Essays on Behavioral Decision Making: Implications for Organizations and Public Policy

Abstract

Decades of research in judgment and decision making have identified important social and emotional influences on human behavior. Yet these influences do not operate uniformly across situations: situational context can determine whether an effect emerges, the direction it takes, and its downstream consequences. This dissertation examines how contextual variation shapes social and emotional influences across three domains: emotion and health behavior, systematic thinking, and interpersonal communication. Across these domains, the findings demonstrate that accounting for context is essential for both theoretical precision and effective organizational and public policy applications. The first essay (“Same Emotion, Opposite Effects: The Role of Emotional Relevance in Health Decisions”) investigates the conditions under which sadness influences craving and consumption, challenging a foundational assumption in emotion and decision-making research: that specific emotions exert uniform effects across contexts. Across four preregistered experiments (N = 2,367), findings revealed that the same emotion can produce opposite behavioral effects depending on its relevance to the decision at hand. This work offers direct implications for the design of emotion-based health communication. The second essay (“Thinking It Through: A Context Sensitive Measure of Systematic Processing in Decision Making”) addresses a measurement gap in the judgment and decision making literature: existing measures of systematic processing primarily capture stable individual differences and are less sensitive to situational variation. Across five preregistered studies (N = 2,869), the Applying Decision Rules task is tested as a performance-based indicator sensitive to situational changes in cognitive load and incentives, while maintaining predictive validity for misinformation discernment even under cognitive load. This work advances both the measurement of systematic processing and the broader understanding of judgment and decision making in environments where cognitive resources are dynamically constrained. The third essay (“Beyond the Script: A Critical Evaluation of Conversational Receptiveness Training”) examines the scope, limits, and costs of training individuals to use language that signals openness to opposing views during disagreement. Across three preregistered experiments (N = 2,235), training and dispositional receptiveness emerged as independent predictors of the utilization of receptive language, with the effect of training approximately four times stronger. The interpersonal benefits of training – including higher perceptions of competence, trustworthiness, and desirability as a collaborator – were largely robust to training disclosure. However, disclosure introduced a specific interpersonal cost: third-party disclosure of training reliably imposed a sincerity penalty, whereas self-disclosure preserved the sincerity benefit of training. This work advances understanding of the scope, limits, and costs of conversational receptiveness training, with implications for how individuals and organizations should approach training transparency. Together, these essays make the case that accounting for situational context increases the precision of existing theoretical frameworks. This work identifies boundary conditions and measurement gaps across three domains of behavioral research, advancing the literature toward a more descriptively realistic model of human judgment and decision making. From a practical standpoint, precision matters especially when moving from theory to practice, as effective applications of behavioral science to organizational and policy decisions must account for when, for whom, and how established effects hold. This work contributes to the broader goal of improving behavioral decision making in organizational and public policy contexts.