Elke Weber - US grants

This proposal develops an empirically-based approach to understanding differences between risk perceptions and risk attitudes. The distinction is important to understanding decision making because little is known about the measures used by individuals to assess the riskiness of options and the criteria used to select between objective measures (e.g., the variance of the alternatives) and subjective measures that may be more relevant for personal decision making. The proposed study will employ a series of experiments to first refine a general model of risk attitudes and then to test this model on two real-world situations, financial markets and medical diagnoses. Pilot data, discussed in the proposal, suggest that knowing more about individuals' risk perceptions may provide substantial support for understanding their general risk attitudes. The proposed studies extend earlier work of the investigator and should provide important insights for a large body of work that focuses on the effect of perceptions of riskiness on both decision processes (e.g., information search and acquisition) and behavior (e.g., individual choice).

Developing valid predictions of the likely impacts of human response to global warming requires a realistic set of assumptions about the process by which humans react to global warming. These assumptions must incorporate knowledge about human limitations in information processing and learning. This project aims to develop a theoretical framework that can serve as the basis for such a set of assumptions by focussing on agricultural decisions. Specifically the project examines the relationship between individual(farm-level) decisions about production and management versus perceptions about weather and climate, especially perceptions about changes in climate(i.e., global warming.) These studies will also investigate the set of conditions that provide for optimal learning, i.e., best usage of climate (and climate change) information, and thus also have prescriptive implications.

The PIs propose to investigate risk perception and decisions under risk, ambiguity and uncertainty in the United States, Poland, Hong Kong, and the People s Republic of China. The investigation will occur at two different levels. First, at the general cultural level, an analysis of proverbs and movies will be performed in order to determine the overall cultural attitude toward risk and the components of decision making, such as probability, outcomes, or dread. Second, at a specific behavioral level, the PIs will examine managerial decision tasks. This portion of the research will include the examination of personality traits and situational factors which influence risk perception and decision making. Scenarios will be included that cover a broad range of risk and decision tasks, including financial, social, and political situations.

Collaborative Research: Decisions and interactions under risk and uncertainty within and across cultures This project examines cross-cultural differences in the conceptualization of risk, uncertainty, and ambiguity, in risk perception and risk preference, and in the prediction of the (risk) preferences of others (e.g., opponents in a negotiation), where the other is either from the same or a different culture. Data will be collected in five countries: the U.S.A., Germany, Poland, Hong Kong, and the P.R.C.. There are two questions that guide the research: (1) On what dimensions related to decision-making under risk and uncertainty do cross-cultural differences occur? (2) What are the causal factors that produce these differences?

9819055
Weber

Suppose that a high school senior has been admitted by two colleges - a prestigious university in New Haven and a community college in Hawaii. How would she go about deciding which offer to accept? One possibility is that she carefully calculates the costs and benefits of both alternatives and chooses the one she concludes to have the greater net benefit. Another possibility is that she thinks about reasons for and against attending either school and chooses the option that she can best justify to herself and others. A third possibility is that she simply bases her choice on her gut feelings about which alternative would be "better." These are just some of the possible ways she can resolve the decision. We refer to these different ways of making decisions as "decision modes." Use of different decision modes can lead to different choices and thereby to different levels of satisfaction with the decision, after it is made and consequences are experienced. The standard decision literature has focused primarily on the cost-benefit mode of decision-making, but recent research in psychology suggests that people often use other decision modes, including the justification-based and feelings-based modes we described. In this project, we seek to accomplish two main objectives: 1) to systematically identify what decision modes people commonly use, and 2) to formulate a theory that can help us predict under what conditions people will use what decision mode. Based on our own work and that of other scholars, we speculate that the answers to the second question depend on issues such as the motivation and the cultural background of the decision-maker, and the nature and the context of the decision problem. We hope that, eventually, our work will not only predict when people use what decision mode, but will also provide constructive advice to decision-makers (such as the student mentioned earlier) as to which decision mode to use under a given situation, and thereby help them make the best decision -- the one with outcomes that will make them happiest in the long run.

Abstract
***
000079664 (proposal number)
Elke Weber

Recent work in decision making has expanded the notion of how people make decisions.
Many researchers now look beyond the rational choice framework used by economists or
the cognitive information integration framework traditionally used by psychologists.
With the expansion of the traditional notion of decision-making as a cost-benefit
analysis, researchers are finding that decision makers act in a variety of ways that
cannot be described in terms of costs and benefits (Beach & Mitchell, 1990;
Gigerenzer, Todd, & Group, 1999; Hammond, 1996; Klein, 1998; Yates & Lee, 1996). In
some cases, these alternative decision-making modes are even designed to prevent
cost-benefit calculations (March, 1994; Prelec & Hernstein, 1991). Yates and Lee
(1996) coined the term decision modes to describe qualitatively different strategies
for arriving at a decision.

