In fields spanning policy, medicine, and finance, it is increasingly common to guide individual interventions on measures of a person's decision-making characteristics. As the practical application of these measures grows, so have efforts to improve their robustness to ostensibly irrelevant contextual factors such as time of day or ephemeral motivational state. Here, we examine whether such instruments exhibit a fundamental context-dependence: namely, the order in which decision problems are presented. In three datasets evaluating decision-making under different forms of uncertainty, we find systematic, meaningful effects of trial order, which in many cases qualitatively change the measurement’s psychological interpretation (e.g. from risk-seeking to risk-averse). We further examine how trial properties modulate this phenomenon and provide an augmented modeling framework to reliably characterize and correct for these effects.

We examine the prevalence and extent of variability across measurements of supposedly stable behavioral economic traits. We begin by reviewing how these traits are conceptualized in behavioral economics, and how different instruments for eliciting them lead to variability in their measurements. We then consider factors such as experiment structure, affect, and context, known to influence or correlate in some way with the inferred values of these constructs: from domain or “subject-level” influences to local influences. We introduce the idea that an important – and cognitively meaningful – source of potential variation in experimentally-inferred measures may come from temporal sequence or the influence of trial order. Finally, we discuss how some of these sources of variation may not be ultimately all be brought under experimental or analytical control, and propose that they should instead be exposed and considered for their predictive value in different settings.

Though perseveration and habit have always been understood as distinct phenomena, they have also been closely linked throughout the history of their scientific study. Seminal work, in particular in the study of lesions and neurological disorders, has described symptomatic errors of commission as being a form of one or the other (Sandson & Albert, 1984), sometimes with disagreement among researchers. More recently, researchers have explored the idea that the formal mathematical framework used to describe the learning and dynamics of habits may also, and perhaps more accurately, be used to understand the emergence and utility of perseverative responding (Gershman, 2020). An explicit lesson from this work is that claims to measure putative habitual behavior would do well to take into account the contribution of one or more types of perseveration. Thus, it makes sense to review the current state of understanding of perseveration, both to draw distinctions of difference with habits, where they are possible, and to outline areas of potential further research. This chapter briefly summarizes the classical conception of perseveration, including conceptual underpinnings and empirical research. We then examine how this conception has evolved via both empirical and theoretical advances. We summarize these findings into a taxonomy of types of perseverative behavior, and describe recent work arguing for an adaptive role of perseveration in multiple forms of cognition. We argue that perseveration is a complex set of constructs that have widespread influence on behavior, with important implications for the experimental measurement of habits and compulsive responding.