Cognitive Load Increases Risk Aversion

We investigate how stable individuals’ risk attitudes are with respect to changes in cognitive load. In a laboratory experiment using pairwise lottery choice and a within-subject design, we show that putting subjects under load via a concurrent working-memory task significantly increases their risk aversion. Subjects made significantly faster choices under load. Regardless of load, they responded faster when choosing the less risky option in safe–risky trials, but not in risky–risky trials. We discuss how these findings relate to both dual-system and unitarysystem theories of decisionmaking.Weobserve that predictions of both recent dual-systemand drift–diffusion models of the decision-making process are confirmedby our data and argue for a convergence of these to-date separate strands of the literature.