Biased Preferences

Riccardo Pedersini

Visual Attention Lab, Brigham and Women's Hospital

This talk discusses how subjective characteristics attached to a situation can change individuals’ choices by interacting with the objective characteristics of the situation itself. Imagine you want to weigh two objects by means of a two-arm balance. If the scales are balanced, they will tilt in the direction of the heavier object, but if the fulcrum is shifted towards the heavier object, they may tilt to the opposite side. This representation will be proven useful in two very different choice situations: in the first one the participants of an experiment face the trade-off between their own monetary interest and a non-enforced rule imposing fairness; in the second one the participants of another experiment need to rely on their autonomous responses in order to guess the right choice in an implicit learning grammar task.