How much information do you need to make up your mind? Our research in various domains of decision making shows that we make decisions more quickly and based on less information than we think. This has important implications in an age in which information is plentiful.
Researchers have long maintained the importance of individual differences in motivational orientations for understanding personality and behavior. Recent findings suggest that strengthening and integrating four different motives in particular may make us better decision makers and more effective at achieving our goals.
New research shows that being similar to a previous winner can have radically different effects on people’s participation likelihood in sweepstakes – it all depends on the attributions people make for the winning outcome.
Changing one’s mind is a difficult, painful process. What kind of appeals are effective at changing the minds of others? How can you work on evaluating information objectively, such that you would reconsider your previous ideas?
Ignorance is bliss: How much would you pay to avoid threatening information?
Planning our retirement is an endeavour we need to undertake sooner or later. A well thought-out pension plan must be able to ensure our well-being during a long period of professional inactivity. However, a striking finding is that people do not save enough for their retirement. They have difficulties to design a retirement plan tailored to their needs and end up with an insufficient pension income and an impoverished lifestyle. Behavioural economics has pointed out some of the problems that affect retirement planning.
By Tim Gohmann While the media focused on Donald Trump’s denigration of women, war heroes, Latinos and Muslims, Trump was building not just support but commitment from his core target — working-class, non-college–educated white males — to get out and vote. What was juvenile and embarrassing to the intellectual was the “silver bullet” that [...]
Emerging insights on “temporal contagion” explain the unusual contours of limited-edition markets.
The BIAS project completed 15 randomized controlled trials of behavioral interventions in child care, child support, and work support programs. This article summarizes the “SIMPLER” framework of behavioral concepts and shares examples of how these concepts were used in BIAS interventions.
Behavioural science has contributed much to the understanding of decision-making in the last few decades. We now understand how heuristics and biases can influence our thinking, perceptions, choices and behaviour. Yet, many of the frequently cited studies from behavioural science have been conducted on students, typically in their early twenties. Consequently, people often ask whether these findings still hold in other generations: Does our decision making process differ as we get older? Do we become more or less ‘rational’? And if minds do differ, how does the 20 year old mind differ to the 70 or 80 year old mind?
