Time Pressure and Stress in Human Judgment and Decision Making

[This book considers] how time constraints, and the time pressure and time stress associated with these constraints, can affect the nature of human judgment and.
Table of contents

The neurobiological effects of stress on adolescent decision making, Neuroscience, , Some consequences of crisis which limit the viability of organizations, Administrative Science Quarterly, 8, Decision making under time pressure: A psychological analysis of conflict, choice, and commitment.

Psychological studies of policy decisions and fiascoes. Vigilant and hypervigilant decision making, Journal of Applied Psychology, 82, Decision Making Under Stress: Decision making under stress: Judgement and decision making under stress: An overview for emergency managers, International Journal of Emergency Management, 1 3 , The Effects of Acute Stress on Performance: Stress and thought processes, in L.

Theoretical and clinical aspects. The Hassled Decision Maker: Information input overload and psychopathology. American Journal of Psychiatry , Stress and consumer behavior, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 35 3 , Time pressure and stress as a factor during emergency egress, Safety Science, 38, 95— Stress and decision making: Adaptive strategy selection in decision Making, Journal of Experimental Psychology: When time is money: Some participants assessed CEs under time pressure, while others were given no time limits.

Results from two studies consistently demonstrated more elevated weighting functions for decision makers in the Time Pressure conditions when the gambles incorporated gains-only outcomes, suggesting a significant increase in the overall attractiveness of risk when making decisions under time pressure in a gain domain.

How can groups make good decisions?

A third study explored the effect of time pressure on risk attractiveness in a loss domain, and any such effect of time pressure on risk attractiveness appears to have been overshadowed by extreme risk seeking, which is consistent with the prior literature, at least in a qualitative sense.

Instead, participants who encountered gambles under time pressure failed to discriminate among probabilities as well as those without time pressure. In Experiment 1 participants estimated CEs for bets that had greater-than-even odds of success either under time pressure or under no time pressure. In Experiment 2, this trend was extended to a broader portion of the probability spectrum, validating that the overweighting of probabilities under time pressure pervades a wide range of the probability spectrum. The trend was also extended to designs that utilize hypothetical incentives rather than real monetary incentives.

Operating in the loss domain, Experiment 3 required participants to estimate the amount of money they were willing to pay to avoid the risk of hypothetical losses.

A ceiling effect of risk seeking may have inhibited the ability to observe an effect of time pressure on risk attractiveness in the presence of losses. These results suggest that time pressure has a straightforward effect in making individuals more risk seeking in the gain domain and impedes probability discriminability in the loss domain. Further, by modeling CEs in a formal prospect theory framework, we can assess decision making under time pressure more rigorously than had previously been done.

In modeling both probability weighting functions and value functions across groups, we demonstrate that time pressure leads to an increase in overall risk attractiveness across much of the probability spectrum when assessing potential gains. These results align well with previous research that purports increased risk taking for decisions under time pressure when overall expected value of prospects is positive Busemeyer, Specifically, when participants choose between certain and risky prospects involving potential gains, increases in time pressure lead to increases in risk taking in the form of greater acceptance of the risky prospect.

This effect was specifically found for decision making scenarios with positive expected value, while the opposite effect — greater risk aversion in the form of greater acceptance of the certain prospect — was found for scenarios with negative expected value. However, this support is attenuated by the absence of an observed effect of time pressure in the domain of losses. According to all accounts of probability discriminability, individuals can appreciate an increase in probability at very high and very low levels.

In the present context, participants under time pressure have less time available to evaluate probabilities. With a step function, sensitivity to probability changes occurs only near the endpoints, whereas the probabilities within the middle range are discriminated with less scrutiny. The step function may serve an adaptive purpose under some circumstances by simplifying the task when the environmental characteristics so dictate. Decision researchers have attempted to explain decision making under experienced stress and conflict using various theoretical and methodological approaches, including individual judgment, choice, and processing strategy.

The present findings provide a new approach to investigating time pressure effects on decision making, examining fluctuations in risk taking behavior, directly due to time pressure, through three psychologically relevant components of prospect theory: Previous time pressure research, which generally examined bet acceptance rates or confidence in bet acceptance, provided less rigorous assessment of choice behavior.

Time pressure research plays a central role in such settings, and the present findings provide a significant contribution to the ever-growing understanding of how humans navigate through everyday decision making in a variety of contexts.


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One limitation of the present research concerns the hypothetical nature of the gambles that participants encountered in Experiment 2. Taken as a whole, we followed the advice of Hertwig and Ortmann that both hypothetical stakes and real money incentives should be taken into account; real money incentives were utilized for Experiments 1 and 3, and we provided only hypothetical monetary incentives for Experiment 2. In that our group-level estimated parameters for both experiments are similar, the present results provide further evidence that performance in this type of task may be equivalent in the presence of both real and hypothetical monetary incentives.

