G Loewenstein
Biographic Data
| ID | 23876 |
|---|---|
| NAME | G Loewenstein |
| GIVEN NAMES | G |
| FAMILY NAME | Loewenstein |
| SIGNATURE | LOEWENSTEIN G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Carnegie Mellon University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2790-0474 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 100 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1390 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 100 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
The misery of misbelief
Belief homophily—the tendency to associate with others who hold similar beliefs and the distaste for different beliefs—is often seen as a major cause for belief‐based social segregation and polarization. We question, however, whether social scientists have been correct in identifying belief‐homophily as the primary force driving these pernicious social effects. We argue that when people face others who hold beliefs different from their own, they …
Phishing feedback
Phishing emails cost companies millions. In the absence of technology to perfectly block phishing emails, the responsibility falls on employees to identify and appropriately respond to phishing attempts and on employers to train them to do so. We report results from an experiment with around 11,000 employees of a large U.S. corporation, testing the efficacy of just-in-time feedback delivered at a teachable moment – immediately after succumbing to…
An s-frame agenda for behavioral public policy research
We have previously argued thatbehavioral scientists have been testing and advocating individualistic (i-frame) solutions to policy problems that have systemic (s-frame) causes and require systemic solutions. Here, we consider the implications of adopting an s-frame approach for research. We argue that an s-frame approach will involve addressing different types of questions, which will, in turn, require a different toolbox of research methods
Using curiosity to counter health information avoidance
Curiosity prompts provide an effective and simple way to increase engagement with aversive health information
The i-frame and the s-frame
An influential line of thinking in behavioral science, to which the two authors have long subscribed, is that many of society's most pressing problems can be addressed cheaply and effectively at the level of the individual, without modifying the system in which the individual operates. We now believe this was a mistake, along with, we suspect, many colleagues in both the academic and policy communities. Results from such interventions have been d…
He said, she said
Research on gender differences in (self-)disclosure has produced mixed results, and, where differences have emerged, they may be an artifact of the measures employed. The present paper explores whether gender – defined as self-identified membership in one's sociocultural group – can indeed account for differences in the desire and propensity to divulge information to others. We additionally identify a possible moderator for such differences. In t…
What Does Deliberate Ignorance Reveal to Us About Human Psychology
Deliberate Ignorance is unlikely to be the next book you notice arrayed on custom-made cardboard display racks at the airport, but it arrives at an opportune time. The current challenges of fake news, echo chambers, and conspiracy theories make it particularly urgent to understand the complex ways people interact with information. And if not in airport displays, this provocative set of chapters collected into one volume merits a place on the shel…
The rhetoric of reaction, extended
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Fear and promise of the unknown
Many situations involving exploration, such as businesses expanding into new products or locations, expose the explorer to the potential for subjective losses. How does the potential to experience losses during the course of a search affect individuals' appetite for exploration? In three incentivized studies, we manipulate search outcomes by presenting participants either with a gain‐only environment or a gain‐loss environment. The two environmen…
The rise of affectivism
Encouraging pro-environmental behaviour through green identity labelling
The renaissance of belief-based utility in economics
Information Avoidance
We commonly think of information as a means to an end. However, a growing theoretical and experimental literature suggests that information may directly enter the agent's utility function. This can create an incentive to avoid information, even when it is useful, free, and independent of strategic considerations. We review research documenting the occurrence of information avoidance, as well as theoretical and empirical research on reasons why pe…
Putting nudges in perspective
