Research

Job Market Paper

• Borislow, S. H., & Hu, B., Narrow Bracketing: Evidence of Fee Neglect in Consumer Financial Decision-Making.

  "Consumers often must decide whether to pay an upfront fee to access greater but uncertain savings, as with wholesale clubs and fee-based travel services. Normatively, these decisions should not depend on whether the fee is already reflected in the stated savings or price estimate (e.g., “save $10, including a $5 fee”) or instead presented separately for consumers to account for themselves (e.g., “save $15, after paying a $5 fee”). Yet, across six incentivized studies, we find that consumers respond less favorably to fee-based uncertain options when the fee is incorporated into the displayed price or savings estimate compared to when it is presented separately, seemingly due to consumers insufficiently adjusting expected savings to account for a separately presented fee. Consistent with this, presenting price or savings estimates without the fee already incorporated increases perceived savings, which in turn increases selection of the fee-based uncertain option. We also examine the consequences of incorporating (versus separating) fees from displayed price and savings estimates in naturalistic search and advertising contexts. Together, our findings suggest that consumers insufficiently adjust for non-integrated upfront fees when assessing downstream uncertain savings, indicating that whether firms incorporate fees into displayed price or savings estimates can influence consumers’ decisions."

Publications

• Borislow, S. H., & Bartels, D. M. (2026). Between Confidence and Clarity: Objective and Subjective Expertise Differentially Predict Use of Alignable and Nonalignable Product Attributes. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 39(2), e70073. [Link]

  "Expertise is multifaceted. This project builds on the difference between subjective expertise (the confidence one holds in understanding a particular topic) and objective expertise (one's actual understanding of that topic), which can vary independently. We examine how subjective and objective expertise differentially relate to making better choices and seeking additional choice-relevant information. We hypothesized that some participants would be poorly calibrated in their ability to assess the value of more difficult-to-evaluate nonalignable attributes (in our setting, categorical attributes that are present or absent, such as torque-vectoring) compared with easier-to-evaluate alignable attributes (e.g., miles per gallon). We measure and manipulate subjective and objective expertise and find that participants with greater objective expertise (either naturally or through provided information) tend to base their choices on the values of nonalignable attributes and that this pattern is generally not predicted by measures of subjective expertise. High subjective expertise, instead, predicts a reduced willingness to seek additional information or take advice, as well as a greater willingness to pay for customized items, independent of objective expertise. These studies point to important differences between these facets of expertise, underscoring the importance of incorporating measures of each when examining the role of expertise in decision-making."
• Royzman, E. B., & Borislow, S. H. (2026). Conventions and morals—less distinct than you think: The unacknowledged role of effective consent. Mind & Language. [Link]

  "An influential account of moral judgment suggests there are two distinctive domains: that of conventional wrongs (a breach of social norms that can be changed/“modified” by an authority figure) and moral wrongs (that are viewed as breaching “natural law” and cannot be “modified”). However, pertinent tests conflate behaviors' content (for instance, theft vs. rudeness) with victims' proper consent. Initial studies suggest that this (victims' consent) is integral to the process whereby conventional wrongs are modified or de-wronged; we then demonstrate that this process also applies in the moral domain. The two “domains”, thus, appear far more alike than is claimed."
• Royzman, E. B., & Borislow, S. H. (2024). The puzzle of wrongless injustice: Reflections on Kürthy and Sousa. Cognition, 244, 105686. [Link]

  "The Database of Exemplars (DOE) account of moral cognition emerged in part to explain how wrongless harms could arise (Royzman & Borislow, 2022; henceforth, RB) in spite of being denied by most traditional models (Schein & Gray, 2018; Turiel, 1983; Shweder, 1997; Haidt, 2012). Herein, we defend this account against a set of results that have been claimed to disprove it (Kurthy & Sousa, this issue; henceforth, KS). We argue that DOE is in line with all the findings KS perceive as uniquely supportive of their own account (appraising an act as unjust engenders a judgment of wrong) while RB's findings (Royzman & Borislow, 2022, Studies 2 and 3) do challenge KS under varied conceptions of what it would take for an agent to be or appear unjust in his or her treatment of others, affirming that wrongless injustice is an empirical fact that one must strive to explain and that DOE helps us explain."
• Royzman, E. B., & Borislow, S. H. (2023). Disciplining the disciplined: Making sense of the gender gap that lies at the core of puritanical morals. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 46. [Link]

