Intuitive Choices Research Articles

Moral trade-offs reveal foundational representations that predict unique variance in political attitudes.

Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) explains variation in moral judgements on the basis of multiple innate, intuitive foundations and has been subject to criticism over recent years. Prior research has tended to rely on explicit self-report in the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ). In contrast, we seek to capture intuitive choices between foundations in a novel task - the Moral Foundations Conflict Task (MFCT). Across four studies, responses on this task reflect foundations measured by the MFQ (study 1), are not altered under cognitive load or reduced cognitive control (studies 2a and 2b); and explain unique variance in political orientation and related constructs (study 3). Furthermore, using responses and response times generated on the MFCT, we present a computationally explicit model of foundation-related intuitive judgements and show that these patterns are consistent with the theoretical claims of MFT. These findings show that the MFCT outperforms the MFQ and can contribute to the understanding of moral value conflicts, furthering debate on the nature of moral values.

Is There a Gender Gap in the Birthday-Number Effect? The Case of Lotto Players and the Role of Sequential Choice.

The literature on lottery gambling shows that players do not select numbers randomly, a phenomenon which is called conscious selection. Mainly, players prefer "small" numbers (less than thirty), either because of the existence of small lucky numbers or because they are victims of the so-called birthday-number effect. Because lotto games are parimutuel, such preferences result in poor ticket choices in terms of achieving below average returns. Using data from Belgium, where approximately 10% of the population plays lotto games every week, this paper extends prior literature by documenting the existence of a gender gap in the birthday-number effect, with women displaying a stronger birthday-number effect than men, as well as the non-persistence of the birthday-number effect (and consecutively of the gender gap) when participants are asked to fill in a second lotto ticket immediately after their first one. The disappearance of the birthday-number effect in sequential choices appears to be driven by response speed, with participants being twice as fast to fill in the second ticket compared to the first one. Moreover, we find that participants who bet on their birthday numbers take significantly more time to complete their ticket. Contrary to prior research, we find that the strength of the birthday-number effect is positively related to deliberative number choices, not intuitive and automatic number choices. Our results are robust to controlling for potential confounding effects including those related to participants' age, education, self-esteem, and superstitious beliefs.

Revisiting the tautology problem in rational choice theory: What it is and how to move forward theoretically and empirically

Criminological rational choice theory is blighted by tautology—that if a crime occurs, then by definition the benefits must exceed the costs. The current analysis details the nature of this tautology as well as its theoretical and philosophical implications concerning the circumstances under which offenders make rational (thoughtful and reflective) or irrational (habitual, intuitive, or instinctual) choices. In short, rational choice theorists appear to side-step the problems presented by this tautology by attempting to coerce observations and theorizing to conform with assumptions about cost–benefit rationality. This essay concludes by setting forth an agenda for the continued empirical investigation of the rational choice perspective—one where the perceived cost/benefit analysis itself for criminal behavior is treated as the outcome of interest.

Improving the Accuracy of Marginal Approximations in Likelihood-Free Inference via Localization

Likelihood-free methods are an essential tool for performing inference for implicit models which can be simulated from, but for which the corresponding likelihood is intractable. However, common likelihood-free methods do not scale well to a large number of model parameters. A promising approach to high-dimensional likelihood-free inference involves estimating low-dimensional marginal posteriors by conditioning only on summary statistics believed to be informative for the low-dimensional component, and then combining the low-dimensional approximations in some way. In this article, we demonstrate that such low-dimensional approximations can be surprisingly poor in practice for seemingly intuitive summary statistic choices. We describe an idealized low-dimensional summary statistic that is, in principle, suitable for marginal estimation. However, a direct approximation of the idealized choice is difficult in practice. We thus suggest an alternative approach to marginal estimation which is easier to implement and automate. Given an initial choice of low-dimensional summary statistic that might only be informative about a marginal posterior location, the new method improves performance by first crudely localizing the posterior approximation using all the summary statistics to ensure global identifiability, followed by a second step that hones in on an accurate low-dimensional approximation using the low-dimensional summary statistic. We show that the posterior this approach targets can be represented as a logarithmic pool of posterior distributions based on the low-dimensional and full summary statistics, respectively. The good performance of our method is illustrated in low to moderate dimensional examples. Computer code to implement the methods for the examples of this article is available at https://github.com/cdrovandi/ABC-marginal-approximations.

