Pang Bo, Blanco Nathaniel J, Maddox W Todd, Worthy Darrell A
Department of Psychology, Texas A&M University, TAMU 4235, College Station, TX, 77843-4235, USA.
University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2017 Apr;24(2):536-546. doi: 10.3758/s13423-016-1080-z.
This work aimed to investigate how one's aspiration level is set in decision-making involving losses and how people respond when all alternatives appear to be below the aspiration level. We hypothesized that the zero point would serve as an ecological aspiration level where losses cause participants to focus on improvements in payoffs. In two experiments, we investigated these issues by combining behavioral studies and computational modeling. Participants chose from two alternatives on each trial. A decreasing option consistently gave a larger immediate payoff, although it caused future payoffs for both options to decrease. Selecting an increasing option caused payoffs for both options to increase on future trials. We manipulated the incentive structure such that in the losses condition the smallest payoff for the decreasing option was a loss, whereas in the gains condition the smallest payoff for the decreasing option was a gain, while the differences in outcomes for the two options were kept equivalent across conditions. Participants selected the increasing option more often in the losses condition than in the gains condition, regardless of whether the increasing option was objectively optimal (Experiment 1) or suboptimal (Experiment 2). Further, computational modeling results revealed that participants in the losses condition exhibited heightened weight to the frequency of positive versus negative prediction errors, suggesting that they were more attentive to improvements and reductions in outcomes than to expected values. This supports our assertion that losses induce aspiration for larger payoffs. We discuss our results in the context of recent theories of how losses shape behavior.
这项研究旨在探讨在涉及损失的决策中，一个人的抱负水平是如何设定的，以及当所有选择似乎都低于抱负水平时人们会如何反应。我们假设零点将作为一个生态抱负水平，在这个水平上，损失会促使参与者关注收益的改善。在两个实验中，我们通过结合行为研究和计算建模来研究这些问题。参与者在每次试验中从两个选项中进行选择。一个递减选项始终会带来更大的即时收益，尽管它会导致两个选项的未来收益都减少。选择递增选项会使两个选项在未来试验中的收益增加。我们操纵了激励结构，使得在损失条件下，递减选项的最小收益为损失，而在收益条件下，递减选项的最小收益为收益，同时两个选项的结果差异在不同条件下保持相等。无论递增选项在客观上是最优的（实验1）还是次优的（实验2），参与者在损失条件下比在收益条件下更频繁地选择递增选项。此外，计算建模结果表明，处于损失条件下的参与者对正向与负向预测误差的频率给予了更高的权重，这表明他们更关注结果的改善和减少，而不是预期值。这支持了我们的观点，即损失会引发对更大收益的渴望。我们将在近期关于损失如何塑造行为的理论背景下讨论我们的结果。
