Renato Frey

News about CBDR: Follow us on Mastodon!

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 15:54:25 +0100

Lately we have been posting news about our group on Mastodon (i.e., a free and open-source, decentralized alternative to Twitter and Bluesky). Please see and / or follow us here: https://mastodon.online/tags/CBDR.

New year, new paper: Mixture models reveal four basic risk profiles

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 11:00:56 +0100

In this paper that recently appeared "online first" in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, we adopted a new approach to modeling individual differences in people's risk preferences. Specifically, we used a large dataset with separate discovery and validation samples and blinded variable labels to first identify robust dimensions of risk preference, including domain-general and domain-specific components. Using this multidimensional trait space, we then employed a mixture-modeling approach to test the extent to which groups of people may share similar profiles – thus contrasting the traditional and variable-centered perspective, which assumes that different persons may have highly unique configurations of multidimensional risk preferences. In line with our assumption, mixture models revealed that two thirds of the participants of our sample could be very well described by one of four separate risk profiles – please see the article for further details and the exact configurations of these profiles.

Inaugural lecture at UZH

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 11:00:18 +0100

Shortly before my first year at the University of Zurich as an SNSF Eccellenza professor came to an end it was time to give my official inaugural lecture – please see below for the recording (in German).

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Habilitation, venia docendi, and new group members

Thu, 19 May 2022 16:05:08 +0200

I have recently defended my habilitation (i.e., the highest degree one can typically obtain from European universities) with a presentation on "Big Data in psychological research: Benefits and limitations", and consequently I have just received the venia docendi for psychology from my alma mater. Together with a higher education teaching certificate that I also completed earlier this year I now definitely feel well prepared for teaching at the UZH in the fall semester!

There are also some good news concerning our group: Frederic Gnielka joined us from the Humboldt University Berlin to pursue a PhD with CBDR. He has a background in methods and is interested in modeling psychological processes involved in decision making under risk and uncertainty. Moreover, Linus Signer has started as a student research assistant in our group. Welcome to both of you!

New position, new group, new team member!

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 14:33:54 +0100

Time flies... it has been almost two months since I have begun my new position as an SNSF Eccellenza professor and started my own group, the Cognitive and Behavioral Decision Research (CBDR) lab, at the Department of Psychology of the University of Zurich. Our mission at CBDR consists of contributing to a better understanding of how people make decisions in the complex modern world full of risk and uncertainty. In doing so we focus on the cognitive processes involved in inter- and intraindividual differences in people's risk perceptions and various risk-taking behaviors, and we are also interested in behavioral interventions and risk communication.

And there are more good news to come: In February Olivia Fischer officially started her PhD at CBDR. Olivia is enthusiastic about modeling polarization processes in people's risk perceptions (her first PhD project), real-life risk taking, and risk communication more generally. Welcome, Olivia!

New paper in Psychological Science: What drives individual differences in people's risk perceptions of 5G?

Wed, 06 Oct 2021 08:37:08 +0200

What drives people’s perceptions of novel risks, and how malleable are such risk perceptions? A better understanding of these questions is important as a strong polarization of people's risk perceptions may have far-reaching consequences, such as preventing informed debates about the advantages and disadvantages of novel technologies. This is particularly the case in the increasingly connected world, where extreme views are quickly disseminated and contribute to triggering filter bubbles (e.g., through social media). In this paper I provide an analytic framework that integrates multiple potential drivers of risk perception (as identified by previous psychological research), to thus gauge their relative influence in shaping inter- as well as intraindividual differences. In doing so I focused on the latest generation of mobile communications technology – 5G.

Specifically, a multiverse analysis of a representative population sample in Switzerland (Study 1; N = 2,919) suggested that interindividual differences in risk perceptions are strongly associated with hazard-related drivers (e.g., trust in the institutions regulating 5G, dread of 5G) as well as person-specific drivers (e.g., electromagnetic hypersensitivity). Crucially, interindividual differences in risk perceptions of 5G were strongly predictive of people’s policy-related attitudes (e.g., voting intentions, need for more regulation). Moreover a field experiment based on a national expert report on 5G (Study 2; N = 839 in a longitudinal sample) indicated that population-level effects are not readily triggered, yet identified links between intraindividual changes in psychological drivers and perceived risk. As such, these results highlight potential targets for future policy interventions, aimed at reconciling lay people’s conflicting risk perceptions and facilitating (more) informed debates on the advantages and disadvantages of novel technologies in the future.

