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Economic decisions usually involve high stakes, real consequences, and some degree of personal risk. This article explores the impact of motivational and volitional states on economic decision processes in an incentivized lottery choice task. We investigated the patterns of decision time, choice, information search, and pupil dilation dependent on an experimental manipulation of motivation and volition, that is, the deliberative and the implemental mindset. The results indicated that choice preferences in economic decisions were robust and remained unaffected by motivational and volitional states, but decision processes were notably impacted. Decision makers in a deliberative state of mind searched for information more extensively and made slower decisions than the baseline. The implemental mindset was associated with more attention paid to the probability attributes of the gambles relative to the deliberative mindset. Furthermore, we observed that gamble outcomes that entailed no win at all (i.e., zero outcomes) played an important role for information search. These outcomes were largely disregarded in terms of predecisional information search but elicited pupillary responses similar to very high outcome lotteries. These results inform the current debate about the zero effect in risky choice. We also discuss the potential of eye‐tracking studies of risky choice to dissolve ambiguities concerning the contributions of effort and arousal to modulating pupillary response. Implications for theoretical advances in decision research are discussed.

Based on the Dual-Process Diffusion Model, we tested three hypotheses about response times of errors and correct responses in probability judgments. We predicted that correct responses were (1) slower than errors in the case of conflicting decision processes but (2) faster than errors in the case of alignment; and that they were (3) slower in the case of conflict than in the case of alignment. A binary-choice experiment was conducted in which three types of decision problems elicited conflict or alignment of a deliberative decision process and a heuristic decision process. Consistent with the traditional dual-process architecture, the former captured computational-normative decision strategies and the latter described intuitive-affective aspects of decision making. The hypotheses (1) and (3) were supported, while no statistically significant evidence was found for (2). Implications for the generalisability of the Dual-Process Diffusion Model to slow probability judgments are discussed.

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