Changing Choices: Psychological Relativity Theory (LUP Dissertaties)

The book contains a unifying theory on how the common object space is metrically transformed by individuals with different transformation parameters, due to their other previous experiences, to individually different psychological spaces for judgment on the one hand and preference on the other hand. Individual experiences also change generally, whereby the psychological spaces also change generally for each individual. The theory, therefore, is a psychological relativity theory of perception, judgment, preference, and choice dynamics. Since the geometry of the physical object space is known, its theory-derived, metric psychological transformations determine also the geometry of respectively the sensation, judgmental response, and preferential valence spaces for geometrically grounded, multidimensional scaling analyses of judgmental or preferential data. Their dimensional scales exhibit, as by-product of the theory, the dimensional invariance of physical measurement, which enables the meaningful formulation of quantitative psychology theory. The theory validity is not only sustained by the unification of verified domain theories, but also by verified predictions and verifying results of differently re-analysed data from existing research. Moreover, new applications are presented and in detail verified for individual risk behaviour in road traffic, collective crash risks of motorised transport, and environmental risks of industrial production and motorised transport. The last application contains scenario predictions that show no destructive world developments, in contrast to the politically influential 'doom' scenarios for growth of industrial production and motorised transport. This book is a must for all behavioural, economic, and social scientists with theoretical interest and some understanding of multidimensional data analyses. It integrates more than twenty theories on perception, judgment, preference, and