994) when they discovered an inverse relationship between judgments of risks and benefits of various everyday activities and technologies. Preference reversals between joint and separate evaluations of options: a review and theoretical analysis. The role of affect and availability heuristics in risk analysis. A novel way of looking into the affective component of risk perception was also developed by Dohle et al. Reisberg, D. The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Psychology. Whenever a police officer is killed in the line of duty, it is often a major news event. The other child, however, recently had a negative experience while playing on the swings at a friend's house. Why? This test consisted of 16 items in the form of cube figures. As I have understood, availability heuristic means that things that are "available" in one's cognition (one has thought recently) are prone to influence one's perception. (2012). 23, 665–726. Educ. In the same vein, a study by Keller et al. The items were pseudo-randomly distributed throughout the questionnaire, and the participants were asked to rate each activity based on his/her subjective attitude from 1 (not at all risky/beneficial) to 7 (extremely risky/beneficial). They allow us to make decisions quickly and efficiently. Let’s use this as our working definition of the availability heuristic: The availability heuristic is a shortcut that confuses easy with true when you … For example, the availability heuristic is a cognitive bias by which humans tend to rely on recent information far more than historical information. New York, NY: The Psychological Corporation. By looking at different facets of cognitive abilities, we can get a better understanding of the mechanisms that may explain why some individuals may or may not utilize the affect heuristic. Risk Anal. Risk Anal. doi: 10.1111/risa.12179, Sloman, S. A. Still, a strength of Study 2 was that all testing was supervised and strictly controlled, which is also necessary when employing standardized cognitive tests. Accordingly, poorer performance on these tasks would be associated with stronger inverse correlations between judgments of risk and benefit. According to this model, there are three modes of thinking, two of which correspond to System 2 processing (“the algorithmic mind” and “the reflective mind”), and one corresponds to System 1 processing (“the autonomous mind”). However, our results imply that the inverse relationship can be elicited irrespective of whether the judgments of the relative risks and benefits are made jointly or separately. KS interpreted the results and drafted the manuscript. This research was supported by a grant from the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation (Dnr: 2014-0173) awarded to DV. Availability Heuristic: ... One other type of heuristic that wasn't mentioned in the lesson is called an affect heuristic. 34, 1482–1494. PLoS One 10:e0123202. Decision Mak. The availability heuristic and the affect heuristic are key accounts of how laypeople judge risks. A plausible hypothesis is that higher risk literacy results in less propensity to use the affect heuristic (see also Ikawa and Kusumi, 2018). By giving more favorable information about a certain activity, the affective evaluation increased. (2016). For the RB group, the mean correlation was −0.50 (SD = 0.33). 5 Ways to Become More Emotionally Intelligent at Work, The Psychology Behind Why We Strive for Consensus. These findings corroborate the notion that affective information underlies judgments of risk and benefit, but also confirm that there is a causal link between perceptions of risk and benefits of a given activity. Psychol. Science 236, 280–285. Thus, the affect heuristic is a ubiquitous feature of everyday life when judging risks and benefits. He immediately makes the decision that the swings will be fun (high benefit, low risk) and runs to play on the swings. “The affect heuristic,” in Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment, eds T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, and D. Kahneman, (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press), 397–420. Psychol. Are you more likely to be killed working as a police officer or as a fisherman? In Study 2, we go deeper to investigate individual cognitive abilities involving System 2 processes that may drive the affect heuristic. “How do I feel about it? We administer a test battery of standard cognitive abilities, such as general intelligence, executive functions, and working memory. doi: 10.1006/cogp.1999.0735. It likely is important in such judgments. This correlation coefficient can be construed as an index (risk–benefit index; RBI) of individual inclination to use the affect heuristic. The phrasing of the problems is constructed in such a way that intuitive but wrong solutions have to be inhibited. When an infrequent event can be brought easily and vividly to mind, this heuristic overestimates its likelihood. A reasoning heuristic is a mental shortcut we use to simplify decision making. The domains from which the risky activities were selected