Unlikely Angel: The Songs of Dolly Parton

Lydia Hamessley's book Unlikely Angel: The Songs of Dolly Parton offers a welcome addition to the scholarly discussion of Parton's oeuvre. Focusing on Parton's songwriting, Hamessley provides a helpful musicological analysis of Parton that details specific elements of Parton's music, ranging from analysis of melody, harmony, form, and modes to themes in her lyrics. She contributes a lively account of Parton's compositional practice and biographical contexts, in part by drawing on interviews with Parton herself, as well as interviews with Parton's producer, Steve Buckingham. Researchers in the field will find productive material here, particularly the discussion of the music itself and the details about the Parton interviews and how they illustrate Parton's compositional processes. As Hamessley includes listening outlines for songs like “Coat of Many Colors” and musical examples, the book would also be useful for students.Assessing Parton's compositional practice, Hamessley describes the artist's approach as “instinctive and emotional, not theoretical” (p. 4), and she registers some of the contributions of a musicological approach: “Musical analysis identifies and clarifies her intuitive musical choices, explains their effects, and reveals Dolly's distinctive compositional voice” (p. 4). As Hamessley notes, Parton is a prolific songwriter, with more than 3,000 songs, over 450 of which have been recorded. The book uses representative songs as examples, given the huge number of songs in Parton's oeuvre. Because she wishes to illustrate how the songs speak to each other, linking families of tunes and lyrics, Hamessley organizes the book thematically rather than chronologically. Such an approach assists Hamessley in establishing how Parton undertakes a workshop approach to songwriting, in which she returns to melodic and lyrical content to rewrite in new ways.Hamessley's interviews with Parton fill in the blanks of some of the singer's family history and her earliest musical memories. Hamessley argues that Parton “uses her songs to remember and take control of her experiences, both the good and the bad” (p. 11). While Hamessley notes that Parton is often interpreted autobiographically and that the singer herself sometimes uses her songs as “memory palaces” (p. 33), Hamessley is also careful to point out that Parton is frequently dramatizing other people's stories. Parton talks about depicting the lives and emotions of people she knows or true stories she has heard.After a first chapter on Parton's biography, focusing on the development of her music, the book's second chapter uses “Coat of Many Colors” as a case study for unpacking Parton's practices as a composer. Chapters 3 and 4 concern Parton's use of Appalachian music, and form the heart of the book, which will be of special interest from the point of view of folklore studies. Hamessley's specialization in Appalachian music lends her the vantage from which to evaluate Parton's use of those musical traditions and also to contextualize and complicate critical understandings of those musics as multiple and varied. In a second part, focused on thematics, the book includes chapters on love, women's lives and struggles, tragic songs, and spiritual and inspirational songs. The chapter on love draws special attention to, and provides engaging musicological analyses of, “I Will Always Love You” and “Jolene,” two of Parton's classic songs. The gender chapter turns to Parton's bluegrass albums in particular.One song that Hamessley returns to in different chapters and contexts is “Little Sparrow,” Parton's adaptation of the traditional song “Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies.” By discussing that song both in terms of Parton's use of Appalachian story songs and her engagement with Appalachian ballads, and also in terms of Parton's bluegrass albums, Hamessley is able to detail the multiple ways in which Parton's classic songs may illuminate different influences in the singer's oeuvre. The book also includes an appendix in which Hamessley provides a case study of Parton's compositional voice in “Wayfaring Stranger.”Throughout, Hamessley underscores how Parton frames her own songwriting process as serious, instinctual, and based on what Parton sees as a spiritual gift (p. 35). Hamessley's readings showcase how Parton emphasizes songwriting itself as the driving force of her work and career. The book also makes the case for further musicological analyses of popular music and of genres such as country music.

