General evaluability theory

A central question in psychology and economics is the determination of whether individuals react differently to different values of a cared-about attribute (e.g., different income levels, different gas prices, and different ambient temperatures). Building on and significantly extending our earlier work on preference reversals between joint and separate evaluations, we propose a gen-eral evaluability theory (GET) that specifies when people are value sensitive and when people mispredict their own or others’ value sensitivity. The GET can explain and unify many seemingly unrelated findings, ranging from duration neglect to affective forecasting errors and can generate many new research directions on topics ranging from temporal discounting to subjective well-being. Keywords evaluation mode, scope sensitivity, duration neglect, preference reversal, temporal discounting Will people be more willing to take a vacation if the airfare is $200 rather than $300? Will people have a more painful mem-ory of a surgery they underwent if the surgery lasted 2 hr rather than 1 hr? Will people work harder to earn $100 now or $120 a month from now? Will increasing the wealth of all improve th