Behavioral Decision Making

"The crime of blackmail has risen to national media attention because of the David Letterman case, but this wonderfully curious offense has long been the favorite of clever criminal law theorists. It criminalizes the threat to do something that would not be criminal if one did it. There exists a rich literature on the issue, with many prominent legal scholars offering their accounts. Each theorist has his own explanation as to why the blackmail offense exists. Most theories seek to justify the position that blackmail is a moral wrong and claim to offer an account that reflects widely shared moral intuitions. But the theories make widely varying assertions about what those shared intuitions are, while also lacking any evidence to support the assertions.
This Article summarizes the results of an empirical study designed to test the competing theories of blackmail to see which best accords with prevailing sentiment. Using a variety of scenarios designed to isolate and test the various criteria different theorists have put forth as “the” key to blackmail, this study reveals which (if any) of the various theories of blackmail proposed to date truly reflects laypeople’s moral judgment.
Blackmail is not only a common subject of scholarly theorizing but also a common object of criminal prohibition. Every American jurisdiction criminalizes blackmail, although there is considerable variation in its formulation. The Article reviews the American statutes and describes the three general approaches these provisions reflect. The empirical study of lay intuitions also allows an assessment of which of these statutory approaches (if any) captures the community’s views, thereby illuminating the extent to which existing law generates results that resonate with, or deviate from, popular moral sentiment.
The analyses provide an opportunity to critique the existing theories of blackmail and to suggest a refined theory that best expresses lay intuitions. The present project also reveals the substantial conflict between community views and much existing legislation, indicating recommendations for legislative reform. Finally, the Article suggests lessons that such studies and their analyses offer for criminal law and theory."

Inequity aversion and reciprocity have been identified as two primary motives underlying human decision-making. However, because income and wealth inequalities exist to some degree in all societies, these two key motives can point to different decisions. In particular, when a beneficiary is less wealthy than the benefactor, a reciprocal action can lead to greater inequality. In this paper we report data from a trust game variant where trustees’ responses to kind intentions generate inequality in favor of investors. In relation to a standard trust game treatment where trustees’ responses reduce inequality, the proportion of non-reciprocating decisions is twice as large when reciprocity promotes inequality. Moreover, we find that investors expect that this will be the case. Overall, we find that a majority (more than half) of trustees do not reciprocate when reciprocity increases inequality that favors investors. Our results call attention to the potential importance of inequality in principal-agent relationships and have important implications for policies aimed at promoting trust and cooperation.

Using a managerial cognition lens, we investigate the organisational design issues facing multinational corporation (MNC) managers. We apply concepts hitherto untested in the international management (IM) literature to a longitudinal study of reconfiguration efforts within a large, Asian MNC. We focus on how organisational design outcomes can be affected through mental interventions that provoke changes in senior executives’ mental representations of what the MNC is and can be to achieve a strategic re-direction and redesign. We draw on extensive interview and other qualitative data. Our study contributes to the literatures on MNC design and to our understanding of the important, but largely neglected, micro-foundational role of cognition in IM. This field research on executive judgment and decision-making in real time offers unique insights into the dynamics of MNC design.

The aim of the present study was to examine to what degree different mechanisms of moral disengagement were related to age, gender, bullying, and defending among school children. Three hundred and seventy-two Swedish children ranging in age from 10 to 14 years completed a questionnaire. Findings revealed that boys expressed significantly higher levels of moral justification, euphemistic labeling, diffusion of responsibility, distorting consequences, and victim attribution, as compared with girls. Whereas boys bullied others significantly more often than girls, age was unrelated to bullying. Moral justification and victim attribution were the only dimensions of moral disengagement that significantly related to bullying. Furthermore, younger children and girls were more likely to defend victims. Diffusion of responsibility and victim attribution were significantly and negatively related to defending, while the other dimensions of moral disengagement were unrelated to defending.

The article first describes characteristics of major infrastructure projects. Second, it documents a much neglected topic in economics: that ex ante estimates of costs and benefits are often very different from actual ex post costs and benefits. For large infrastructure projects the consequences are cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and the systematic underestimation of risks. Third, implications for cost–benefit analysis are described, including that such analysis is not to be trusted for major infrastructure projects. Fourth, the article uncovers the causes of this state of affairs in terms of perverse incentives that encourage promoters to underestimate costs and overestimate benefits in the business cases for their projects. But the projects that are made to look best on paper are the projects that amass the highest cost overruns and benefit shortfalls in reality. The article depicts this situation as ‘survival of the unfittest’. Fifth, the article sets out to explain how the problem may be solved, with a view to arriving at more efficient and more democratic projects, and avoiding the scandals that often accompany major infrastructure investments. Finally, the article identifies current trends in major infrastructure development. It is argued that a rapid increase in stimulus spending, combined with more investments in emerging economies, combined with more spending on information technology is catapulting infrastructure investment from the frying pan into the fire.

In two experiments, we used an automatic car simulator to examine the steering control, speed regulation and response to hazards of young adults with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) and limited driving experience. In Experiment 1 participants either used the accelerator pedal to regulate their speed, or used the brake pedal when they needed to slow down from a pre-set speed. In Experiment 2, we introduced an auditory distraction condition that shared similarities with maintaining a conversation. Overall, the DCD group produced a larger variance in heading and needed more steering adjustments on straight roads, compared to age-matched controls. When turning bends, the DCD group showed greater difficulty in controlling steering while regulating their speed with the accelerator pedal but this was less problematic when using the brake. The DCD group also responded slower than the control group to pedestrians who walked towards their path. The auditory distraction in Experiment 2 had no visible effects on steering control but increased the reaction times to pedestrians in both groups. We discuss the results in terms of the visuomotor control in steering and the learning of optimal mappings between optic flow and vehicle control.