Intuitive cooperators: Time pressure increases children's cooperative decisions in a modified public goods game.

There is mounting empirical evidence to suggest that adults are intuitively cooperative. When presented with a cooperative dilemma between self-maximizing and benefitting the common good, decisions made quickly are more likely to be cooperative, whereas slow decisions tend to favor self-interest. To investigate the ontogenetic origins of intuitive cooperation, we examined the development of intuitive cooperation in middle childhood. We presented 150 children (7-12 years of age) with an online child-friendly public goods game where participants had a choice between giving two resources to themselves or four to their group. Participants were assigned to one of three decision time conditions; speeded, neutral, or delayed. We found that when decisions were speeded, children were more likely to cooperate compared to when decisions were unconstrained or delayed. Furthermore, children's intuitive choices only favored cooperation if they believed their peers were also cooperative. This pattern of findings held across the age range included in this study. Our findings suggest that in middle and late childhood, children are intuitively cooperative when making decisions to benefit the common good. HIGHLIGHTS: Time pressure increases children's cooperation in a public goods game, compared to when decisions are delayed or unconstrained. Between 7 and 12 years of age children engage in costly cooperation most of the time regardless of decision time. When children believe others are generally cooperative, their intuition is to cooperate. From middle to late childhood, intuitive decisions favor costly cooperation towards the common good.

Finite Sample Identification of Low-Order LTI Systems via Nuclear Norm Regularization

This paper studies the problem of identifying low-order linear time-invariant systems via Hankel nuclear norm (HNN) regularization. This regularization encourages the Hankel matrix to be low-rank, which corresponds to the dynamical system being of low order. We provide novel statistical analysis for this regularization, and contrast it with the unregularized ordinary least-squares (OLS) estimator. Our analysis leads to new finite-sample error bounds on estimating the impulse response and the Hankel matrix associated with the linear system using HNN regularization. We design a suitable input excitation, and show that we can recover the system using a number of observations that scales optimally with the true system order and achieves strong statistical estimation rates. Complementing these, we also demonstrate that the input design indeed matters by proving that intuitive choices, such as i.i.d. Gaussian input, lead to sub-optimal sample complexity. To better understand the benefits of regularization, we also revisit the OLS estimator. Besides refining existing bounds, we experimentally identify when HNN regularization improves over OLS: (1) For loworder systems with slow impulse-response decay, OLS method performs poorly in terms of sample complexity, (2) the Hankel matrix returned by regularization has a more clear singular value gap that makes determining the system order easier, (3) HNN regularization is less sensitive to hyperparameter choice. To choose the regularization parameter, we also outline a simple joint train-validation procedure

Product color emotional design considering color layout

AbstractEmotional experience and demand for product colors are important factors in users' decisions to buy and use a product. Therefore, accurately characterizing users' emotional responses of the product's color has become a significant consideration for product color design. However, a product color design problem exists in which it is challenging to accurately and efficiently position users' color image space because consumers have completely different image perceptions when encountering a large number of color schemes generated by different color spatial distributions. For this reason, this article proposes a product color emotional design method that considers the color layout. A table is built of an elemental composition for product color design, which contains color layout forms. This article also establishes a mapping model based on the semantic difference and back propagation neural network between the users' color image perceptions and the elements of the product's color design. The system recommends a color layout form that matches the users' emotional image goal through the k‐nearest neighbor algorithm, and then the form is initialized using a genetic algorithm. The system can realize the solution to the optimal product color scheme by optimizing and evaluating the population. Designers can make intuitive choices and decisions through the product color recommendation system. Through an example of color design for industrial vacuum cleaners, this article shows that the method has satisfactory feasibility and applicability for solving the problem of the optimization of product color design with color layout forms.