included the social domain (e.g., “Speak before an audience,” “Having an affair”), the health domain (e.g., “Undergo surgery,” “Vaccination”), the sensation-seeking domain (e.g., “Skydiving,” “Taking ecstasy”), the economic domain (e.g., “Buy stocks,” “Housing mortgage loan”). Researchers have found that when you are in a positive emotional state, you are more likely to perceive an activity as having high benefits and low risks. The immediacy of the information holds more power than the accuracy or completeness of the information. This was primarily used to investigate the degree to which participants interpreted the activities as intended. The arithmetic of emotion: integration of incidental and integral affect in judgments and decisions. Every day, the patch doubles in size. 2007;177:1333-1352. doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2005.04.006, Lerner JS, Li Y, Valdesolo P, Kassam KS. If the judgments of risk and benefit are sensitive to whether they are made in joint or separate evaluation, we would expect a difference in the strength of the correlation coefficient between conditions. (2000) that demonstrated that the inverse relationship between perceived risks and benefits increased greatly under time pressure, when the opportunity for analytic deliberation was reduced. 7:325. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00325. 19, 25–42. The sequencing condition requires the participant to recall all the digits in the correct ordinal sequence. For a long time, the general view was that human decision making was a matter of rational, cognitive processing in which alternatives were exhaustively explored and calculated upon (Västfjäll and Slovic, 2013). Availability Heuristic According to Tversky and Kahneman s (1973) availability heu-ristic, People assess the frequency of a class or the probability of an event by the ease with which instances or occurrences can be brought to mind. doi: 10.1111/j.1539-6924.2010.01404.x, Epstein, S., Pacini, R., Denes-Raj, V., and Heier, H. (1996). The second aim of this project is to investigate another form of stability: across methods of assessing/inducing reliance on System 1 versus System 2 processing. Although previous research suggests that the affect heuristic reliably predicts an inverse correlation between risk and benefit judgments, it has not yet been tested if the affect heuristic is sensitive to elicitation method effects (joint/separate evaluation) and to what extent individual differences in cognitive abilities may mediate the risk–benefit correlation. Heuristics come in all flavors, but two main types are the representativeness heuristic and the availability heuristic. J. Behav. Västfjäll, D., and Slovic, P. (2013). Preference reversals during risk elicitation. Each subtest contained 54 problems except for division, which contained 26. Decision Proces. Therefore, one aim of the current research project is to establish whether the inverse relationship can be found in both a joint condition and a separate condition and, thus, displays stability across elicitation methods. If so, we would strengthen the assumption that an affect heuristic drives the judgments of both risk and benefits. Second, the participants filled in the questionnaire in two steps. People get this wrong because of the availability heuristic. Bradley, M. M., and Lang, P. J. As in Study 1, the pattern of negative correlations for activities in each domain showed similar patterns. By contrast, the availability heuristic is where we use existing memories to identify the … Your feelings of the relative "goodness" or "badness" of a particular person, object, or activity impact the decisions that you ultimately make. (2014). For example, if you witness two car accidents in a week you may start to believe that driving is dangerous, even if your historical experience suggests it's reasonably safe. In addition, we used a measure of general intelligence to primarily control for abstract reasoning when investigating the role of numeracy and risk literacy, executive functions, and cognitive reflection in relation to the affect heuristic. Police officers are often killed in the pursuit of criminals and this is typically viewed as a heroic act, which means it becomes a human interest story a… The affect heuristic refers to the fact that people make judgments based on representations of objects or events that are marked with valenced affect. Eur J Oper Res. Executive functions, spatial ability, and working memory capacity did not link to RBI although cognitive reflection did even when controlling for general intelligence. The short version contains 12 items taken from the original RAPM that have proven to be a useful and valid proxy for the full-length RAPM (r = 0.92 correlation with full RAPM; Bors and Stokes, 1998). Psychol. In addition, we investigate numeracy and risk literacy as measured by the BNT and CRT that has been explicitly linked to System 1 and System 2 processes. (1999). Out of the 500 inhabitants that are not in the choir, 300 are men. (2012). The affect heuristic is a type of mental shortcut