Heh, I feel this way about Tesla stock right now. I held Nvidia right before its meteoric rise and traded it for Tesla stock. Do I have to feel 10X more pain to give it up now?
I don’t know anymore. Everyone, you can feel free to roast me today.
the investment question is not whether they have great futures, but is whether the market (which agrees that they have great futures) is currently overvaluing their futures.
the answer is that the weight of the market cap of each company, measured against the market cap of the entire market, tells you how much weight these companies should have in your portfolio.
or just buy broadly diversified funds and achieve the same result.
I think that would count as loss aversion. As long as you hold TSLA, you get to hold out hope for a future payoff against the patent mistake of the switch.
"Well, son, a funny thing about regret is: it's better to regret something you have done, than to regret something you haven't done. Oh by the way, if you see your mom this weekend, would you be sure and tell her... SATAN SATAN SATAN"
"Satan" by Orbital. The 30 something years later mix is an absolute banger.
Whenever my kids are debating whether or not to do something, I use exactly that line on them. I usually stop after the first sentence, but sometimes it's hard not to do the whole thing and leave them completely confused.
This song doesn't have an 'official' meaning, stated by the artist.
Even when songs do they aren't that important and it's the meaning the listener gives the song (or the other way around) that's actually meaningful. Or in other words: only the listener's experience of the song is meaningful.
My dummy interpretation: Mom will be upset by her kid chanting SATAN. If mom is upset, dad is going to regret it. But it will be funny, so it might be worth it.
Fits perfectly into a question/lesson about regret.
A super basic search doesn't show any studies showing the two cup experiment (with results showing 3x reward to get 50% of people to switch) and TFA doesn't cite any sources. If anyone can cite a paper for it, I would appreciate it.
If I knew the experimenter was trustworthy, I would not switch after the initial decision because there is no point to and definitely would for the $6 alternative. It seems very surprising that the median person needs triple to make it worth it to switch.
If I didn't know the experimenter was trustworthy (for example a street hustler in NYC), I definitely would not switch in the equal reward scenario and may even require 3x to switch because I would expect that they would only offer if my initial selection was wrong.
It seems reasonably likely the actual experiments failed to build trust in the experimentees and so are showing that reasonable decision making process. Given that the described process is very similar to 3 card monte, the experimentees would be primed to distrust the process.
Yes, and it's hard to imagine feeling much regret at failing to win $5. Maybe if the prize or penalty was something more significant, the results would be different?
> the actual experiments failed to build trust in the experimentees
Psychological experiments involve trickery very often, because they need test subjects to be unaware of what experiments is trying to measure. I expect the most of subjects of psychological experiments to know this because they heard of other experiments. So I wouldn't expect that the trust building will change anything.
This particular experiment with a strange proposition to switch cups probably forces subjects to think what is happening, they inevitably form some hypotheses and run with them. I wouldn't believe that the results has something with a regret before I've read the research paper and have found there what researches did to ensure that they measured regret avoidance and not the ability of a subject to simulate their immunity to manipulations (if they thought that experiment tried to measure their resolve by coercing them to switch...).
Normally there is a post-experiment interview where researcher could try to learn the reasoning behind decisions of a test subject, but in this case a direct answer probably will not do. Though if "untrustworthy" researchers tricked test subject so they would get a reward in any case, then subjects would be happy and proud, and probably they would love to explain their "winning logic", even (or maybe especially) if they were mistaken about goals of experiment. It would be like researchers were too smart by half when devising the game and so they lost $5. I personally would feel an urge to brag about my "superior" thought process.
But in any case we need the original paper to learn how it was done and could we believe the interpretation of the experimental data.
> Psychological experiments involve trickery very often, because they need test subjects to be unaware of what experiments is trying to measure. I expect the most of subjects of psychological experiments to know this because they heard of other experiments. So I wouldn't expect that the trust building will change anything.
Long time ago, the joke was that "subjects are 19-23 years old women studying psychology and who happened to walk in the faculty halls that day".