Conventional economic policy focuses on ‘economic’ solutions (e.g. taxes, incentives, regulation) to problems caused by market-level factors such as externalities, misaligned incentives and information asymmetries. By contrast, ‘nudges’ provide behavioural solutions to problems that have generally been assumed to originate from limitations in human decision making, such as present bias. While policy-makers have good reason for exploiting the powe…
Bored in the USA
We report new evidence on the emotional, demographic, and situational correlates of boredom from a rich experience sample capturing 1.1 million emotional and time-use reports from 3,867 U.S. adults. Subjects report boredom in 2.8% of the 30-min sampling periods, and 63% of participants report experiencing boredom at least once across the 10-day sampling period. We find that boredom is more likely to co-occur with negative, rather than positive, e…
The Preference for Belief Consonance
We consider the determinants and consequences of a source of utility that has received limited attention from economists: people's desire for the beliefs of other people to align with their own. We relate this 'preference for belief consonance' to a variety of other constructs that have been explored by economists, including identity, ideology, homophily, and fellow-feeling. We review different possible explanations for why people care about othe…
Privacy and human behavior in the age of information
This Review summarizes and draws connections between diverse streams of empirical research on privacy behavior. We use three themes to connect insights from social and behavioral sciences: people’s uncertainty about the consequences of privacy-related behaviors and their own preferences over those consequences; the context-dependence of people’s concern, or lack thereof, about privacy; and the degree to which privacy concerns are malleable—manipu…
The under-appreciated drive for sense-making
This paper draws attention to a powerful human motive that has not yet been incorporated into economics: the desire to make sense of our immediate experience, our life, and our world. We propose that evolution has produced a 'drive for sense-making' which motivates people to gather, attend to, and process information in a fashion that augments, and complements, autonomous sense-making. A large fraction of autonomous cognitive processes are devote…
What Is Privacy Worth
Understanding the value that individuals assign to the protection of their personal data is of great importance for business, law, and public policy. We use a field experiment informed by behavioral economics and decision research to investigate individual privacy valuations and find evidence of endowment and order effects. Individuals assigned markedly different values to the privacy of their data depending on (1) whether they were asked to cons…
Supplementing Menu Labeling With Calorie Recommendations to Test for Facilitation Effects
Objectives. We examined the effect on food purchases of adding recommended calorie intake per day or per meal to the mandated calorie information posted on chain restaurant menus. Methods. Before and after New York City implemented calorie posting on chain restaurant menus in 2008, we provided daily, per-meal, or no calorie recommendations to randomized subsets of adult lunchtime customers (n = 1121) entering 2 McDonald’s restaurants, in Manhatta…
Goal gradient in helping behavior
Slow Down! Insensitivity to Rate of Consumption Leads to Avoidable Satiation
Consumers often choose how quickly to consume things they enjoy. The research presented here demonstrates that they tend to consume too rapidly, growing tired of initially well-liked stimuli such as a favorite snack (experiments 1 and 4) or an enjoyable video game (experiments 2 and 3) more quickly than they would if they slowed consumption. The results also demonstrate that such overly rapid consumption results from a failure to appreciate that …
Measuring the Prevalence of Questionable Research Practices With Incentives for Truth Telling
Cases of clear scientific misconduct have received significant media attention recently, but less flagrantly questionable research practices may be more prevalent and, ultimately, more damaging to the academic enterprise. Using an anonymous elicitation format supplemented by incentives for honest reporting, we surveyed over 2,000 psychologists about their involvement in questionable research practices. The impact of truth-telling incentives on se…
More Affected = More Neglected
Professionals often give advice to many anonymous people. For example, financial analysts give public recommendations to trade stock, and medical experts formulate clinical guidelines that affect many patients. Normatively, awareness of the advice-recipient’s identity should not influence the quality of advice, and when advice affects a larger number of people, if anything, greater care should be taken to ensure its accuracy. Yet, contrary to thi…
Misplaced Confidences