New paper in Decision: How do people render self-reports of their willingness to take risks?

Sat, 05 Jun 2021 15:52:37 +0200

Markus Steiner, Florian Seitz, and I have a new paper in which we investigate the cognitive processes underlying people's self-reports of their risk preferences. Specifically, we were interested in the information-integration processes that people may rely on during judgment formation, with a particular focus on the type of evidence people may consider when rendering their self-reports. In doing so, we aimed to contribute to a better understanding of why self-reports typically achieve high degrees of convergent validity and test-retest reliability, thus often outperforming their behavioral counterparts (i.e., monetary lotteries and other lab tasks).

To achieve these goals we employed the process-tracing method of aspect listing, to thus gain "a window into people's mind" while they render self-reports. Our cognitive modeling analyses illustrated that people are particularly sensitive to the strength of evidence of the information retrieved from memory during judgment formation. Interestingly, people's self-reported risk preferences and the strength of evidence of the retrieved aspects remained considerable stable in a retest study (i.e., across a one-month interval). Moreover, intraindividual changes in the latter were closely aligned with intraindividual changes in the former – suggesting that a relatively reliable psychological mechanism is at play when people render self-reports.

Beyond our quantitative modeling analyses, the process-tracing method of aspect listing also rendered possible more qualitative insights, such as concerning the sources and contents of the information people retrieved from memory (see the word clouds below). To learn more about all further details on this, please have a look at the paper!

New paper in JEP General: Is representative design the key to valid assessments of people's risk preferences?

Fri, 30 Apr 2021 11:38:24 +0200

A large body of research has documented the relatively poor psychometric properties of behavioral measures of risk taking, such as low convergent validity and poor test–retest reliability. In this project we examined the extent to which these issues may be related to violations of "representative design" – the idea that experimental stimuli should be sampled or designed such that they represent the environments to which measured constructs are supposed to generalize.

To this end, we focused on one of the most prominent behavioral measures of risk taking, the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART). Our analyses demonstrate that the typical implementation of the BART violates the principle of representative design, and strongly conflicts with the expectations people might have formed from real balloons. We conducted two extensive empirical studies (N = 772 and N = 632), aimed at testing the effects of improved representative designs. Indeed, participants acquired more accurate beliefs about the optimal behavior in the BART due to these task adaptions. Yet strikingly, these improvements proved to be insufficient to enhance the task's psychometric properties (e.g., convergent validity with other measures of risk preference and related constructs). We conclude that for the development of valid behavioral measurement instruments, our field has to overcome the philosophy of the "repair program" (i.e., fixing existing tasks). Instead, the development of valid task designs may require ecological assessments that identify those real-life behaviors and associated psychological processes that lab tasks are supposed to capture and generalize to.

This is a joint project with my (now former) PhD student Markus Steiner (see picture below), who has successfully defended his thesis last week – congratulations, Dr. Steiner!

SNSF Eccellenza Professorial Fellowship

Fri, 27 Nov 2020 17:50:11 +0100

Great news from the Swiss National Science Foundation: I was awarded an Eccellenza Professorial Fellowship for my project entitled "Decision making in a complex world: Towards a process-level theory of risk taking" (details about the project will soon appear online). I am super excited about this opportunity and look forward to joining the University of Zurich as an assistant professor next year.

Amerbach Prize 2020

Fri, 27 Nov 2020 17:44:16 +0100

Even more good news in addition to the approval of my SNSF Eccellenca Professorial Fellowship (see blog post above): Today was the (virtual) dies academicus, and the University of Basel announced online that I will receive the Amerbach Prize 2020 for my work on individual differences in decision making under risk and uncertainty!

Presentation at the Risk Center of the ETH Zurich: Modeling risk perception of 5G

Thu, 05 Nov 2020 22:12:03 +0100

This week I was invited to give a talk at a dialogue event on 5G, organized by the Risk Center of the ETH Zurich. 5G is the latest generation of mobile communications technology, and its recent deployment in countries around the world has triggered fierce public debates. At the dialogue event, I presented a project in which I modeled inter- and intraindividual differences in people's risk perceptions of this technology, as well as how people's risk perceptions of 5G are associated with their policy-related attitudes. The presentation was recorded and if you are interested, please have a look below.

