Events occurring to similar people are often more likely to strike us too. People
overgeneralize this observation and routinely use their similarity to an affected individual to …

Sweepstakes have often been used to generate excitement and raise awareness by giving
customers opportunities to win the featured prizes. Both the featured prizes and the odds of …

Consumers' judgments of the magnitude of benefit that a product provides increase their
likelihood of purchasing it, and their judgments of the magnitude of harm that accrues from …

People are often called on to make an assessment of the relative likelihood of events (eg,
which of two investments is more likely to outperform the market?) and their complements …

Many real-world decisions involving rare events also involve extreme outcomes. Despite this
confluence, decisions-from-experience research has only examined the impact of rarity and …

When making decisions involving risky outcomes on the basis of verbal descriptions of the
outcomes and their associated probabilities, people behave as if they overweight small …

We developed a platform to consider both optimism and pessimism biases in the same
context using construal level theory as a basis, and gained the following key results: An …

The first part of the dissertation focuses on the nature of comparative optimism. In two
studies spontaneous thoughts about the future were examined for comparatively optimistic …

The authors show that the value of a risky option decreases upon addition of risky prospects
of the same valence. For instance, a medical drug with a potential side effect of seizures is …

Recent research has focused on the “description-experience gap”: while rare events are
overweighted in description based decisions, people tend to behave as if they underweight …