I am interested in studying the conditions under which people make seemingly-irrational decisions. I believe we can discover systematic patterns in decision-making that suggest ways of improving people’s decisions.
I have focused on two factors impacting decision-making: economic factors and drug (alcohol) factors. I have used laboratory experiments with pigeons and humans to study several behavioral dimensions of impulsivity and risk-taking. Finding similarities between human and nonhuman behavior emphasizes that our behavior is largely a product of simple learning processes, not something innately human or nonhuman.
Impulsivity can be defined many ways, but some I have utilized are:
- Choosing a smaller, sooner outcome instead of a larger, later one
- You might choose M&Ms now instead of weight loss later
- Being unable to stop yourself from making responses
- When intoxicated, you might be unable to stop yourself from violently responding to another’s remarks
- Spending money on smaller units of goods instead of saving your money for the better deal
- If you eat one energy bar every day, do you buy them individually or save up to buy the economy pack?
- Choosing the best option right now, versus taking the path that leads to a higher overall rate of return
- Your company makes widgets, but each widget you sell brings a lower and lower profit. Do you keep making widgets because some profit is better than none, or do you suffer a time of no profit in order to start a new, more profitable product line?
Risk-taking is the process of making decisions under uncertainty. A simple example is if Investment A yields $20 with a 50% chance, and investment B yields $40 with a 10% chance. Which do you choose? The field of behavioral economics has recently pointed out that these decisions are based on more than the absolute expected value ($10 for each in this example). Psychological processes are also involved in how we respond to amounts and probabilities. By making observations and doing experiments, we can discover the systematic ways people’s decisions differ from normative predictions. This lets us make new descriptive models which are better for predicting what people do in the real world.
Papers
Yankelevitz, R. L., Bullock, C. E. & Hackenberg, T. D. (2008). Reinforcer accumulation in a token-reinforcement context with pigeons. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 90, 283-299. Link
Yankelevitz, R. L., Mitchell, S. H., & Zhang, Y. (2011). Gender differences in factors associated with alcohol drinking: Delay discounting and perceptions of others’ drinking. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, epub ahead of print. Link
Posters and abstracts
Yankelevitz, R. L., Mitchell, S. H., & Zhang, Y., (2010). College students’ drinking patterns, impulsivity, and estimation of peers’ drinking patterns. Posters. Paper 24. Samuel B. Guze Symposium on Alcoholism. Link
Yankelevitz, R. L., & Mitchell, S. H. (2011). Effects of alcohol on human drinkers’ behavioral inhibition, risk-taking, and subjective responses. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 35(Suppl.), 836. Link to journal
Yankelevitz, R. L., & Mitchell, S. H. (2010). Binge drinkers’ impulsivity, risk-taking, and sensitivity to positive and negative consequences under the influence of alcohol. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 34(Suppl.), 120A. Link to journal