Please use the form on page 3 of the Newsletter to make nominations for the Executive Board of the Society. Recall that because of a tie in last year's election, Irwin Levin will begin serving as President-Elect next year, and there is no nomination process for president this year. For details, see the minutes in the December 1996 issue of the Newsletter. The deadline for receipt of ballots is August 15, 1997.
The 1997 Directory for the society is being mailed with this issue of the newsletter. Please check your entry for accuracy and report any changes using the form on page 11 of the Newsletter.
Please take notice of the survey on page 5 of the Newsletter and send this to Hal Arkes as soon as possible (i.e., right now will be fine).
From the Editor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Board Nominations Ballot. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
From the President. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
On-Line Services. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Notice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1996 Presidential Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
New Book. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10
Dues and Journal Order Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11
Upcoming Meetings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12
SUBMISSION DEADLINE FOR THE NEXT J/DM NEWSLETTER: September 5, 1997
1997 EXECUTIVE BOARD
Hal R. Arkes, President, <arkes@oak.cats.ohiou.edu>
Elke Weber, President-Elect, <eweber@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>
Barbara Mellers, Past President, <mellers.1@osu.edu>
Lola Lopes, 1995-1997, <lola-lopes@uiowa.edu>
Jonathan Baron, 1997-1998, <baron@psych.upenn.edu>
George Loewenstein, 1997-1999, <gl20@andrew.cmu.edu>
Colleen Moore, Secretary/Treasurer, <cfmoore@facstaff.wisc.edu>
EDITOR
Shawn P. Curley
Department of Info. & Decision Sciences
University of Minnesota
271 19th Avenue S.
Minneapolis, MN 55455
(612) 624-6546
FAX: (612) 626-1316
scurley@csom.umn.edu
DUES, ADDRESSES, & CORRECTIONS:
Colleen F. Moore/JDM
Psychology Department
University of Wisconsin
1202 W. Johnson St.
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-4868
cfmoore@facstaff.wisc.edu
The J/DM Newsletter welcomes submissions from individuals and groups. However, we do not publish substantive papers. Book reviews will be published. If you are interested in reviewing books and related materials, please write to the editor.
There are few ground rules for submissions. The best way to send your contribution is via EMAIL or in an ASCII file on a 3.5" or 5.25" diskette. If you must send hard-copy (e.g., if you are using special graphics or do not have computer access), please submit camera-ready copy. This means that the copy should be typed single-spaced on white 8 1/2 by 11 paper. If possible, use a carbon or film ribbon. Please mail flat -- do not fold.
Advertising Rates: Advertising can be submitted to the editor. Inclusion of the ad and the space given to the ad is at the editor's discretion. The current charge is $100 per page to cover production and mailing costs. Contact Shawn Curley for details. Alternatively, you can use--
Mailing Labels: Some readers may wish to send reprint lists or other material to people listed in the directory. The current charge is $125 for a set of labels. Contact Colleen Moore for details. A diskette of the database is available for one-time use. The charge is $50 for commercial use, $25 for nonprofit use
Address corrections: Please check your mailing label carefully. Because the J/DM Newsletter is usually sent by bulk mail, copies with incorrect addresses or which are otherwise undeliverable are neither forwarded nor returned. Therefore, we have no way of knowing if copies are delivered. Address changes or corrections should be sent to Colleen Moore.
Subscriptions: Subscriptions are available on a calendar year basis only. Requests for information concerning membership in the Society for Judgment and Decision Making should be sent to Colleen Moore.
THE SOCIETY NEEDS YOUR HELP!
Nominations for J/DM Executive Board Member
Please take a few minutes to think about suitable candidates for the Executive board. Your participation in this process is very important. To make it easier, a self-mailer is on the next page.
So, fill in your ballot, fold it over, and then please seal, stamp, and mail it. The first step in the election process is the nomination of candidates. This is the task of the membership, i.e., YOU. The election ballot will be mailed in the September issue of the Newsletter.
Please take a moment to think of people that you would like to see leading our Society. You may nominate up to FIVE individuals for the Board. Note that all members, including ex-Presidents are eligible to serve as Board members. Please do nominate at least a few candidates--quite modest numbers of nominations have put candidates on the ballot in past years.
