Toward an attentional turn in research on risky choice

Abstract

For a long time, the dominant approach to studying decision making under risk has been to use psychoeconomic functions to account for how behavior deviates from the normative prescriptions of expected value maximization. While this neo-Bernoullian tradition has advanced the field in various ways—such as identifying seminal phenomena of risky choice (e.g., Allais paradox, fourfold pattern)—it contains a major shortcoming: Psychoeconomic curves are mute with regard to the cognitive mechanisms underlying risky choice. This neglect of the mechanisms both limits the explanatory value of neo-Bernoullian models and fails to provide guidance for designing effective interventions to improve decision making. Here we showcase a recent “attentional turn” in research on risk choice that elaborates how deviations from normative prescriptions can result from imbalances in attention allocation (rather than distortions in the representation or processing of probability and outcome information) and that thus promises to overcome the challenges of the neo-Bernoullian tradition. We argue that a comprehensive understanding of preference formation in risky choice must provide an account on a mechanistic level, and we delineate directions in which existing theories that rely on attentional processes may be extended to achieve this objective.

Heuristics in risky decision-making relate to preferential representation of information

“…Here, by identifying a link between outcomes that are represented during choice evaluation and behavioral signatures that reflect consideration of either reward or probability information, we provide evidence that this variation is related to the types of information prioritized during evaluation. These results add to recent research demonstrating that heuristics and biases in choice can be explained for by individual differences in the types of information considered during the decision process 12 – 18 and demonstrate a link between these processes and previous research demonstrating the role of outcome reactivation in choice evaluation 21 , 22 , 24 – 26 , 44 .…”

“…Recent research has pointed to selective consideration of information as a source of bias in decision making. This work has analyzed eye-tracking, mouse-tracking, and response-times to reveal that selective consideration of choice options, attributes, or other information can explain biases in value-based consumer choice 12,13 , multi-attribute choice 14 , social choice 15 , intertemporal choice 16 , and risky decisionmaking [17][18][19] . Here, we expand on this work by first providing two additional forms of evidence, based on neural decoding and behavioral priming, for a relationship between selective consideration of information and heuristic strategy in decision-making under risk.…”

Differential effects of prior outcomes and pauses on the speed and quality of risky choices

“…We speculate that pauses may exert its effects by influencing predecisional attentional dynamics. Recent work has shown that attention allocation during risky decision can be systematically linked to the choices that people make (Zilker & Pachur, 2022). More concretely, more balanced attention between different attributes (e.g., probability versus outcome information) or between different options (e.g., the LP option versus HP option here) is associated with less distortion of relevant choice DECISION SPEED AND QUALITY 40 information (Pachur et al, 2018;Zilker & Pachur, 2021, which in turn may enable people to make choices that are more aligned with EV.…”