Given the new plurality of views on the ways that people make decisions, it is time to
take a look at the bigger picture and to carefully examine the range of decision modes
that people use. In the current climate of decision making research, the careful
development of a taxonomy of decision modes will be an important contribution to the
field. A central objective of the proposed research is to develop a comprehensive
taxonomy of decision modes and a common vocabulary that can be used to identify and
distinguish decision making processes that fall within each mode. The proposed
taxonomy includes four decision modes, i.e., cost-benefit-based, recognition-based,
affect-based, and reason-based. Each mode is characterized in terms of its
attentional focus, primary cognitive and affective processes, and mental
representations. The further development of this decision mode taxonomy will involve
more precisely characterizing the distinguishing attributes of different decision
modes and developing experimental procedures able to demonstrate more unequivocally
the existence of these qualitatively different modes.

A second objective is to establish a better understanding of the factors that
determine when a particular mode will be used and why. This requires the development
of a model of implicit decision mode selection that is directly related to the
decision mode taxonomy. Which decision mode is used in a given situation is
hypothesized to depend both on person-centered factors (i.e., cognitive and affective
processes) and on situational factors. Identifying and characterizing the factors
that influence decision mode selection will be important not only because it is
theoretically interesting to better understand the decision making process, but also
because the selection of one or the other decision mode is hypothesized to influence
the final decision outcome.

The proposed research has the potential to integrate existing knowledge about human
motivation, the nature and function of cognitive and affective processes, and mental
representation into an adaptive decision making framework. The proposed framework is
far broader than its precursors in both its specification of the criteria on which
people are trying to optimize and its specification of the strategies and processes at
people's disposal. Such a framework has the potential to guide and focus new
research in the field.

The proposal examines preference, a key construct in decision science and economics, as the natural output of the human memory system, following the properties and characteristics of other types of knowledge. This preferences-as-memory approach suggests that preferences are neither "constructed" from first principles anew on each occasion, nor completely stable and immutable. The research attempts to explain and predict important phenomena in which preference deviates from rational-economic model prescription (including loss aversion, intertemporal discounting, and tradeoff difficulty) by examining the memory mechanisms involve in preference construction. These include priming, i.e., a transient increase in the accessibility of a concept after presentation of a related concept; inhibition or interference, i.e., a class of phenomena where instructions to recall parts of previously learned materials hinders subsequent recall of the rest; reactivity, i.e. where access of memory produces changes in its content and structure; structure of memory representations, i.e., the number of concept attributes and the system of their interconnections.

The proposed theoretical and empirical work has the following three purposes: (1) to convince behavioral decision researchers that they are ignoring the (memory) processes involved in the formation and expression of preference at their peril, (2) to demonstrate that current considerations of mostly explicit memory processes are incomplete, and (3) to show that the incorporation of a small number of well established memory properties provides conceptual integration across a large number of preference and choice phenomena that range from loss aversion to tradeoff difficulty, subadditivity, anchoring, and overconfidence. Societally important practical applications also arise from the use of a memory framework for understanding the formation and modification of preferences. A better understanding of developmental changes in memory processes and preference construction could help, for example, to design interventions that would minimize socially harmful consequences of changes in memory performance on judgment and choice in geriatric populations.

The Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED) at Columbia University will coordinate a series of studies of decision processes underlying human adaptation to uncertainty and change-in particular climate-related uncertainty and climate change. The Center's mission is to address decisions made at multiple scales: by individuals, by small groups, and by organizations that face climate-related problems. Center research will be conducted by Columbia students and faculty affiliated with the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) and with various units of the Earth Institute (EI), a consortium of natural and social scientists and engineers committed to improving our understanding of the Earth, its environment and climate, as well as by students and faculty at six partner institutions (Bard College, University of California at Davis, University of Georgia, University of Miami, University of Pittsburgh, and University of Oregon). CRED research will (a) extend insights about the constructive nature of individual decision making to the context of group decisions, (b) integrate social motives more fully into theories of decision making, and (c) study individual and group processes in the laboratory and in field settings as climate-change and climate-variability related decisions occur. A carefully designed set of four laboratory projects, four historical and theoretical projects, and eight field projects around the world will provide interdisciplinary and complementary insights on five substantive objectives: (1) understanding the nature and impact of mental representations and framing in both individual and group climate decision settings; (2) understanding the role in decision making of affective, experiential information vs. analytic, statistical information; (3) understanding the effects of individual and group goals, group composition, and group processes in climate decisions; (4) improving the presentation format and delivery of probabilistic climate information; (5) developing microeconomic theories that incorporate knowledge gained about individual and group decision processes making and macroeconomic theories that integrate climate models and their impacts. Five field projects examine the use of seasonal climate forecasts in individual, group, and institutional decision processes. Three field projects deal with long-term climate change and examine the role of direct personal experience vs. statistical information in detecting and responding to climate change.

CRED's research contributions are only the first of four areas of contribution. Research results will feed directly into the design and testing of educational interventions, decision tools, and institutional strategies that will help people, organizations, and governments to better understand the risks and possible benefits associated with climate change and variability and the response options they have. Regarding education and training, the Center will work with several educational programs under the aegis of the Earth Institute at Columbia, Columbia's Teachers College, local New York colleges and high schools, and the Office of Minority Affairs in the Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The Center's curriculum and decision tools development will utilize the expertise of Columbia's Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN). The large and dense contact network of the International Research Institute for Climate Prediction (IRI) will facilitate dissemination of these products. In addition, the Center will work with the Weather Channel to produce educational segments on climate change and climate variability that will allow for audience feedback. This award was supported as part of the Fiscal Year 2003 Human and Social Dynamics priority area special competition on Decision Making Under Uncertainty (DMUU).