I came here to say exactly this. Nothing in the article says that the operator doesn’t know where the red die is, and the subject cannot know that every subject is always offered the switch.
So they think they’re being tricked into it. Perfectly rational.
Indeed it is weird to theorize why somebody should switch if they trusted the process to be random. There's no reason to. And if I'm not sure about the process, indeed I may want to stick with my choice. I was wondering how a study would control for this. One could make a group where the price was shared with the person doing the shuffling. If people in that group were more inclined to switch, it would indicate that they don't trust the process to be random.
Yeah, IMO the only reason not to switch at $6 is mistrust at the person conducting the experiment: they're tricking me to switch because they know I won.
If I knew it was double blind, I'd switch instantly.
Agreed -- if they changed the experiment so it was verifiably trustworthy, I think most people who could do math would switch.
Basically, it would be a repeated game where the subject would be told by the experimenter.
1. I will put a black ball under exactly one of these two cups without you seeing it.
2. You will pick the first cup -- if you keep this cup and it's right, you get $5.
3. You will have an opportunity to change cups always, if you change cups and the changed cup is correct, you get $6.
I cannot see the above experiment failing to generate most people always choosing change if repeated 10 times, with the above structure being common knowledge ahead of time.
That's like saying "choose a cup with your left or right hand -- if you choose correctly with your left hand, you get $5, and if you choose correctly with your right hand, you get $6". Everyone would use their right hands.
> That's like saying "choose a cup with your left or right hand -- if you choose correctly with your left hand, you get $5, and if you choose correctly with your right hand, you get $6". Everyone would use their right hands.
From the article it seems that placing the chosen cup in front of the subject, to make it feel like they "own it", is an important part of the experiment.
> If I knew the experimenter was trustworthy, I would not switch after the initial decision because there is no point to and definitely would for the $6 alternative.
One rational reason not to switch for $6 would be the hope/expectation that the offered incentive will increase. In the experiment, the subjects who held on to their first choice the longest received 10x the reward, while the quick switchers got only 1.2x (assuming the alternative cup was winning).
> the subjects who held on to their first choice the longest received 10x the reward
If the experiment was designed right, there wasn't a second offer to the same subject and it was made clear that there won't be one. Instead separate test groups were offered different amounts. Or at the very least the game was repeated.
+1 would be interested to see the actual study and can’t find it. There’s apparently a lot of work on the two effects mentioned here, Endowment Effect & Regret Minimisation. But it’s psych research so last time I heard, you could safely ignore about 40% of published papers.
I recognize a lot of this in “fan” communities. Where people invest a lot of time/money/effort in their hobby, they minimize regret by doing everything to convince themselves they made the right choice. All the classic tech holy wars are susceptible (Mac vs PC, Vim vs Emacs, Xbox vs PlayStation, dozens more…). It’s almost impossible to get a direct measure of regret (e.g. by asking them) on these emotive topics because admitting regret after spending all that time/money/effort is psychologically devastating.
The person I know who exhibits this pattern the most is constantly trying to get the people around him to buy the same things he has bought, because it validates the decision. I consistently regret buying things on his recommendation. I think he tries hardest to recommend the worst ones because they're the biggest sources of regret.
He's otherwise an amazing friend though. The earnestness that makes him a sucker for limited edition scotch comes out in other nicer ways too.
I think this is 100% correct, and very surprised the author of the article and/or study didn’t figure this out.
Here’s how you could (possibly) prove that.
Instead of the options being you get the money or not, the options become you win you pocket the money, you lose the money goes to a charity of your choice.
I think 100% the person would always choose the outcome with more money, regardless of the level of trust with the person giving the experiment.
That is, you completely remove trust from the equation.
> If I didn't know the experimenter was trustworthy (for example a street hustler in NYC), I definitely would not switch in the equal reward scenario and may even require 3x to switch because I would expect that they would only offer if my initial selection was wrong.
If you don't trust the experimenter at all, then you might as well not switch, but I don't think that is a better than switching, as you have no basis for assuming any outcome in any circumstance.
