Archive for May, 2017

Christoph Korn

We have Dr. Cristoph Korn, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, visiting this week and giving a talk in the Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology colloquium (title and abstract follow).

How do we solve multi-step decision-making problems? Optimal and heuristic solutions

Making a decision now influences which decisions we will face next. Ideally, our decisions should thus consider the current situation as well as all possible up-coming situations. However, this requires computing the values for a vast combination of probabilistic future situations. The complexities of such multi-step computations can easily exceed our cognitive capabilities, which is why we may often resort to myopic heuristics that only rely on the situation at hand. I will present a series of studies that combine mathematical modeling with functional neuroimaging to specify how human participants trade off using optimal versus heuristic solutions. Computing this trade-off recruits parts of the medial prefrontal cortex and the striatum. Furthermore, I will delineate how these notions of multi-step decisions can be extended to social scenarios, which pose the added challenge that we have to predict how our interaction partners react to our decisions

Bernoulli Lecture 2017

The 2017 Bernoulli Lecture took place May 16th and was held by Prof. Dr. Brian Knutson, Stanford University, who talked about the neural basis of decision making under risk and uncertainty!

Towards a Neural Basis for Expected Utility

Increasing resolution of neuroimaging techniques has allowed investigators to track changes in neural activity not only resulting from, but also in anticipation of choice. This has supported identification of circuits that respond to the magnitude and probability of expected gains and losses, as well as determination of whether their activity can also predict upcoming choice. Even more recent evidence suggests that beyond predicting individual choice, activity in some of these circuits may forecast aggregate choice. Although not a perfect match, these collected findings imply that in less than two decades, researchers are converging on a neural basis for expected utility.

PhD Workshop on Big Data and Language by Thomas Hills

This week we got the chance to welcome Thomas Hills (University of Warwick) back to his old workplace at the psychology department of the University of Basel. Thomas was not only visiting for nostalgic reasons, but also to teach our PhD students about the possibilities and challenges of working with big data.

More concretely, the aim of Thomas’ workshop was to provide PhD students with an understanding of how data science is applied to large data sets (‘big data’) to make data-driven decisions and to answer theoretical questions about human behavior. The course mainly focused on how to derive psychological inferences from natural language, across domains such as culturomics, memory, wellbeing, and language across the lifespan.

We would like to thank Thomas for this excellent introduction to big data and language and hope to be able to welcome him back to Basel soon again.

Marcus Grüschow

This week, Marcus Grüschow from the University of Zürich is visiting us and will give a talk about effects of arousal on decision making and stress resilience. Marcus is a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Christian Ruff at UZH’s Department of Economics. Here are title and abstract of his talk on Thursday at the SWE colloquium:

Arousal-state influences on human decision-making and stress resilience

Arousal-related influences on brain states are ubiquitous in the mammalian brain and vary with neuromodulatory catecholamine levels. How such endogenous fluctuations in brain state impact on behaviour is only poorly understood. During the first part of the talk I will report on our investigations regarding the neural mechanisms by which spontaneous arousal-related fluctuations in brain state, indexed by pre-stimulus pupil dilation, impact on everyday perceptual and value-based choices in humans. Moreover, pathological changes in the arousal system can lead to severe behavioural alterations, as evident in multiple neuropsychiatric disorders including depression and anxiety. Such malfunctions of the arousal systems may be triggered by stress and traumatic events which are common features of life in modern societies. Even though stressful life events are on average associated with heightened vulnerability to psychopathology, the majority of individuals exposed to even severe stressors do not develop psychological problems. In the second part of the talk I will aim to elucidate the neurobiological basis of stress resilience, by identifying neural processes that predict who is resilient and who succumbs to stress, thereby offering possible neural pathways promoting stress resilience.

Helga Fehr-Duda

We have Prof. Dr. Helga Fehr-Duda, Professor of Decision Theory and Experimental Decision Research, University of Zurich, visiting this week and giving a talk in the Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology colloquium (title and abstract follow).

A Tale of Two Tails: The Impact of Interactions of Time and Risk on the Valuation of Tail Events

The majority of economic decisions involve consequences that are both risky and delayed. While the bulk of previous research has focused on measuring atemporal risk preferences, a robust body of evidence has emerged showing that risk tolerance is delay dependent, usually increasing with the delay to the resolution of uncertainty. I will argue that the driving force of this effect is the inherent uncertainty of future events, which generates an additional layer of uncertainty not accounted for by the objectively given probabilities. This future uncertainty conjointly with people’s proneness to nonlinear probability weighting provides an explanation for the co-existence of underweighting and overweighting of tail events, manifest, for example, in the low take up of disaster insurance and the high willingness to purchase extended warranties, respectively.

The Heuristic Revolution in Finance

A small group of scientists from psychology and economics and practitioners from the field of finance met to start a heuristic revolution in finance from 27th to 29th of March in Hertenstein, Switzerland. The conference was organized by Thorsten Hens, Florian Artinger, Shabnam Mousavi, and Jörg Rieskamp. It took place at an extremely nice venue close to the Lake Lucerne and was generously funded by Peter Püringer, a successful carry trader, who basically made use of differences in interest rates across countries. In workshops and presentations, the participants discussed how heuristics can inform financial decision making. For example, we discussed the performance of the 1/n rule for investing in stocks compared to more complex financial models like Markowitz’s Portfolio Theory. In small group discussions we exchanged academic and practitioner’s perspective on topics like retirement savings, financial advice, financial literacy, and portfolio selection. All these areas turned out to be very interesting for psychologists to supplement financial theory with empirical studies of decision-making. We, Jörg Rieskamp, Rui Mata, Jana Jarecki, Janine Hoffart, Steve Heinke, and Sebastian Olschewski, were happy to be part of this very special conference.

Tobias Bothe-Hutschenreuter

We have Dr. Tobias Bothe-Hutschenreuter, Principal at Kienbaum Consultants International GmbH, and Head of the Kienbaum Institute for Management Diagnostics, visiting this week (title and abstract of his Thursday talk follow).

Status Quo, Challenges, and Trends in Understanding People’s Performance at Work

Understanding people’s behavior at work and the likelihood of being able to succeed in certain roles and environments has been an area of ongoing activity and debate in research, management, HR functions and consulting firms alike. In light of topics such as digitalization, agility, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous business and work environments, the status quo, challenges, and especially trends in understanding people’s performance at work will be presented and discussed based on a framework of individual differences of performance at work. In addition, trending points of discussion such as big data and predictive analytics are raised, which may change and have a major impact on how we assess predictors of people’s performance at work in the future. The presented framework helps to identify requirements, select appropriate assessment methods, and tailor content to an organization’s strategy and business requirements and incorporate different sources of potential behavior such as qualification and experience, competencies, and personality.

Sozial-, Wirtschafts- und Entscheidungspsychologie

Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Blog