On the Value of Experience-Based Decisions in Studying Constructs of Risk Taking

Does risk taking behavior reflect intrinsic or constructed preferences? This question is deeply rooted in psychology and decision science, but is still the subject of a lively debate. The current paper suggests that the degree of support for the idea of consistent constructs of risk taking might be contingent upon the methodology used in the experiment. Specifically, it addresses the properties of two main paradigms that have been used to study this question: decisions from description and decisions from experience (Hertwig et al., 2004). The first paradigm attends to “explicit risk taking” extracted from self-reports of risky behaviors and/or tasks in which subjects are asked to choose between descriptions of different outcomes and their associated probabilities. The second paradigm deals with “implicit risk taking.” It focuses on experiencebased tasks in which people make repeated choices between options without knowing their exact payoffs and probabilities. Instead, they have to learn them from experience. Interestingly, while description-based studies typically find risk taking to be mostly situation-specific, experience-based studies show evidence of consistent individual differences, and seem able to distinguish populations associated with risk taking behaviors from controls. The current paper will first overview some evidence showing the difference between the paradigms in suggesting stable constructs of risk, and then will address properties of these paradigms that may contribute to the discrepancies.