No abstract

Intelligence agents make risky decisions routinely, with serious consequences for national security. Although common sense and most theories imply that experienced intelligence professionals should be less prone to irrational inconsistencies than college students, we show the opposite. Moreover, the growth of experience-based intuition predicts this developmental reversal. We presented intelligence agents, college students, and postcollege adults with 30 risky-choice problems in gain and loss frames and then compared the three groups’ decisions. The agents not only exhibited larger framing biases than the students, but also were more confident in their decisions. The postcollege adults (who were selected to be similar to the students) occupied an interesting middle ground, being generally as biased as the students (sometimes more biased) but less biased than the agents. An experimental manipulation testing an explanation for these effects, derived from fuzzy-trace theory, made the students look as biased as the agents. These results show that, although framing biases are irrational (because equivalent outcomes are treated differently), they are the ironical output of cognitively advanced mechanisms of meaning making.

Theoretical accounts of risky choice framing effects assume that decision makers interpret framing options as extensionally equivalent, such that if 600 lives are at stake, saving 200 implies that 400 die. However, many scholars have argued that framing effects are caused, instead, by filling in pragmatically implied information. This linguistic ambiguity hypothesis is grounded in neo-Gricean pragmatics, information leakage, and schema theory. In two experiments, we conducted a critical test of the linguistic ambiguity hypothesis and its relation to framing. We controlled for this crucial implied information by disambiguating it using instructions and detailed examples, followed by multiple quizzes. After disambiguating missing information, we presented standard framing problems plus truncated versions, varying types of missing information. Truncations were also critical tests of prospect theory and fuzzy trace theory. Participants were not only college students, but also middle-aged adults (who showed similar results). Contrary to the ambiguity hypothesis, participants who interpreted missing information as complementary to stated information none the less showed robust framing effects. Although adding words like “at least” can change interpretations of framing information, this form of linguistic ambiguity is not necessary to observe risky choice framing effects.

Using fuzzy trace theory, we integrate behavioral and neuroscientific evidence in a process model of adolescent risky decision making that emphasizes gist and verbatim thinking, reward sensitivity, and cognitive control. Gist thinking, which increases with age, facilitates recognition of danger and protects against unhealthy risk taking. Adolescents, who rely on verbatim thinking and thus analyze the expected value of a risk, are susceptible to unhealthy risk taking, particularly when reward magnitude is high. Signal in the nucleus accumbens of the brain is proportional to reward magnitude, which is more active in adolescents than in adults during the outcome phase of reward tasks.Personality traits and motivational factors, such as reward sensitivity and cognitive control, interact with gist and verbatim mental processes during risky decision making. Reward sensitivity magnifies the perceived magnitude of a reward, which interacts with the verbatim calculation of approximate expected value in order to encourage risk taking. However, gist-based thinking supplants magnitudesensitive verbatim thinking over time, and gist helps to cue values that guard against risk taking, facilitating cognitive control. Prefrontal cortex contributes to cognitive control through better appraisal of decision options and better inhibition with development, consistent with fuzzy trace theory and other neurobiological models.In sum, developmental differences in the brain are consistent with fuzzy trace theory: The anatomical theme of "less is more," reflecting pruning of gray matter