Economists, psychologists and neuroscientists have proposed a wide range of models of people's choices when confronted with risky options that describe how such decisions should be made (normative) or how such decisions appear to be made (descriptive). However, the actual processes by which such choices are made remain an open question. Recently, neuroscience researchers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have begun to examine how the human brain encodes information about some of the variables used by many models of risky decision making. These techniques have been used to identify neural signals that may be related to both the material and emotional consequences of choices, and can thus inform controversies between competing descriptive theories of risky decision making.

We will use neuroscience evidence to test between different theories or models of behavior in two areas of considerable interest to researchers and policy makers: (a) the nature of risk perception and its role in risky decision making, and (b) differences in the way people make risky decisions when basing them on repeated personal experience with the outcomes of choice options vs. basing them on statistical summary information about the choice options, typically provided by others. Our investigation of risk perception and risky choice will relate levels of brain activation in areas known to be involved in risk judgments and risky decisions to choice set characteristics and to observed judgments and choices. This will enable us to test between competing models of risky choice and to investigate the neural determinants of individual differences in risk perception and risky choice. Future studies will take such insights and apply them to risky decisions from description and uncertain decisions from personal experience made in clinical populations, in particular by schizophrenics and young substance abusers. The will help to build a neural process model of risky decision-making in normal adults, which can serve as a foundation for understanding the neural sources of impaired decision making in clinical and other at-risk populations.

Agriculture plays a central role in global food production and food security, and is among the societal sectors most vulnerable to climate variability and change. A marked increase in rainfall since the 1970s has contributed to major changes in land use in the Pampas of Argentina, the focus of this study: continuous cropping has widely replaced ecologically-sound agriculture-pasture rotations. Nevertheless, production systems that evolved partly in response to increased rainfall may not be viable if (as is entirely possible) climate reverts to a drier epoch. As there is much uncertainty about projected paths of future climate, particularly on regional scales and short time horizons (25-30 years hence), this project will explore various plausible climate scenarios to anticipate potential impacts on agricultural systems together with advances in agricultural technology that may affect productivity and vulnerability to climate. The central goal of this study is to improve understanding of linkages between agricultural ecosystems, uncertain decadal climate trajectories, technological innovations that decrease vulnerability to climate stresses, human decision-making, and land use and tenure changes over periods of a few decades. To achieve this goal, the investigators will build scenarios of inter-decadal climate variability; assess the impacts of climate variability on current and adapted agricultural production systems; simulate biological and economic effects of genetically-improved crops tolerant to drought stress; study the diffusion of this technological innovation; (5) develop models of individual decision-making and use these models to assess emerging regional-scale patterns of land use and land tenure and their implications for sustainability of production systems.

Agricultural production involves real-world decisions with important economic consequences, and thus is a useful test bed to understand decision-making in complex natural-human systems. This project will develop new insights on decision-making processes in agriculture, including individual and group learning, and adaptation to plausible climate changes. On a broader scale, the research will implement tools to assess the regional implications of climate change in the next 25-30 years, a scale relevant to resource management, and infrastructure and investment planning. Climate fluctuations will be explored in the context of important technological changes that may shape agriculture over the next decades. One highlight of the project is the active involvement of farmers and operational producers of climate information (the Argentine Met Service) that guarantee the relevance of the research, facilitate and demand outreach, and ensures stakeholders'' ownership of the process. Finally, similarity in experienced climate fluctuations, production scale, technology and crops grown, and land tenure regimes of the Pampas to those in the US Midwest suggest a broader relevance of the project''s results.

This research will examine the relative advantages and disadvantages of having decisions made by an individual or by a group. The research focuses on environmental decisions, an important and complex class of decisions that involve uncertainty, consequences that are realized at different and often distant points in time, and conflicting goals (short- vs. long-term, individual vs. collective, material vs. moral/ethical, cooperative vs. competitive). We will examine the quality of individual vs. group decision processes and outcomes for such complex choice situations and investigate the effect of group composition, in particular of group variation in psychological traits known to affect decision making and of group variation in the way members receive decision-relevant information. We make a (new) distinction of potential practical importance, namely between predecided groups whose members have considered a problem or decision individually before deliberating it as a group and naive groups who are considering a problem or decision for the first time in the group setting. We will also examine the effect of cross-cultural differences in attitudes and values on group decision processes and outcomes, by conducting a subset of studies in multiple countries, including the US, the Netherlands, and Argentina.

