Logic vs. Emotion in Decision-Making

Interesting. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-06-13 10:56 · Score: 0

Very interesting!

Too bad that this article, like most of its kind, won't get many comments.

i'm confused.... by jeffy124 · 2003-06-13 10:59 · Score: 1

I'm not much into game theory, hence I'm a little lost on this ultimatum game described in the article. Could someone who knows something about it speak up?

--
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.

Re:i'm confused.... by ceejayoz · 2003-06-13 11:06 · Score: 2, Informative

Basically, one person has $10 and the other has $0. The person with $10 has to offer money to the other person.

Now, if the person with $10 offers $1 to the other, both people "win" - person A is up $9, person B is up $1. So, it would be logical for person B to accept the offer.

In most cases, though, person B will reject the offer - as it seems unfair for him to be only getting a small amount. S/He rejects the offer, even though it means BOTH people get nothing.

So, it's a nice illustration of rational vs. irrational thought.
Re:i'm confused.... by epsalon · 2003-06-13 11:09 · Score: 1

There are two players, and $10 that should be split between them. One player suggests how to split the $10. The other player may accept or reject the offer. If the other player accepts, each gets as much as the first player suggested. If he or she rejects, both get nothing.

It turns out that the second player somtimes rejects the offer, even if it's in his or her best interest to accept.

--

Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
Re:i'm confused.... by melete · 2003-06-13 11:11 · Score: 4, Informative

You don't really need to understand game theory to get this application of it.

Basically, two random individuals are put in a situation with a few ground rules (one being that this is the only time these two people will play this game together)

Person A is then allowed to offer person B a portion of $10; if person B accepts, person A gets to keep the remainder of the $10; if person B rejects the offered money, neither of them get any of the money.

The article is saying that people tend to reject low offers (like $1) since obviously, they want at least $5 of the money, and see less than that as unfair.
Re:i'm confused.... by Detritus · 2003-06-13 11:26 · Score: 1

It seems rational to me. You are punishing the other player for antisocial behavior, by accepting a short-term loss to encourage better behavior in the long run.

--
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Re:i'm confused.... by Chris+Pimlott · 2003-06-13 11:43 · Score: 3, Interesting

The ultimatum game has two players. Player A decides how to split up some amount of money (say $10) between the two players. Player B decides whether or not to accept. If he accepts, the money is divided accordin to the split Player A decided. Otherwise, no one gets any money.

If Player B is rational, he will always accept any non-zero sum of money. However, in practice, Player B's often refuse to accept if the split is too much in Player A's favor. Thus the emotional response (punishing Player A for lack of fairness) often ends up overcoming the logical response (taking some money over no money).

There's also a related game called the dictator game. The setup is the same, but Player B must always accept. A rational Player A should always keep all the money for himself; however, in practice, the split often gives at least some money to Player B.
Re:i'm confused.... by anthony_dipierro · 2003-06-13 12:10 · Score: 1

"The game is played with the explicit stipulation that it is a one-time interaction."
Re:i'm confused.... by zenyu · 2003-06-13 13:38 · Score: 4, Insightful

So, it's a nice illustration of rational vs. irrational thought.

I don't think it's that clearcut. In our normal lives you often have transactions where you will never interact with the same person again, but by punishing bad actors you often get them to behave better in future transactions. The punishing them costs you more than just ignoring bad actor, but you accept that for everyone you bust and spend time dealing with someone that was going to harm you in the future is being punished for harming someone else.

The way I understand this expirement was run was that each person got to either make 10 offers to 10 different people, or accept/reject 10 offers from 10 different people. On average the least punishing player will end up with the most money of all the people accepting and rejecting offers. But I bet you would also notice that in a egaliterian society (small democratic republic say) the split will be 1:1 and they will have near the highest total payout. In a broken society the split will be more like 1:4 in favor of the offerers, and many transactions will be rejected. Here the least punising receiver will have much more money than the most punishing, unlike in the egaliterian society where the income inbalance will be small. Since they didn't write about this in the article I think the expirementers really don't understand what they are dealing with, or the reporter is just clueless.