in which people make decisions that are heavily influenced by their current emotions. Essentially, your affect (a psychological term for emotional response) plays a critical role in the choices and decisions you make. No study has, to date, verified that separate evaluations of risk and benefits show the same pattern as joint evaluations. Hum. Keller, C., Siegrist, M., and Gutscher, H. (2006). The affect heuristic can influence decisions in essentially any domain, and it has been demonstrated that we tend to rely on this heuristic more in situations where there is significant time pressure 1.This means that if we are ever given an important decision to make quickly, we may resort to this heuristic, which has the potential to lead us to choose poorly. This corroborates previous work by Finucane et al. Alhakami, A. S., and Slovic, P. (1994). In the scatterplot in Figure 2, we observe the same overall pattern as in Study 1 in terms of the risk–benefit correlation. as quickly as possible. A study by Thoma et al. J. Pers. Several researchers suggest that there is an interaction between more affective, experiential systems and deliberative systems (labeled System 1: fast thinking and System 2: slow thinking, respectively; Kahneman, 2011). In the digit span forward condition, the participant hears a series of digits and attempts to repeat them out loud in order. The mean age in the sample was 28.08 years (SD = 4.23). Numeracy and risk literacy was measured using the BNT, developed by Cokely et al. We investigated whether judgments of risk and benefit were the same for the separate and joint conditions by using a test of statistical equivalence (TOST) using a smallest effect size of interest (SESOI) of one half of a standard deviation of the mean risk ratings and benefit ratings. In psychology, a heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows people to make decisions quickly and efficiently. 14, 1085–1096. Front. Most people select police officer. Dohle, S., Keller, C., and Siegrist, M. (2010). This is the heuristic approach to answering the question because you used some information you already knew to make an educated guess (but still a guess!) Although individual analyses of the different domains are outside the scope of the current study, using a large questionnaire with a variety of everyday activities that are not necessarily infused with strong affect (as opposed to studies investigating attitude toward nuclear power plants or biotechnology) would strengthen the notion that the affect heuristic is involved ubiquitously in everyday judgments of risk and benefits. (2006) found that evoking negative affect resulted in an increased level of perceived risks, which also has been linked to the possibility that the affect heuristic may lead to biased decisions when risk is a factor (Siegrist and Sutterlin, 2014). Scand. The difficulty level of the problems was manipulated by increasing the number of digits or by requiring borrowing or carrying. The authors assessed risk and benefit judgments at two time points, and the follow-up assessment was made after 2 years had elapsed after the initial assessment. To assess executive functions, we administered a shifting task (trail-making test) and an inhibition task (Stroop task). If each one of us analyzes information in a way that prioritizes memorability and nearness over accuracy, then the model of a rational, logical chooser, which is predominant in economics as well as many other fields, can be flawed at times. Front. Slovic et al. According to the developers, the BNT captures a skill that is “…important for accurately interpreting and acting on information about risk—i.e., risk literacy” (Cokely et al., 2012, p. 37). Researchers have also discovered that emotions can also influence the judgments people make about statistical information. 3:E1701381. An online survey (described below in Section “Material” of Study 1) administered by CMA Research was created and sent out to a sample of 602 Swedish adults aged 19–35 (328 women, 269 men, and 5 unspecified). Many theorists have given affect a direct and primary role in decision making (Damasio, 1994; Loewenstein and Lerner, 2003). For example, nuclear power should be deemed to be both risky and beneficial. While such mental shortcuts allow people to make quick and often reasonably accurate decisions, they can also lead to poor decision-making. Given that Finucane et al. availability heuristic and the affect heuristic . Participants in two groups were asked to either recall a handful of childhood memories, or many childhood memories from each age in their childhood in response to word prompts (1).For example, participants might have been asked to recall a memory from age 7 that related to the keyword "apple". Prospect theory 2 Representativeness Heuristic Used to judge membership in a class Judge similarity to stereotypes People are insensitive to prior probability of outcomes They ignore preexisting distribution of categories or base rate frequencies But sometimes, they’re obstacles to effective, logical, and critical thinking. I find that in