A recent issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest (Kozlowski Ilgen 2006) highlights the ubiquity of work groups and the importance of improving group effectiveness. The proposed research will suggest (a) what types of decisions benefit from being made by groups rather than individuals, (b) how group decisions are affected by the composition and preparation of the group, (c) how group decision processes can be improved as a result of a better understanding of these dynamics, and (d) how these improvements can be implemented in the field. Our results can also improve the effectiveness of participatory processes in environmental decisions, which is something several organizations, including the World Bank, have recently called for, with the hope that they lead to greater efficiency of decisions and broader empowerment of stakeholders. While participatory processes can have such outcomes, more needs to be known about how group interactions of typically heterogeneous stakeholders affect decision processes and whether, when, and how participation is a useful tool.

Affective and Deliberative Risky Decision Making in Children, Adolescents, and Adults

Adolescents are well known to take risks which can result in traffic accidents, infections from sexually transmitted diseases, or substance abuse. The proposed research lays the groundwork for investigating neural mechanisms that give rise to such risk-taking behavior, which are currently not well understood. Recent research has proposed that affective/emotional processes and experiential learning (i.e., learning from personal experiences) might be a key to a better understanding of risk taking in adolescents and other individuals known to seek risks, such as substance abusers or pathological gamblers. We will use behavioral and physiological (skin conductance and heart rate) data to investigate how learning the risk-relevant information experientially versus analytically influences risk taking. We hypothesize that experiential learning triggers affective decision making as opposed to analytical learning, which triggers predominantly deliberative decision making. We assume that adolescents are prone to take greater risks than children and adults due to greater reliance on their affective processing system over the more controlled deliberative system when both systems are triggered. The grant will further allow us to conduct pilot studies with brain imaging techniques (fMRI). These pilot studies will enable us to submit a proposal for a series of fMRI studies on affective versus deliberative information processing and the role of experiental versus analytical learning in risk taking in children, adolescents, and adults.

A better understanding of the behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying risk taking and risky decision making will help with the development of better prevention and intervention strategies. These strategies can be targeted at adolescent at-risk populations and other populations with deficits in risky decision making, including substance abusers and pathological gamblers. A better understanding of both the triggering situational characteristics and the differential role and interplay of affective and deliberative decision making can lead to policies that help people make better decisions in everyday life. For example, at-risk individuals can be helped to learn what situation characteristics lead them to take dangerous risks. On a broader level, people can be trained to better integrate affective and deliberative reactions in their decisions. Policy makers can learn how to communicate risks and describe decisions in a way that triggers an optimal balance of the two types of decision processes.

Delayed benefits are usually valued less than immediate ones, for several reasons. Such a reduction in value can be viewed as the result of applying a temporal discount factor. There have been many studies of the observed discounting of future receipts of money. For example, if a decision maker judges that $100, to be received in 2 years, is equal in value to $70 right now, the observed discount rate for this decision is about 30% for 2 years (or about 16% per year). However, people also pursue goals other than money, including good health, safety, leisure, belonging, status, well being of others, and a stable and attractive environment. Such non-monetary goals may also be valued less if their achievement is delayed, so the concept of a temporal discount factor can be extended to these other goals. Different discount factors may apply for different goal categories, and this, in turn, would affect how people make tradeoffs among goals attained at different points in time. For example, if a decision maker judges an environmental improvement 2 years hence to be almost as valuable as the same improvement achieved now, the discount rate might be only 3% per year for the environmental goal even though it is 16% per year for a monetary gain of $100. A person who is unwilling to give up $100 now, for immediate attainment of the environmental goal, might be willing to make a binding commitment to give up $100 with a delay of one year (worth only $84), in order to achieve the same environmental goal with a delay of 1 year. Thus, it is important to know how human temporal discounting varies across goal categories in order to analyze the long-term benefits of public policies relating to health, safety, and environment.

Our previous research showed the importance of affiliation and social goals (such as status or adherence to group norms) for decisions concerning environmental goals. Our new research will determine the best ways of measuring temporal discount factors for different goal categories, and will then quantitatively compare discount rates for a variety of economic, social and environmental goals. We focus both on typical responses and on individual and cultural variation. The research will advance the theory of decision making in social and group contexts (temporal discounting of social goals has not previously been considered), will develop methods for assessing temporal discount factors, and will lead to better analysis of public policy costs and benefits. For example, we will assess discount rates for some costs and benefits of measures to prevent global warming, using a diverse national sample, to inform policy on this critical issue. A field study will test applicability of our findings in an international population and will provide data on effective means of encouraging energy conservation.

Adolescents are prone to take risks that result in elevated levels of traffic accidents, infections from sexually transmitted diseases, or substance abuse. The proposed research investigates neural mechanisms that give rise to such risk-taking behavior, which are currently not well understood. Recent research has proposed that affective/emotional processes might be crucial to better understanding risk taking in adolescents and other individuals known to seek risks, such as substance abusers or pathological gamblers. Behavioral and brain activation (BOLD in fMRI) data to investigate how different forms of dynamic versus static decision-making situations influence the involvement of affective versus deliberative modes of processing and the levels of risk taking in children, adolescents, and adults. One primary hypothesis to be tested is that dynamic choice situations trigger affective processing more than static choice situations, which trigger predominantly deliberative processing. A second hypothesis is that adolescents are prone to take greater risks than children and adults because of differences in the maturation rates of their deliberative and affective systems, differences that result in teens relying more on affective processing to make decisions. In addition, a large internet-based study will extend the age range of our investigation to middle-aged and older-aged adults in order to investigate later developmental changes in dynamic risk taking, studying it effectively across the life span.

