Behavioral Social Neuroscience Seminar / Bray Theory Workshop

I present a model of judgment in a brain consisting of two systems, each of which has private information, but in which the second system has access to the output of the first system. Judgments will be influenced by irrelevant associations, an empirical regularity which has been described elsewhere as "heuristic," "inattentive," "coarse," or "similarity-based" reasoning. The model additionally predicts that, although decisions may be inconsistent, decision-makers will never choose dominated outcomes, a stylized fact of the experimental literature. The model has implications for interpreting laboratory choices, and for the economic analysis of persuasive advertising and policy nudges.