Generalization, defined as applying limited experiences to novel situations, represents a cornerstone of human intelligence. Our review traces the evolution and continuity of psychological theories of generalization, from origins in concept learning …
Humans are uniquely capable social learners. Our capacity to learn from others across short and long timescales is a driving force behind the success of our species. Yet there are seemingly maladaptive patterns of human social learning, characterized …
Pandemic management of SARS-CoV-2 has involved temporary freedom restrictions to curb the spread of infection. In this study, citizens are asked for whom they would grant freedoms and it is examined how their granting is influenced by risk …
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) promise to make traffic safer, but their societal integration poses ethical challenges. What behavior of AVs is morally acceptable in critical traffic situations when consequences are only probabilistically known (a …
How are judgments in moral dilemmas affected by uncertainty, as opposed to certainty? We tested the predictions of a consequentialist and deontological account using a hindsight paradigm. The key result is a hindsight effect in moral judgment. …
How can heuristic strategies emerge from smaller building blocks? We propose Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) as a computational solution to this problem. As a first proof of concept, we demonstrate how a heuristic decision strategy such as …
_Background_: Treatment benefits and harms are often communicated as relative risk reductions and increases, which are frequently misunderstood by doctors and patients. One suggestion for improving understanding of such risk information is to also …
We investigate whether people rely on their causal intuitions to determine the predictive value or importance of cues. Our real-world data set consists of one criterion variable (child mortality) and nine cues (e.g., GDP per capita). We elicited …
What--if anything--can psychology and decision science contribute to risk management in financial institutions? The turmoils of recent economic crises undermine the assumptions of classical economic models and threaten to dethrone Homo oeconomicus, …
Is the mind an "intuitive statistician"? Or are humans biased and error-prone when it comes to probabilistic thinking? While researchers in the 1950s and 1960s suggested that people reason approximately in accordance with the laws of probability …