We test the hypothesis that increasing individuals’ perceived control over the release and access of private information—even information that allows them to be personally identified––will increase their willingness to disclose sensitive information. If their willingness to divulge increases sufficiently, such an increase in control can, paradoxically, end up leaving them more vulnerable. Our findings highlight how, if people respond in a suffici…
Risk as feelings
Virtually all current theories of choice under risk or uncertainty are cognitive and consequentialist. They assume that people assess the desirability and likelihood of possible outcomes of choice alternatives and integrate this information through some type of expectation-based calculus to arrive at a decision. The authors propose an alternative theoretical perspective, the risk-as-feelings hypothesis, that highlights the role of affect experien…
Time-inconsistent Preferences and Consumer Self-Control
Why do consumers sometimes act against their own better judgment, engaging in behavior that is often regretted after the fact and that would have been rejected with adequate forethought? More generally, how do consumers attempt to maintain self-control in the face of time-inconsistent preferences? This article addresses consumer impatience by developing a decision-theoretic model based on reference points. The model explains how and why consumers…
Anticipation and the Valuation of Delayed Consumption
This paper presents a model of intertemporal choice that incorporates and dread-i.e., utility from anticipat ion of delayed consumption. The model explains why an individual with positive time preference may delay desirable outcomes or get unpleas ant outcomes over with quickly, contrary to the prediction of convent ional formulations of intertemporal choice. Implications of savoring and dread for savings behavior, empirical estimation of discoun…
Social utility and decision making in interpersonal contexts
Three studies examined preferences for outcomes to self and a codisputant. Studies I and 2 estimated social utility functions from judgments of with alternative outcomes. Comparing functional forms, we found that a utility function, including terms for own payoff and for positive and negative discrepancies between the parties' payoffs (advantageous and disadvantageous inequality), provides a close fit to the data. The typical utility function is …
Explaining Bargaining Impasse
The authors review studies conducted by themselves and coauthors that document a 'self-serving' bias in judgments of fairness and demonstrate that the bias is an important cause of impasse in negotiations. They discuss experimental evidence showing that (1) the bias causes impasse; (2) it is possible to reduce impasses by debiasing bargainers; and (3) the bias results from selective evaluation of information. The authors also review results from …
The heat of the moment
Despite the social importance of decisions taken in the “heat of the moment,” very little research has examined the effect of sexual arousal on judgment and decision making. Here we examine the effect of sexual arousal, induced by self‐stimulation, on judgments and hypothetical decisions made by male college students. Students were assigned to be in either a state of sexual arousal or a neutral state and were asked to: (1) indicate how appealing …
The Curse of Knowledge in Economic Settings
In economic analyses of asymmetric information, better-informed agents are assumed capable of reproducing the judgments of less-informed agents. The authors discuss a systematic violation of this assumption that they call the "curse of knowledge." Better-informed agents are unable to ignore private information even when it is in their interest to do so; more information is not always better. Comparing judgments made in individual-level and market…
Anomalies
We examine a number of situations in which people do not appear to discount money flows at the market rate of interest or any other single discount rate. Discount rates observed in both laboratory and field decision-making environments are shown to depend on the magnitude and sign of what is being discounted, on the time delay, on whether the choice is cast in terms of speed-up or delay, on the way in which a choice is framed, and on whether futu…
The Effect of Ownership History on the Valuation of Objects
Previous work on the endowment effect has demonstrated that current ownership status affects object valuation and that this effect occurs instantaneously on possession of an object. The current work presents findings from four studies which indicate that the history of past ownership can also affect object valuation. For objects currently in one's possession, we find that valuation increases with duration of ownership. For objects not in one's po…
Experimental Economics From the Vantage‐point of Behavioural Economics
Journal Article Experimental Economics From the Vantage‐point of Behavioural Economics Get access George Loewenstein George Loewenstein Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 109, Issue 453, 1 February 1999, Pages 25–34, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0297.00400 Published: 25 December 2001
