Would you Buy a South-Pointing Compass? People Underestimate the Informativeness of Negatively Correlated Preferences
Abstract
If you had to decide about which movie to watch, which product to purchase, or which policy to vote for, would you rather ask a friend you systematically disagree with, or one you often agree with? Our experiments show that people undervalue “south-pointing compasses”: Sources of information that have a strong negative correlation with their own preferences. Instead, they prefer to rely on information that is weakly correlated with their own preferences, and therefore less informative. We show that this bias is robust to different paradigms (decisions from description and description from experience), different decision domains (political choices, movie choices, and abstract stimuli), and different tasks (accept and reject).
Zoom link: https://eur-nl.zoom.us/j/91450803072?pwd=VHExQjNzL1lqTURsaHQvUS9mdFFDQT09
Meeting ID: 914 5080 3072