If you are dealing with a street hustler in NYC, the optimal move is to disengage.
WRT the first (equal rewards) scenario: a weak bias towards sticking with an original decision might be favored by evolution, as constantly changing one's mind without new knowledge is not optimal behavior.
I was playing an old RPG for the classic Mac OS recently and it has a casino that lets you gamble for money. One of the games is "dot racing" where you pick one of three dots and they race across the screen in random spurts and you win if the one you selected is the winner. I was save scumming so the only real penalty to losing was lost time, but I decided on the strategy of always picking the middle one no matter what happened, because of regret! I found if I was trying to pick the one I hoped would win each time I'd start feeling pangs of regret like "oh, I KNEW I should have picked that one, darn it!" but if I just picked the same one every time then it was out of my hands and I didn't feel the same sting.
Exactly! If the rules are clear from the start that youcwill offer the switch, then it's useless, so dont bother.
If the rules are not clear that you will do it, then maybe you only offered it because you know I have the right one and want to avoid the loss. So it's worst than useless.
If the value increases, there is this same question, if you can know if I'm right or not, then you offering me a milion is just a trick isn't it? Also, you clearly wouldn't just give out one milion anyways, you dont havr the budget for that.
The only case is seems useufl to switch is when additional information was added in a guaranteed way (monty hall paradox)
> Why is that? The odds of being right are 50-50, so why not switch?
Couldn't you ask the opposite question: if the odds are 50-50, why switch? Keeping your initial choice is more passive than switching. If the odds of success are the same, shouldn't the choice with the least energy expenditure be preferred?
Learning to play poker now. You basically have to fight your own psychology and do the thing that makes the most mathematical sense. Eye-opening but very difficult.
A dowsing rod is a greater predictive instrument than behavioral economics.
If my undergraduate work had the same scientific rigor and reproducibility possessed by the foundational texts of behavioral economics I would have been failed and every project I ever worked on would have ended up killing somebody.
The experiment seems flawed because they might think the experimenter knows the right choice and tries to lead them to the wrong answer. If you're only interested in studying regret, I wouldn't let the experimenter know the right cup.
Right, it would be simpler to just say “I flip a coin and keep it in my hand, and you guess heads or tails, but before I open my hand I ask if you want to change your answer.”
It’s the exact same probability but with less extraneous factors that can confuse people. It also makes it plainly obvious that switching makes no difference to your likelihood, and takes away any interpretation of “why” people don’t switch in the first experiment: because it doesn’t make any difference so what’s the point?
That’s amazing. I even think it is ridiculous that when offered 20% higher reward for changing choices, when both cups have the same chance, people don’t jump at the better (change) offer.
How could someone become attached to a random chance cup?
> Go ahead and select one of the cups. Let’s say you pick the cup on the right. I slide it toward you but don’t let you look underneath.
> I then ask you if you want to switch to the cup on the left, to change your choice.
> Would you switch?
Again, like in some Monty cases, the formulation of the problem is annoyingly ambiguous. I would answer "It depends. Do you always offer the switch, no matter the location of the dice, and no matter my initial choice?". Only if they say yes, would I conclude that switching shouldn't affect the odds.
> But now, if you switch and are correct, you win $6. If you stick with your original choice and are right, you still only get $5. Would you switch now?
This only makes people more suspicious that the offer did in fact depend on the initial choice. If they want to study regret, they should go out of their way to make sure the test subject understands that there is no such dependency.
> When I was in school and taking multiple choice exams, the advice was always to “stick with your first instinct” rather than to change to a different answer. I am now convinced that this advice does not give you a better chance at getting the correct answer — but it does make people feel better than if they get it wrong and find out their original choice was correct.
This would make sense if you had zero knowledge about which answer was right - like if the problem were in a foreign language you didn’t speak. But if you have some knowledge of the subject, it doesn’t make sense to say that your first guess isn’t more likely to be correct. There are some tests that have problems meant to trap people who aren’t thinking deeply enough, but many tests aren’t like this (or maybe these distractors aren’t tricky enough to fool you). Gut instinct on multiple choice tests ain’t nothing.
