An empirical study of irrational behavior and expected utility theory.

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The study was investigated to clarify the psychological mechanisms of irrational behavior which was not fully explained by the expected utility theory in economics. Data on irrational behavior was collected from the various perspectives such as gambling behavior, decision making, "psychological purse", reliability assessment of prediction, and risk recognition.An analysis of computer-mediated experiments on gambling behavior revealed that decision-making with satisfaction and joy was attributed internally, and that decision-making with regret was attributed externally. This selective attribution strategy made it possible to avoid having internal feeling of discomfort or feeling of insufficiency.Results on decision-making experiments under quiz competition made it clear that subjects who had strong desire for control tended to make final decision by themselves. Irrespective of the degree of strength of desire for control, there was no significant difference of the feeling of regret between ‘consistent decision' and ‘altered decision.' On the feeling of joy, however, the feeling of joy with ‘consistent decision' is stronger that that with ‘altered decision.' This result suggests that human decision making is biased to conduct irrational decision to get comfortable feeling.To put together the results and implications from the studies on "psychological purse", reliability assessment of prediction, and risk recognition, maximum utilization of cognitive/behavioral resources makes it possible to adapt ourselves to our environment, and on that meaning, irrational behavior is suggested to have a bounded rationality under the available resources.