If they are right about a considerable emotional component it is probably just rightous indignation, something you might need in order to overcome the rational thought that you can get the most money by leaving the punishment to others. There is a bit of a prisoners dilema though, because if everyone else does the same thing you will get a smaller payoff next time, and no matter what they did you have betrayed another receiver so there would also be the emotion of guilt for your evil dead. There would be less guilt if you've been cheated much before, or if you get a low offer next time. This reinforces the brokeness in broken societies, conversely a fair offer next time will reenforce good feelings about a previous punishing round.

It sort of makes sense that this is acts as an emotion and not just on the rational level. Presumably we developed the emotional part of the brain before we got rational, and this kind of skill would be needed for any social group large enough to have strangers. Not having "a conscience" might be what restricts some of our primate cousins to small groups, they are restricted to group sizes where the possibility of developing a bad reputation is enough to keep actors in line. (Possibly it's just bad government :) I wonder if bonobos treat strangers better than other chimps...)

Still I'm not convinced, memory lights up all over the brain, and you would be remembering previous times you were cheated when considering not punishing the bad actor, i.e. cheating yourself. The emotion they measure might be just a side effect of accessing memory associated with being cheated and hence associated with feeling rotten or angry.
Re:i'm confused.... by Detritus · 2003-06-13 14:58 · Score: 1

The universe doesn't close down and disappear at the end of the game. The players and society will be there long after the game has ended.

--
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Re:i'm confused.... by anthony_dipierro · 2003-06-13 15:17 · Score: 1

I assume the players are kept anonymous from one another, though.
Re:i'm confused.... by mbogosian · 2003-06-13 16:49 · Score: 3, Insightful

If Player B is rational, he will always accept any non-zero sum of money. However, in practice, Player B's often refuse to accept if the split is too much in Player A's favor. Thus the emotional response (punishing Player A for lack of fairness) often ends up overcoming the logical response (taking some money over no money).

This is assuming that keeping A from getting any money has no value to Player B. If it's worth a buck to Player B to say, "Fuck you!" to Player A, then the line isn't that clear.

The behavior isn't necessarily irrational, it's just that there are non-monetary results that still have value to the players.

--

moto411.com
Re:i'm confused.... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-06-15 11:00 · Score: 0

So they learn that they can't try to screw over strangers. Society benefits. Greedy jackasses die.
Re:i'm confused.... by Madcapjack · 2003-06-20 21:04 · Score: 1

So, it's a nice illustration of rational vs. irrational thought.
hold your horses! not so fast. Lets think about this. We've defined rationality in terms of the aquisition of material gain, in this case, money and we've defined that doing things to satisfy emotional impulses are irrational. However, if we are really to look at rationality in the way that economists say they look at rationality we should all see the problem here. The rationality in economics is a kind of instrumental rationality. You have an end, whatever that may be, and you do those things which will achieve those ends. In economic theory utility is undefined; though it is often is described in terms of dollars it does not have to be. I could, for example, have a desire to punish someone who didn't offer me a fair deal. In this game a person could be deciding which utility or desire he wishes to satisfy: a desire for the money or a desire for revenge. To act out on either is completely rational from the perspective of the agent as long as the agent does the appropriate things to achieve the end desired by the agent. Standard economic theory doesn't say anything about people's preferences being rational or irrational; in fact preferences are usually a given. This game they played would be better described as an evaluation of what preferences players have, not on their rationality.

--
Logic, macros, and more

I would like to get _some_ money as... by OwnerOfWhinyCat · 2003-06-13 11:03 · Score: 1

opposed to _no_ money.

Obviously this test wasn't conducted in Santa Cruz.