Came here for this subpoint. We know a lot more than we know we know.
I had a system, back when multiple choice tests were a significant part of my life. Next to each question, I would write a 1, 2, or 3, so I knew which ones to come back to if I had time at the end. 1 meant I was confident I knew the answer. 2 meant I could eliminate at least one answer, but was guessing among the remaining ones, and 3 meant I didn't know, and had just circled the first thing that came to mind.
I especially appreciated tests where I got my own question sheet back, not just my answer sheet with a grade (like a Scantron) because I could verify that my system worked!
Ha, I did this when I was prepping for the LSAT. It was useful to see if I was missing questions I knew I didn’t know well, or if I was missing questions that I thought I had nailed.
I don't like this at all. First, you can improve your performance, you should regret not studying enough, or not concentrating enough during the test.
If you want to regret something, regret your decisions.
If you can't regret your decisions because there is nothing to regret, you probably should feel no regret instead, than doing cheap tricks. Of course if you are unable to not feel any regret, then “stick with your first instinct” can be a good cheap trick.
> [...] So why not switch? Experimenters point to two reasons. First is the endowment effect [...]. The second reason is [...] to minimize regret.
I think there is a potential third reason, which is that the question to switch cups may be perceived as a trick of the experimenter: you feel certain that you got it and know which cup is right, and since you assume that the experimenter is aware of this as well, they now try to lure you into switching just to save their skin. Refusing to switch is basically done in the spirit of trying to evade this alleged trap, and the experimenter’s question may further emphasise that your initial guess was correct.
I agree completely. It doesn't even require you to believe you have the right answer, or that the experimenter knows this. All it has to be is some niggling feeling that there is some trickery going on here. Something along the lines of, "why are they contriving to make me choose and then immediately trying to 'make me' change my decision with no other information or incentives offered?" Then, in the next iterations when more money is offered, the suspicion changes to, "why are they trying to make me change my decision by offering me more money?"
If, as the researchers propose, people experience more regret by changing their decision with "no additional information," they will experience significantly more regret still if they feel as though they have been tricked into giving up on their instinctive choice.
I put no information in quotes because even though the article puts it this way, there actually is some additional information: that the researchers want participants to have the option to change their choice, but only to be aware of that after making their first choice. Although cryptic, this does give some additional information into the real nature of their experiment, and to a random study participant certainly could be suggestive of some trickery going on.
People think they are being tricked is my guess. But also in general, people like to stick to what they have committed to. I think this has more to do with culture than regret.
72 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] threadI don’t know anymore. Everyone, you can feel free to roast me today.
Sorry, I forgot I’m not at Wendy’s.
the answer is that the weight of the market cap of each company, measured against the market cap of the entire market, tells you how much weight these companies should have in your portfolio.
or just buy broadly diversified funds and achieve the same result.
"Well, son, a funny thing about regret is: it's better to regret something you have done, than to regret something you haven't done. Oh by the way, if you see your mom this weekend, would you be sure and tell her... SATAN SATAN SATAN"
"Satan" by Orbital. The 30 something years later mix is an absolute banger.
https://youtu.be/LLeVJDJG2mk?feature=shared
Is there meaning here? I feel like there is something to get that I don't get.
Even when songs do they aren't that important and it's the meaning the listener gives the song (or the other way around) that's actually meaningful. Or in other words: only the listener's experience of the song is meaningful.
That's what I meant.
Fits perfectly into a question/lesson about regret.
If I knew the experimenter was trustworthy, I would not switch after the initial decision because there is no point to and definitely would for the $6 alternative. It seems very surprising that the median person needs triple to make it worth it to switch.
If I didn't know the experimenter was trustworthy (for example a street hustler in NYC), I definitely would not switch in the equal reward scenario and may even require 3x to switch because I would expect that they would only offer if my initial selection was wrong.
