Proximity to Task: A Prerequisite for Two Cognitive Biases

Abstract

Abstract Proximity to an event or task can alter one’s perception or judgment in many situations. We extended such findings to two cognitive biases in decision making and showed that one’s psychological proximity to the task was a prerequisite that had to be met before the illusion of control and the framing effect could arise. In Experiment 1, a coin-tossing task was used to create an illusion of control. Unlike the participants who reported their guesses to the experimenter directly, participants who reported their guesses while watching themselves engage in the task on a monitor, and were thus distanced to some extent from the task, did not show an illusion of control. In Experiment 2, the Asian disease decision-making task was used to show a framing effect. The same distancing procedure as in Experiment 1 removed the participants’ wording-based risk preference bias. Thus, the proximity prerequisite was shown to extend also to the framing effect. We discuss the findings within the framework of explanations offered for these two biases and suggest that a prerequisite of proximity may generalize to other decision-making biases.