Development of Individual Differences in Decision Biases

在人类判断和决策领域有大量的文献证明了系统地使用简化逻辑学以及由此产生的偏见。例如，“框架效应”很常见，人们对信息的标签方式做出反应，对一种被描述为“75%成功率”而不是“25%失败率”的医学治疗给予更有利的评价。然而，首席研究员和其他人的研究发现，不同个体表现出这种偏见的程度存在相当大的差异。最近，这项几乎完全针对成年人的研究将这些个体差异与稳定的人格特质和决策风格联系起来。这自然带来了双重问题，即这种偏见是何时形成的，以及它们是否与独特的童年性格有关。本系列研究旨在解决这些问题。这些研究的一个主要资源是一个5- 6岁的可用人口，他们的社会和情感发展以及认知能力从他们蹒跚学步时就被跟踪。因此，我们有能力将孩子的决策行为与害羞、冲动和智力等指标联系起来。在最初的研究中，我们发现这些特征与赌博类游戏中的冒险行为有关。我们正在开发一系列“儿童友好型“的任务/游戏，但这些任务/游戏抓住了成年人决策过程的本质。新研究的一个创新之处在于，父母和孩子都将完成任务，这样我们就可以将两组反应联系起来，以了解更多关于决策偏差的发展。

There is considerable literature in the area of human judgment anddecision making demonstrating systematic use of simplifying heuristics andthe biases that can arise from them. For example, "framing effects" arecommon in which people react to the manner in which information is labelledby assigning more favorable evaluations to, say, a medical treatment thatis described as having a "75% success rate" as opposed to a "25% failurerate". However, research by the Principal Investigator and others hasuncovered considerable variation in the extent to which differentindividuals display such biases. Most recently, this research, which hasbeen done almost exclusively with adults, has linked these individualdifferences to stable personality traits and decision styles. Thisnaturally brings up the dual questions of when such biases develop andwhether they can be linked to distinctive childhood dispositions. Thepresent series of studies is proposed to address these questions. A major resource for these studies is an available population of 5-6year-olds whose social and emotional development and cognitive capacityhave been tracked since they were toddlers. Thus, we have the capability ofrelating children's decision making behavior to measures such as shyness,impulsivity, and intelligence. In an initial study we showed that thesetraits are related to risk-taking in a gambling-type game. We are in theprocess of developing a battery of tasks/games which are "child-friendly"yet capture the essence of the decision processes observed in adults. Aninnovation of the new studies is that the parent as well as the child willcomplete the tasks so that we can correlate the two sets of responses tolearn more about the development of decision biases.