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Special issue on decision making under risk and uncertainty

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 15:14:17 +0200

The research magazine of the University of Basel, UNI NOVA, has recently released a special issue on decision making under risk and uncertainty. In this issue, I and other decision scientists from psychology and economics were interviewed on the latest developments in our field, as well as regarding how the behavioral sciences may contribute to understanding how people approach the risks and uncertainties of modern life. As you will potentially notice, these interviews were still conducted in the pre-Corona era. That is, for once there is none of the omnipresent discussion in this respect. Nevertheless, it might be an interesting exercise to see which of the discussed concepts and findings apply to the current period, too!

Registered report on competitive decisions from experience published in JDM

Sat, 11 Apr 2020 17:03:46 +0200

We often (have to) make choices between risky options without knowing the possible outcomes upfront. Sometimes, however, we can obtain a preview through active information search (e.g., sampling reviews on Tripadvisor to choose one of two hotels). But what if other people simultaneously pursue the same goal, forcing us to make decisions from experience under competitive pressure ("only one room left at this price")? In this paper, I studied to what extent competition reduces pre-decisional search (and potentially choice performance) in different choice environments. A set of simulation analyses and empirical studies indicated that reduced search due to competitive pressure was particularly detrimental for choice performance in "wicked" environments, which contain rare events and thus require ample exploration to identify advantageous options. Interestingly, however, from a cost-benefit perspective and taking into account search costs, frugal search may not only be efficient in "kind" but also in "wicked" environments. For the full results, please have a look here:

On a side note, in this project I was up for some exploration myself: In the spirit of trying out new avenues for promoting transparent and reproducible research, I was committed to publish this paper as a registered report (RR). The idea of this relatively new publication format is to run the paper's theoretical rationale through the full peer-review process at a scientific journal, with the goal of obtaining "in-principle acceptance" before the empirical studies are conducted. It was a very interesting but sometimes also difficult process, as it may be particularly hard to convince reviewers of the soundness and importance of the research questions a-priori, without being able to present fancy results yet. So I am glad that this paper found a nice home at JDM, and I hope that more psychological journals will adopt the format of RRs soon!

For more on my research on decisions from experience, please also see the research section.

New paper in JPSP: Identifying robust correlates of risk preference

Mon, 09 Mar 2020 11:32:27 +0100

In the behavioral sciences it has long been a goal to identify variables that are systematically associated with people's risk preferences. Yet, evidence concerning many "candidate correlates" (e.g., wealth, age, sex, education) has been mixed, because previous studies tended to focus on single variables (i.e., not taking into account many competing predictors) and to implement few operationalizations of risk preference. In our paper recently published in JPSP (see here for the PDF), we tackled this issue in a novel way: using specification curve analysis (SCA), we assembled all possible model specifications given the variables of our dataset, which resulted in over 1 million models (incl. simulation analyses). Thanks to our powerful sciCORE at the University of Basel, we could efficiently estimate these models using traditional OLS and Bayesian methods.

A key advantage of SCA is its possibility to visualize results of extensive modeling analyses transparently. The main findings indicated that a person's sex and age have robust and consistent associations with people's risk preferences, whereas other candidate correlates showed less consistent or no associations. The results also demonstrate the important role of construct operationalization when assessing people’s risk preferences: self-report measures picked up various associations with the proposed correlates, but behavioral measures largely failed to do so. In sum, we hope that our paper illustrates how exhaustive modeling analyses can provide conclusive answers to important theoretical issues in the behavioral sciences.

Norming the assessment of risk preference in the financial advisory process

Mon, 02 Dec 2019 12:16:11 +0100

Last week I was invited at the DIN (i.e., the German Institute for Standardization in Berlin) to contribute to the development of a new norm concerning the financial advisory process of bank customers. Specifically, the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MIFID) requires financial companies to collect and document a series of information concerning their clients – including their risk tolerance. Yet, these regulations do not specify how risk profiling ought to be carried out in practice. For this reason, an expert panel composed of different stakeholders (e.g., financial advisors, representatives of banks) currently works on establishing respective norms to standardize this process. I am glad that our scientific efforts can contribute to this discussion, and it was good to see that this panel has an open ear for the empirical insights we have recently published. I am excited to see how the norm will eventually be carved out!

