Teaching the Use of Cost-Benefit Reasoning in Everyday Life
Larrick, Morgan and Nisbett tested whether the cost-benefit rules of economics transfer to ordinary life, and whether they can be taught. Two groups were examined: people with extensive formal training in the rules, and people with no training who were randomly assigned to receive a brief lesson in them. Both training histories affected how people reasoned and what they reported doing, across a range of everyday decisions unrelated to the examples used in teaching. Two conclusions follow. The rules are extremely general, in that people apply them across domains once they have them, and they are learnable, in that a short intervention makes a difference. That is a more optimistic finding than the debiasing literature usually produces, since most attempts to improve reasoning by instruction fail or stay tied to the examples used. This vault cites it alongside the later work on training people out of specific biases.
Larrick, Morgan and Nisbett tested whether the cost-benefit rules of economics transfer to ordinary life, and whether they can be taught. Two groups were examined: people with extensive formal training in the rules, and people with no training who were randomly assigned to receive a brief lesson in them. Both training histories affected how people reasoned and what they reported doing, across a range of everyday decisions unrelated to the examples used in teaching. Two conclusions follow. The rules are extremely general, in that people apply them across domains once they have them, and they are learnable, in that a short intervention makes a difference. That is a more optimistic finding than the debiasing literature usually produces, since most attempts to improve reasoning by instruction fail or stay tied to the examples used. This vault cites it alongside the later work on training people out of specific biases.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
Training on cost-benefit rules transferred between the money and time domains. Abstract only.
Where we use it
- Why You Finish the Series You Stopped Enjoying, Why We Act
Reliability of this reference
The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1990.tb00243.x
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.1990.tb00243.x