Richard Larrick
Richard P. Larrick is a decision researcher at Duke University and the first author of a 1990 study on whether people can be taught to reason about costs and benefits in ordinary life. They can. Training changed both how people reasoned and what they reported doing afterwards, and, more interestingly, it carried across from decisions about money to decisions about time and back again.
Who they are
Cost-benefit reasoning, as taught in that study, is the discipline of asking what the next hour or the next pound buys you from where you are standing now, rather than what you have already put in. The training was given both as an abstract rule and with worked examples from everyday situations.
Key papers
Larrick, R. P., Morgan, J. N., & Nisbett, R. E. (1990). "Teaching the use of cost-benefit reasoning in everyday life", Psychological Science, 1(6). First author. Abstract and reported design read. Training transferred in both directions between the money domain and the time domain.
Key ideas
This is one half of this site's line on what actually helps. Being told that a bias exists does not help. Being trained to run a different calculation does.
The other half is Carey Morewedge's 2015 training study, which still showed a benefit three months later. Against both sits Hal Arkes's tenth experiment, in which a university economics course made no measurable difference at all, including among students handed the questionnaire by their own economics lecturer weeks after the topic had been covered.
Where that leaves a reader. Knowing about the error is not a fix. Practising a different question, out loud, on real decisions, is closer to one. Changing the situation so the decision does not arise is closer still.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- Larrick, R. P., Morgan, J. N., & Nisbett, R. E. (1990). Psychological Science, 1(6).
- The Morewedge and Arkes results are set out in full on the sunk cost page.