This article is concerned with the implications of the surprisingly different experimental practices in economics and in areas of psychology relevant to both economists and psychologists, such as behavioral decision making. We consider four features of experimentation in economics, namely, script enactment, repeated trials, performance-based monetary payments, and the proscription against deception, and compare them to experimental practices in psychology, primarily in the area of behavioral decision making. Whereas economists bring a precisely defined ìscriptî to experiments for

An important research tradition in the cognitive psychology of reasoning--called the heuristics and biases approach--has firmly established that people’s responses often deviate from the performance considered normative on many reasoning tasks. For example, people assess probabilities incorrectly, they display confirmation bias, they test hypotheses inefficiently, they violate the axioms of utility theory, they do not properly calibrate degrees of belief, they overproject their own opinions onto others, they display illogical framing effects, they uneconomically honor sunk costs, they allow prior knowledge to become implicated in deductive reasoning, and they display numerous other information processing biases (for summaries of the large literature, see

Levin, Schneider and Gaeth (1998) identified three distinct types of framing effects in the literature: attribute-framing effects, goal-framing effects, risky choice-framing effects. While most previous framing studies used between-subjects manipulations of frame, the present study used two sessions, spaced one week apart, to give each of 102 participants both framing conditions and all three types of framing. Using the difference between the score for the positive framing condition and the negative framing condition as the unit of analysis for each type of framing effect, the following were found: 1) reliable framing effects for attribute framing and risky choice framing, but not for goal framing; 2) distributions of individual framing effects showing that the aggregate-level effects were representative of individuals even though some individuals showed no framing effects; 3) no significant interdependencies between the three categories of framing effects; 4) individual differences in reaction to the task scenarios related to various of the "Big Five " personality traits as well as the Faith in Intuition scale. The use of within-subject designs to assess individual differences in decision making phenomena such as framing effects and other biases and heuristics is recommended for future research.

smart people can be so stupid (pp. 124-158). New Haven, CT: Yale

Individual differences in reasoning:

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to X.T. Wang, Psychology Department,

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Abstract. Recommendation technologies support users in the identification of interesting products and services. Beside the wide-spread approaches of collaborative and content-based filtering, knowledge-based recommender technologies gain an increasing importance due to their capability of deriving recommendations for complex products such as financial services, technical equipment, or consumer goods. The identification of best-fitting products is in many cases a complex decision making task which forces users to fall back to different types of decision heuristics. This phenomenon is explained by the theory of bounded rationality of users which is due to their limited knowledge and computational capacity. Specifically in the context of recommender applications bounded rationality acts as a door opener for different types of persuasive concepts which can influence a user’s attitudes (e.g., in terms of product preferences) and behavior (e.g., in terms of buying behavior). The major goal of this paper is to provide an overview of such persuasive aspects and possible formalizations in knowledge-based recommender systems.