Cognitive Psychology

University of Georgia

Much of the research conducted in the Georgia Decision Lab is devoted to uncovering the role that perceived control plays in decision making.  If you could sink your entire life’s savings into a lottery ticket with a 10% chance of winning millions of dollars, would you do it?  Probably not.  If you could sink the same savings into your own business, with a 10% chance of making millions?  For many people, the answer is yes.  At a more basic level, research in the Decision Lab has revealed that people are more willing to accept risk when betting on an event they have control over – like starting a business – than when betting on a random event like a lottery.  Participants do this even when the probabilities and the payoffs are identical, suggesting that control itself plays an important role in decision making. 

 

We are examining how  personality affects judgment and decision making.  For example, research in the Decision Lab has looked at how overconfidence (believing you will succeed more often than you actually succeed) is related to the Big Five personality traits of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience.  We have also explored how performance on the Georgia Gambling Task is affected by the personality trait of narcissism. 

 

With funding from the National Institute for Mental Health, research in the Decision Lab is exploring the neural activity that underlies the processes that contribute to perceptions of control and decision making.  For example, when people believe their probability of having answered a question correctly is high (in other words, when their confidence is high), the right dorsolateral frontal cortex is activated more than when confidence is low.  These results are depicted at right.  Also, non-problem gamblers show a marked difference in processing “oddball” stimuli with more activation in the parietal-temporal junction, which is associated with attention.  This makes sense – people need to devote more attention to processing odd stimuli.  But problem and pathological gamblers do not show this difference, suggesting that problem gambling has a significant basis in attentional factors.

With the explosion of opportunities to bet in casinos, with friends or on the internet, the rates of problem gambling appear to be rising as well.  Research in the Decision Lab, funded by the National Institute for Mental Health, is investigating the role that perceived control plays in problem gambling.  For example, we know that most people engage in disadvantageous paradoxical betting when they perceive they have control.  When they no longer have control, and the task is a random one, problem and pathological gamblers continue to accept disadvantageous risk, whereas non-problem gamblers reduce their risk taking.  This suggests that the illusion of control may be a powerful contributing factor in problem gambling.  Research conducted in the Decision Lab has been nominated for the 2006 Outstanding Research award of the National Council on Problem Gambling.

 

 

The judgmental phenomenon of base rate neglect – paying too much attention to case-specific cues, and too little to overall rates of events – has received a great deal of attention.  For example, even if you have several of the symptoms of a rare, deadly disease, it is much more likely that you have a common, less serious disease, simply because it is more common.  Yet, many people become convinced that they have a rare disease when they just have a cold, or that they have just seen their favorite movie star at the fast food stand, rather than one of the many people who happen to look like the star.  Researchers in the Decision Lab have found that base rate neglect extends not only to cases of thinking about probabilities, but also to situations where people experience all the relevant events one by one – and still under-utilize the information that is available in the rarity of certain events.  We have also found that this base rate neglect is due to a significant degree to the fact that base rates changes while cue accuracy does not.  Epidemics of chicken pox come and go, but red spots will always be a likely consequence of chicken pox when it occurs.  When one doesn’t know how the base rates may change, it may be reasonable to pay more attention to the case cues.

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The Role of control in decision making

Personality and decision making

Bayesian reasoning and base rate usage

Decision Neuroscience

problem and pathological gambling

PROJECTS AND Publications

GEORGIA DECISION LAB

Psychology Building

Room 512

Athens, GA 30602-3013

Phone: (706) 542-6624

Fax: (706) 542-3275

decision@uga.edu

 

Dunwoody, P.T., Goodie, A.S., & Mahan, R.P. (2005). The use of base rate information as a function of experienced consistency.  Theory and Decision, 59, 307-344.

Goodie, A.S., & Fantino, E.  (1996). Learning to commit or avoid the base-rate error.  Nature, 380, 247-249. [.pdf]

Goodie, A.S., & Fantino, E.  (1995). An experientially derived base-rate error in humans. Psychological Science, 6, 101-106.

 

Schaefer, P.S., Williams, C.C., Goodie, A.S., & Campbell, W.K. (2004). Overconfidence and the Big Five.  Journal of Research in Personality, 38, 473-480. Click here for paper

 

Campbell, W.K., Goodie, A.S., & Foster, J.D. (2004).  Narcissism, confidence and risk attitude.  Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 17, 297-311. [.pdf]

We found that narcissists are more confident than others, without being any more accurate.  This makes them more overconfident, which makes the bets they face in the GGT less favorable than those that others face.  Furthermore, they accept those bets more often than others, leading to systematically lower point totals for narcissists. 

Goodie, A.S. (2005). The role of perceived control and overconfidence in pathological gambling.  Journal of Gambling Studies, 21, 481-502. [.pdf]

 

In the Georgia Gambling Task, where people face bets that are fair (have zero average value) if their confidence is appropriate, we have found that people accept bets on their own abilities more often as they become more confident, even though the value of those bets becomes less as confidence increases, whether considered as objective average value or subjective utility.  This effect is termed paradoxical betting, and it leads people to lose large amounts of points in simulated computer tasks, and perhaps money and other things of value in real-world tasks.  These findings are being analyzed both with knowledge-based tasks like answering trivia questions, and with more skill-based tasks like making golf putts.

 

 

 

Goodie, A.S. (2003).  The effects of control on betting: Paradoxical betting on items of high confidence with low value. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 29, 598-610.  [.pdf]

Goodie, A.S., & Young, D.L.  The skill element in risky decision making: Control, competence or both?.  Manuscript under review, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. [.pdf]