Risky Choice; Cognitive Heuristics; Decisions from Experience; heuristics; sampling
Mata R, Hau R, Papassotiropoulos A, Hertwig R (2012), DAT1 polymorphism is associated with risk taking in the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), in
PLoS ONE, 7(6), e39135.
Lejarraga T, Hertwig R, Gonzalez C (2012), How choice ecology influences search in decisions from experience, in
Cognition, 124(3), 334-342.
Hertwig Ralph (2012), The psychology and rationality of decisions from experience, in
Synthese, 187, 269-292.
Hills TT, Hertwig R (2012), Two distinct exploratory behaviors in decisions from experience: Comment on Gonzalez and Dutt (2011), in
Psychological Review, 119(4), 888-892.
Mata R, Josef AK, Samanez-Larkin GR, Hertwig R (2011), Age differences in risky choice: a meta-analysis, in
DECISION MAKING OVER THE LIFE SPAN, 1235, 18-29.
Hertwig Ralph, Gigerenzer Gerd (2011), Behavioral inconsistencies do not imply inconsistent strategies., in
Frontiers in psychology, 2, 292-292.
Hills T, Hertwig R (2011), Why Aren't We Smarter Already: Evolutionary Trade-Offs and Cognitive Enhancements, in
CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE, 20(6), 373-377.
Hills Thomas T, Hertwig Ralph (2010), Information search in decisions from experience. Do our patterns of sampling foreshadow our decisions?, in
Psychological science, 21(12), 1787-92.
Hertwig R., Decisions from experience., in Keren G. (ed.), Blackwell, Oxford, UK..
Hertwig Ralph, Frey Renato, The challenge of the description-experience gap to the communication of risks., in Cho H. (ed.), SAGE, Thousand Oaks, CA..
Most investigations into how people make decisions under risk have employed a simple experimental drosophila: monetary gambles involving explicitly stated outcomes and probabilities. People’s choices under risk are thus typically decisions from descriptions. This research has led to the discovery of systematic patterns of preferences and a number of sophisticated descriptive theories, for example cumulative prospect theory, to account for them. The four-fold pattern of risk summarizes the observation that participants in decisions from description are risk averse for large-probability gains and small-probability losses. Interestingly, this is not always borne out in people’s real-life decision making. Governments, for example, have found it difficult to encourage their citizens to take precautions (e.g., purchasing insurances) against small-probability losses such as floods or volcano eruptions (Hertwig, in press).One explanation for this discrepancy between theory and practice is that in many of their real-world decisions people do not get to enjoy the convenience of described outcomes and probabilities. For instance, when they decide whether to back up their computer’s hard drive, cross a busy street (Hoffrage, Weber, Hertwig & Chase, 2003), or go out on a date, they make such decisions either in the void of complete ignorance or in the twilight of their own often limited experience with their real-world options. In the latter case, they make decisions from experience. Recent research has consistently documented that decisions from experience and decisions from description can lead to substantially different choices. This description-experience gap has important implications for our understanding of human decision-making processes as well as for public policy, as many choices we make in everyday life are decisions from experience.With this research proposal we pursue three major goals: We continue are work on the cognitive strategies that people employ to make decisions from experience and decisions from description. Second, we investigate the role of memory and, relatedly, age in decisions from experience. Finally, we connect research on decisions from experience with other fields, in particular, research on decisions in dynamically changing environments.