Abstract:The typical gambler loses money but continues to gamble nonetheless. Why? Research from orthodox and behavioral economics, psychology, sociology, and medicine has offered a wide range of possible explanations. This paper reviews these explanations. The evidence is organized according to the degree of rationality assumed and/or found in the studies. This approach allows research from highly distinctive fields to be integrated within a unified framework. Gambling patterns are so highly dispersed that no satisfyi… Show more
“…They could act in ways which are incompatible with the utilities themselves (like when we plan to exercise but fail to) or fail to update their utilities given new information (Edwards, 1954;Kalis, Mojzisch, Schweizer, & Kaiser, 2008;Stetzka & Winter, 2021;Wiggins, 1978). All of these possibilities can be accounted for under our framework, distinguishing it from revisionist accounts of theoretical rationality (like the idea of "resource rationality" proposed by Lieder & Griffiths, 2020).…”
Section: Theoretical Implications Of Distinguishing Motivated Reasoni...mentioning
People are motivated to maintain their beliefs, often leading them to ignore or reinterpret information to support what they think. What psychological mechanisms give rise to this phenomenon, and how can we distinguish the impact of motivation on people's beliefs from other less nefarious causes which may nonetheless produce similar behavior? Here, we introduce a computational modeling framework for distinguishing motivated reasoning and practical rationality -- rationality that concerns what acts one should take rather than what one should believe. We demonstrate how the framework works in a series of simulations and highlight its implications for measuring the impact of motivation on beliefs.
“…They could act in ways which are incompatible with the utilities themselves (like when we plan to exercise but fail to) or fail to update their utilities given new information (Edwards, 1954;Kalis, Mojzisch, Schweizer, & Kaiser, 2008;Stetzka & Winter, 2021;Wiggins, 1978). All of these possibilities can be accounted for under our framework, distinguishing it from revisionist accounts of theoretical rationality (like the idea of "resource rationality" proposed by Lieder & Griffiths, 2020).…”
Section: Theoretical Implications Of Distinguishing Motivated Reasoni...mentioning
People are motivated to maintain their beliefs, often leading them to ignore or reinterpret information to support what they think. What psychological mechanisms give rise to this phenomenon, and how can we distinguish the impact of motivation on people's beliefs from other less nefarious causes which may nonetheless produce similar behavior? Here, we introduce a computational modeling framework for distinguishing motivated reasoning and practical rationality -- rationality that concerns what acts one should take rather than what one should believe. We demonstrate how the framework works in a series of simulations and highlight its implications for measuring the impact of motivation on beliefs.
“…But some people do bet. This may be fuelled partly by the utility they get from placing a bet, perhaps in a way that increases their enjoyment of watching sporting events, as discussed in detail by Stezka and Winter (2023). But even then, there is the question of why they choose to bet on one team rather than the other.…”
Research on sports betting has generally found a favourite–longshot bias: bets on longshots lose more than bets on favourites. Existing research focuses largely on pari‐mutuel betting, but favourite–longshot bias is also evident in fixed‐odds online betting markets of the type that are growing rapidly around the world. Explanations for this bias in previous work on pari‐mutuel markets cannot explain why it would be a feature of competitive fixed‐odds betting markets. We show how disagreement among gamblers and risk aversion on the part of bookmakers in a competitive market can produce a pattern of favourite–longshot bias resembling the empirical evidence.
“…First, we'd expect that people might have utilities that they don't correctly join with information they believe, or utility functions which deviate from rational-actor models (Loewenstein & Molnar, 2018;Tversky & Kahneman, 1991). Second, people could fail to act in ways which are compatible with the utilities themselves (like when we plan to exercise but fail to), or fail to update their utilities when they are provided with new information (Edwards, 1954;Kalis, Mojzisch, Schweizer, & Kaiser, 2008;Stetzka & Winter, 2021;Wiggins, 1978). All of these possibilities distinguish the Bayesian decision framework from revisionist accounts of theoretical rationality, like the idea of resource rationality proposed by Lieder and colleagues (2020).…”
Section: Open Questionsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Instead, it is the product of perception of the environment at a particular time and context. And it is known that the perceived utility of some actions change as other states of the world change (e.g., see Holton, 1999;Meyer & Hundtofte, 2022;Portmore, 2013;Stetzka & Winter, 2021). One question then is whether an initially practically rational decision could lead to a stable credence at odds with the evidence.…”
Psychological, political, cultural, and sociological factors shape how people form and revise their beliefs. An established finding across these fields is that people are motivated to hold onto their beliefs even in the face of evidence by ignoring or reinterpreting information in a way that supports what they think. Although these and similar findings are compelling, the predominantly qualitative theories which guide research in this domain, and the often implicit definitions of motivation that accompany these theories, come at the cost of obscuring the cognitive mechanisms that produce motivated reasoning. Here, we introduce a new Bayesian decision-theoretic framework which describes three key factors necessary for distinguishing between cases of practically rational behavior and motivated reasoning. We demonstrate how the framework works in a series of simulations and argue that it provides guidance about what psychologists need to measure to determine where the errors in people's reasoning are occurring when they fail to revise their beliefs in light of new evidence. We then propose that this framework provides guidance for thinking about the development of interventions aimed at correcting misconceptions.
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