Hannah Seidler

Description:

In our daily life we make many decisions under uncertainty. People differ in their risk attitudes, some are more risk averse than others. Research has shown, that choices can be affected by the cognitive capacity available during task performance, so that people appear more risk averse (e.g.  Benjamin, Brown, & Shapiro, 2013; Deck & Jahedi, 2015). One explanation is, that cognitive load leads to qualitative changes in preferences. An alternative hypothesis states that cognitive load increases response noise and therefore reduces choice consistency (Olschewski, Rieskamp, & Scheibehenne, 2018).

In these studies, numeric manipulation tasks as well as gambles with numeric information were presented.  The goal of the study is to investigate the influence of cognitive load on risk preference, when choice options are presented graphically.

Level: Bachelor

Language: English or German

Skills required:

• Interest in the topic (risk preferences, decision making)
• Basic statistics skills (i.e. ttest, ANOVA in SPSS/R)

Goals:

The student will

• gain an insight in the field of decision making
• do a detailed literature search
• learn how to conduct an experimental study (planning, (programming), data collection, data analysis)
• learn how to write a thesis according to scientific standards

References:

Benjamin, D. J., Brown, S. A., & Shapiro, J. M. (2013). Who is ‘behavioral’? Cognitive ability and anomalous preferences. Journal of the European Economic Association, 11(6), 1231-1255.

Deck, C., & Jahedi, S. (2015). The effect of cognitive load on economic decision making: A survey and new experiments. European Economic Review, 78, 97-119.

Olschewski, S., Rieskamp, J., & Scheibehenne, B. (2018). Taxing cognitive capacities reduces choice consistency rather than preference: A model-based test. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(4), 462.