Daniel Kahneman issued an open letter to researchers doing social priming research, which has become the subject of skepticism after some studies were found to be fabricated and others were not able to be independently replicated. His letter offers advice to scholars about how to address the situation, and we at DSN like the approach: Simply find out the truth and announce it.
This week, an interesting paper about how heuristics, which have low cognitive demands, can nonetheless become less effective as cognitive decline sets in.
At Decision Science News, we love the commitment devices. But, as we’ve have spoken about, we have mixed feelings about them, including the nagging concern is that commitment devices they may not lead to deep-seated changes or habit formation.
Belief in the hot hand in sports is the belief that someone who makes a shot has an increased probability of making the next shot, and that someone who misses a shot has a decreased probability of making the next shot.
FOUNDING MEMBERS OF MICROSOFT RESEARCH’S NEW YORK CITY LAB As reported in the New York Times (Microsoft Taps Yahoo Scientists for New York Research Lab) and elsewhere, we’re moving to Microsoft. Your Decision Science News editor will be one of the founding members of a brand new Microsoft Research Lab in New York City. The […]
THE BERLIN NUMERACY TEST We’ve written before about the challenges of communicating risks. Can people understand the risks inherent in their savings plans, loans, surgeries, or medications? This week, researchers have published a new instrument designed to very quickly assess exactly that (www.riskliteracy.org). We introduce the Berlin Numeracy Test, a new psychometrically sound instrument that […]
New York has, in the last years, joined the list of cities that require calorie counts to be posted on the menus of chain restaurants. Early research suggests that the labeling is not terribly effective.
At Decision Science News, we have all kinds of numbers memorized: IP addresses, passport numbers, phone numbers, bank account numbers, logarithms, etc. Once you have stuff like this memorized, you’ll start to realize how much less of a hassle it is to have things in memory rather than on paper or disk. Besides, it’s fun.
But how is it done?
It is done with the digit-sound method, which we learned from Professor Jaap Murre’s neuroMod site at the University of Amsterdam.
Stanislas Dehaene and colleagues surveyed Mundurucu participants (in the Amazon) and Western participants (in the USA) on where they felts numbers lie on a scale from from 10-100. Specifically, participants had an interface like that pictured above, with 10 dots on the left and 100 dots on the right. They were then shown between 10 and 100 dots and asked to click on the line where they would fall.
This week, two fun Econ-Finance papers. First is Steven Levitt and Thomas Miles’ analysis of whether poker is a game of skill. Next the famous Fama-French duo ask the same question of mutual fund management.
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