A Nobel Prize in Economics was given to the psychologist Daniel Kahneman for his joint research with the late psychologist Amos Tversky on decision making under uncertainty and on subjective judgments of uncertainty. The two proposed Prospect Theory as a descriptive alternative to Utility...

From drop-down computer menus to department-store aisles, people in everyday life often choose from simultaneous displays of products or options. Studies of position effects in such choices show seemingly inconsistent results. For example, in restaurant choice, items enjoy an advantage when...

When asked to mentally simulate coin tosses, people generate sequences which differ systematically from those generated by fair coins. It has been rarely noted that this divergence is apparent already in the very first mental toss. Analysis of several existing data sets reveals that about 80% of...

It has been noted and demonstrated that people are reluctant to make changes in their current state (called the status quo bias, Samuelson & Zeckhauser, 1988), and to trade objects they own (called the endowment effect, Thaler, 1980). This reluctance has been explained by a combination of loss...

Polygraph test results are by and large ruled inadmissible evidence in criminal courts in the US, Canada and Israel. This is well-conceived with regard to the dominant technique of polygraph interrogation, known as the Control Question Technique (CQT), because it indeed does not meet the...

In a series of experiments, Bar-Hillel and Budescu (1995) failed to find a desirability bias in probability estimation. The World Cup soccer tournament (of 2002 and 2006) provided an opportunity to revisit the phenomenon, in a context where wishful thinking and desirability bias are notoriously...

We offer a case-study in irrationality, showing that even in a high stakes, deliberate context, highly intelligent professionals may adopt dominated practices. Multiple-choice tests (MCTs) enjoy many advantages that made them popular tools in educational and psychological measurement. But they...

Evidence, both anecdotal and scientific, suggests that people treat (or are affected by) products of prestigious sources differently than those of less prestigious or anonymous sources. The "products" which are the focus of the present study are poems, and the "sources" are the poets. We explore...

"Waste not want not" expresses our culture's aversion to waste. "I could have gotten the same thing for less" is a sentiment that can diminish pleasure in a transaction. We study people's willingness to "pay" to avoid this spoiler. In one scenario, participants imagined they were looking for a...