Slashdot way behind on this by Atario · 2003-06-13 11:14 · Score: 1

I saw this a couple weeks ago, on Scientific American Frontiers (or Alan Alda in Scientific American Frontiers, or Alan Alda Acts As Everyman or whatever they're calling it now), on PBS.

--
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt

Based on Principle. by saden1 · 2003-06-13 11:15 · Score: 2, Interesting

I make decisions based on principle. I try to stay away from doing business with companies I feel their vale/price ratio to be too high, but if their is absolutely no alternative the old adage of "you have to do what you have to do" applies. When it comes to web technology Iâ(TM)ll confesses and say I will absolutely stay away from anything M$. I mean what other choice does one have when they know M$ mission as far as the web is concerned is to control it all.

--

-----
One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.

Re:Based on Principle. by zenyu · 2003-06-13 22:17 · Score: 1

I try to stay away from doing business with companies I feel their vale/price ratio to be too high

That's not really an analog. The value/price should always be positive even with monopoly pricing, if it didn't generate more value than you are giving up in the purchase it's irrational to buy. Also if the average value/price ratio is 20:1 then it makes no sense to buy something that has a 5:1 value/price ratio while the other options are on the market. It would be like buying a government bond at 0.5% yield when an equally risky one was on sale with 2.0% yield. Only if you were in a an economy where less goods were on sale than you could afford to buy would you need to buy anything below the average value/price ratio to maximize returns. In any moderately healthy economy you could buy an radio instead of a telephone if that gave you more value, there doesn't have to be competition in that particular good. An exception being for an essential good like food. But then if there isn't much food its value to you is probably very high.

This would only be an analog if the price to you was zero and you still refused it. Consider a tax cut where you get back $300, your neighboor gets back $300,000 and your children and the neighbors' children pick up $3,000,000 in debt service. Refusing that no cost value would be a closer analog. You might give up the $300 because you saw the scheme on the whole as unfair, even though it is of direct benefit to you, you still might refuse. You wouldn't want others to be making the same decision for you as you would be by putting that large obligation on your children with so little gain. Essentially your neighboor has the same choice but it's harder with real money at stake, I think some famous Jew said something about a rich man having as much chance of being good as a camel has of getting through the eye of a needle. I think if they had given the one actor 10 $100,000 checks the receiver might accept just 2-3 of them... I think even at $100,000 out of $1,000,000 most people would refuse, but anything they could convince themselves was fair would usually be accepted. It's sort of like the teachers strike in Peru over the last month, the teachers wouldn't agree to a $28/mo raise to their $180/mo income until the president said he'd take a paycut from $12,000/mo to $6,000/mo, then they saw him as feeling their pain and being more fair even though it made no immediate change in their situation. (For perspective minimum wage there is $110, the dollar will get you about 3 times as far as in the US, and during the strike the teachers approval rating went from 70% to 85% and the president fell from 17%(the GDP rose 5% last year) to 12%.)

Limits of simple GT scenarios by jeorgen · 2003-06-13 11:22 · Score: 2, Interesting

Some of these Game Theory scenarios do not include the bigger social picture. Sometimes it's rational to turn down a paltry offer and make it so that both loses, even when that could be seen as irrational.

However it is only rational to take $1 if you are absolutely sure that:

1) You will not be doing business with the other person again

2) People won't find out you're a loser.

And yes, the experiments I guess explicitly presupposes that 1) and 2) are true, but the brain probably says "Who am I to trust that?". The situation is too artificial for the brain to take seriously.

Try walking hunched on a crowded sidewalk and then try to walk straight (particularly stretch your stomach, rotate your tailbone back and press your pelvis lightly forward). People will stop bouncing into you. Why? Because a person walking straight and proud can't give way without falling, while walking hunched gives you good balance to give way in all directions. So you commit to walking staright and the game changes. People solve it through readjusting their paths at more of a distance, problem solved. I. e. you solved the problem by changing the problem: "This is what I am gonna do, you guys do what you want".