A better understanding of the behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying risk taking and risky decision making will help with the development of better prevention and intervention strategies. These strategies can be targeted at adolescent at-risk populations and other populations with deficits in risky decision making, including substance abusers and pathological gamblers. A better understanding of both the triggering situational characteristics and the differential role and interplay of affective and deliberative decision processes can lead to policies and interventions that help people make better decisions in everyday life. For example, at-risk individuals can be helped to learn what situational characteristics lead them to take dangerous risks. On a broader level, people can be trained to better integrate affective and deliberative reactions in their decisions. Policy makers can learn how to communicate risks and describe decisions in a way that triggers an optimal balance of the two types of decision processes.

Decisions about "green electrical generation" are made both by energy consumers (who may choose to pay something extra) and by energy providers (who may choose to develop green power and to offer it to consumers). Social and environmental goals of both consumers and providers play an important role in this, as do social expectations about choices of green power by others. The interdisciplinary research program to be undertaken by this collaborative group, the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, will focus on the social processes underlying group decisions (for example, the decision to develop or offer green options) as well as on processes underlying individual or household decisions (such as selection among different energy plans). Recent research on decision making has highlighted the importance of decision architecture -- the features of a decision setting that affect how preferences are constructed. Examples include whether outcomes are framed as gains or losses, what option is designated as default, and what temporal horizon is implied in the setting. The investigators will explore how decision architecture affects environmental decisions, especially those that are made in a social context and that usually involve uncertainty, long time horizon, and a mixture of goals, including social goals. The investigators will address social processes, decision architecture, and the use of technical information (including forecasts of climate variability and longer-term climate change) in environmental decision making by conducting laboratory experiments and field studies, the latter particularly focused on regions where there are useful year-to-year and decadal-scale forecasts of climate variation and significant impacts of this variation on livelihoods.

This collaborative group's work will enhance basic understanding about social processes and decision architecture. It also will advance decision design for complex climate-related decisions that involve long time scales, great uncertainty, and interdependence; and it will provide new insights regarding how technical information is used. It also will provide practical information and insights for multiple stakeholders at field sites, such as water managers, farming communities, insurance companies, and communities near retreating glaciers. The group's work also will provide new perspectives about the close collaboration and integration of social and natural science research. This collaborative group project is supported by the NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences through its Decision Making Under Uncertainty (DMUU) competition.

Climate change offers a unique challenge for human problem solving. Whereas evolution has equipped us to address immediate threats to life or limb, climate change is a slow-moving threat, largely understood through the eyes of climate scientists, who admit uncertainty in how quickly or slowly change will take place. It is not surprising that polling shows that even the US public persuaded by the science does not give this issue priority. Nevertheless, significant action is required now to contain a threat that may not fully manifest itself for decades.

An increasingly rich body of work in a range of behavioral sciences - including cognitive and social psychology, anthropology, behavioral economics and sociology - is examining human cognition and motivation and gaining insights about decision processes. This research may hold the key to building constituencies for addressing climate change and for motivating behavioral change. However, its results are largely confined to academic literature, and locked, for the most part, in stylized language that is not always accessible to the many non-governmental organizations, businesses and others who would benefit from its insights. Our Research Coordination Network (RCN) is designed to make the insights gained from this work more accessible to practitioners. Work now underway and anticipated will provide insights into alternative ways to address climate challenge and its unique demand for upfront investments to deliver benefits that are by necessity uncertain and far into the future, accruing to future generations and to geographically distant regions.

The network will act as a market maker, using physical and virtual meetings and a software platform to create a forum for the integration and sharing of theory, results, and experience (a) across disciplinary lines, to stimulate robust cross-fertilization, additional research, cross-training of postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty members, and (b) between the academic supply side and the practitioner demand side building better two-way communication between these two communities. Our RCN will help build a multi- or trans-disciplinary sub-specialty that will raise the status, profile and reach of individual efforts as well as create awareness for the need of institutional support to maintain and use research output of this sort, attracting more creative minds into the effort, including young researchers. Equally important, the RCN will find systematic ways for dissemination and to connect research to application. It will do so in part by integrating into this platform approach the knowledge and needs of the non-governmental world and of government policy-makers.

Despite frequent and vivid reminders of the destruction that natural disasters can leave in their wake, compliance rates with evacuation orders and support for mitigation efforts remain troublingly low. One possible contributing factor to this apparent under-weighting of the risk from environmental hazards is the fact that when making decisions between uncertain outcomes in laboratory studies, people appear to treat rare events differently if their probabilities are learned through sampling and feedback (experience), as opposed to summary statistics (descriptions). Despite a recent surge in laboratory research on this topic, it is not yet clear how, or whether, this effect applies in the far more complex environment of real-world decisions about hazard preparedness. The current research project systematically investigates how learning about environmental hazards through personal experience affects people's perceptions of (and therefore their actions in response to) such dangers. The results provide a framework for scientists and policymakers to better understand how the public's personal experience with those natural hazards might interact with -- or override -- the descriptive warning information they disseminate. Appreciation of the psychological hurdles to the understanding or use of such information can improve the influence of hazard forecasts, increasing compliance with warnings and protective measures.

