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Incorporating Interpretation into Risky Decision-Making

A Computational Model

  • Conference paper
Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction (SBP 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 8393))

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Abstract

Most leading computational theories of decision-making under risk do not have mechanisms to account for the incorporation of cultural factors. Therefore, they are of limited utility to scholars and practitioners who wish to model, and predict, how culture influences decision outcomes. Fuzzy Trace Theory (FTT) posits that people encode risk information at multiple levels of representation – namely, gist, which captures the culturally contingent meaning, or interpretation, of a stimulus, and verbatim, which is a detailed symbolic representation of the stimulus. Decision-makers prefer to rely on gist representations, although conflicts between gist and verbatim can attenuate this reliance. In this paper, we present a computational model of Fuzzy Trace Theory, which is able to successfully predict 14 experimental effects using a small number of assumptions. This technique may ultimately form the basis for an agent-based model, whose rule sets incorporate cultural and other psychosocial factors.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

    David A. Broniatowski

  2. Departments of Psychology and Human Development, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Valerie F. Reyna

Authors
  1. David A. Broniatowski
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  2. Valerie F. Reyna
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Social Complexity and Department of Computational Social Science, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MS 6B2, 22030-4400, Fairfax, VA, USA

    William G. Kennedy

  2. University of Arkansas at Little Rock, 2801 South University Avenue, EIT Building, Room 553, 72204, Little Rock, AR, USA

    Nitin Agarwal

  3. Department of Computer Engineering, Rochester Institute of Technology, 83 Lomb Memorial Drive, Bldg 09, 14623-5603, Rochester, NY, USA

    Shanchieh Jay Yang

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© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Broniatowski, D.A., Reyna, V.F. (2014). Incorporating Interpretation into Risky Decision-Making. In: Kennedy, W.G., Agarwal, N., Yang, S.J. (eds) Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction. SBP 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8393. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05579-4_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05579-4_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-05578-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-05579-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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