Q&A with Dr. Elke Weber on query theory

CHIBE is hosting Elke U. Weber, PhD, MA, the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment and Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton, on April 25 for our next CHIBE Seminar Series.

Her talk is on: “Query theory: a process account of preference construction.” Find a brief description of the talk below, and register for the noon ET virtual event here.

Many psychologists and behavioral economists agree that many of our preferences are constructed, rather than innate or pre-computed and stored. Little research, however, has explored the implications that established facts about human attention and memory have when people marshal evidence for their decisions. This talk reviews query theory, a psychological process model of preference construction, and uses it to explain a range of phenomena in intertemporal choice, including our impatience when we are asked to delay consumption, applied to both clinical and normal populations. Behavioral data, meta-analyzed across multiple contexts and studies, provide support for query theory’s assumptions about the processes underlying intertemporal preference construction and attribute labeling.

CHIBE spoke with Dr. Weber ahead of the talk about her work.

What’s one take-away people should have after hearing your seminar?

That a better (social science) understanding of decision making and decision processes can help them with their own decisions at home and at work, in at least two ways: (a) by being able to better detect when others (who may not have their best interests in mind) are trying to frame a decision that favors a particular answer; and (b) to frame decisions for themselves and others in way to allow them to best achieve their goals.

How did you get interested in query theory?

There are at least 2 answers to this question.

The more scientific one says that my coauthor Eric Johnson and I were looking for a parsimonious way to explain a broad range of decision “anomalies,” applying the constructs of psychology that explain other behaviors, e.g., attention and memory.  

The more personal one says that my collaborator (who is also my husband) had a long period of hospitalization early in the 2000s, and that we used that time together during my hospital visits constructively to engage in high-level theorizing.

Why do people become more impatient when they are asked to delay consumption?

The answer to this is provided by query theory – from 4 of its assumptions that we have found validated multiple times:

• First the assumption that people decompose a question like “how impatient should I be in this decision?” into 2 component queries: “what argues for waiting to get more later” and “what argues for consuming the smaller reward now?”  

• Second the assumption that these queries are issued serially (one after the other) because we are finite information processors.  

• Third the assumption that it matters in which order these 2 questions are (implicitly and automatically) posed to our memory of past experiences with decisions like this, because the first query temporarily inhibits arguments for the second query, which then have a harder time being activated.  

• And finally the assumption that arguments for the default action get queried first, with immediate consumption being the default for delay decisions and later consumption being the default of acceleration decisions.