General Evaluability Theory

Abstract

A central question in psychology and economics is the determination of whether individuals react differently to different values of a cared-about attribute (e.g., different income levels, different gas prices, and different ambient temperatures). Building on and significantly extending our earlier work on preference reversals between joint and separate evaluations, we propose a general evaluability theory (GET) that specifies when people are value sensitive and when people mispredict their own or others' value sensitivity. The GET can explain and unify many seemingly unrelated findings, ranging from duration neglect to affective forecasting errors and can generate many new research directions on topics ranging from temporal discounting to subjective well-being.Will people be more willing to take a vacation if the airfare is $200 rather than $300? Will people have a more painful memory of a surgery they underwent if the surgery lasted 2 hr rather than 1 hr? Will people work harder to earn $100 now or $120 a month from now? Will increasing the wealth of all improve the happiness of all?These questions tap a diverse array of topics, ranging from price and demand, through duration neglect and temporal discounting, to wealth and happiness. Yet they all concern the same fundamental issue: value sensitivity.The topic of value sensitivity is essential to both psychology and economics. Psychophysics (concerning how one reacts to sensory input), prospect theory (concerning how one values outcome and weighs probability), theory about price elasticity of demand (concerning how demand changes as price changes), and happiness research (concerning how happiness is related to income and other variables) are all about value sensitivity.This article presents an integrative theory about value sensitivity-namely, about when one's evaluation is responsive to variations in value and when it is not. Value is a level of an objective attribute one cares about, such as price, duration, probability, wealth, and so on, and evaluation is one's subjective reaction, including willingness to purchase, willingness to work, happiness, and so on. If a person is willing to pay as much for a 1-karat diamond as he would for a 0.5-karat diamond, we say that the person is insensitive to diamond size (value) in that range. The more he is willing to pay for the larger diamond relative to the smaller diamond, the more he is sensitive to diamond size.In what follows, we first introduce the theory, then show how it unifies many disparate findings in the existing literature, and finally suggest new research directions derived from the theory. The Theory OverviewOur theory, which we call the general evaluability theory (GET), seeks to address three broad questions: What factors determine value sensitivity? What is the relationship between these factors? Can people accurately predict value sensitivity? The GET starts from three basic propositions, each addressing one of the questions, and generates an array of specific hypotheses. The chart in Figure 1 offers ...

Options as information: Rational reversals of evaluation and preference.

“…Recently, Hsee and Zhang (2010) proposed GET, which refines and extends the evaluability hypothesis. Its core postulate is a general positive relationship between attribute evaluability and value sensitivity, where the latter is defined as the difference in valuation that results from a fixed objective increment on the attribute.…”

“…Rather, the hypothesis entails that the EI generally obtains, and this explains why JSRs sometimes occur. Recently, Hsee and Zhang (2010) introduced general evaluability theory (GET), which generalizes and extends the evaluability hypothesis and which we examine in the General Discussion. Importantly, GET also implies the EI.…”

Attitudes and Donation Behavior When Reading Positive and Negative Charity Appeals

“…This was tested in two studies, one using joint evaluation and one using separate evaluation of the two types of appeals (cf. Hsee & Zhang, 2010).…”

The Subjective Understanding of Guideline Recommendations and of the Risks of the Side Effects of Medication

“…What appears to us subjectively as a lot or a little, or as probable or improbable, depends in part on what standard for comparison is offered by the situation (11).…”