Books by Andrew M Colman
Two experiments examined a form of singleton bias deducible from lexicographic choice and Tversky... more Two experiments examined a form of singleton bias deducible from lexicographic choice and Tversky's theory of elimination by aspects. In Experiment 1, 100 decision makers who chose from a set of job applicants defined by equal numbers of equally important qualifications tended to ignore the singleton defined by possession of a relevant attribute but tended to rank-order the attributes as predicted by lexicographic choice theory and showed various forms of singleton bias. In Experiment 2, 100 decision makers who chose from sets of unspecified alternatives, universities, and houses/apartments defined by attributes that they had individually rated as equally important ignored the attribute-defined singleton in every alternative set but manifested a different singleton bias in favor of the middle option of the on-screen display.
Papers by Andrew M Colman
Psychology of Reasoning, 2004
Game theory is concerned with rational choice in decisions involving two or more interdependent d... more Game theory is concerned with rational choice in decisions involving two or more interdependent decision makers. Its range of applicability is broad, including all decisions in which an outcome depends on the actions of two or more decision makers, called players, each having two or more ways of acting, called strategies, and sufficiently well-defined preferences among the possible outcomes to enable numerical payoffs reflecting these preferences to be assigned. Decision theory has a certain logical primacy in psychology, because decision making drives all deliberate behaviour, and game theory is the portion of decision theory dealing with decisions involving strategic interdependence. This chapter focuses on reasoning in games, and in particular on theoretical problems of specifying and understanding the nature of rationality in strategic interaction. These problems are far from trivial, because even simple games present deep and mysterious dilemmas that are imperfectly understood and have not been solved convincingly. The notion of rationality underlying game theory is instrumental rationality, according to which rational agents choose the best means to achieve their most preferred outcomes. This means-end characterization of rational choice is conspicuously neutral regarding an agent's preferences or desires, a point that was stressed by the Scottish philosopher David Hume in a frequently quoted passage of his Treatise of Human Nature: 'Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.. .. A passion can never, in any sense, be call'd unreasonable, but when founded on a false supposition, or when it chuses means insufficient for the design'd end.' (1739-40, 2.III.iii). Hume conceded only that preferences based on 'false supposition' are unreasonable or irrational. Contemporary philosophers and game theorists take an even more permissive view, requiring only that preferences should be consistent. Although everyday language contains both internal reason statements (P has a reason for doing x) and external reason statements (There is a reason for P to do x), the philosopher Bernard Williams (1979) has shown that 'external reason statements, when definitely isolated as such, are false, or incoherent, or really something else misleadingly expressed' (p. 26). A person's reasons for acting in a particular way are invariably internal, hence an action is instrumentally rational, relative to the agent's knowledge and beliefs at the time of acting, if it is the best means to achieve the most preferred outcome, provided only that the knowledge and beliefs are not inconsistent or incoherent. Thus, if I am thirsty, and I come upon a jar of powder that I believe to be cocoa but is actually rat poison, I act rationally, relative to my knowledge and beliefs, if I dissolve the powder in hot milk and drink the infusion, even though my preference for doing so is based on a 'false supposition'. Instrumental rationality is formalized in expected utility theory, introduced as an axiomatic system by
The theory of games seems to me to provide the most promising alternative to the traditional theo... more The theory of games seems to me to provide the most promising alternative to the traditional theories of social behaviour. Gaming modelS are inherently social in character (an individual's strategy choice in a game cannot even be properly defined without reference to at least one other individual) and they represent a radical departure from the "social stimulus - individual response" approach. They sean, furthermore, to be the only models which can adequately conceptualize an important (and large) class of social behaviours which arise from deliberate free choice. (From preface
Retour page d'accueil Chercher, sur, Tous les supports. Retour page d'accueil, Plus de ... more Retour page d'accueil Chercher, sur, Tous les supports. Retour page d'accueil, Plus de 1.626.000 de titres à notre catalogue ! Notice. ...
Psychology Teaching Review
A 10-hour workshop-based course designed to teach communication skills to undergraduates is descr... more A 10-hour workshop-based course designed to teach communication skills to undergraduates is described and evaluated. In five two-hour sessions, the course covered technical aspects of written communication, oral presentations to small and medium-sized groups, interview skills, non-verbal communication, and skills associated with assessing the presentations of others and providing constructive feedback. Evidence from a course evaluation questionnaire and from observations of the students’ performance suggests that the course was reasonably successful in achieving its aims.
Psychology Press eBooks, 2017
Among all the thousands of strategic games that have been discovered and investigated since the e... more Among all the thousands of strategic games that have been discovered and investigated since the early development of game theory in the 1920s, especially after the publication of von Neumann and Morgenstern's (1944) landmark book, Games and Economic Behavior, the Centipede game stands out as perhaps the most perplexing and paradoxical of them all. It was introduced by Rosenthal (1981) as an incidental comment (pp. 96-97) in a discussion of an entirely different game (the Chain-store game). The Centipede game was first named in print by Binmore (1987) after the passing resemblance of its game tree to a multi-legged insect, as can be seen in Figure 1, where Rosenthal's original version of the game is depicted.
