The effect of context on decisions: Decision by sampling based on probabilistic beliefs
- Hidehito Honda, Faculty of Psychology, Otemon Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan
- Toshihiko Matsuka, Department of Cognitive and Information Science, Chiba University, Chiba, Japan
- Kazuhiro Ueda, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
AbstractPrevious studies have shown that people’s decisions are affected even when they are provided with the same or analogous information by various contextual effects. In the present study, we analyzed decisions based on verbally expressed probabilistic expressions (verbal probabilities) and examined how contextual factors affected such decisions. In particular, we focused on the difference in contexts that produced different probabilistic beliefs on uncertain events. We hypothesized that such contextual effects could be explained in terms of Decision by Sampling (DbS) account (Stewart et al., 2006). In order to examine our hypothesis, we proposed a modified version of DbS, Decision by Belief Sampling (DbBS), and conducted behavioral experiment about decision making. In this experiment, we set different decision contexts that would be expected to produce different probabilistic beliefs on uncertain events, and examined how such difference would affect decision making. Results showed that decisions were significantly affected by the difference in contexts, and DbBS well explained such effects.