The target article sought to question the common belief that our decisions are often biased by unconscious influences. While many commentators offer additional support for this perspective, others question our theoretical assumptions, empirical evaluations, and methodological criteria. We rebut in particular the starting assumption that all decision making is unconscious, and that the onus should be on researchers to prove conscious influences. Further evidence is evaluated in relation to the core topics we reviewed (multiple-cue judgment, deliberation without attention, and decisions (...) under uncertainty), as well as priming effects. We reiterate a key conclusion from the target article, namely, that it now seems to be generally accepted that awareness should be operationally defined as reportable knowledge, and that such knowledge can only be evaluated by careful and thorough probing. We call for future research to pay heed to the different ways in which awareness can intervene in decision making (as identified in our lens model analysis) and to employ suitable methodology in the assessment of awareness, including the requirements that awareness assessment must be reliable, relevant, immediate, and sensitive. (shrink)

We critically survey explicit discussions of the narrativity of economic agents by economists. Narrativity broadly refers to the way humans construct and use stories, notably to define their personal identity. We borrow from debates outside of economics to provide the critical dimension of our survey. Most contributions on the narrativity of economic agents do not discuss one another. To establish communication, we suggest a structure of oppositions that characterize these contributions taken as a whole. These oppositions are notably characterized by (...) three tensions: in terms of methodological attitudes, of underlying theories of personal identity postulating the existence of a unique sense of self or not and of the normative implications of narrativity. The main goal is to clarify the structure of opposite positions within a more or less explicit debate about the identity of individuals in economics. (shrink)

Recently Jason Hanna has argued that a particular type of susceptibility to framing effects—namely, the tendency to reverse one’s choice between certain logically equivalent frames—invalidates actual tokens of consent. Here I argue that this claim is false: proneness to choice-reversal per se between the relevant types of frames does not invalidate consent.