The aversive value of pain in human decision-making

Mapping Intimacies ◽

10.1101/2021.02.19.431988 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Hocine Slimani ◽

Pierre Rainville ◽

Mathieu Roy

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Pain Intensity ◽

Profit Maximization ◽

Harm Avoidance ◽

Monetary Rewards ◽

Electric Shocks ◽

Human Decision ◽

Pain Detection ◽

Local Range

AbstractAccording to basic utilitarian principles, people should try to maximize rewards and minimize pain. Here, participants were put in a situation where monetary rewards were paired to electric shocks spanning between pain detection and tolerance thresholds. Monetary offers ranged linearly from $0 to $5 or $10 in Group1 and 2, respectively, and exponentially from $0 to $5 in Group3. The value of pain increased quadratically as a function of the anticipated pain intensity. While increasing the range of monetary offers increased the price requested to accept pain, skewing the distribution of rewards encouraged profit maximization. Participants scoring higher on harm avoidance and lower on persistence scales requested more money to accept pain. Accepting highly painful offers slowed decisions regardless of the value of the concurrent reward. Altogether, pain-related decisions are highly relative to the local range of available rewards and may be under the control of more automatic avoidance mechanisms.

Download Full-text

Harm to self outweighs benefit to others in moral decision making

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ◽

10.1073/pnas.1706693114 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 114 (30) ◽

pp. 7963-7968 ◽

Cited By ~ 14

Author(s):

Lukas J. Volz ◽

B. Locke Welborn ◽

Matthias S. Gobel ◽

Michael S. Gazzaniga ◽

Scott T. Grafton

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Economic Theory ◽

Social Interactions ◽

Moral Principle ◽

Moral Decision ◽

Moral Decision Making ◽

Moral Foundation ◽

Trade Off ◽

Monetary Rewards ◽

Electric Shocks

How we make decisions that have direct consequences for ourselves and others forms the moral foundation of our society. Whereas economic theory contends that humans aim at maximizing their own gains, recent seminal psychological work suggests that our behavior is instead hyperaltruistic: We are more willing to sacrifice gains to spare others from harm than to spare ourselves from harm. To investigate how such egoistic and hyperaltruistic tendencies influence moral decision making, we investigated trade-off decisions combining monetary rewards and painful electric shocks, administered to the participants themselves or an anonymous other. Whereas we replicated the notion of hyperaltruism (i.e., the willingness to forego reward to spare others from harm), we observed strongly egoistic tendencies in participants’ unwillingness to harm themselves for others’ benefit. The moral principle guiding intersubject trade-off decision making observed in our study is best described as egoistically biased altruism, with important implications for our understanding of economic and social interactions in our society.

Download Full-text

Evaluating Human Decision-Making Theories With Monkey Data

PsycEXTRA Dataset ◽

10.1037/e633262013-157 ◽

2013 ◽

Author(s):

Scott D. Brown ◽

Pete Cassey ◽

Andrew Heathcote ◽

Roger Ratcliff

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Human Decision

Download Full-text

Evidence Supporting Theory of Shannon Capacity in Human Decision-Making

PsycEXTRA Dataset ◽

10.1037/e633262013-272 ◽

2013 ◽

Author(s):

Laurence T. Maloney ◽

James Tee ◽

Hang Zhang

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Shannon Capacity ◽

Human Decision

Download Full-text

History among the Junipers: Hosea 14:2–10 as Metahistoriography

Biblische Zeitschrift ◽

10.30965/25890468-06301006 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 63 (1) ◽

pp. 105-116

Author(s):

Mark W. Hamilton

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Moral Formation ◽

Divine Agency ◽

Human Decision

Abstract The dual endings of Hosea promoted reflection on Israel’s history as the movement from destruction to restoration based on Yhwh’s gracious decision for Israel. It thus clarifies the endings of the prior sections of the book (chs. 3 and 11) by locating Israel’s future in the realm of Yhwh’s activities. The final ending (14:10) balances the theme of divine agency in 14:2–9 with the recognition of human decision-making and moral formation as aspects of history as well. The endings of Hosea thus offer a good example of metahistoriography, a text that uses non-historiographic techniques to speak of the movements of history.

Download Full-text