/jeorgen

Re:Limits of simple GT scenarios by anthony_dipierro · 2003-06-13 12:05 · Score: 1

The situation is too artificial for the brain to take seriously.

Or maybe it's just that emotion takes over before the brain has a chance to think.

After all, the situation isn't as artificial as you make it out to be. The phrase "cut off your nose to spite your face" didn't come from nowhere, after all.
Re:Limits of simple GT scenarios by Beryllium+Sphere(tm) · 2003-06-13 17:07 · Score: 1

Those are really good points, and another is that we evolved as pack animals. It's tempting to speculate that being programmed to prevent hogs from benefiting, even to your own detriment, is a trait that helps the pack (and therefore its members) survive.
Re:Limits of simple GT scenarios by Dachannien · 2003-06-14 03:07 · Score: 1

The evidence collected in the experiment wasn't the behavior of the participants. It was brain activity *correlated* with behavior. Their conclusions are that it appears that more primitive emotional portions of the brain are involved in overriding the advanced prefrontal regions when an unfair offer is made.

In other words, you might sit here and logically think that you'd take even a penny if someone offered it to you.... But if faced with the actual situation, you'd probably be thinking "dude, that sucks" as the guy handed the penny over.

And that is really what they're getting at - that the mechanism behind refusing (or disliking) an offer is a primitive emotional response, while the mechanism behind accepting a fair offer is one of logic.
Re:Limits of simple GT scenarios by Sloppy · 2003-06-14 10:59 · Score: 1

And that is really what they're getting at - that the mechanism behind refusing (or disliking) an offer is a primitive emotional response, while the mechanism behind accepting a fair offer is one of logic.
These guys have the fancy equipment and did the brainscans, so I can't credibly argue with 'em. Nevertheless, my guess would have been that's it's not so simple. Accepting the offer could just as easily be an emotional "Whoopee! I get a free dollar!" vs rejecting the offer with a cold, calculated "I just sacrificed a dollar, but this guy is going to offer me $5 every time from now on, if he knows what's good for him."

--
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.

Reloaded? by arunkv · 2003-06-13 11:49 · Score: 1

Did the researchers just watch Neo meet the Architect and make a choice? ;-)

David Hume on the helix of passion/reason. by Shwag · 2003-06-13 11:50 · Score: 2, Informative

Hume

figured that out more then 200 years ago.
Why is science always the last to figure things out?

Re:David Hume on the helix of passion/reason. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-06-13 17:00 · Score: 1, Informative

Why is science always the last to figure things out?

Because saying "this is how things are" is a lot easier than telling yourself that and then actually constructing an experiment to prove/disprove it and then getting the funding to execute that experiment. Lets not even get into how you go about getting it published in a respectable journal. It's something like a patent search in that you've got to try to find all the references for the trivial things you proved in a day and forgot about even doubting in the first place. Sometimes your experiment is inconclusive which makes things more interesting, but also makes it harder to get funding even if you manage to publish the "I did this and it didn't work" paper. If you give up many others will probably repeat the failed experiment; usually this info gets passed around at conferences, so there is like a five year window where someone else may make progress but if the problem isn't popular it will languish for years until the answer is needed for something that is popular.

There are also a lot of crackpots writing books compared with the number of scientists.

In a related story... by anthony_dipierro · 2003-06-13 12:17 · Score: 3, Funny

9 out of 10 slashdotters said they would be willing to pay $1 to watch Bill Gates lose $9.

moderation, please... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-06-13 13:10 · Score: 0

but seriously, do any of the editors/admins actually read the comments to articles that don't hit the main page? let alone ones starting at 0... if you read this, reply or mod me up!

What is rational? What isn't? by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) · 2003-06-13 13:45 · Score: 1

Irrational is merely rational in the short term - sometimes very short.