A second limitation of this research concerns the nature of the matching procedure in this design. While Busemeyer and Ben Zur and Breznitz used direct choice procedures to elicit preferences from participants, the present study required participants to choose from among a variety of response options. As such, the present findings may be restricted to decisional scenarios in which possible preferences are made by choosing from an array of options. Due to time and space constraints, all experiments in the present study were conducted in a 3-workstation lab suite that allowed the researcher to run up to three participants at once.

This could have added social pressure to the intended time pressure. The prior literature on decision making under time pressure provided diverging accounts, with one line of research suggesting that time pressure leads to decreased risk-taking, and the other line suggesting that time pressure leads to an increase in risk-seeking for gains but a decrease in risk-seeking for losses. In three studies, we utilized a sophisticated, prospect theory-based computational model to investigate the effects of time pressure on risk-taking.

Here, time pressure led to increased risk attractiveness in a gain domain and decreased probability discriminability in a loss domain. These findings point to multiple cognitive processes involved in decision making that may be differentially influenced by time pressure. Furthermore, the factorial nature of the wagers 7 probabilities of a win crossed with 15 win-loss amounts allows for assessing how one aspect of decision behavior changes while holding 1 aspect of the wager constant e. This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript.


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    • The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Organ Behav Hum Decis Process. Author manuscript; available in PMC Jul 1. Young , a, 1 Adam S. Goodie , b Daniel B. We would like to acknowledge the contributions of our coauthor and colleague, Eric Wu, who passed away October, See other articles in PMC that cite the published article.

    Abstract The current research examines the effects of time pressure on decision behavior based on a prospect theory framework. The formulation used in PT for this set of prospects is: Open in a separate window. The Present Research Using these methods, we sought to rigorously test the two current theories of the impact of time pressure on decision making: Method Participants and materials Participants were volunteers 65 female who were recruited from the Research Pool of the Psychology Department at the University of Georgia in exchange for partial psychology course credit.

    Procedure For Phase 1, all participants answered questions about U. Which state has the higher population according to the U. Census bureau estimates for New Jersey Illinois The second question type asked participants to assess their confidence in each answer based on one of the following seven categories: Modeling We modeled subject specific parameters via mixed effects: Table 1 Sample sizes, means and standard errors for all conditions in Experiment 1.

    Method Participants and materials Eighty-five new undergraduate participants 53 female were recruited for Experiment 2 from the same population as Experiment 1.

    Time Pressure and Stress in Human Judgment and Decision Making

    Procedure In Phase 1, participants answered general knowledge questions and assessed their confidence in each answer. Which of the following six U. Results and Discussion We removed data from 1 participant from the Time Pressure-Knowledge condition prior to analysis due to internal inconsistency. Table 2 Sample sizes, means, and standard errors for all conditions in Experiment 2.

    An example of an Experiment 3 trial is below: For the gamble now under consideration: Results and Discussion As was found in Experiment 1, Time Pressure participants spent significantly less time 3. Table 3 Sample sizes, means, and standard errors for both conditions in Experiment 3. Increased attractiveness of risk for gains under time pressure These results align well with previous research that purports increased risk taking for decisions under time pressure when overall expected value of prospects is positive Busemeyer, Implications for time pressure research and applied settings Decision researchers have attempted to explain decision making under experienced stress and conflict using various theoretical and methodological approaches, including individual judgment, choice, and processing strategy.

    leondumoulin.nl: Time Pressure and Stress in Human Judgment and Decision Making: A.J. Maule, O. Svenson

    Limitations One limitation of the present research concerns the hypothetical nature of the gambles that participants encountered in Experiment 2. Conclusion The prior literature on decision making under time pressure provided diverging accounts, with one line of research suggesting that time pressure leads to decreased risk-taking, and the other line suggesting that time pressure leads to an increase in risk-seeking for gains but a decrease in risk-seeking for losses. Footnotes 1 As observed in Gonzalez and Wu and Tversky and Kahneman , the design of a study that examines decision behavior from a prospect theory framework requires a large number of observations in order to permit assessments of probability weighting and utility at both the group and individual level.

    Parameter-free elicitation of utility and probability weighting functions. A tractable method to measure utility and loss aversion under prospect theory. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty.

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    The effects of time pressure and completeness of information on decision making. Journal of Management Information Systems. The effect of time pressure on risky choice behavior. Artificial time constraints on the Iowa Gambling Task: The effects on behavioural performance and subjective experience. Uncovering heterogeneity in probability distortion.

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    Decision making under uncertainty: A comparison of simple scalability, fixed-sample, and sequential-sampling models. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. Survey of decision field theory. A dynamic-cognitive approach to decision making in an uncertain environment. Goal-based construction of preferences: Task goals and the prominence effect. Decision making under stress: Fox CR, Tversky A. A belief-based account of decision under uncertainty. Gonzalez R, Wu G. On the shape of the probability weighting function.

    The effects of control on betting: Paradoxical betting on items of high confidence with low value. Learning, Motivation, and Cognition. The skill element in decision making under uncertainty: This item is not eligible for international shipping. Click here to make a request to customer service. See questions and answers.

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