Decision making scenarios in expert and ordinary people beyond the Bounded Rationality Theory

According to the literature that affirms that decision making is not only a rational process, but includes also emotional variables, such as the linguistic frame, the affect heuristics, the regret, the social context, the personal involvement in purchasing and other contingencies related to money and goods (Legrenzi, Girotto & Johnson- Laird, 1993; Kahneman & Tversky, 2000; Zajonc, 1968; Bell, 1982), the aim of the present empirical study is to show the connection of the economic behaviour between experts and ordinary people; to figure out how decisionmakers with different economic expertise are similar in decision making in economic behaviour; and to analyse the heuristics that influence some economic choices games. According to the socio-psychological methods, the research followed two phases: 1) a first quantitative research (a on line questionnaire, N=370); 2) a second phase carry out by a Full Profile Conjoint Analysis, in which more than 200 subjects - experts (bank operators) and ordinary people (social operators) – answered some questions in 8 scenarios through an online questionnaire. The results of this research highlights the differences of the «bounded rationality» (Simon, 1982; Gigerenzer e Selten, 2002) between experts and ordinary people involved in some decision making scenarios through two online questionnaires: in particular, the first one to study the differences within the two groups and the second one to verify through a Full Profile Conjoint Analysis the weight of some important factors. The results show that decision-makers with different degrees of economic expertise, through similar mental processes, reach to different conclusions. The subjects are distinguished by the importance they attribute to the same factors of the decisionmaking scenario, by categorizing, prototypically or restrictively, options and by operating different strategies for using information. What seems distinguish an expert from an ordinary decision-maker is different cognitive skills and emotive heuristics used in way to organize knowledge.