The new article is called Potential effect of physical activity based menu labels on the calorie content of selected fast food meals. These authors tested four variant menus “(1) a menu with no nutritional information, (2) a menu with calorie information, (3) a menu with calorie information and minutes to walk to burn those calories, or (4) a menu with calorie information and miles to walk to burn those calories”. The authors found, as before that calorie counts decreased the amount of calories people chose to consume, and that exercise equivalents (telling you how much walking time or walking distance you’d need to burn off those calories) increased the effect.
This is one of the most amazing things we’ve seen in a while. What does the text block above say? You have no idea, right?
This summer Gerd Gigerenzer and Ralph Hertwig will host the annual Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality, with a focus on “Decision Making in a Social World”.
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Last week we posted two fun probability problems. If you haven’t given them the old college try do so now, because this week we present you with the answer. Voila.
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COUNTERINTUITIVE PROBABILITIES REDUX Drawn in by our post Tuesday’s child is full of probability problems, author and Professor of Operations Research and Probability Henk Tijms writes in with two new puzzles: Problem 1: An isolated island is ruled by a dictator. Every family on the island has two children. Each child is equally likely a […]
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One question we get asked a lot is whether it’s worth it to pre-pay for the tank of gas when renting a car.
At first, blush it seems like something you should never do. In the best case, you pay market rate for gas, and in the worst case, you pay for a tank of gas you never consume (what if your trip gets cancelled)?
At second blush, it can be worth the risk to avoid the hassle of fueling up just before returning the car. If your time and peace of mind are worth something, then maybe you should pre-pay when you are reasonably sure you’ll return it below a certain percentage full. But what percentage?
We take on a reader question of whether the stadium / home team matters for making a field goal. We pulled up the data on every field goal since 2002 (over 10,000) of them and plotted the probability of scoring as a function of the stadium in which the field goal was kicked.
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We looked at NFL punts before on Decision Science News. That’s old news. Field goals are the new hotness, and Super Bowl Sunday is coming up, so let’s look at a kicker’s chances.
We’ve taken the same data set and looked at a kicker’s chances of getting the ball through the uprights depending on the yard line the kick is from. The result is above.
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The site reddit told us about data on every single NFL (U.S. National Football League) play since 2002. We read it in and did an analysis of punting. The results are beautiful.
Decision making is rarely taught in high school, even though improved decision skills could benefit young people facing life-shaping decisions. While decision competence has been shown to correlate with better life outcomes, few interventions designed to improve decision skills have been evaluated with rigorous quantitative measures. A randomized study showed that integrating decision making into U.S. history instruction improved students’ history knowledge and decision-making competence, compared to traditional history instruction. Thus, integrating decision training enhanced academic performance and improved an important, general life skill associated with improved life outcomes.