this sense priming would be a subcategory of availability or vice versa. Cognitive reflection and decision making. (2000), illustrating that our questionnaire captures the affect heuristic. The BNT consists of four items (e.g., “Out of 1000 people in a small town, 500 are members of a choir. The findings based on the RB group, who filled out both risk and benefit judgments in a joint evaluation, showed an inverse correlation of r = −0.85, p < 0.001, echoes previous studies by Finucane et al. On the other hand, it could very well turn out that superior cognitive abilities lead to more deliberate evaluations of risk and benefits. If group A was asked to imagine a specific outcome and then asked if it was a likely outcome, and group B was asked whether the same specific outcome was likely without being asked to imagine it first, the members of group A tend to view the outcome as more likely than the members of group B, thereby de… 15, 322–325. Wechsler, D. (2011). The raven’s progressive matrices: change and stability over culture and time. Keywords: affect heuristic, cognitive reflection, risk perception, decision making, risk INTRODUCTION For a long time, the general view was that human decision making was a matter of rational, |, Study 1: Establishing the Affect Heuristic, Study 2: the Affect Heuristic and Individual Cognitive Abilities, Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). However, there were two differences. The affect heuristic in judgments of risks and benefits. For each test item, there is one missing piece of the figure. To investigate the affect heuristic, we developed a questionnaire containing 64 items. Risk has been suggested to be perceived and acted upon in two ways: (1) risk-as-analysis, in which risk judgments are driven by logical reasoning and deliberation and (2) risk-as-feelings, in which judgments of risk are the result of momentary and intuitive reactions to averse events and dangers (Loewenstein et al., 2001; Slovic and Peters, 2006). J. Psychol. Heuristics & Biases Heuristics are one source of biases. 24, 311–322. J. Further support for the affect heuristic came from a second experiment by Finucane et al. Loewenstein, G. F., Weber, E. U., Hsee, C. K., and Welch, N. (2001). Given that the affect heuristic may be considered as a System 1–driven process, it could very well be negatively tied to cognitive processing abilities, such as logical reasoning, executive functions, numeracy and risk literacy, and cognitive reflection. doi: 10.1037/xge0000655. Risk and benefit judgments in Study 2 sorted by level of estimated risk. See Figure 1 for a scatterplot of both joint and separate evaluations. Curr. R. J. Davidson, (Cham: Springer), 619—-642. When he sees the swings at the park, he draws on this recent negative memory and decides that the swings are a bad choice (low benefit, high risk). For each group, all items were averaged with respect to their perceived level of risk or benefit. Bull. Although deliberative analyses are certainly important in many decision-making circumstances, reliance on affect and emotion as sources of information tends to be a quicker, easier, and more efficient way to navigate in a complex, uncertain, and sometimes dangerous world (Schwarz and Clore, 1988). Therefore, individuals who perform less well on the CRT may not tend to inhibit these affective or intuitive responses and, thus, act according to their intuitive gut feelings when judging risks and benefits. Gen. 149, 585–589. See Figure 3 for scatterplots of the relationships between RBI, CRT, and general intelligence. Table 2. Thus, the inverse relationship between risk and benefit judgments may be driven by System 1 processes, which our findings support. To verify the stability of the involvement of the affect heuristic in risk and benefit judgments, we developed a questionnaire (see brief description below). J. A methodological strength is that we could find an almost identical pattern when administering the risk–benefit questionnaire online to 600 participants as when we administered it individually in a closely supervised setting. The participant was told to verbalize the color in which the words were written as quickly as possible while inhibiting the meaning of the words. Here is a quite different example of the availability heuristic. One of the best known is the availability heuristic. How much does the ball cost?” (2) “If it takes five machines 5 min to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?” (3) “In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Calculating a rank-order correlation revealed a slight decrease in the coefficient, rs = −0.73, p < 0.001. New York, NY: Avon Books. Taken together, our findings indicate that the tendency to use the affect heuristic (RBI), on a group level, does relate to a specific cognitive ability, namely the ability or disposition to identify and resist responses that first comes to mind. The participants were instructed to complete as many problems as they could within the allotted time of 120 s for each subtest.

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