  Commentary: "Since suppression of sex has been and is at the core of puritanical morals, any account thereof would need to explain why said suppression of sex has been largely directed at the human female. Not only do the authors not account for this pattern, but their general model should predict the reverse—ie, greater suppression of the male libido."
• Royzman, E. B., & Borislow, S. H. (2022). The puzzle of wrongless harms: Some potential concerns for dyadic morality and related accounts. Cognition, 220, 104980. [Link]

  "There is wide-ranging consensus that harm or perceptions of harm play a significant role in judgments of moral wrongdoing. On one prominent view, the pattern that makes up the “essence” (Gray, Waytz, & Young, 2012) of acts of moral wrongdoing is “harm caused by an agent” (Schein, Goranson, & Gray, 2015, p. 983). According to Gray, Schein, and colleagues, events matching this pattern—a thinking/intentional agent inflicting some manner of harm (i.e., emotional/physical pain) upon a suffering patient—will be perceived as immoral. With this proposal in mind, we argue two basic points: (1) the current specification of the dyadic template would need to be further refined or “fortified” to withstand some obvious counter-examples; (2) this “fortified” formulation is still unfit to address the underlying concern: for any general pattern that is supposed to link perceptions of harm and wrongdoing, there are a number of cases (the “wrongless harms” of the title) that match the pattern quite well but are not viewed as immoral. We show this in four studies and one supplementary study. In our original study, we find, across six vignettes, that people may judge a behavior to be intended, self-serving, as well as foreseeably harmful and yet not judge it immoral. In our subsequent studies, we replicate these results with further checks and controls. With these findings in mind, we argue that moral cognition is far too complex and capricious to be reduced to a template."

Manuscripts in Prep / Under Review

• Borislow, S. H., & Kristin Donnelly (in prep). Bigger on the Upswing: Disparities in Estimating Numeric Increases vs. Decreases.

  "People constantly engage with numerical information—prices, times, temperatures, and more—and often must infer how those quantities change by adjusting up or down from known values. Across seven studies with online samples, we find that upward adjustments are consistently larger than downward ones. In Studies 1a-1c (Ns = 523, 577, 501), we observe that this pattern holds even when the conceptual meaning of the change opposes the required numeric adjustment (e.g., estimating a lower value for a pre-increase price). In Study 2a (N = 1066), we find that the asymmetry persists when using a common, unidirectional scale, while in Study 2b (N = 1044), we observe its attenuation with a symmetric, bidirectional scale. In Studies 3a-3b (Ns = 335, 425), we extend our findings to inferences about tiered and discount pricing. This asymmetry appears to reflect an intuitive tendency to move upward more than downward when reasoning about quantities."
• Borislow, S. H., & Goodwin, G. P. (in prep). Holding Experts to Excessive Epistemic Standards.

  "De Freitas and Johnson (2018) found that people are blamed for making suboptimal decisions, even under circumstances in which an optimal decision cannot reasonably be expected (De Freitas & Johnson, 2018). They termed this phenomenon “optimality bias,” and stated that it depended only on a reference to the relevant agents' choices, making no reference to their mental states. More precisely, they stated that suboptimal decisions are seen as more difficult to explain and are, therefore, also perceived to be more deserving of blame. However, what if the cause of this bias is instead an overassessment of the decision makers’ abilities (thus, making reference to their mental states)? In a series of three studies, we examined whether thinking that an agent “should have known better” predicts blame judgments better than thinking an explanation was needed for their suboptimal behavior, as well as whether this effect is only found when judging experts. From our first study, we discovered that the sentiment that an agent “should have known better” explains optimality bias better than De Freitas and Johnson’s proposed explanation. From our second study, we found evidence that expertise affects the potency of optimality bias, which again opposes De Freitas and Johnson's non-mentalistic explanation for the bias. And from our third study, we found evidence that eliminating an agent's potential to acquire greater knowledge impacted optimality bias—a finding which we replicated in a follow-up study—providing further support for our more mentalistic explanation for the bias."

Working Papers

• Borislow, S. H., & Moore, A. K., The Allure of Unfolding Outcomes: Contextual Preferences for Sequential (vs. Simultaneous) Reveals of Outcomes.

  Work in Progress :)
• Borislow, S. H., Herzog, N. R., Landy, J. F., & Levine, E., Judging Moral Policies: Decision-Makers Who Prioritize One Value Across Decisions, Rather Than Balancing Multiple Values, Are Seen as More Ethical.

  Work in Progress :)
• Wu, A., Aggarwal, P., McGill, A. L., and Borislow, S. H., Humanness In 3D: Revisiting Anthropomorphism.

  Work in Progress :)