Entrepreneurs: intuitive or contemplative decision-makers?

In a large survey (n = 1928), we examine whether entrepreneurs differ in their decision-making style from managers and employees. Besides two self-reported measures taken from psychology, we build on Rubinstein (Quarterly Journal of Economics 131: 859–890, 2016) by including two behavioral measures derived from response times and the nature of the strategic choices made. Supporting conventional wisdom, entrepreneurs report a stronger Faith in Intuition than others. Their actual choices are partly in line with this: entrepreneurs make indeed more intuitive choices than managers, but are equally intuitive as employees. At the same time, entrepreneurs have response times and a self-reported Need for Cognition that exceeds those of employees. Together, these findings tentatively suggest that entrepreneurs start from a stronger predisposition to choose the intuitive action, but share with managers that they take more time to think things over and thereby are more inclined to move away from their instant intuitive choice.

The Relationship between Intuitive Action Choices and Moral Reasoning on Animal Ethics Issues in Students of Veterinary Medicine and Other Relevant Professions.

With growing understanding of animals' capabilities, and public and organizational pressures to improve animal welfare, moral action by veterinarians and other relevant professionals to address animal issues is increasingly important. Little is known about how their action choices relate to their moral reasoning on animal ethics issues. A moral judgment measure, the VetDIT, with three animal and three non-animal scenarios, was used to investigate the action choices of 619 students in five animal- and two non-animal-related professional programs in one Australian university, and how these related to their moral reasoning based on Personal Interest (PI), Maintaining Norms (MN), or Universal Principles (UP) schemas. Action choices showed significant relationships to PI, MN, and UP questions, and these varied across program groups. Having a previous degree or more experience with farm animals had a negative relationship, and experience with horses or companion animals a positive relationship, with intuitive action choices favoring life and bodily integrity of animals. This study helps to explain the complex relationship between intuitive moral action choices and moral reasoning on animal ethics issues. As a useful research and educational tool for understanding this relationship, the VetDIT can enhance ethical decision making.

Longitudinal integration measure in classical spin space and its application to first-principle based simulations of ferromagnetic metals

The classical Heisenberg type spin Hamiltonian is widely used for simulations of finite temperature properties of magnetic metals often using parameters derived from first principles calculations. In itinerant electron systems, however, the atomic magnetic moments vary their magnitude with temperature and the spin Hamiltonian should thus be extended to incorporate the effects of longitudinal spin fluctuations (LSF). Although the simple phenomenological spin Hamiltonians describing LSF can be efficiently parameterized in the framework of the constrained Local Spin Density Approximation (LSDA) and its extensions, the fundamental problem concerning the integration in classical spin space remains. It is generally unknown how to integrate over the spin magnitude. Two intuitive choices of integration measure have been used up to date – the Murata-Doniach scalar measure and the simple three dimensional vector measure. Here we derive the integration measure by considering a classical limit of the quantum Heisenberg spin Hamiltonian under conditions leading to the proper classical limit of the commutation relations for all values of the classical spin magnitude and calculate the corresponding ratio of the number of quantum states. We show that the number of quantum states corresponding to the considered classical spin magnitude is proportional to this magnitude and thus a non-trivial integration measure must be used. We apply our results to the first-principles simulation of the Curie temperatures of the two canonical ferromagnets bcc Fe and fcc Ni using a single-site LSF Hamiltonian with parameters calculated in the LSDA framework in the Disordered Local Moment approximation and a fixed spin moment constraint. In the same framework we compare our results with those obtained from the scalar and vector measures.

Nudging generosity: Choice architecture and cognitive factors in charitable giving

In an experimental setup we investigate the effect of two different choice architectures on donation decisions. In the treatment group, subjects can either specify a charity of their choice, or select one from a list of five well-known charities; in the control group we do not provide a list. In a sample of 869 subjects we find a large treatment effect: Offering a list of default charities doubles the fraction of donors, as well as the revenue for charities. We find that the treatment intervention particularly affects subjects who tend to make intuitive choices.