The Description-Experience (DE) Gap in risky choice describes the shift from Prospect Theory's predicted over-weighting of rare events when probabilities are learned through summary statistics (description), to an apparent under-weighting of small probabilities when learning occurs through repeated feedback (experience). This research program develops methods to extend existing findings about the DE gap into laboratory paradigms that more closely address the complexities inherent to real-world environmental decisions such as how to prepare for potential hazards. The research then validates existing findings through field studies that examine decisions from real-world experiences and assess the validity of prior results. Field studies integrate choice problems used in the laboratory studies into realistic paradigms, and test the boundaries of the type, timing, and valence of feedback typically used in DE gap studies. By converging evidence from well-controlled laboratory tasks and the richer, more complex set of real-world choices that people face every day, this program of research addresses current theory more thoroughly and effectively than either approach could alone. Insight into how provision of probability and outcome information in different ways affects real-world decisions illuminates ways of communicating information about environmental hazards to increase the likelihood that people will take protective action.

Recent aging and forecasting literature gives plausibility to the idea that changes in goal orientation, as well as errors in affective forecasting, may differ across the lifespan. Yet despite these important suggestions from the literature, little empirical research has directly compared experienced affect and affective forecasting in older and younger adults, and none has examined underlying mechanisms that may account for age differences in this domain. This project clarifies the relationship between goal orientation, emotional regulation, and affective forecasting, and explore whether this relationship is consistent with the positivity effect found in elders' retention and memory for emotional information. Specifically, three studies assess mediation of age-related affective forecasting ability by emotional regulation and goal orientation in adults between 18-90 years of age. The first two studies identify the processes in which forecasts are constructed, and test the hypothesis that if older adults tend to be more prevention-oriented than young or middle-aged adults, their forecasts may be based on the motivation to avoid incurring losses versus an orientation towards achieving gains. The third study builds upon the findings from the first two studies by examining the role of age-differences in affective criteria in the domain of temporal discounting, and will employ a query order intervention, with the purpose of reducing the influence of forecasting biases.

Affective variables play a major role in decision processes, and age differences in emotional aspects of decision making have important implications for choice outcomes. By understanding what components of affect dynamics lead adults across the lifespan to make better decisions, results will provide directions for the development of interventions that can improve the welfare of older adults.

Many resources have been invested in programs to promote the voluntary adoption of pro-environmental behaviors (PEBs) through education, marketing, and economic incentives. Such investments, however, are threatened by the potential for rebound effects, by which the initial adoption of a PEB renders the adoption of subsequent PEBs less likely because the individual feels licensed to behave in environmentally counterproductive ways. On the other hand, an initial PEB may actually motivate the adoption of subsequent PEBs by reinforcing a pro-environmental identity, leading to gateway effects. The existence of gateway vs. rebound effects has profound implications for the effectiveness of environmental conservation programs and efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through energy efficiency and conservation. Research to date has generated mixed results and has been limited by a reliance on correlational designs and by an incomplete investigation of the psychological and situational factors that facilitate and underlie these effects. The interdisciplinary research team for this project (cognitive and social psychology, decision theory, and law) draws on existing theories related to identity, emotions, moral self-regulation, and multiple modes of decision making to create and test a comprehensive theory of positive and negative pro-environmental behavior spillover. Does the adoption of a PEB affect the likelihood that an individual will adopt a subsequent PEB? What are the psychological processes by which rebound and gateway effects occur? Under what conditions are rebound and gateway effects most likely to occur? The research employs a mixed-methods approach that combines experiments and surveys conducted in both laboratory and field settings, using diverse populations. Research findings are disseminated through journal articles, workshops, and publications targeting policy makers and real-world decision makers.

The results from this research provides a foundation for evidence-based environmental policy that reduces the likelihood of counterproductive results or missed opportunities. By generating an understanding of the situations that give rise to rebound effects, the project's results provide insight to governments and private institutions about funding for initiatives that may be better spent on other policies and programs. By identifying the situations that give rise to gateway effects, the results will suggest when the promotion of one easy PEB can be expected to be a gateway to more demanding PEBs. The dissemination plan includes targeted publications and a dedicated workshop. Decision and policy makers in the government, non-profit and business sectors are also reached through a professionally designed communications guide that summarizes research findings in accessible language. Partnerships with corporate and community based organizations help transfer project findings into real-world demonstration projects.

1531041 (Klotz). This INSPIRE project is jointly funded by the Environmental Sustainability program in the CBET Division in the ENG Directorate, the Decision, Risk, and Management Sciences program in the SES Division of the SBE Directorate, and the Office of Integrative Activities. The project will extend - to upstream, multi-stakeholder decision making for sustainability - the study of interventions designed to alleviate decision biases such as framing effects and social norms. This topic will be studied in the context of defaults, or starting points, in development decisions for physical infrastructure, which has long term impacts on various sustainability concerns. Such decisions in infrastructure, as in other domains, are guided by decision aids including rating systems that do not take full advantage of advances in behavioral sciences, in part because this is an area where interdisciplinary exchange of methods, problems, and solutions has been rare. Through a collaboration that was established by the NSF RCN SUSSTAIN, this project will examine whether and how default options presented to infrastructure designers can help them overcome barriers to the selection of more sustainable options.

