One of Decision Science News’ rules of thumb for losing weight was never eat more than 500 calories at at time.

In Japan(*), they have institutionalized this at the Tanita Shokudo restaurant, which serves a daily 500 calorie meal.

We at DSN believe this will work, as we’ve seen our own weights decrease after moving to small-portion-size countries and increase after moving back to the States. We admit to following a simple  heuristic of “eat what you get till it’s gone”.

(*) BTW, we’ve noticed that people pay more attention when you preface things with “In Japan, …”.

Ecological Rationality: Intelligence in the World is a new book by Peter Todd, Gerd Gigerenzer and the ABC Research Group (including your Decision Science News editor). It is much of the same team who brought you Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart, with a number of new voices in the mix.
Here is a blurb:

Ecological Rationality: Intelligence in the World explores how people can be effective decision makers by using simple heuristics that fit well into the structure of the environment. When we wield the right tool from the mind’s adaptive toolbox for a particular situation, we can make good choices with little information or computation. Thus, simple strategies excel by exploiting the reliable patterns in the world. Heuristics are not good or bad, “biased” or “unbiased,” on their own, but only in relation to the setting in which they are used. The authors demonstrate this principle through case studies of heuristics and environments fitting together to produce good decisions, in situations including sports competitions, the search for a parking space, business group meetings, and doctor/patient interactions. The message of Ecological Rationality is to study mind and environment in tandem. Intelligence is not only in the mind but also in the world, captured in the structures of information around us.

The interdisciplinary research presented in this book, by turns theoretical, empirical, and applied, will be interesting and inspiring for all those concerned with how people make decisions. With specific examples in a variety of domains, it shows psychologists, economists, philosophers, cognitive scientists, and ethologists how to study the mind together with the decision environment, and the perils of ignoring their vital interaction. Furthermore, this book provides guidance to practitioners who aim to design environments and institutions that help people make better choices.

TIBER, the Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economics Research is happy to announce the 11 Tiber Symposium on Psychology and Economics, to be held on August 24, 2012.

The symposium aims to bring together Economists, Psychologists, Marketing researchers and others who work on Behavioral Decision Making, either in individual or interdependent settings. The symposium will be held at Tilburg th University and consists of two keynotes, a number of parallel sessions with presentations of about 20 to 30 minutes, and a poster session.

This year’s keynote speakers are:

- George Loewenstein
- Colin Camerer

The goal of this series of symposia is to establish contact and discussion between researchers of the different fields. We look for empirical contributions from diverse fields, such as Individual Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, Bargaining, Social Dilemmas, Experimental Games, Emotions, Fairness and Justice, Rational Choice, and related subjects.

CALL FOR PAPERS
If you would like to contribute to this symposium by presenting a paper, we ask you to send an abstract of max. 300 words via email to Diana Vingerhoets (D.Vingerhoets@tilburguniversity.edu). Please use subject: TIBER XI in your email.
On the basis of these abstracts we will select presenters for the symposium. Please indicate whether you would be willing to present your research in a poster session by adding Poster: Yes or Poster: No to your submission.

IMPORTANT DATES
18th of April Call for papers
1st of June Deadline for submission of abstracts
18th of June Selection of speakers
11th of August Normal registration deadline (late registration fee applies after this date)
24th of August Symposium at Tilburg University

More information about the program of the symposium and the keynote speakers, as well as the location of the symposium and the registration forms will soon be available here.

If you have any questions regarding the conference, please contact Job van Wolferen (J.vanWolferen@tilburguniversity.edu). Again, please use subject: TIBER XI. Other organizers include Ilja van Beest, Rik Pieters, Jan Potters, and Marcel Zeelenberg.

As reported in the New York Times (Microsoft Taps Yahoo Scientists for New York Research Lab) and elsewhere, we’re moving to Microsoft. Your Decision Science News editor will be one of the founding members of a brand new Microsoft Research Lab in New York City.

The founding members, so far, are:

Sharad Goel web twitter
Dan Goldstein web twitter
Jake Hofman web twitter
John Langford web
Dave Pennock web twitter
Dave Rothschild web twitter
Sid Suri web twitter
Duncan Watts web twitter

Managing Directors of the lab are:
Jennifer Chayes
Christian Borgs

SELECTED REFERENCES:

NEW YORK TIMES
Microsoft Taps Yahoo Scientists for New York Research Lab

PC MAGAZINE
Microsoft Opens New York Research Lab With Former Yahoo Scientists

COMPUTERWORLD
Microsoft opens New York research lab, hires mainly Yahoo researchers

CNET
Microsoft snags Yahoo scientists for new research lab

ALL THINGS D
Microsoft Hires 14 Yahoo Researchers to Kick-Start New NYC Research Lab

MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
Microsoft’s New Lab Hunts for Value in User Data

PRESS RELEASES
Start Spreading the News … Announcing Microsoft Research New York City!