Look, when you weigh up what to do next (and I don't necessarily mean consciously) you can imagine that you're averaging your benefit minus cost to yourself over a period of time. If that time (call it T) is long then that's called 'rational'. If that time is short 'irrational'.

So what's the optimal time? Make that time long and you won't even be alive. But what's the standard by which you make a judgement about T? You can't use the cost-benefit analysis above because that itself refers to T. There is no optimal T. T is something that has been selected by natural selection and is part of your genes (and acquired from culture too). For some people it is long. For some people it is short. There is no external judge of who is right.

--
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.

Real story: Researchers are cheap bastards. by Eevee · 2003-06-13 13:53 · Score: 4, Interesting

Fighting over ten bucks? If I was offered nine I'd turn it down just to watch the researcher wet his pants over the bad data point.

Now, if it were a thousand bucks, and I was offered a hundred -- that's about a good dinner out -- yeah, I'd take it if I wasn't in a bad mood. But if I were feeling surly or pissed-off, I might refuse it just to make the other guy suffer too.

A million and I'm offered a hundred thousand? It doesn't matter what my mood is, I take the money. Other Joe's got nine-hundred thousand? Who cares, I got my cash!

Moral of the story: Trying to prove things on the cheap doesn't work.

Re:Real story: Researchers are cheap bastards. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-06-14 00:08 · Score: 0

That's only because your emotions which make the researchers appear 'cheap' would overwhelm your logic which says 'ten bucks is money'.

What are emotions by Snowspinner · 2003-06-13 14:45 · Score: 4, Insightful

I admit, I'm somewhat curious how "emotion" is defined for the purpose of this study. At least some credible people, most notably Martha Nussbaum, claim that emotions are in fact a form of rational response, depending on a conscious judgment of value. When I am upset that my cat died, this emotion is based on the judgment that my cat was valuable to me, which is a rational decision, not an irrational one.

In other words, the game theory model may be flawed here. If, for some people, seeing someone who has slighted them be unsatisfied is pleasurable, than it has a value. If that value is greater than $1, then it is a rational decision for them to choose not to accept the deal. The game theory model assumes that the pleasure of that has no value, however, and is thus an inaccurate model.

And yes, I do think money is a reasonable measure of value, so long as you accept that there are some things (Being punched in the face) with a value of $0, and some things (Not having to shoot your sister in the head) that are worth an infinite amount of money.

--
Philip Sandifer's academic website

Re:What are emotions by YU+Nicks+NE+Way · 2003-06-14 05:07 · Score: 2, Interesting

Well, not quite. Nussbaum et. al are talking about the question of the objective value of emotional response: things which bring you pleasure are, ipso facto, valuable, and things which cause you pain are, ipso facto, costly. That's certainly important and true -- and, all to often, neglected -- but it's not something terribly new. You can go back to Watson and the other Chicago behaviorists and still see that idea quite explicitly stated.

There's another side of the story, though: the question of whether humans and other decision makers can be modelled as rational decision makers. We can't answer that, since we can't all agree on what a rational decision maker is, but we do know that humans and animals are not utilitarian decision makers. There's a wonderful theorem, due to Mike Cohen, which actually proves that we cannot: it is possible to use simple betting games to show that no linear preference order can account for the behavior of subjects making choices in risky scenarios. That means that humans can't be treated as simply maximizing some utility functional.
Re:What are emotions by Snowspinner · 2003-06-14 10:23 · Score: 2, Interesting

I may be remembering Nussbaum poorly here, but I'm fairly sure she makes a claim for a rational component to emotional response, or, at least, that emotional judgments cannot be distinguished from other judgments in terms of their process.

The real problem I see with my claim is that there's an unfortunate circularity to it. If every decision can be modeled as a judgment, then there is no such thing as an irrational decision - merely one with a different valuation than we would use. Thus begins a headlong slide into relativism.

