Research group - decision making

• Project Bless - Our project addresses the role of affective and cognitive feelings in decision making. We assume that feelings can influence how a decision situation is mentally represented. In particular, by providing information about the problematic or non-problematic nature of the current situation, affective and cognitive feelings trigger different levels of construal.

• Project Erdfelder-Pohl - The project serves several goals that are closely related to the overarching themes of the research unit ‘contextualized decision making’. In particular, we are concerned with underlying processes in simple non-compensatory judgment mechanisms investigated herein, for example the recognition heuristic, fluency heuristic, take-the-best, and others.

• Project Fiedler - The goal of this research project is to specify eecological conditions under which decisions based on small information samples can lead to better outcomes than decisions based on large ones and under which conditions the contrary effect occurs.

• Project Keller - In this project, the impact of individuals’ self-regulatory orientation on decision making and behavior will be assessed using established game theoretical paradigms (e.g., one-shot dilemma games involving public goods, altruistic punishment paradigm). The core idea underlying this research holds that a vigilant, prevention-focused mode of self-regulation entails several elements that are of crucial relevance with respect to individuals’ behavior in social dilemmas involving public goods.

• Project Meiser - This project investigates the use of sample information and inferred contingencies as a basis of decision behaviour in situations in which (a) information about the choice alternatives and (b) the actual outcomes depend on some context variable. In particular, the planned experiments analyze effects of pseudo-contingencies and cue competition on decision making in complex scenarios.

• Project Unkelbach - The present project investigates the central role of subjective frequencies of information on judgments and decisions. For example, if people remember more positive aspects of Brand A than of Brand B, they should buy Brand A. The standard assumption is that subjective frequencies should be a function of objective frequencies in the environment.

Die Forschergruppe wird unterstützt durch die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).