Journal
PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN
Volume 47, Issue 8, Pages 1309-1324Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1177/0146167220969051
Keywords
probability weighting bias; social distance; emotional intensity; probability neglect; judgment and decision-making
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Funding
- Natural Science Foundation of China [71801193, 71771088, 71942004]
- National Social Science Foundation of China [15ZDB121]
- Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China [LY20C090011]
- Humanity and Social Science foundation of Ministry of Education [18YJC630155]
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Increasing social distance can reduce biases in probability weighting, with a stronger effect in the gain domain. This reduction is accompanied by a decrease in emotional intensity and an increase in attention to probability.
People often exhibit biases in probability weighting such as overweighting small probabilities and underweighting large probabilities. Our research examines whether increased social distance would reduce such biases. Participants completed valuation and choice tasks of probabilistic lotteries under conditions with different social distances. The results showed that increased social distance reduced these biases in both hypothetical (Studies 1 and 2) and incentivized (Study 3) settings. This reduction was accompanied by a decrease in emotional intensity and an increase in the attention to probability in the decision-making process (Study 4). Moreover, the bias-buffering effect of social distance was stronger in the gain domain than in the loss domain (Studies 1-4). These results suggest that increasing the social distance from the beneficiaries of the decisions can reduce biases in probability weighting and shed light on the relationship between social distance and the emotional-cognitive process in decision-making.
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