Lecture 5 Flashcards
Motivational and affective influences
Utilitarian approach
doing the greatest good for the greatest number of people”. You add up the costs and benefits of each choice and choose the option that yields the best
balance of costs and benefits for all involved.
Deontological approach
judges the morality of an action based on the action’s
adherence to rules or duties.
When emotion and cognition collide
Each of us faces internal conflicts between what we want to do and what we think we should do. We have introduced the affect heuristic, which argues that decision makers have an automatic affective, or emotional, reaction to most options.
multiple-selves
account for a variety of dysfunctional behaviours. In almost all cases, one of our “selves” is in favour of a decision that provides immediate gratification rather than an alternative that would provide greater future rewards.
“want” vs “should”
Thus, when someone is given the option of a short-term reward that has long-term costs, the “want” self may make an immediate assessment that the option seems appealing. Yet when that person explicitly compares the short-term desire against the choice to resist the indulgence, the “should” self is empowered by the ability to evaluate and compare the relative value of each.
discounting
which states that any choice that involves a tradeoff between current and future benefits should discount the future to some event. A rational decision maker would discount the future using exponential discounting, which means discounting each future time period by the same percentage.
hyperbolic discounting
Relative to the present time period, we view all gains and losses in the future to be worth less than they would be in the present. People dramatically overweight the present, neglecting both future pain and future pleasure. People are willing to pay to enjoy rewards immediately
Self-serving reasoning
Evidence suggests that individuals first determine their preference for a certain outcome on the basis of self-interest and then justify this preference on the basis of fairness by changing the importance of attributes affecting what is fair.
Mood-congruent recall
Depressed people often report that the bleakest aspect of their depression is that they cannot remember what it felt like to be happy. The weather can also influence people’s moods in ways that affect their perceptions.
Regret avoidance
The motivation to minimize the opportunity for regret can lead people to make decisions that are suboptimal with respect to actual outcomes. Lack (1993) provides evidence that decision-makers will distort their decisions to avoid negative feedback
Pham
If you are not knowledgeable at all in a given domain, your feelings won’t help you.
In Pham’s experience, decision-makers who decide based on feelings with little knowledge or only local knowledge usually get it wrong.
optimistic bias
Optimism bias is a cognitive bias that causes someone to believe that they themselves are less likely to experience a negative event. It is also known as unrealistic optimism or comparative optimism. Food is a good example
Miles & Scaife
Results also indicated that in relation to ‘the average student’ and ‘one of your friends’ respondents saw themselves as having lower egg, red meat and cholesterol intakes and a similar pattern emerged for the drinking- and cancer-related risk factors.
Motivational explanations
assume that individuals are motivated to make risk judgements that will not induce negative affect or threaten self-esteem, and so will maintain or promote psychological wellbeing.
Cognitive explanations
tended to emphasise inadequacies in human information processing capabilities. Individuals may process risk-relevant information in a manner that introduces systematic errors.