No effect of birth order on adult risk taking

Mon, 03 Jun 2019 20:51:45 +0200

Research in personality psychology has explored many potential sources for the emergence of individual differences. One of them is birth order: according to Sulloway’s childhood niche hypothesis, later-borns develop a more pronounced propensity to take risks than firstborns, because "risk taking is a useful strategy in the quest to find an unoccupied niche". That is, in their competition for parents' limited resources, risk taking might be instrumental for later-borns to attract attention. But do such early experiences shape personality lastingly, potentially leading to stable adult differences in risk taking? We analyzed three datasets to address this question. First, we employed an exhaustive modeling approach (i.e., specification curve analysis) to analyze a large panel dataset with self-report data. Second, we analyzed a large set of self-report and behavioral measures from the Basel-Berlin Risk Study. Third, we analyzed historical data on explorers and revolutionaries. The analyses of our three-pronged approach speak with one voice and suggest a clear conclusion: there exists no effect of birther order on adult risk taking. For the full details, please see here.

How well do people's subjective risk perceptions track objective risks?

Fri, 15 Mar 2019 18:43:57 +0100

What drives people's risk perceptions in dynamic risk-taking environments? And how well do subjective risk perceptions in fact track the environments' objective risks? In a recently published paper, Oliver Schürmann, Tim Pleskac, and I have addressed these questions using the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART; for an online demo, click here). Specifically, using this task we aimed to map people's subjective perceptions of risks, as well as to examine how risk perceptions potentially change with growing task experience. We observed two main results: First, participants' subjective beliefs that a balloon will explode on a given stage of inflation (i.e., the conditional probability of an explosion when pumping once more) dramatically differed from the task's actual stochastic structure (i.e., shown by the dashed line in the figure below) – thus providing an explanation why people typically appear risk-averse in this task. Second, whether the first balloon exploded early (green lines) or late (red lines) had a substantial impact on participants' risk perceptions. Although these differences vanished by the end of the task, participants' risk-taking behaviors across the 30 trials still differed substantially. In sum, these findings highlight the important role of early experiences in the formation of subjective risk perceptions, and have direct implications for valid task designs in future developments of risk-taking measures. Read more.

Research stay at Princeton University

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 18:19:52 +0200

At the beginning of October I moved to the USA for a research stay at the Behavioral Science for Policy Lab at Princeton University. During the next few months, I will work together with Elke Weber to address questions regarding the generalizability of the construct risk preference (and potentially other personality dimensions) to sustainability- and energy-related decision making, as well as regarding the basic cognitive processes driving risk perceptions in these domains. Princeton has a thriving academic life, with numerous interesting talks at the various departments. Last but not least, the campus itself is phenomenal, including many beautiful libraries and quiet spaces to get a lot of work done!

New paper on surrogate decision making published in BMJ Open

Thu, 02 Aug 2018 11:53:24 +0200

If a patient is no longer able to express his or her treatment preferences (e.g., due to an accident or due to dementia), a surrogate may need to make medical decisions on behalf of this person. Such "surrogate decisions" are among the most difficult decisions under uncertainty that we have to make in our lives. So how to best make surrogate decisions?

In our previous research (Frey, Hertwig, & Herzog, 2014) we found that different approaches to surrogate decision making (e.g., a patient-designated surrogate; all family members rendering a joint decision; etc.) do not differ substantially in terms of their "predictive accuracy". Therefore, in our most recent paper published in the British Medical Journal: Open (Frey, Herzog, & Hertwig, 2018) we investigated people's "procedural preferences". Specifically, how strongly do people endorse different approaches to surrogate decision making?

The figure above shows the results from two representative population surveys that we conducted in Germany and Switzerland. People reported their procedural preferences for six different approaches to surrogate decision making, either from the perspective of an incapacitated patient or from the perspective of a potential surrogate for an incapacitated family member. Fortunately, the procedural preferences of potential "patients" and "surrogates" were mostly aligned. Yet, endorsements for the different approaches varied markedly (see figure). These findings may have direct implications for clinicians and policy makers, as current legislations only provide for individualistic approaches. You can learn more about this topic under my research section on medical decision making and by downloading our paper with the detailed results.

SNSF Ambizione project started

Tue, 16 Jan 2018 15:42:53 +0100

Together with my new Ph.D. student Markus Steiner, I have started to work on an SNSF Ambizione project entitled "Mapping the ecology of risk taking: A test of the generalizability of the construct risk preference to real-life behaviors." During the next four years we will run a series of lab studies and ecological assessments to i) address open issues regarding the measurement of risk preference, ii) to better understand the ecology of risk-taking behaviors in the modern society, and iii) to evaluate the predictive validity of different measures of risk preference for important life outcomes. You can learn more about this project in my research section.