Colleen Moore
Secretary/Treasurer
Nominate up to FIVE people as candidates for the Executive Board:
Return your nominations to:
J/DM Nominations
c/o Colleen Moore
Psychology Department
University of Wisconsin
1202 W. Johnson St.
Madison, WI 53706 USA
or send by e-mail:
cfmoore@facstaff.wisc.edu
NOMINATIONS MUST BE RECEIVED BY August 15, 1997
As many of you know, the Decision Risk, and Management Science Program at the National Science Foundation is a major source of funding for members of our organization. The number of proposals submitted to this program has dropped precipitously in the last year or so, but no one knows exactly why this is the case. Since the health of this program is important to our membership, I thought I'd insert this survey both in the newsletter and on our bulletin board. Please respond in one of the two formats, either by replying to Hal Arkes by e-mail or by mailing back the filled-in survey below to:
Hal Arkes
Department of Psychology
Ohio University
Athens, OH 45701 USA
Thanks.
Yes No
2. Have you ever submitted a proposal to DRMS?
Yes No
In the last year?
Yes No
3. Have you ever had a funded proposal from DRMS?
Yes No
4. What do you estimate the funding rate of DRMS proposals to be? __________%
5. If you haven't submitted a DRMS proposal in the last two years but you had submitted previously, why have you not submitted recently?
6. Is there any other information or advice you'd like the J/DM Society to transmit to the DRMS program?
We welcome suggestions and comments about new features.
Alan Cooke <acooke@garnet.berkeley.edu>
Alan Schwartz <alansz@cogsci.berkeley.edu>
ELECTRONIC MAILING LISTS
To subscribe, send a message of the form:
subscribe mailing-list YOUR FULL NAME
to the following address:
listproc@mellers1.psych.berkeley.edu
where mailing-list is
jdm-society for members of the society in
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Graduate students receive messages to
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To send a message to all subscribers (including graduate students), send the message to:
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jdm-grads@mellers1.psych.berkeley.edu
To cancel your subscription, send a message to the same address as for subscriptions of the form:
unsubscribe mailing-list YOUR FULL NAME
REFERENCE ARCHIVE
The system allows users to store and retrieve book and chapter
references related to the fields of judgment and decision making.
The archive is located at:
references@mellers1.psych.berkeley.edu
For more information send the message "help" to this address.
WORLD WIDE WEB
The J/DM Society now has a set of pages on the World-Wide Web,
providing information about the Society and Society Membership,
upcoming events, all our electronic services (including course
syllabi, easy-to-use forms for subscribing to SJDM mailing lists,
and help with the reference archive), links to related Web sites
that may be of interest to members, copies of the JDM Newsletter
(for society members), and the SJDM directory with links to
members' home pages. The URL (uniform resource locator) for the
Web page is:
http://mellers1.psych.berkeley.edu/sjdm
INTERNET SUBJECT COOPERATIVE
This service allows researchers to fill out each other's
questionnaires and surveys, for pilot studies or real data.
Contact Jon Baron, the moderator of the effort
baron@cattell.psych.upenn.edu
ONLINE SOCIETY NEWSLETTERS
The SJDM newsletters are available on-line and through
email. If you would like to receive text-only versions of the
newsletter via e-mail, subscribe to the "jdm-newsletter" mailing
list. Send mail to:
listproc@mellers1.psych.berkeley.edu
The message should say:
subscribe jdm-newsletter YOUR FULL NAME
You must be a member of the society in good standing to subscribe to this mailing list.
Call for Papers
Journal of Consumer Psychology
Special Issue on Ethical Tradeoffs in Consumer Decision Making
Moral beliefs and obligations are expressed in personal judgments and decisions. For instance, if we believe in saving endangered species, then we should be likely to contribute to relevant charities, to vote for candidates who support our position, and to avoid killing the species directly ourselves. The observation that sometimes we do not act in accordance with our moral beliefs, or that sometimes we are torn between personal utility and public welfare, has been a popular subject of attitude and game-theoretic research, as well as of philosophical inquiry.
This special issue is devoted to studying the reasoning processes used to manage ethical tradeoffs in marketplace decision making. In their everyday shopping, consumers may evaluate product attributes which carry moral implications, and these moral attributes must be traded off against more benign attributes such as quality and size and price. We might need to weigh the possibility that a pesticide is harmful to an endangered insect, for example, against its low cost and great effectiveness in weed control. Because of the unfamiliarity, emotion, and difficult ethical reasoning involved in such a purchase, it is highly unlikely that we accomplish such a judgment in a straightforward and/or consistent fashion. The cognitive complexity of these sorts of decisions, combined with their ubiquity, make them especially suitable to psychological marketing research.