The Relationship between Intuitive Action Choices and Moral Reasoning on Animal Ethics Issues in Students of Veterinary Medicine and Other Relevant Professions.

With growing understanding of animals' capabilities, and public and organizational pressures to improve animal welfare, moral action by veterinarians and other relevant professionals to address animal issues is increasingly important. Little is known about how their action choices relate to their moral reasoning on animal ethics issues. A moral judgment measure, the VetDIT, with three animal and three non-animal scenarios, was used to investigate the action choices of 619 students in five animal- and two non-animal-related professional programs in one Australian university, and how these related to their moral reasoning based on Personal Interest (PI), Maintaining Norms (MN), or Universal Principles (UP) schemas. Action choices showed significant relationships to PI, MN, and UP questions, and these varied across program groups. Having a previous degree or more experience with farm animals had a negative relationship, and experience with horses or companion animals a positive relationship, with intuitive action choices favoring life and bodily integrity of animals. This study helps to explain the complex relationship between intuitive moral action choices and moral reasoning on animal ethics issues. As a useful research and educational tool for understanding this relationship, the VetDIT can enhance ethical decision making.

Intuitive Choices Lead to Intensified Positive Emotions: An Overlooked Reason for “Intuition Bias”?

People have, for many well-documented reasons, a tendency to overemphasize their intuitions and to follow them, even when they should not. This “intuition bias” leads to several kinds of specific intuitive biases in judgments and decision making. Previous studies have shown that characteristics of the decision process have a tendency to “leak” into the experience of the choice outcome. We explore whether intuitive choices influence the experience of the choice outcomes differently from “non-intuitive,” analytic choices. Since intuition is feeling based, we examine in particular if intuitive choices have stronger affective consequences than non-intuitive ones. Participants in two scenario studies (N = 90; N = 126) rated the feelings of decision makers who experienced a conflict between two options, one intuitively appealing and another that appeared preferable on analytic grounds. Choosing the intuitive alternative was anticipated to lead to somewhat more regret after negative outcomes and, in particular, much more satisfaction with positive outcomes. In two autobiographical studies, one with psychology students (N = 88) and the other with experienced engineers (N = 99), participants were asked to provide examples of choice conflicts between an intuitive and a non-intuitive option from their own private or professional lives. Both groups showed a tendency to report stronger emotions, in particular positive, after intuitive choices. One well-established explanation for intuition bias focuses on the nature of people’s anticipated negative counterfactual thoughts if their decisions were to turn out badly. The present data indicate that intuitive choices intensify positive emotions, anticipated and real, after successful outcomes much more than negative emotions after failures. Positive outcomes are also more commonly expected than negative ones, when we make choices. We argue that markedly amplified emotions, mediated by stronger personal involvement, in the positive outcomes of intuitive versus non-intuitive choices, is an overlooked reason for intuition bias.

Intuitive Versus Contemplative: Do Entrepreneurs Differ in Their Decision-Making Style from Managers and Employees?

We examine in a large survey (n = 1,928) how contemplative entrepreneurs, managers and employees are in their decision making styles. Besides two well-known subjective measures taken from psychology, we also build on Rubinstein (2016) by including two objective measures derived from response times and the nature of the strategic choices made. Supporting conventional wisdom, we find that entrepreneurs have a stronger subjective Faith in Intuition than others. Their actual action choices are partly in line with this: entrepreneurs make indeed more intuitive choices than managers, but are equally intuitive as employees. At the same time entrepreneurs have response times and a subjective Need for Cognition that (on average) equal those of managers. Together these findings tentatively suggest that entrepreneurs start from a stronger prior intuition, making them ceteris paribus more intuitive than others, but at the same time share with managers a higher need for cognition, and thus take more time to think things over.

