Exploring and Exploiting the Understanding/Acceptance Assumption

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Experiments on behavioral decision making often compare how people behave (descriptive facts) with how they ought to behave (rational, or normative, models). Many differences have been documented over the past several decades between them. However, whether differences between rational and actual behavior signal a problem with behavior or with the rational model (or its application) is sometimes hotly debated. And knowing whether the behavior in question is indeed (ir)rational is important, both because understanding how we ought to reason or make decisions has practical implications for improving judgments and decisions, and because it influences the research strategy of much of the field. How, then, does one know what is rational? Rationality is determined by analysis and reasoning; it rests on arguments. Because some arguments are better than others, and because new arguments can be introduced, what is deemed rational can change. Nonetheless, experts can -- and often do -- disagree on what is rational. The proposed research probes a wide variety of non-experts about whether they believe that controversial errors and biases are in fact mistakes, and whether they are swayed by arguments for and/or against traditional interpretations. The research does not only contribute in important ways to the debate regarding rational behavior, but also tell us a great deal about people’s intuitions about rationality, which is itself intrinsically valuable.The studies present participants with purportedly descriptive violations of rational models to see whether they believe that the behaviors in question are indeed mistakes. For example, do people consider it a mistake to respond differently to the typical frames used in framing experiments? In addition, the research agenda incorporates the “understanding/acceptance” principle -- namely, the assumption that the deeper the understanding, the greater the willingness to accept a normative principle -- by presenting participants with competing normative accounts and seeing if that influences whether they believe that the behavior in question is a mistake. For example, does understanding the principle of description invariance lead participants to accept framing effects as mistakes? The studies examine people’s intuitions about, and responses to arguments about, behavioral phenomena such as framing effects, joint-separate reversals, default effects, and intransitivity. In each case, the goal is to examine the compelling arguments for accepting the traditional conceptualization of rationality or the competing accounts.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.