A Bias in the Prediction of Tastes
Recent research has documented an `endowment effect' whereby people become more attached to objects they receive than would be predicted from their prior desire to possess the object. In two experiments, we test whether people are aware of the effect--whether they realise that they will become attached to an object once they receive it. In both experiments, subjects without an object underestimated how much they would value the object when they r…
Egocentric empathy gaps between owners and buyers
In 5 studies, the authors examined people's perceptions of the endowment effect, or the tendency to value an object more once one owns it. In the 1st 2 studies, the authors documented egocentric empathy gaps between owners and buyers regarding the endowment effect: Both owners and buyers overestimated the similarity between their own valuation of a commodity and the valuation of people in the other role. The next 2 studies showed that these empat…
The devil you know
Prior research has confirmed Thomas Schelling's observation that people are more sympathetic and hence generous toward specific identified victims than toward “statistical” victims who are yet to be identified. In the study presented in this article we demonstrate an equivalent effect for punitiveness. We find that people are more punitive toward identified wrongdoers than toward equivalent, but unidentified, wrongdoers, even when identifying the…
Utility maximization and melioration
How do people go about choosing between alternatives in relatively simple settings? This study explores some of the variables that past work suggests may be relevant. Volunteer subjects worked for money in six procedures in which the probability of a payment from either of two alternatives was 1.0, but the rate of pay (i.e. the speed with which a payment was delivered or the size of the payment) interacted with the subjects recent allocation of c…
Subjective relative income and lottery ticket purchases
Despite a return of only $.53 on the dollar, state lotteries are extremely popular, especially among the poor, who play the most but can least afford to play. In two experiments conducted with low‐income participants, we examine how implicit comparisons with other income classes increase low‐income individuals' desire to play the lottery. In Experiment 1, participants were more likely to purchase lottery tickets when they were primed to perceive …
Putting nudges in perspective
Conventional economic policy focuses on ‘economic’ solutions (e.g. taxes, incentives, regulation) to problems caused by market-level factors such as externalities, misaligned incentives and information asymmetries. By contrast, ‘nudges’ provide behavioural solutions to problems that have generally been assumed to originate from limitations in human decision making, such as present bias. While policy-makers have good reason for exploiting the powe…
The under-appreciated drive for sense-making
This paper draws attention to a powerful human motive that has not yet been incorporated into economics: the desire to make sense of our immediate experience, our life, and our world. We propose that evolution has produced a 'drive for sense-making' which motivates people to gather, attend to, and process information in a fashion that augments, and complements, autonomous sense-making. A large fraction of autonomous cognitive processes are devote…
Self-Interest, Automaticity, and the Psychology of Conflict of Interest
Mispredicting distress following romantic breakup
Source dependence in the valuation of objects
We ran two experiments to test whether people value objects more highly when they obtain those objects due to exemplary performance at a task. In the first, subjects who believed they had obtained a prize due to their performance on a classroom exercise valued it more highly than those who believed they had obtained it by chance. In the second, subjects who obtained a prize due to exemplary performance on a task valued it more highly than those w…
Distributing scarce livers
The transplant system has been criticized for not paying enough attention to efficiency in distributing scarce organs. But little research has been done to see how the general public views tradeoffs between efficiency and equity. We surveyed members of the general public to see how they would distribute organs among patients with varying chances of benefiting from them. In addition, we asked subjects to explain their decisions and to tell us abou…
Slow Down! Insensitivity to Rate of Consumption Leads to Avoidable Satiation
Consumers often choose how quickly to consume things they enjoy. The research presented here demonstrates that they tend to consume too rapidly, growing tired of initially well-liked stimuli such as a favorite snack (experiments 1 and 4) or an enjoyable video game (experiments 2 and 3) more quickly than they would if they slowed consumption. The results also demonstrate that such overly rapid consumption results from a failure to appreciate that …
