New paper – Emotional coherence in decisions

Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour has just published the third paper from my PhD thesis. We co-wrote this with my two wonderful PhD supervisors, Dr. Quoc Vuong and Professor Elisabetta Cherchi, and the publishing process was surprisingly smooth.

Transport behaviour models have a unique origin. They are usually associated with transport engineering, a discipline covering transport infrastructure and operations, including aspects like highway design, city planning, traffic lights programming, bus scheduling, among many others. Individual decision-making comes to the fore in this only in a derivative way: we need to predict the demand for these projects, and therefore we need to understand how individuals make their choices.

One of the interesting problems studied by transport behaviour models is precisely trying to understand what drives us to certain decisions. The link with social psychology is not clear at first but becomes straightforward when focusing on this aspect. If we need to decide how to get to work tomorrow and have the luxury of more than one available option, we will need to consider several factors before deciding. Aspects such as which alternative is cheaper and faster are likely to be relevant, but there will be other, more internal factors, that sometimes might be overlooked. What do we think about each option? How do they make us feel? Do we think buses are a good way to contribute towards a cleaner environment with less pollution and congestion? Or do we just think they are late, slow, and dangerous? These attitudes and feelings can play a significant role in the decision, and they can be important for policy design. We have recently seen how designing transport policies that are not well understood can dangerously turn into a political nightmare.

There is a wide range of transport literature focusing on how to analyse these effects. In this newly published paper, we consider the decision of buying a car, a long-term decision that can be very costly for the household. In this scenario, we assume that decision-makers require a higher level of consideration for all the available alternatives, and the way they might help them satisfying their transport needs. Emotional coherence refers to reaching a decision that makes sense in terms of satisfying the most relevant needs (i.e. those that are deemed as important and those that elicit a positive emotional reaction) and leaving the less important ones behind.

It does make sense, doesn’t it? Our chosen alternative will never solve all our problems, and we will have to settle for the most relevant ones being taken care of, and forgetting about what we don’t really care about so much. If all we really care about is the price, it is likely that we will not be able to worry about the environment at the same time. If we have the luxury of paying a prime for a cleaner car, we will only do it if we are strongly aware of environmental issues.

We use the HOTCO model for these analyses. This was originally devised by Professor Paul Thagard, and has seldom been used in transport before. There are, however, some relevant previous experiences in the literature. As modellers, we mostly apply theories to understand our data. We must always be thankful for the pioneers who conceived them.

The very helpful reviewing process by the editor and reviewers led to a much better article compared with the original manuscript. The paper is open access and can be downloaded here.

Incredibly, there should still be more to come from my PhD thesis.