It seems reasonably likely the actual experiments failed to build trust in the experimentees and so are showing that reasonable decision making process. Given that the described process is very similar to 3 card monte, the experimentees would be primed to distrust the process.
And that how you revealed yourself as a replicant.
Psychological experiments involve trickery very often, because they need test subjects to be unaware of what experiments is trying to measure. I expect the most of subjects of psychological experiments to know this because they heard of other experiments. So I wouldn't expect that the trust building will change anything.
This particular experiment with a strange proposition to switch cups probably forces subjects to think what is happening, they inevitably form some hypotheses and run with them. I wouldn't believe that the results has something with a regret before I've read the research paper and have found there what researches did to ensure that they measured regret avoidance and not the ability of a subject to simulate their immunity to manipulations (if they thought that experiment tried to measure their resolve by coercing them to switch...).
Normally there is a post-experiment interview where researcher could try to learn the reasoning behind decisions of a test subject, but in this case a direct answer probably will not do. Though if "untrustworthy" researchers tricked test subject so they would get a reward in any case, then subjects would be happy and proud, and probably they would love to explain their "winning logic", even (or maybe especially) if they were mistaken about goals of experiment. It would be like researchers were too smart by half when devising the game and so they lost $5. I personally would feel an urge to brag about my "superior" thought process.
But in any case we need the original paper to learn how it was done and could we believe the interpretation of the experimental data.
Long time ago, the joke was that "subjects are 19-23 years old women studying psychology and who happened to walk in the faculty halls that day".
So they think they’re being tricked into it. Perfectly rational.
If I knew it was double blind, I'd switch instantly.
Basically, it would be a repeated game where the subject would be told by the experimenter.
1. I will put a black ball under exactly one of these two cups without you seeing it.
2. You will pick the first cup -- if you keep this cup and it's right, you get $5.
3. You will have an opportunity to change cups always, if you change cups and the changed cup is correct, you get $6.
I cannot see the above experiment failing to generate most people always choosing change if repeated 10 times, with the above structure being common knowledge ahead of time.
That's like saying "choose a cup with your left or right hand -- if you choose correctly with your left hand, you get $5, and if you choose correctly with your right hand, you get $6". Everyone would use their right hands.
From the article it seems that placing the chosen cup in front of the subject, to make it feel like they "own it", is an important part of the experiment.
One rational reason not to switch for $6 would be the hope/expectation that the offered incentive will increase. In the experiment, the subjects who held on to their first choice the longest received 10x the reward, while the quick switchers got only 1.2x (assuming the alternative cup was winning).
If the experiment was designed right, there wasn't a second offer to the same subject and it was made clear that there won't be one. Instead separate test groups were offered different amounts. Or at the very least the game was repeated.
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4...
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1942711
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0146167295217006?ic...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5723021/
I recognize a lot of this in “fan” communities. Where people invest a lot of time/money/effort in their hobby, they minimize regret by doing everything to convince themselves they made the right choice. All the classic tech holy wars are susceptible (Mac vs PC, Vim vs Emacs, Xbox vs PlayStation, dozens more…). It’s almost impossible to get a direct measure of regret (e.g. by asking them) on these emotive topics because admitting regret after spending all that time/money/effort is psychologically devastating.
He's otherwise an amazing friend though. The earnestness that makes him a sucker for limited edition scotch comes out in other nicer ways too.
Here’s how you could (possibly) prove that.
Instead of the options being you get the money or not, the options become you win you pocket the money, you lose the money goes to a charity of your choice.
I think 100% the person would always choose the outcome with more money, regardless of the level of trust with the person giving the experiment.
That is, you completely remove trust from the equation.
I wonder if you could do it with a coin, and flip the coin after the decision was made? I think that reintroduce risk and regret, but remove trust.
If you don't trust the experimenter at all, then you might as well not switch, but I don't think that is a better than switching, as you have no basis for assuming any outcome in any circumstance.
If you are dealing with a street hustler in NYC, the optimal move is to disengage.
