Observational learning can debias judgment and decision making. One-shot observational learning-based training interventions (akin to “hot seating”) produce reductions in cognitive biases the laboratory (i.e., anchoring, representativeness, social projection), successfully teach a rule that increases advice taking weight on paradigm averaging principle). These improve judgment, learning, more t...

The acquisition of bidirectional action-effect associations plays a central role in the ability to intentionally control actions. Humans learn about actions not only through active experience, but also through observing the actions of others. In Experiment 1, we examined whether action-effect associations can be acquired by observational learning. To this end, participants observed how a model ...

Models of observational learning in settings of sequential choice have two key features. The first is that players make decisions by using Bayes’ rule to update their beliefs about payoffs from a common prior. The second is that each agent’s decision rule is common knowledge, so that subsequent players can draw inferences about unobserved private signals from observable actions. In this paper, ...

In many differentiated good markets like music, books, and movies, the choice set of available products is overwhelmingly large, with many new products flowing into the market each week. Consumers are not aware of or are poorly informed about many of the available products. They learn about products and their preferences for them from the search and purchasing decisions of other consumers and t...

Choosing optimal (or at least better) policies is an important problem in domains from medicine to education to finance and many others. One approach to this problem is through controlled experiments/trials but controlled experiments are expensive. Hence it is important to choose the best policies on the basis of observational data. This presents two difficult challenges: (i) missing counterfac...

The temporal co-occurrence of a novel word and a visual referent undoubtedly facilitates establishing the meaning of a word. It is less understood, however, how precisely learners can keep track of the frequencies of these co-occurrences across situations. Observational learning may rely on one or few highly informative exposures (propose-but-verify) or it may be driven by the collection of evi...

Objectives: The main aim of the present investigation was to examine how athletes use observational learning (OL) through the development of a valid and reliable questionnaire. A second purpose was to determine how the functions of OL that emerged compared to the functions of imagery that have already been determined [Paivio, A. (1985). Cognitive and motivational functions of imagery in human p...