Objective choice of phylogeographic models

Phylogeography seeks to discover the evolutionary processes that have given rise to organismal and genetic diversity. This requires explicit hypotheses (i.e., models) to be evaluated with genetic data in order to identify those hypotheses that best explain the data. In recent years, advancements in the model-based tools used to estimate phylogeographic parameters of interest such as gene flow, divergence time, and relationships among groups have been made. However, given the complexity of these models, available methods can typically only compare a handful of possible hypotheses, requiring researchers to specify in advance the small set of models to consider. Without formal quantitative approaches to model selection, researchers must rely on their intuition to formulate the model space to be explored.We explore the adequacy of intuitive choices made by researchers during the process of data analysis by reanalyzing 20 empirical phylogeographic datasets using PHRAPL, an objective tool for phylogeographic model selection. We show that the best models for most datasets include both gene flow and population divergence parameters, and that species tree methods (which do not consider gene flow) tend to be overly simplistic for many phylogeographic systems. Objective approaches to phylogeographic model selection offer an important complement to researcher intuition.

Does spatial layout matter to theme park tourism carrying capacity?

In order to optimize theme parks’ tourism carrying capacity, one must understand how park spatial structure influences visitor distribution and, in turn, congestion. This study applied a mixed-methods approach of statistical and spatial analyses of survey data from a theme park in China, to determine how attraction and spatial layout attributes affect theme park visitor movement. Results indicated that visitor movement is influenced by attraction attributes (e.g., attraction type, experience value, facility capacity, floor area, and indoor feature) and spatial layout attributes (e.g., distance between attractions, path network, entrance location, and attraction distribution). Theories relating intuitive and rational choices supported the effects of attraction and spatial layout attributes on visitor movement in light of the objective environment, benefits, costs, available information, and available options. Overall, these findings may inform theme park capacity design and management.

Nudging Generosity: Choice Architecture and Cognitive Factors in Charitable Giving

In an experimental setup we investigate the effect of two different choice architectures on donation decisions. In the treatment group, subjects can either specify a charity of their choice, or select one from a list of five well-known charities; in the control group we do not provide a list. In a sample of 869 subjects we find a large treatment effect: Offering a list of default charities doubles the fraction of donors, as well as the revenue for charities. We find that the treatment intervention particularly affects subjects who tend to make intuitive choices.

See how tasty it is? Effects of symbolic cues on product evaluation and taste

Beyond more obvious informational cues, such as prices or labels, brands also communicate with consumers through more subtle means. The visual design of a package (e.g., its shape, size, colour, or imagery) conveys symbolic meaning to consumers hereby impacting product evaluation and hedonic expectancies. Inspired by the growing interest in symbolic design, the present work examines how visual and verbal cues relating to divergent levels of processing impact product evaluation, taste evaluation, and purchase intention. Results show that visuals of unprocessed foods symbolize naturalness to influence product evaluation, but only with consumers who are health conscious and search for symbolic meaning. In addition, for those consumers, visuals of unprocessed foods relate to purer product taste and, in turn, to greater purchase intentions. Remarkably, a visual showing processed food leads to purer taste evaluations with the majority of consumers. Results aid brand managers in employing visuals more effectively, alerting them that the more intuitive choices for front-of-package designs might not be the most suitable ones.

Optimal toll design: a lower bound framework for the asymmetric traveling salesman problem

We propose a framework of lower bounds for the asymmetric traveling salesman problem (TSP) based on approximating the dynamic programming formulation with different basis vector sets. We discuss how several well-known TSP lower bounds correspond to intuitive basis vector choices and give an economic interpretation wherein the salesman must pay tolls as he travels between cities. We then introduce an exact reformulation that generates a family of successively tighter lower bounds, all solvable in polynomial time. We show that the base member of this family yields a bound greater than or equal to the well-known Held-Karp bound, obtained by solving the linear programming relaxation of the TSP's integer programming arc-based formulation.