Intentionally designed defaults will be studied in Envision, a leading rating system for sustainable infrastructure. The research plan follows an iterative process that begins with experimental work to test a series of default interventions, with students and professionals, using replicas of actual infrastructure development decisions. Experiments will test the extent to which behavioral science theories translate to upstream, multi-stakeholder decisions, in particular whether choice defaults influence such decisions, and through which of three channels: the cognitive energy required to make a decision; perceptions that the default is the recommended or social norm option; and by framing the outcome as a loss or gain. Experiments will also explore whether disclosing interventions diminishes their effect. Semi-structured interviews with decision makers will complement the experiments to explore the relative influence of the choice defaults compared to technical and economic considerations and compared to stakeholders' differing goals, importance weightings, and tradeoff values. This project is set up to yield educational case studies to infuse research insights into engineering and behavioral science curricula.

This collaborative group will continue ongoing efforts to study individual and group decision making under climate uncertainty and decision making in the face of environmental risk. The researchers will focus on synthesizing theoretical and empirical results of studies conducted over the last ten years in areas such as agriculture and water management. Three themes have connected the various research projects: the presentation and use of scientific information, the role of social context across different scales, and the effects of decision architecture. The collaborative group will synthesize project results generated across different sectors, cultures, and theoretical frameworks. The focus will be on the development of products that benefit the broad academic and practitioner communities, such as a book, educational videos, and tutorials. These materials will be available to inform future studies of environmental decision goals and processes and the communication of scientific information related to environmental science in order to motivate sustainability. The collaborative group will maintain its international network of expertise and researchers through virtual connections.

The investigators will synthesize theoretical and empirical results from their prior research generated across different sectors, cultures, and theoretical frameworks and translate those results into a form accessible to other researchers. Synthesis and integration efforts of sector-based field project results (in the areas of climate, water, hazards, energy) will enable researchers to infer the influence of central constructs from cognitive and social psychology in environmental perception and decisions. Comparing findings across sectors, particularly pertaining to the description-experience gap, will allow researchers to disentangle the effect of different elements of personal experience. Synthesis activities will focus on choice architecture, where behavioral decision theories and insights are turned into interventions. A meta-analysis of the relative effectiveness of different choice architecture interventions in different domains and with different populations of decision makers will generate a matrix, including data from this collaborative group and others. This collaborative group project is supported by the NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences through its Decision Making Under Uncertainty (DMUU) funding opportunity.

The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research.

Our infrastructure influences everyone, and even those who never use it. Buildings and roads are where we spend most of our time and also account for the majority of energy use and associated emissions in the United States and globally. This project pursues transformative infrastructure improvements through a new approach merging engineering and psychology. The new approach promises solutions that do not rely solely on material resources, which often cost less than purely technological responses, and can be more rapidly translated from research to practice. Beyond better infrastructure, this project's merging of engineering and psychology promises societal impacts in three additional ways. First, through engineering workforce development, by not only better preparing engineers for current engineering jobs, but also by extending the types of jobs for which engineering students are prepared. Second, through diversity and culture of inclusion, by broadening the pool of people who see themselves as potential engineers and by appealing to a more diverse group of prospective engineers. And third, by building an innovation ecosystem through the embedded industry partnerships that are central to this project.

This project is to plan for an ERC that envisions services (e.g., shelter, mobility, and water) provided via infrastructure that goes beyond reducing negative environmental impacts to actually creating positive ones. Such restorative infrastructure addresses engineering grand challenges and supports global development goals. Restorative infrastructure is elusive, however, in large part because it requires merged understanding of technological and social systems, and therefore of engineering and psychology. The potential ERC will pursue convergence research between these disciplines, focused on identifying obstacles to and opportunities for creating restorative infrastructure. The project core team brings together engineers and psychologists, academics and practitioners, already working together on convergence research for restorative infrastructure. This planning grant will help the core team mature these unique existing relationships and extend team formation to a larger stakeholder community. The team plans to facilitate engineering workforce development with embedded research residencies in which researchers study fundamental questions in natural contexts with program partners. The core team will identify and fill gaps in disciplinary and practical expertise through in-person planning charrettes held in conjunction with the ideas42 Behavioral Summit (October 2018, New York) and Engineering Sustainability Conference (April 2019, Pittsburgh). Building upon the in-person meetings, virtual bi-weekly meet-ups will include invited presentations followed by structured conversation around ERC pillars. Economics and other fields have advanced their theoretical foundations by rigorously incorporating psychology to account for systematic deviations from "rational" models of consistent, utility-maximizing, thinking and behavior. This ERC seeks analogous advances for engineering, through the social focus on restorative infrastructure. Research will advance understanding of environmental sustainability, infrastructure systems, and engineering design. Pursuing this vision will make much-needed intellectual contributions to both extend the boundaries of engineering as well as bring more applications of psychology into engineering-related research and practice.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