Some topics of interest include:
All papers will undergo the usual JCP review process. Please submit papers by January 1, 1998, to:
Julie Irwin, Guest Editor
JCP Special Issue
Department of Marketing
Wharton School of Business
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6371
jirwin@stern.nyu.edu
Emotional Responses to Risky Choice
Barbara Mellers (Ohio State University)
Shawn Curley has kindly given me the opportunity to summarize my Presidential Address last November for those who did not attend the meeting. Academics never seem to turn down opportunities to talk about their work, and I am grateful for another chance to do just that.
We make decisions to experience outcomes, and outcomes produce emotions. Winning money in the lottery can be exhilarating, earning a salary raise can be gratifying, and missing a plane can be annoying. These feelings usually don t come out of the blue; we often imagine how we will feel about outcomes of decisions before we make decisions, and those anticipated feelings help us guide our choices.
In research on the experiences of decision outcomes, experimenters usually measure choices based on assumed emotions or emotions based on assumed choices. Alan Schwartz, Ilana Ritov and I have developed a technique that allows us to measure both choices and emotional experiences. Although we have only examined choices and emotions associated with monetary outcomes of gambles, the method can be used with other stimuli as well.
We present subjects with pairs of gambles having outcomes of wins and losses. After a choice, subjects learn the outcome of the chosen gamble and rate their feelings of pleasure or displeasure. In some experiments, subjects learn the outcome of the chosen gamble only, and they rate their feelings of pleasure or displeasure. In others, they learn the outcomes of both the chosen and unchosen gambles, and they rate their feelings about their own outcome. Finally, in still others, subjects learn their own outcomes, and then they decide whether they want to learn the other gamble s outcome. In this way, we can test whether people search for the context that maximizes their hedonic pleasure.
Holding all else constant, emotional reactions become more favorable the greater the amount won and less favorable the greater the amount lost. This is not surprising. Furthermore, emotional responses depend on expectations; surprising outcomes have greater emotional impact than expected outcomes. This result ties in with Kahneman and Miller s (1986) notions about emotional amplification. Finally, hedonic responses are relative. People make counterfactual comparisons between what actually occurred and what might have occurred under a different state of the world and/or a different choice (Roese & Olson, 1995). These comparisons are powerful enough to make smaller wins more pleasurable than larger wins and larger losses less painful than smaller losses, a result also found by Boles and Messick (1995).
We provide an account of the emotional responses called decision affect theory. Although at first glance, one might think that the utilities of outcomes should describe emotional reactions. We find that emotional responses can not be captured by utilities alone. Utilities should be independent of probabilities, but emotional responses differ greatly depending on whether outcomes are expected or unexpected. Utilities should be monotonically increasing with amount won, but emotional responses are often nonmonotonically related to outcomes. Moreover, the same monetary outcome can have many different emotional experiences, depending on expectations and counterfactual comparisons.
We then ask whether people can anticipate their emotional reactions to monetary outcomes. Although there is research showing that people are not always good at predicting their emotional responses, we find that in this task, people are exceptionally good at predicting the surprise, disappointment, and regret that they actually experience with monetary outcomes. Anticipated emotions and actual emotions are almost identical. The similarity of these measures allows us the opportunity to predict choices using actual (rather than anticipated) emotional experiences. Is there a hedonic strategy that captures preferences for gambles?
The answer turns out to be Yes , but there are also many hedonic strategies we can rule out. Simple hedonic rules such as maximizing pleasure or minimizing pain are inadequate, as is minimizing the probability of regret. Instead, choices can be predicted by a hedonic strategy that balances pleasure against pain and maximizes the subjective expected pleasure of risky options. That is, people select the gamble that makes them feel the best in the long run. This strategy, though similar to maximizing expected utility, makes different predictions and appears to predict choice at least as well.
We are currently examining other factors that predict hedonic experiences and other types of outcomes. How these results tie into other issues about emotions remains to be seen. The current interest in emotions--from neural connections to daydreams about future possibilities--will undoubtedly open many doors and lead to new perspectives on decision making.
