The Psychology of Preferences

Presents examples in which a decision, preference, or emotional reaction is controlled by factors that may appear irrelevant to the choice made. The difficulty people have in maintaining a comprehensive view of consequences and their susceptibility to the vagaries of framing illustrate impediments to rational decision making. However, experimental surveys indicate that such departures from objectivity tend to follow regular patterns that can be described mathematically. The descriptive study of preferences also challenges the theory of rational choice, as it is often unclear whether the effects of decision weights, reference points, framing, and regret should be considered as errors or biases or whether they should be accepted as valid elements of human experience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved) Language: en