The risk elicitation puzzle

Abstract

Social and cultural historians have long used legal records to shed light on those otherwise lost to the historical record: the poor, the disenfranchised, youths, and women. This special issue seeks to interrogate what analytical value an explicit engagement with the emerging field of the "History of Emotions" can bring to explorations of law and emotions. In this Introduction, I suggest that working with a more methodologically reflexive understanding of emotions, and how they can be analyzed in concrete historical situations, can deepen our understanding-and complicate chronologies of change-regarding the interrelationship between law and emotions. We need to understand emotions not just as inchoate feelings but as bodily practices that are culturally and historically situated. Moreover, in order to historicize emotions, we also need to historicize the psychological, physical, and material context in which a person experiences her emotions: that is, we need historically contingent notions of the self, body, and the material performance of corporeality. Sabine Gruebler killed her husband and his brother's son with an axe in the night between 26 and 27 March in 1774 in the Electorate of Saxony. She did this "out of love" because "we all have to die" in the end. 1 What followed in this lengthy trial was a heated discussion of Sabine Gruebler's state of mind: was she an unstable woman suffering from melancholy, or was she a coldblooded murderess? Gruebler justified her actions through her-admittedly idiosyncratic-notion of love. Her interrogators as well as expert witnesses called upon from the medical and legal faculties sought to establish whether her rational faculties were impaired and, thus, whether she deserved a mitigated sentence. Gruebler's state of mind, her gender and body, and her emotions were all investigated and assessed in deciding her fate. The presiding magistrates as well as the assembled witnesses presented a variety of emotional reactions-from shock to incredulousness, revulsion to pity. The twenty-firstcentury reader of the trial cannot help but also react emotionally to the events described; yet it is clear that the way that Gruebler's emotions and ultimately her actions were judged was inextricably intertwined with historically specific notions of these categories.

Mapping risk perceptions in dynamic risk‐taking environments

“…Adjusted Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) score as a function of the size at which the balloon exploded in Trial 1 (i.e., the first experienced explosion point; data from the Basel‐Berlin Risk Study; Frey et al, ; Pedroni et al, ). This analysis only includes participants who actually experienced an explosion in the first trial (i.e., 765 of all 1,507 participants).…”

Risk Preference: A View from Psychology

“…One interesting avenue toward a toolbox and taxonomy of risk preference measures is theory-driven task construction and decomposition using computational or neural methods that can disentangle risk preference from cognitive demands or other individual characteristics (Wallsten, Pleskac, and Lejuez 2005;Helfinstein et al 2014). However, we suspect that computational and neural methods offer no panacea for the lack of temporal stability and convergent validity of the currently available behavioral measures Pedroni et al 2017).…”

“…Moreover, the correlations among the nine different behavioral measures were substantially weaker (r = 0.08) than those among the 29 self-report measures (r = 0.20), even though the latter intentionally capture risk preference in diverse domains, such as financial, health, recreational, and social. The correlations between behavioral measures were not increased when parameters from specific decision models, such as expected utility theory or cumulative prospect theory, were used to describe individual's choices (Pedroni, Frey, Bruhin, Dutilh, Hertwig, and Rieskamp 2017). We also conducted a psychometric analysis using a bifactor model that directly accounts for shared variance across all measures with a single factor, leaving any residual variance to be captured by yet other specific, orthogonal factors.…”

Dopaminergic Drug Effects on Probability Weighting during Risky Decision Making

“…This might have limited our ability to replicate our previous result on the elevation of probability weighting (Ligneul et al, 2013) and more generally our ability to uncover true differences between groups or drug conditions. Furthermore, individual risk preferences have been shown to vary substantially across tasks, a phenomenon known as the “risk elicitation puzzle,” partly attributable to inconsistent decision strategies across tasks (Pedroni et al, 2017). This observation warrants some caution regarding the generalizability of the present findings, which could in part be driven by the specific demands of the task that we used.…”