(cut-and-paste)
Understanding Probability and Statistics: A Book of Problems
Ruma Falk
1-56881-018-0, Hardcover, 256 pp., $44.00
This hands-on book brings together a collection of problems that effectively use humor and the familiar to make this often daunting subject less intimidating.
A K Peters, Ltd
Publishers of Science & Technology
289 Linden Street
Wellesley, MA 02181
617-235-2210
fax 617-235-2404
service@akpeters.com
See the hard copy of the newsletter for more information.
You can now pay your membership dues and order the journals
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes and the
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making using the single form
below.
If you want to subscribe to either journal for 1997, just check
the appropriate space(s) below. Do NOT send your journal fees,
you will be billed for the amount by the publishers. Please DO
send your Society membership dues.
For your dues status, please check your label. The date next to your name is the last year for which the database shows you as having paid dues.
If your label shows "1997" or later, you are fully paid.
THANK YOU!
If it is "1996" then you owe dues of $20 for 1997.
If it is "1995" or earlier then you owe back dues ($20
per year) and $20 for 1997. Please act soon, or
you will be dropped from the mailing list.
Members residing outside the United States who incur expenses in
getting checks written in U.S. funds have the privilege of paying
in advance for multiple years. The label date should indicate if
you have done this.
Members residing in countries where getting checks written in
U.S. funds is impractical or illegal may apply to the Society for
a free membership. Such members will find a "*" next to their
names on the label.
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Please make checks payable to the JUDGMENT/DECISION MAKING
SOCIETY.
Checks must be in US dollars and payable through a US bank. Mail
the form and check to:
Colleen F. Moore/JDM
Psychology Department
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1202 W. Johnson St.
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Date:
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I wish to subscribe to the following for 1997: [The journal will bill you later for the price of subscription at the special Society rates shown]
_____ Organizational Behavior and Human Decision
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elsewhere)
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(4 issues, $75)
Society for Mathematical Psychology: will be at Indiana University, Bloomington IN, July 31-August 3, 1997. For information contact: Karen Niggle, Indiana University Conference Bureau, Indiana Memorial Union 671, Bloomington, IN 47405 USA; (812) 855-6449; fax: (812) 855-8077, <kniggle@indiana.edu>, <www.socsci.uci.edu/smp>.
Cognitive Science Society: will be Stanford University, Stanford CA, August 7-10, 1997. For information contact: <cogsci97@csli.stanford.edu>; <www-csli.stanford.edu/cogsci97>.
SPUDM-16: will be in Leeds, England, August 18-21, 1997. For information contact: John Maule; School Business/Econ Studies; Univ of Leeds; 11 Blenheim Terrace; Leeds LS2 9JT UNITED KINGDOM; 44-532 332622; (fax) 44-532 332640; <jm@bes.leeds.ac.uk>
European Mathematical Psychology: will be at the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands, Sept. 2-5, 1997. For information contact: Eric Maris; NICI, Dept. of Mathematical Psychology; Univ of Nijmegen; PO Box 9104; 6500 HE Nijmegen, Netherlands; (fax) 31 24 361-6066; <empg97@nici.kun.nl>; <www.nici.kun.nl/empg97>
Australasian Cognitive Science Society: will be at the University
of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, Sept. 26-28, 1997. For
information contact: Richard Heath;
rheath@hiplab.newcastle.edu.au
Society for Medical Decision Making: will be at the Hyatt Regency, Houston TX, October 26-29, 1997. For information contact: Elizabeth Paine; Society for Medical Decision Making; The George Washington University; Office of CME; 2300 K Street, NW; Washington DC 20037 USA; (202) 994-8929
Society for Computers in Psychology: Philadelphia, PA, November 20, 1997. For information contact: Walter K. Beagley, Dept of Psychology, Alma College, Alma, MI 48801 USA; (517) 463-7267; fax: (517) 463-7277, <beagley@alma.edu>
The Psychonomic Society: Philadelphia, PA, November 21-23, 1997. For information contact: Roger L. Mellgren, Secretary-Treasurer, Dept of Psych, Box 19528, Univ of Texas, Arlington TX 76019-0528 USA, (817) 272-2775, fax: (817) 272-2364, <mellgren@uta.edu>
Judgment/Decision Making Society: Philadelphia, PA, November 22- 24, 1997. Program and registration information will appear in the September 1997 issue of the Newsletter.