Two studies examine the effect of the complexity of the choice environment on the perceived duration of the time spent choosing. The experiments demonstrate that the estimation of the time spent making a decision is affected by the number of options available in the choice set. In Experiment 1, participants having to choose 1 of 24 mobile phones tended to underestimate the time spent whereas participants confronted with the choice of 6 mobile phones tended to overestimate the actual time spent. Experiment 2 corroborates this finding, in the presence of varying degrees of attribute correlation. We conclude with theoretical and practical implications for marketers.
Two studies investigated cognitive mechanisms that may be associated with people's tendency to maximize. Maximizers are individuals who are spending a great amount of effort in order to find the very best option in a decision situation, rather than stopping the decision process when they encounter a satisfying option. These studies show that maximizers are more future oriented than other people, which may motivate them to invest the extra energy into optimal choices. Maximizers also have higher numerical skills, possibly facilitating the cognitive processes involved with decision trade-offs.
M. Cardaci's (2000) Mental Clock Model maintains that a task requiring a low mental workload is associated with an acceleration of perceived time, whereas a task requiring a high mental workload is associated with a deceleration. The authors examined the predictions of this model in a musical listening condition in which musical pieces were audible in several structural complexities. To measure the effects of musical complexity on time estimation, the authors used retrospective and prospective time-estimation paradigms. For the retrospective paradigm, the authors invited participants to listen to a musical piece and then estimate its duration. For the prospective paradigm, the authors invited participants to stop the musical reproduction after a certain interval of time. Results show that the variations of musical complexity yielded the empirical effects that the Mental Clock Model predicted for both paradigms.
The question of whether humans are able to work in a Bayesian way is currently a topic of substantial investigation. An important finding, reported by Gigerenzer and Hoffrage in 1995 is that Bayesian reasoning is facilitated when the information format corresponds to natural frequencies. The present concern was whether the facilitating effect of frequencies persists when natural frequencies relate to samples which are not convenient multiples of 10. 150 undergraduates participated as volunteers (42 men, 108 women; M age = 23 yr.). Analysis showed the effect of natural frequency formats was not dependent on size of reference class. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
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