Development of Individual Differences in Decision Biases

University Of Iowa, Iowa City IA

Investigators

Abstract

There is considerable literature in the area of human judgment and decision making demonstrating systematic use of simplifying heuristics and the biases that can arise from them. For example, "framing effects" are common in which people react to the manner in which information is labelled by assigning more favorable evaluations to, say, a medical treatment that is described as having a "75% success rate" as opposed to a "25% failure rate". However, research by the Principal Investigator and others has uncovered considerable variation in the extent to which different individuals display such biases. Most recently, this research, which has been done almost exclusively with adults, has linked these individual differences to stable personality traits and decision styles. This naturally brings up the dual questions of when such biases develop and whether they can be linked to distinctive childhood dispositions. The present series of studies is proposed to address these questions. A major resource for these studies is an available population of 5-6 year-olds whose social and emotional development and cognitive capacity have been tracked since they were toddlers. Thus, we have the capability of relating children's decision making behavior to measures such as shyness, impulsivity, and intelligence. In an initial study we showed that these traits are related to risk-taking in a gambling-type game. We are in the process of developing a battery of tasks/games which are "child-friendly" yet capture the essence of the decision processes observed in adults. An innovation of the new studies is that the parent as well as the child will complete the tasks so that we can correlate the two sets of responses to learn more about the development of decision biases.