The way out of that is to claim that some systems of value are better than others. In its simplest form, this is an uncontroversial claim - most of us accept that eliminating world hunger is a better value than raping small children. But most of us shy away from extreme absolutism as well - few of us seem terribly comfortable with, say, the fullest rigidity of Kantian (or Utiliatarian) ethics.

The upshot being that what I was really doing was trying to challenge the value system implied by game theory in this problem - that one ought always maximize one's prize. Concepts of social mores and ethics play into a lot of game theory examples, and complicate the matter such that game theory is just that - a theory, and one that can't really be applied to the real world as much as some would try to.

--
Philip Sandifer's academic website

Whats emotions then? by Gaurang · 2003-06-13 18:17 · Score: 1

Your reply was insightful, and reflected a great deal of reflection (sorry for the choice of words) on your part regarding the behavior of people. But I have something to add.

Your reasoning that "I wont allow myself to be cheated" is based on reasoning of past experiences and social logic is sound - and means that this emotion is actually reason-based. I agree.

But, then, "most" emotions can be explained by reason and logic. Love is nothing but an act with purpose correlating with survival/reproduction of the species (reproduction is obvious, survival is by way of mutual help for survival). Hatred is based on reasoning that "this guy can damage my survival chances", "this girl cannot fulfill my love(reproduction) wishes", "this behavior is not good for society's well being--sort of social darwinism", or other rational thoughts. Greed, Ego are other emotions which also have rational basis for survival.

So then what are we left with - Humor? Humor was the most difficult one for me to find a reason to, and I couldnt. So basically I looked up the internet, and found theories of Laughter and Humor, which can explain even that based on reason. I wont go into that here, you can find it yourself.

So then....what are emotions??? I would say emotions are only rational behavior but with rationality hidden a little deeper non-obvious way. But we still call them emotions after all....so this ultimatum experiment's claim of this as an emotion is not incorrect.

What do you say?

--
I have found a solution to Riemann's Hypothesis, but have run out of spac

Re:Whats emotions then? by zenyu · 2003-06-13 21:09 · Score: 1

So then....what are emotions??? I would say emotions are only rational behavior but with rationality hidden a little deeper non-obvious way. But we still call them emotions after all....so this ultimatum experiment's claim of this as an emotion is not incorrect.

I haven't really thought about this with the brain in mind. My guess is that there is a rational basis for our emotions. Some which, at least, we reasoned through in early childhood or learned through conditioning. But for the most part they are hard code, sort of like other things we learn yet don't think about afterward, we learn to balance ourselves when first walking, but at a certain point it becomes automatic. We can adjust later if injured or when first walking on stilts so it's not permanent, but it can take months for someone to learn to walk again after a major accident.

I have an early memory... I remember having a problem with others taking me seriously when I was two or three, and thought that it was because I reacted to everything rationally and whenever anything noticable happened I recalled the pertinent facts then thought about the possible solutions and their probability of success and of the various states of failure and my confidence in those probabilities and then assigned values to the indefinates(success/failures) and calculated the best action. -- My parents were artists and pretty much thought I was a freak. My plan was to simulate emotion by applying the same calculation to the desireability of my current situation after notable events. And it sort of worked, at least on my parents. At some point the calculation became almost automatic. Maybe because my memory recall got quicker and those paths were all optimized. Or, maybe it was just positive reenforcement, I got others to solve my problems with happyness and anger alike. My point isn't that this is really how everyone learns to react emotionally to life, but more that just because we notice emotion in small children it doesn't mean they didn't think about it first. I think the research shows that kids are analytical monsters; everyone is born a scientist, it just gets pounded out of some of us. (I took a graduate school probablity class when I was little and left 10 mins in to the final and got a 100% when the next score was a 53% and the average was in the 20%'s, it did bad bad things to my ego.)

