Reading week (random topic week!)

Someone mentioned in the revision week the fact that judgment and decision making studies are always based on the same topics:

• Money (that's what I want)
• MORTAL ASIAN DISEASES (caps locks for effect), in which two sets of population perfectly opposite and equivalent, but presented in a different way (saving lives vs killing them), are genocided multiple times. 
• people giving you randomly money in the street, and asking you to gamble with it
• people giving you mugs and asking you how much would you sell them for
• people asking you how much do you want to pay for that mug the same people gave to someone else seconds ago (bastards! they could have given me the mug, instead of giving it to them!)

And it goes on. Since the statistical chances of that happening (ANY of those, as a matter of fact) is slim-to-none, I fail to see where those studies are helping me. Yes, they have proven that framing effects do exist, but I'm not usually presented with an option and the immediate equivalent opposite nearby, thus probably I won't even know that I've been framed (since you don't know the reference, the whole picture!).

I have decided to compile a list of things that need to be studied by judgment and decision making studies:

1. why I go to work instead of staying in bed sleeping in a cold morning.
2. why I don't mug that person on the street, and instead I go to work in cold mornings.
3. why I spend my money fixing a bike instead of stealing one.
4. why I don't steal a bike nor buy a new one, and instead I spend my money fixing that same bike.
5. why people behave like animals when a radius = 15 feet of any form of public transport
6. why some people prefer Coke rather than Pepsi
7. why I am so lazy on doing the coursework, and I always seem to find that thing that happens to be more interesting than doing the coursework, instead of actually doing it.
8. why different people use different web browsers
9. why some people consider Yoko Ono the breaker of The Beatles, whilst other people don't.
10. why some people vote Labour, and some people don't.
11. why some people read The Sun (no excuse on that one!)
12. why Judgement and Decision making studies don't address these VERY IMPORTANT QUESTIONS, and instead keep doing their research on trivial things like "money".
13. why I don't consider money important, whilst other people consider it the most importantest [sic] thing ever
14. why some people just can't spell properly, whilst I personally enjoy making some spelling mistakes for effect 
15. why some people are ignorant because of lack of knowledge, and some other people are ignorant because they seem to enjoy the status that it confers them
16. why I should stop writing witty comments and go to eat something instead of er..., well, keep writing witty comments and NOT eat something.

So there you go. Dear oh dear, plenty of things that need research!

Week 6 (13th November post): Endowment Effect

Having read the article named Aspects of Endowment, by Johnson, Häubel & Keinan (full reference: Johnson, E.J., Häubel, G., & Keinan, A. (2007). Aspects of endowment: A query theory of value construction. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33 (3), 461-474. [click to download pdf]), some things become clear: People attach more value to whatever belongs to them, even if it has just been given to them, and thus the "emotional attachment" due after lengthy periods of possession time is non existent.

That means that (following the classical experiments), if you are given a mug, you will attribute it a higher value than what you (or an "equal") would pay for it, even if you have had that mug for a mere minute.

Also, that could explain the loss aversion effect that is shown/explained several times, in which people tend to make more conservative choices once they have the "item" (let it be money, mugs, air guitars, knowledge?), by means of not wanting to lose what it's "yours", thus sometimes not making the rational choice (a nice video on this here (which is the same one we added on our wiki page)

Week 5 (6th November post): Decision framing

Just a quick note on this week: Since it is the week in which we based our first assessment, I thought that instead of posting a review here, you could just read the coursework wiki, which works as well, and saves me from dying in the attempt!