Neurosciences and Law as an interdisciplinary field of science, has recently attracted attention of many scholars by distinct motives. Hopes that brain mapping could be of help for court decisions at one side, are contrasted with ethical concerns about using neurosciences tests for evaluating liability at the other side. Despite its impressive development in the last half century, Neurosciences lacks well supported and formalized theories to guide experimental studies about complex cognitive tasks. This limits the impact any contribution of this new interdisciplinary area may have in the present and near future. Therefore, it is necessary to start to build a solid formal knowledge that will correctly guide future work in this new and very important area of research. The purpose of the present paper is to contribute to the development of this formal knowledge, by discussing how knowledge provided by neurosciences may contribute to the understanding of some concepts such as action adequacy and fairness; altruism and selfishness, personal and social conflict, etc. that are at the core of any law system. In addition, the study of brain activity associated with vote decision in Brazilian Firearm Commerce Prohibition carried out by Rocha et al (2010) is discussed to illustrate the present proposal.

This paper attempts to disentangle the difference between our own self-assessment of moral judgment and intentional judgment. Using a Knobe effect version of the Trolley Problem in our experiment, we used reactant variables—magnitude of victims, outcome probabilities, and expected outcome of lives saved—to find points were these two forms of moral judgments diverge. Outcome probabilities provided the most salient and consistent pattern, indicating that participants used outcome probabilities as their reference point in their moral decision making. We saw that, with respect to their own self-assessed moral judgments, individuals tend to be morally optimistic when the task dilemma emphasizes the lives saved, but become morally pessimistic when the same dilemma emphasizes the killing of the one other victim. Under negative probability frames, individuals tend to overestimate their attribution on positive intentions and underestimate their attribution on negative intentions.

"The aim of this article is to discuss the conditions under which functional neuroimaging can contribute to the study of higher-cognition. We begin by presenting two case studies---on moral and economic decision-making---which will help us identify and examine one of the main ways in which neuroimaging can help advance the study of higher cognition. We agree with critics that fMRI studies seldom `refine' or `confirm' particular psychological hypotheses, or even provide details of the neural implementation of cognitive functions. However, we suggest that neuroimaging can support psychology in a different way, namely, by selecting among competing hypotheses of the cognitive mechanisms underlying some mental function. One of the main ways in which neurimaging can be used for hypothesis selection is via reverse inferences, which we here examine in detail. Despite frequent claims to the contrary, we argue that successful reverse inferences do not assume any strong or objectionable form of reductionism or functional locationism. Moreover, our discussion illustrates that reverse inferences can be successful at early stages of psychological theorizing, when models of the cognitive mechanisms are only partially developed.
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We study the behavioral consequences of interpersonal communication prior to experimental Trust games. We manipulated the richness of the communication medium and the size of the communicating group. Communication richness failed to produce significant differences in first-mover investments, but the size of the communicating group did: The amounts sent were significantly higher in the dyadic communication conditions than in the group communication and no-communication conditions. We also found that first-movers’ expectations of second-movers’ reciprocation strongly predicted their levels of investment.

The central assumption of behavioral ecology is that natural selection has shaped individuals with the capacity to make decisions that balance the fitness costs and benefits of behavior. A number of factors shape the fitness costs and benefits of maternal care, but we lack a clear understanding how they, taken together, play a role in the decision-making process. In animal studies, the use of experimental methods has allowed for the tight control of these factors. Standard experimentation is inappropriate in human behavioral ecology, but vignette experiments may solve the problem. I used a confounded factorial vignette experiment to gather 640 third-party judgments about the maternal care decisions of hypothetical women and their children from 40 female karo Batak respondents in rural Indonesia. This allowed me to test hypotheses derived from parental investment theory about the relative importance of five binary factors in shaping maternal care decisions with regard to two distinct scenarios. As predicted, access to resources—measured as the ability of a woman to provide food for her children—led to increased care. A handful of other factors conformed to prediction, but they were inconsistent across scenarios. The results suggest that mothers may use simple heuristics, rather than a full accounting for costs and benefits, to make decisions about maternal care. Vignettes have become a standard tool for studying decision making, but have made only modest inroads to evolutionarily informed studies of human behavior.

Classical rationality as accepted by game theory assumes that a human chooser in a given moment has consistent preferences and beliefs and that actions result consistently from those preferences and beliefs, and moreover that these preferences, beliefs, and actions remain the same across equal choice moments. Since, as is widely found in prior experiments, subjects do not follow the predictions of classical rationality, behavioral game theorists have assumed consistent deviations from classical rationality by assigning to subjects certain dispositions — risk preference, cognitive abilities, social norms, etc. All of these theories are fundamentally cognitive theories, making claims about how individual human minds work when choosing. All of them are fundamentally wrong in assuming one kind of consistency or another. Or at least, all of the proposals for consistency in belief, preference, and action with which we are aware turn out to be wrong when tested experimentally.