Conflict and the stochastic-dominance principle of decision making

One of the key principles underlying rational models of decision making is the idea that the decision maker should never choose an action that is stochastically dominated by another action. In the study reported in this article, violations of stochastic dominance frequently occurred when the payoffs produced by two actions were negatively correlated (in conflict), bur no violations occurred when the payoffs were positively correlated (no conflict). This finding is contrary to model which assume that choice probability depends on the utility of each action, and the utility for an action depends solely on its own payoffs and probabilities. This article also reports, Sor the first time ever; the distribution of response rimes observed in a risky decision task. Both the violations of stochastic dominance and the response rime distruibutions are explained in terms of a dynamic theory of decision making called multiattribute decision field theory.