Microsoft Research Debuts N.Y.C. Lab

Microsoft Research sets up home in NYC

MANY MORE REFERENCES:
Search Microsoft “New York”

Decision Science News was creating a new account online and had to fill out the above-pictured CAPTCHA (*) to proceed. It’s an ad and a CAPTCHA in one. It gets people to spend time and effort typing the name of the brand. [If you don't know what a CAPTCHA is see Wikipedia, or the Official CAPTCHA Site]

That time and effort should serve the advertiser well.

Cognitive psychologists know that the longer people spend processing a thing the more likely they are to remember it. By getting you to type the name of the brand, you become more likely to remember it, which is what advertisers want.

But this manipulation does double duty. Psychologists have also uncovered the familiarity-liking effect in which repeated stimuli (e.g. songs) become liked simply for being familiar. These studies randomly assign people to various stimuli, repeat the stimuli over time, and measure liking, which tends to increase. Each subsequent impression of an ad has this effect on you, but some ad impressions go unnoticed. By getting you to type the name of the brand, you are pretty sure to notice it. [Another thing that determines whether people notice ads is the amount of time they are in view, see our recent papers on this here and here].

What’s next? Will they go after the frequency-validity effect, by which familiar statements are judged as more likely to be true? If so, the CAPTCHAs of the future will ask you to type things like “I’m going to buy a Prius C right away!”

REFERENCES

Arkes, H. R., Hackett, C. and Boehm, L. (1989), The generality of the relation between familiarity and judged validity. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 2,  81–94.

Bornstein, Robert F.  (1989) Exposure and affect: Overview and meta-analysis of research, 1968–1987. Psychological Bulletin, 106(2), 265-289.

Hintzman, Douglas L. and Richard A. Block (1971). Retition and memory: Evidence for a multiple-trace hypothesis. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 88(3), 297-306.

A friend of Decision Science News awoke in a hotel on April 3rd of this year and found two newspapers outside the door. The Wall Street Journal used the word “scarred” in its front page headline, which was weird enough, but all was made far weirder by the USA Today, which used the same word, also in a front page headline, also above the fold, on the same day.

We could overfit and say that “scarred” is the hot buzzword of 2012, or underfit and act as though there’s nothing to this at all, but instead we’ll just put it out there.

Scarred. Consider it out there.

Just a reminder that the quarterly Society for Judgment and Decision Making newsletter can be downloaded from the SJDM site:

http://sjdm.org/newsletters/

It features jobs, conferences, announcements, and more.

Enjoy!
Decision Science News / SJDM Newsletter Editor

At DSN, we’ve been playing a bit with FetchClimate Explorer from Microsoft Research. It lets one define regions of the globe over which it superimposes spatial and time series data concerning temperature, precipitation, sunlight, and, pictured above, wind speed.

See a demo of FetchClimate in this video, starting at 22:45.

The data (graphed above, larger image here) mesh with our experience living in Chicago that the “windy city” is not really that windy. Yes, Chicago is in a part of the country that is windier than average, but Kansas makes it look calm. Furthermore, New York City and Long Island are windier than Chicago, but nobody goes “OMG! How can you stand that wind?” when you say that you live there.

Average Wind Speed (meters / second)

• Chicago 4.92
• New York, NY 5.01
• Milwaukee, WI 5.03
• Casper, WY 5.5
• Rochester, MN 5.5
• Amarillo, TX 6.12
• Dodge City, KS 6.25

And a little wind is a good thing. Houston, TX (wind speed 4.11 m/s) would love a bit of air movement during its stifling summers. They say the phrase “windy city” has not to do with high winds or the hot air of politicians, but rather stems from an Chicago tourism slogan promoting the delightful summer breezes in the days before air conditioning.

If the numbers are both even or both odd
1. Learn how to square numbers in your head from our earlier post
2. Take the midpoint of the two numbers and square it. For example, if the numbers are 18 and 22, the midpoint is 20, which squared is 400
3. Square the difference between the midpoint and one of the original numbers. For example, the difference between 20 (midpoint number) and 18 (original number) is 2, which squared is 4.
4. Subtract step three from step two. 400 – 4 = 396. Done!

In general, (a + b) * (a -b) = a^2 – b^2. The trick is thinking of the two original numbers as (a+b) and (a-b) which are equally distant from a midpoint a.

If one number is even and the other odd
1. Round one number down or up so that both are even or both are odd. Apply the above method. Do one addition or subtraction to correct for the rounding. For example, think of 18*23 as 18*22 (which we solved above) plus 18.

Grab some pairs of numbers from the grid and try it. You may just like it!

P.S. Andrew Gelman: This is why you’d want to square numbers in your head.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthew-h/5579739816

Behavioral Economics For Dummies. That is all.

Hat tip: http://xkcd.com/1022/

ADDENDUM: Just noticed it includes a section on default options and organ donation [also movie]. What an enlightened tome!