From Mindless to Mindful Choice: How Introspection Improves Decision Making

在这个项目中，首席调查员将研究如何反省个人关于如何做出好的决策的规范性信念，以提高决策的质量。该建议基于三个观点：(1)人们的决策往往是“盲目的”，因为人们在决策时不知道自己的规范信念；(2)牢记自己的规范信念使人们的决策过程与这些信念更加一致；(3)内省可以提高正念，因此内省增加了规范信念和决策过程之间的一致性。将进行四组研究，使用实验室和现场实验，对学生和非学生样本进行研究。第一组研究将测试，在做出决定之前，对情绪因素和客观范围(如幅度和概率)决策的规范性影响进行反思，是否会导致人们根据自己的规范信念更紧密地权衡情绪和范围，典型地降低情绪因素的权重，增加范围的权重。第二组研究将测试让人们在做出决定之前反思个人偏好和社会影响(如政治党派和同龄人的偏好)的规范影响是否会导致人们根据自己的规范信念来权衡个人偏好和社会影响，这通常会降低社会影响的权重，增加个人偏好的权重。第三组研究将考察这些内省效应的调节因素，包括认知需求的差异、规范信念的差异以及决策的相对复杂性。最后一组研究将考察自省对社会决策的影响，包括对他人个人决策的评估，对政策制定者决策的评估，以及战略社会情景中的行为。就更广泛的影响而言，这项研究将为一种简单的内省程序提供科学证据，该程序将促进人们对是否以及何时根据个人信念做出决定的理解。通过这样做，这项研究将展示一种简单的方法来提高人们在许多领域的决策质量，包括减轻人道主义痛苦的慈善捐赠、环境政策评估、恐怖主义风险认知、个人财务决策、消费者选择以及社会背景下的合作行为。因此，这项研究将为那些对改进他人决策感兴趣的人(如经理、营销人员和政策制定者)和那些对改进个人决策感兴趣的人(如员工、消费者和公民)提供关于有用工具的知识。这项研究还将澄清和扩展判断和决策中的一个相对较新的结构，该结构区分无脑选择和有意识选择，提供这两种状态的可操作性，并考察从无脑选择转向有意识选择的机制、边界条件和有益后果。这些研究将提供一种简单、有效的方法来提高决策质量，而不是依赖于将人们推向特定方向的“高压”外部干预，而不是依赖于其他人对最佳和适当决策方式的想法的干预。在进行这项研究的过程中，还有更广泛的影响，包括培训和支持一群性别和种族不同的本科生和博士生，拟议的研究将促进美国和德国的教师、研究生和本科生之间的国际合作和培训。

In this project, the Principal Investigators will examine how introspecting about one's personal normative beliefs about how to make good decisions can improve the quality of decisions. The proposal is grounded in three ideas: (1) that people's decisions are often "mindless" in that people make decisions unaware of their normative beliefs; (2) that becoming mindful of their normative beliefs brings people's decision processes into closer correspondence with those beliefs; and (3) that introspection can increase mindfulness and that introspection therefore increases the correspondence between normative beliefs and decision processes. Four sets of studies will be conducted, using laboratory and field experiments with student and non-student samples. The first set of studies will test whether introspection about the normative influence on decisions of emotional factors and objective scope (such as magnitude and probability) before making decisions causes people to weight emotion and scope in closer correspondence with their normative beliefs, typically decreasing the weight of emotional factors and increasing the weight of scope. The second set of studies will test whether asking people to introspect about the normative influence of personal preferences and social influence (such as political partisanship and peers' preferences) before making decisions causes people to weight personal preferences and social influence in closer correspondence with their normative beliefs, typically decreasing the weight of social influence and increasing the weight of personal preference. The third set of studies will examine moderators of these introspection effects, including differences in need for cognition, differences in normative beliefs, and the relative complexity of a decision. The final set of studies will examine implications of introspection for social decision making, including evaluations of others' personal decisions, evaluation of policy makers' decisions, and behavior in strategic social situations. In terms of broader impacts, this research will provide scientific evidence for a simple introspection procedure that will advance understanding of whether and when people make decisions according to their personal beliefs. In so doing, the research will demonstrate a simple way to improve the quality of people's decisions in many domains, including charitable donations to alleviate humanitarian suffering, evaluation of environmental policy, perceptions of terrorist risks, personal financial decision making, consumer choices, and cooperative behavior in social contexts. This research will thus provide knowledge about a useful tool both for those interested in improving others' decisions (such as managers, marketers, and policy makers) and for those interested improving their personal decisions (such as employees, consumers, and citizens). This research will also clarify and extend a relatively new construct in Judgment and Decision Making that distinguishes between mindless versus mindful choice, providing an operationalization of those two states, and examining the mechanisms, boundary conditions, and beneficial consequences of moving from mindless to mindful choice. These studies will offer a simple, effective means of improving the quality of decisions without reliance on "heavy handed" external interventions that nudge people in a particular direction, going beyond interventions that rely on other people's ideas about the best and proper way to make decisions. There are also broader impacts inherent in the process of conducting this research, including the training and support of a group of undergraduate and PhD students that is diverse in sex and ethnicity, and the proposed research will foster international collaboration and training among, faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students in the United States and Germany.