Mistake
Based on contrast effects studies from psychology, we predicted that movers arriving from more expensive cities would rent pricier apartments than those arriving from cheaper cities. We also predicted that as people stayed in their new city they would get used to the new prices and would readjust their housing expenditures countering the initial impact of previous prices. We found support for both predictions in a sample of 928 movers from the PS…
Adam Smith, Behavioral Economist
Adam Smith's psychological perspective in The Theory of Moral Sentiments is remarkably similar to "dual-process" frameworks advanced by psychologists, neuroscientists, and more recently by behavioral economists, based on behavioral data and detailed observations of brain functioning. It also anticipates a wide range of insights regarding phenomena such as loss aversion, willpower, and fairness that have been the focus of modern behavioral economi…
The role of decision analysis in informed consent
An important goal of informed consent is to present information to patients so that they can decide which medical option is best for them, according to their values. Research in cognitive psychology has shown that people are rapidly overwhelmed by having to consider more than a few options in making choices. Decision analysis provides a quantifiable way to assess patients' values, and it eliminates the burden of integrating these values with prob…
Anticipation and the Valuation of Delayed Consumption
This paper presents a model of intertemporal choice that incorporates and dread-i.e., utility from anticipat ion of delayed consumption. The model explains why an individual with positive time preference may delay desirable outcomes or get unpleas ant outcomes over with quickly, contrary to the prediction of convent ional formulations of intertemporal choice. Implications of savoring and dread for savings behavior, empirical estimation of discoun…
Frames of Mind in Intertemporal Choice
Recent research has demonstrated that choices between gambles are systematically influenced by the way they are expressed. Kahneman and Tversky's Prospect Theory (Kahneman, D., A. Tversky. 1979. Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica 47(2) 363–391.) explains many of these “framing” effects as shifts in the point of reference from which prospects are evaluated. This paper demonstrates the applicability of the reference p…
The Curse of Knowledge in Economic Settings
In economic analyses of asymmetric information, better-informed agents are assumed capable of reproducing the judgments of less-informed agents. The authors discuss a systematic violation of this assumption that they call the "curse of knowledge." Better-informed agents are unable to ignore private information even when it is in their interest to do so; more information is not always better. Comparing judgments made in individual-level and market…
Social utility and decision making in interpersonal contexts
Three studies examined preferences for outcomes to self and a codisputant. Studies I and 2 estimated social utility functions from judgments of with alternative outcomes. Comparing functional forms, we found that a utility function, including terms for own payoff and for positive and negative discrepancies between the parties' payoffs (advantageous and disadvantageous inequality), provides a close fit to the data. The typical utility function is …
Anomalies
We examine a number of situations in which people do not appear to discount money flows at the market rate of interest or any other single discount rate. Discount rates observed in both laboratory and field decision-making environments are shown to depend on the magnitude and sign of what is being discounted, on the time delay, on whether the choice is cast in terms of speed-up or delay, on the way in which a choice is framed, and on whether futu…
Time-inconsistent Preferences and Consumer Self-Control
Why do consumers sometimes act against their own better judgment, engaging in behavior that is often regretted after the fact and that would have been rejected with adequate forethought? More generally, how do consumers attempt to maintain self-control in the face of time-inconsistent preferences? This article addresses consumer impatience by developing a decision-theoretic model based on reference points. The model explains how and why consumers…
Anomalies in Intertemporal Choice
Research on decision making under uncertainly has been strongly influenced by the documentation of numerous expected utility (EU) anomalies—behaviors that violate the expected utility axioms. The relative lack of progress on the closely related topic of intertemporal choice is partly due to the absence of an analogous set of discounted utility (DU) anomalies. We enumerate a set of DU anomalies analogous to the EU anomalies and propose a model tha…
Preferences for sequences of outcomes.