Psychological Inquiry, 2012
Social dilemmas do not need to be solved by social projection or any other special mechanism or t... more Social dilemmas do not need to be solved by social projection or any other special mechanism or theory, because they are fully and unambiguously solved by the standard game-theoretic concept of strategic dominance. The real problems lie in explaining why human decision makers do not invariably choose the dominant-strategy solutions that are mandated by game theory, but those problems require explanation of the decision making of human agents with bounded rationality rather than any new solution of social dilemmas. The most influential explanations for the empirical findings are reciprocity, inclusive fitness, other-regarding preferences, team reasoning (properly understood in a way that escapes the criticism of it made in the target article), and similarity, with or without the social projection hypothesis.
Royal Society Open Science, Aug 1, 2022
In this preregistered study, we attempted to replicate and substantially extend a frequently cite... more In this preregistered study, we attempted to replicate and substantially extend a frequently cited experiment by Schurr and Ritov, published in 2016, suggesting that winners of pairwise competitions are more likely than others to steal money in subsequent games of chance against different opponents, possibly because of an enhanced sense of entitlement among competition winners. A replication seemed desirable because of the relevance of the effect to dishonesty in everyday life, the apparent counterintuitivity of the effect, possible problems and anomalies in the original study, and above all the fact that the researchers investigated only one potential explanation for the effect. Our results failed to replicate Schurr and Ritov's basic finding: we found no evidence to support the hypotheses that either winning or losing is associated with subsequent cheating. A second online study also failed to replicate Schurr and Ritov's basic finding. We used structural equation modelling to test four possible explanations for cheating—sense of entitlement, self-confidence, feeling lucky and inequality aversion. Only inequality aversion turned out to be significantly associated with cheating.
MPRA Paper, 2007
The problem of ambiguity in games is discussed, and a class of ambiguous games is identified. A t... more The problem of ambiguity in games is discussed, and a class of ambiguous games is identified. A total of 195 participants played strategic-form games of various sizes with unidentified co-players. In each case, they first chose between a known-risk game involving a co-player indifferent between strategies and an equivalent ambiguous game involving one of several co-player types, each with a different dominant strategy, and then they chose a strategy for the preferred game. Half the players knew that the ambiguous co-player types were equally likely, and half did not. Half expected the outcomes to be known immediately, and half expected a week's delay. Known-risk games were generally preferred, confirming a significant strategic ambiguity aversion effect. In the delay conditions, players who knew that the ambiguous co-player types were equally likely were significantly less ambiguity averse than those who did not. Decision confidence was significantly higher in 2 Â 2 than in larger games. Games in which players cannot assign meaningful probabilities to their co-players' strategies present a major challenge to game theory and to rational choice theory in general. Ever since von Neumann and Morgenstern (1947) developed an axiomatic theory of expected utility (EU), and especially since Savage (1954/1972) presented his theory of subjective expected utility (SEU), game theory has rested on the fundamental assumption that a player can invariably assign probabilities to a co-player's strategies. These probabilities are normally interpreted as the player's beliefs about how the co-player is likely to act in the game. On this basis, the theory purports to provide a comprehensive theory of rational interactive decision making. But everyday
Data for: Far but finite horizons promote cooperation in the Centipede game. The file contains al... more Data for: Far but finite horizons promote cooperation in the Centipede game. The file contains all exit points in the four Conditions of the Centipede game, which were tested in the reported experiment.
Current opinion in psychology, Apr 1, 2022
Antibiotic prescribing can be conceptualised as a social dilemma in which the overuse of antibiot... more Antibiotic prescribing can be conceptualised as a social dilemma in which the overuse of antibiotics, to minimise immediate risks to individual patients, results in a sub-optimal outcome for society (antimicrobial resistance) and increased risks to all patients in the long run. Doctors face the challenge of balancing the interests of individual patients against the collective good when prescribing antibiotics. While evidence suggests that doctors tend to prioritise individual interests over those of the collective, the conventional interpretation of such decisions as selfish may be inappropriate because most doctors are motivated by prosocial concerns about their patients. This review of antibiotic decision research provides a more nuanced understanding of prosociality in the context of the social dilemma of antibiotic prescribing.
Journal of Economic Psychology, Jun 1, 2009
In two experiments, decision makers chose between risky and ambiguous gambles under conditions of... more In two experiments, decision makers chose between risky and ambiguous gambles under conditions of both single (unrepeated) and multiply repeated choices. The gambles were presented either as modified Ellsberg urn choices or as marketing strategy decisions. In both experiments, decision makers chose the ambiguous options more frequently in the repeated-choice than the single-choice conditions. More decision makers made risky single choices and ambiguous repeated choices than ambiguous single choices and risky repeated choices. Decision makers expressed more self-rated confidence in their repeated than their single ambiguous choices. These findings are interpreted in the light of findings on repeated decision making under risk and theories of loss aversion and ambiguity aversion.
Uploads
Books by Andrew M Colman
Papers by Andrew M Colman