The personal anecdote explains why I've suspected a rational basis, but I could tell other story about me in my teans which show a complete lack of rationality. Ignoring anecdotes, I think there is some real evidence for a rational basis, starting with all our emotions having very believable post-facto reasoning behind them. But it doesn't have to be something we reasoned to be reasonable, it could be that emotions are pre-wired, that we evolved to react to our world in a certain way. One thing that seems to support that is that babies cry and smile at birth (or a few days after at least.) But there is really no evidence for there being an emotion behind this. There is a good strong evolutionary reason for them to look like they feel anguish or happyness to their caretakers, but there is no need for them to actually an emotion behind these things, it is enough for them to cry at pain and smile in reaction to their caretakers.

I think many animals do have feelings, it's a good idea for evolution to reward positive outcomes and punish negative ones with drugs. And, I have cats. But emotion as I think of it is a reaction to complex events that must be interpreted and understood, at least to the point that you can tell that $1 is unfair out of a possible $10 when sharing. With our brains constructed by genes little different from their analogs in the genes of earthworms it's hard to believe any complex reaction is really pre-programmed. Plus there are all those people who are sociopathic, many with perfectly normal ancestors. I think we can confuse emotions with the feelings that are triggered by our emotional state. But feelings are easy to trigger

Depends on the social circumstances... by Nutrimentia · 2003-06-13 20:50 · Score: 1

The key difference is whether the cash offer is a one-time deal or not. People are more likely to accept even $1 if it is a one-time offer, but if the game is played in rounds and reputation can be a factor, then people turn it down more often.

The title of this topic is kind of misleading, since there is logic underlying both decisions. I thought it was going to be about stuff like Antonio Damasio's research (see his book Descartes Error for more) that shows when someone's emotional centers in the brain are destroyed, they lose the ability to make decisions. They effectively become pure rational machines, but without an emotional center to give the options some sort of value with relation to the person, no decision can be made. It basically showed that rationality depends on emotion in many cases.

--

Etc, etc, ad nauseam, and so on and so forth.

Financial consultant job:Behavioral researchers... by Rares+Marian · 2003-06-13 21:32 · Score: 1

need not apply. They're as capable as Commodore Inc. I only say that because they're still considering the results as new info.

If there was an offer to use the Alpha processor in an Amiga in the early days or to just stay with Motorola's 68000, which would you choose? ...

Thought so, but then you're not C Inc.

--
The message on the other side of this sig is false.

Irrational processes by Muhammar · 2003-06-13 23:54 · Score: 1

"Researchers at Princeton have announced the results of a brain imaging study showing ... a battle between different logical and emotional sectors of the brain...to investigate why people often make irrational decisions that actually go against their most logical best interests."

One day, the technical types will figure even the most unpredictable process of all - the mind of a girfriend.

--
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it

re: Real story: Researchers are cheap bastards by obtuse · 2003-06-14 01:48 · Score: 2, Insightful

Yup. Odds aren't all that is important. Logical best interests are often misrepresented. A buck isn't a thousand.

The difference between a buck and a thousand becomes qualitative in addition to quantitative because those extra few orders of magnitude can change your life. That's not irrational.

Would I risk my home to invest in a double or nothing bet that I had a 55% chance of winning? No. Even though the odds are in my favor, the downside is too ugly. Someone in a less expensive part of the world, or with more resources, might choose differently.

Don't bet more than you can afford to lose. Almost everybody understands that. There is a converse, and I think it probably goes something like this: Have fun and bet on the longshot if it's money you'd never miss.

People will act perversely with small amounts of money, especially for the chance at a life changing amount.

Will I buy a dollar lottery ticket? Occasionally. I'd probably be making more of a social contribution by handing that dollar to a street person, but the chance for a life changing amount of money might be worth a dollar.

Please note, the use of the word "chance" in the previous argument is misleading and only a poor example. Buying a lottery ticket does not significantly increase your odds of winning.

--
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.

Slashdot Mirror

Logic vs. Emotion in Decision-Making

40 comments