WRT the first (equal rewards) scenario: a weak bias towards sticking with an original decision might be favored by evolution, as constantly changing one's mind without new knowledge is not optimal behavior.
If the value increases, there is this same question, if you can know if I'm right or not, then you offering me a milion is just a trick isn't it? Also, you clearly wouldn't just give out one milion anyways, you dont havr the budget for that.
The only case is seems useufl to switch is when additional information was added in a guaranteed way (monty hall paradox)
Couldn't you ask the opposite question: if the odds are 50-50, why switch? Keeping your initial choice is more passive than switching. If the odds of success are the same, shouldn't the choice with the least energy expenditure be preferred?
> But now, if you switch and are correct, you win $6.
Everyone I know, would switch. It's a linear optimization.
If my undergraduate work had the same scientific rigor and reproducibility possessed by the foundational texts of behavioral economics I would have been failed and every project I ever worked on would have ended up killing somebody.
It’s the exact same probability but with less extraneous factors that can confuse people. It also makes it plainly obvious that switching makes no difference to your likelihood, and takes away any interpretation of “why” people don’t switch in the first experiment: because it doesn’t make any difference so what’s the point?
Kahneman and Tversky published entirely based on such experiments where grad students participated for a fee.
How could someone become attached to a random chance cup?
The participant then assumes, quite rationally, that they are being tricked into losing.
This is a really poor experiment, to be honest, because it is measuring the host's appearance of honesty, not the risk appetite of the subject.
> I then ask you if you want to switch to the cup on the left, to change your choice.
> Would you switch?
Again, like in some Monty cases, the formulation of the problem is annoyingly ambiguous. I would answer "It depends. Do you always offer the switch, no matter the location of the dice, and no matter my initial choice?". Only if they say yes, would I conclude that switching shouldn't affect the odds.
> But now, if you switch and are correct, you win $6. If you stick with your original choice and are right, you still only get $5. Would you switch now?
This only makes people more suspicious that the offer did in fact depend on the initial choice. If they want to study regret, they should go out of their way to make sure the test subject understands that there is no such dependency.
This would make sense if you had zero knowledge about which answer was right - like if the problem were in a foreign language you didn’t speak. But if you have some knowledge of the subject, it doesn’t make sense to say that your first guess isn’t more likely to be correct. There are some tests that have problems meant to trap people who aren’t thinking deeply enough, but many tests aren’t like this (or maybe these distractors aren’t tricky enough to fool you). Gut instinct on multiple choice tests ain’t nothing.
I had a system, back when multiple choice tests were a significant part of my life. Next to each question, I would write a 1, 2, or 3, so I knew which ones to come back to if I had time at the end. 1 meant I was confident I knew the answer. 2 meant I could eliminate at least one answer, but was guessing among the remaining ones, and 3 meant I didn't know, and had just circled the first thing that came to mind.
I especially appreciated tests where I got my own question sheet back, not just my answer sheet with a grade (like a Scantron) because I could verify that my system worked!
If you want to regret something, regret your decisions.
If you can't regret your decisions because there is nothing to regret, you probably should feel no regret instead, than doing cheap tricks. Of course if you are unable to not feel any regret, then “stick with your first instinct” can be a good cheap trick.
I think there is a potential third reason, which is that the question to switch cups may be perceived as a trick of the experimenter: you feel certain that you got it and know which cup is right, and since you assume that the experimenter is aware of this as well, they now try to lure you into switching just to save their skin. Refusing to switch is basically done in the spirit of trying to evade this alleged trap, and the experimenter’s question may further emphasise that your initial guess was correct.
If, as the researchers propose, people experience more regret by changing their decision with "no additional information," they will experience significantly more regret still if they feel as though they have been tricked into giving up on their instinctive choice.
I put no information in quotes because even though the article puts it this way, there actually is some additional information: that the researchers want participants to have the option to change their choice, but only to be aware of that after making their first choice. Although cryptic, this does give some additional information into the real nature of their experiment, and to a random study participant certainly could be suggestive of some trickery going on.