Existing models of intertemporal choice normally assume that people are impatient, preferring valuable outcomes sooner rather than later, and that preferences satisfy the formal condition of independence, or separability, which states that the value of a sequence of outcomes equals the sum of the values of its component parts.The authors present empirical results that show both of these assumptions to be false when choices are framed as being bet…
Utility maximization and melioration
How do people go about choosing between alternatives in relatively simple settings? This study explores some of the variables that past work suggests may be relevant. Volunteer subjects worked for money in six procedures in which the probability of a payment from either of two alternatives was 1.0, but the rate of pay (i.e. the speed with which a payment was delivered or the size of the payment) interacted with the subjects recent allocation of c…
The psychology of curiosity
The psychology of curiosity
Research on curiosity has undergone 2 waves of intense activity. The 1st, in the 1960s, focused mainly on curiosity's psychological underpinnings. The 2nd, in the 1970s and 1980s, was characterized by attempts to measure curiosity and assess its dimensionality. This article reviews these contributions with a concentration on the 1st wave. It is argued that theoretical accounts of curiosity proposed during the 1st period fell short in 2 areas: The…
Source dependence in the valuation of objects
We ran two experiments to test whether people value objects more highly when they obtain those objects due to exemplary performance at a task. In the first, subjects who believed they had obtained a prize due to their performance on a classroom exercise valued it more highly than those who believed they had obtained it by chance. In the second, subjects who obtained a prize due to exemplary performance on a task valued it more highly than those w…
Smoking
This is a book on smoking that uses rigorous empirical data to explore in detail the character of the tradeoffs that people make in choosing whether to smoke or not to smoke. It is, therefore, not strictly about the hazards of smoking but about how people's perceptions of the risk of smoking affects their smoking behaviour. Some of the interesting and potentially controversial conclusions include: 1) People overestimate the risk of lung cancer co…
A Bias in the Prediction of Tastes
Recent research has documented an `endowment effect' whereby people become more attached to objects they receive than would be predicted from their prior desire to possess the object. In two experiments, we test whether people are aware of the effect--whether they realise that they will become attached to an object once they receive it. In both experiments, subjects without an object underestimated how much they would value the object when they r…
Out of Control
Distributing scarce livers
The transplant system has been criticized for not paying enough attention to efficiency in distributing scarce organs. But little research has been done to see how the general public views tradeoffs between efficiency and equity. We surveyed members of the general public to see how they would distribute organs among patients with varying chances of benefiting from them. In addition, we asked subjects to explain their decisions and to tell us abou…
Explaining the Identifiable Victim Effect
Labor Supply of New York City Cabdrivers
Life-cycle models of labor supply predict a positive relationship between hours supplied and transitory changes in wages. We tested this prediction using three samples of wages and hours of New York City cabdrivers, whose wages are correlated within days but uncorrelated between days. Estimated wage elasticities are significantly negative in two out of three samples. Elasticities of inexperienced drivers average approximately −1 and are less than…
Creating Convergence
Previous experimental research has found that self-Serving biases are a major cause of negotiation impasses. In this study we show that a simple intervention can mitigate such biases and promote efficient settlement of disputes.
Creating Convergence
Previous experimental research has found that self-Serving biases are a major cause of negotiation impasses. In this study we show that a simple intervention can mitigate such biases and promote efficient settlement of disputes
Explaining Bargaining Impasse
The authors review studies conducted by themselves and coauthors that document a 'self-serving' bias in judgments of fairness and demonstrate that the bias is an important cause of impasse in negotiations. They discuss experimental evidence showing that (1) the bias causes impasse; (2) it is possible to reduce impasses by debiasing bargainers; and (3) the bias results from selective evaluation of information. The authors also review results from …
The role of decision analysis in informed consent
An important goal of informed consent is to present information to patients so that they can decide which medical option is best for them, according to their values. Research in cognitive psychology has shown that people are rapidly overwhelmed by having to consider more than a few options in making choices. Decision analysis provides a quantifiable way to assess patients' values, and it eliminates the burden of integrating these values with prob…
The Effect of Ownership History on the Valuation of Objects
Previous work on the endowment effect has demonstrated that current ownership status affects object valuation and that this effect occurs instantaneously on possession of an object. The current work presents findings from four studies which indicate that the history of past ownership can also affect object valuation. For objects currently in one's possession, we find that valuation increases with duration of ownership. For objects not in one's po…
Choice Bracketing
Preference reversals between joint and separate evaluations of options
Arguably, all judgments and decisions are made in 1 (or some combination) of 2 basic evaluation modes-joint evaluation mode (JE), in which multiple options are presented simultaneously and evaluated comparatively, or separate evaluation mode (SE), in which options are presented in isolation and evaluated separately. This article reviews recent literature showing that people evaluated options differently and exhibit reversals of preferences for op…
Psychology (70 works) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics (47 works) · Economics (47 works) · Social Psychology (43 works) · Computer Science (40 works) · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies (29 works) · Microeconomics (29 works) · Cognitive psychology (23 works) · Social Psychology (21 works) · Political science (20 works)