Social Distance Reduces the Biases of Overweighting Small Probabilities and Underweighting Large Probabilities

People often exhibit biases in probability weighting such as overweighting small probabilities and underweighting large probabilities. Our research examines whether increased social distance would reduce such biases. Participants completed valuation and choice tasks of probabilistic lotteries under...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Personality & social psychology bulletin 2021-08, Vol.47 (8), p.1309-1324
Main Authors: Sun, Qingzhou, Lu, Jingyi, Zhang, Huanren, Liu, Yongfang
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Beneficiaries
Bias
Cognition
Decision making
Emotional regulation
Lotteries
Probability
Social distance
Valuation
Weighting
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Summary:People often exhibit biases in probability weighting such as overweighting small probabilities and underweighting large probabilities. Our research examines whether increased social distance would reduce such biases. Participants completed valuation and choice tasks of probabilistic lotteries under conditions with different social distances. The results showed that increased social distance reduced these biases in both hypothetical (Studies 1 and 2) and incentivized (Study 3) settings. This reduction was accompanied by a decrease in emotional intensity and an increase in the attention to probability in the decision-making process (Study 4). Moreover, the bias-buffering effect of social distance was stronger in the gain domain than in the loss domain (Studies 1–4). These results suggest that increasing the social distance from the beneficiaries of the decisions can reduce biases in probability weighting and shed light on the relationship between social distance and the emotional-cognitive process in decision-making.
ISSN:0146-1672
1552-7433
DOI:10.1177/0146167220969051