The role of actively open-minded thinking in information acquisition, accuracy, and calibration
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2013, Vol 8, Issue 3
Abstract
Errors in estimating and forecasting often result from the failure to collect and consider enough relevant information. We examine whether attributes associated with persistence in information acquisition can predict performance in an estimation task. We focus on actively open-minded thinking (AOT), need for cognition, grit, and the tendency to maximize or satisfice when making decisions. In three studies, participants made estimates and predictions of uncertain quantities, with varying levels of control over the amount of information they could collect before estimating. Only AOT predicted performance. This relationship was mediated by information acquisition: AOT predicted the tendency to collect information, and information acquisition predicted performance. To the extent that available information is predictive of future outcomes, actively open-minded thinkers are more likely than others to make accurate forecasts.
Authors and Affiliations
Uriel Haran, Ilana Ritov and Barbara A. Mellers
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678053
- DOI -
- Views 123
- Downloads 0
Short-sighted greed? Focusing on the future promotes reputation-based generosity
Long-term thinking and voluntary resource sharing are two distinctive traits of human nature. Across three experiments (N=1,082), I propose a causal connection: Sometimes people are generous because they think about the...
Investor regret: The role of expectation in comparing what is to what might have been
Investors, like any decision maker, feel regret when they compare the outcome of an investment with what the outcome would have been had they invested differently. We argue and show that this counterfactual comparison pr...
Numeracy predicts preference consistency: Deliberative search heuristics increase choice consistency for choices from description and experience
Many people exhibit inconsistent preferences when they make choices based on descriptive summaries as compared to choices based on prior experiences. Theoretically, factors that promote more deliberative and skilled deci...
“Isn’t everyone like me?”: On the presence of self-similarity in strategic interactions
We propose that in strategic interactions a player is influenced by self-similarity. Self-similarity means that a player who chooses some action X tends to believe, to a greater extent than a player who chooses a differe...
Decisions by coin toss: Inappropriate but fair
In many situations of indeterminacy, where people agree that no decisive arguments favor one alternative to another, they are still strongly opposed to resolving the dilemma by a coin toss. The robustness of this judgmen...