The project studies public responses to COVID-19 and global change in order to advance the health, prosperity and welfare of American citizens and promote the progress of science. Addressing COVID-19 and global change requires large-scale collective action and governmental response. Yet, for both issues, the consequences of inaction are delayed, the costs and benefits of inaction are unequally distributed, and harms grow exponentially over time, if unattended. These features make it hard to learn from experience and lead to drastic underestimates of the costs of inaction. However, the response of the American public to the two risks appears to be very different. This research project will systematically compare public perceptions and reactions in the United States to these two crises, tracking them over the coming months as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unfold. Understanding people?s perceptions and responses will highlight promising (and likely different) policy responses to each crisis. A better social scientific understanding of public reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic under conditions of great fear and deep uncertainty is crucial to inform the design of effective and efficient policy interventions and implementation by public and private actors.

The project seeks to understand the determinants and consequences of public responses to COVID-19 and global change and will examine both the analytic and affective dimensions of these responses. A large nationally-representative panel survey (n = 4,000) enables the research team to examine how different segments of the public respond to each risk and to test focused hypotheses comparing these responses. The longitudinal dataset will allow the researchers to understand how these responses evolve as the pandemic, and exposure to the pandemic, unfold over time and against a rapidly evolving backdrop of COVID-19 incidence and response. The survey instrument examines several DRMS theories of long-standing importance: (1) Psychological risk dimensions; (2) Decisions from experience and the prediction that personal experience of (extreme) consequences shapes decisions under risk and uncertainty more than mere knowledge of their likelihood; (3) Finite pool of worry and theories of people?s limited ability to attend to or worry about multiple hazards at a time. From a political science perspective, the teams examines how public attitudes and behavior are affected by polarization in the American electorate and by variation in trust in institutions. Collecting panel data on four occasions over the course of the next year tracks changes in Americans? risk perceptions, trust and distrust in various actors, and in their willingness to engage over this unique, critical, and uncertain time period, when COVID-19 infections and risks will abate and resume in response to differential enforcement and relaxations of lock-down measures across states. Key explanatory variables for the hypotheses include political party affiliation, levels of social trust, trust in science, personal experience, and visceral concern and dread. Novel survey experiments probe support for multilateral action, connection to air pollution, links between attitudes on the pandemic and support for green infrastructure programs, and comparative willingness to pay for government policy action on the two issues.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

This project seeks to understand how people's worldviews and actions are impacted by the beliefs and actions of others. It examines this question in an important context for our nation's security, health, and natural environment: support for renewable energy and offshore wind. It measures people?s perceptions of a broad range of beliefs and actions they hold of others and examines how these beliefs cluster together and create a social reality about what is normal that shapes one's own opinion about energy policy and technology. The studies also examine what happens to this cluster of beliefs as external events modify one of the beliefs. Not only is the domain selected, offshore wind support, better understood by this work, but the ways that people are impacted by others' actions and beliefs are clarified broadly. Given that interventions for many social problems in health, education, environmentalism, security and other domains seek to harness how we are influenced by others in order to create positive social change, this deeper understanding of how social influence can inform and improve these interventions can help benefit addressing many contemporary social problems.

This project seeks to understand social norms as a clustered network of connected social perceptions. Theoretical and applied research on social norm perceptions or interventions often only study or utilize one norm at a time. Social norms, however do not exist in isolation. Instead, norms co-exist in a network of other descriptive or normative beliefs, forming clusters. This research clarifies how perceptions of social norms are connected and the causal relationship of those connections, pursuing the following questions: How are networks of social norm perceptions organized? Do norm clusters have a hierarchical structure, and do higher-order beliefs dictate more specific lower-order beliefs? What happens when one of these norms gets modified, either by an experimental manipulation or by some naturally occurring change(s) in the environment? Does such a change in the perception of a norm only influence beliefs or behaviors directly connected to it or does its effect spread throughout the norm's cluster as activation does in a semantic network? The team explores how these diagnosed characteristics of norm clusters can be used to shift individual behavior or belief. In a series of studies over 2 years, the scholars examine perceptions of norms surrounding the topic of offshore wind energy and relevant policy support. Using online survey experiments and a combination of convenience samples, representative samples and longitudinal data, the team assesses the structure of norm clusters, which normative and descriptive beliefs are more related to others, and investigates how manipulating one norm in a cluster can affect the perception of norms it is connected to. These insights are used to compare multiple norm intervention techniques to see which is most successful at increasing understanding. Rather than simply intervening on a single norm, understanding the norm cluster for offshore wind allows the team to better understand the most fruitful place to intervene and reveals multiple points for leverage on this issue, so the team may identify a cleaner, more sustainable, and economically viable energy system. Beyond offshore wind, social norm interventions are used across a variety of domains. This research provides a methodology and theoretical framework for applied researchers that would enable them to understand how and where to best intervene in a norms cluster to enhance understanding.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.