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effects. Although doctors learn about the same probabilities and descriptions of the side effects, their perspective is also shaped by experience: doctors have the direct experience of vaccinating patients and they are more likely to recognize the unlikelihood of the side effects. Due to the different ways in which doctors and patients learn about the side effects, there is potential disagreement on the necessity and safety of vaccination.
147:, people are allowed to respond to a number of prospects. Presumably, they form their own estimations for the probabilities of the outcomes through sampling. However, some studies rely on people making decisions for a small sample of prospects. Due to the small samples, people may not even experience the low probability event, and this might influence peoples’ underweighting of the rare events. However,
163:. The recency effect shows that greater weight or value is assigned to more recent events. Given that rare events are uncommon, the more common events are more likely to take recency and therefore be weighted more than rare events. The recency effect, then, may be responsible for the underweighting of rare events in decisions made from experience. Given that
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outcomes were more unlikely than they really were. The effect has been observed in studies involving repeated and small samples of choices. However, people tended to choose the riskier choice when deciding from experience for tasks that are framed in terms of gains, and this, too, is in contrast with decisions made from description.
79:, the decision weight of described prospects are considered differently depending on whether the prospects have a high or low probability and the nature of the outcomes. Specifically, people's decisions differ depending on whether the described prospects are framed as gains or losses, and whether the outcomes are sure or probable.
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is a basic tendency to avoid delayed outcomes: alternatives with positive rare events are on average advantageous only in the long term; while alternatives with negative rare events are on average disadvantageous in the long term. Hence, focusing on short term outcomes produces underweighting of rare
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are those where the two possible choices both result in a reduction of a certain resource. An outcome is said to be sure when its probability is absolutely certain, or very close to 1. A probable outcome is one that is comparably more unlikely than the sure outcome. For described prospects, people
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In both described and experienced choice tasks, the experimental task usually involves selecting between one of two possible choices that lead to certain outcomes. The outcome could be a gain or a loss and the probabilities of these outcomes vary. Of the two choices, one is probabilistically safer
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has been illustrated: the difference in opinions on vaccination between doctors and patients. Patients who learn about vaccination are usually exposed to only information regarding the probabilities of the side effects of the vaccines so they are likely to overweight the likelihood of these side
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towards gains for participants in the experience task is virtually identical to the level of risk-taking towards losses for participants in the description task. The same effect is observed for gains versus losses in experience and description tasks. There are a few explanations and factors that
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Contrary to the results obtained by prospect theory, people tended to underweight the probabilities of rare outcomes when they made decisions from experience. That is, they in general tended to choose the more probable outcome much more often than the rare outcomes; they behaved as if the rare
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when learning the outcomes and their probabilities. Biases for more salient memories, then, may be the reason for greater risk seeking in gains choices in experience-based studies. The assumption here is that a more improbable but greater reward may produce a more salient memory.
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As demonstrated above, decisions appear to be made very differently depending on whether choices are made from experience or description; that is, a description-experience gap has been demonstrated in decision making studies. The example of the
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settings, for instance, players can participate in a game with some level of understanding of the probabilities of the possible outcomes and what specifically the outcomes lead to. For example, players know that there are six sides to a
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events. Consistent with this notion, it has been found the increasing the short term temptation (e.g., by showing outcomes from all options; or foregone payoffs) increases the underweighting of rare events in decisions from experience
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for both choices as well as the probabilities of all the outcomes within each choice. Typically, feedback is not given after a choice is selected. That is, the participant is not shown what consequences their selections led to.
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Since experience-based studies include multiple trials, participants must learn about the outcomes of the available choices. The participants must base their decisions on previous outcomes, so they must therefore rely on
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than the other. The other choice, then, offers a comparably improbable outcome. The specific payoffs or outcomes of the choices, in terms of the magnitude of their potential gains and losses, varies from study to study.
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studies usually involving responding to a limited number of trials or only one trial, recency effects likely do not have as much of an influence on decision making in these studies or may even be entirely irrelevant.
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tend to show opposite forms of responding. In described prospects, people tend to overweight the extreme outcomes such that they expect these probabilities to be more likely than they really are. Whereas in
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studies involve making the exact probabilities known to the participant. Since the participants here are immediately made aware of the rareness of an event, they are unlikely to undersample rare events.
111:. In the natural environment, people's decisions must be made without a clear description of the probabilities of the alternatives. Instead, decisions must be made by drawing upon past experiences. In
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from these choices, and they can only learn the outcomes from feedback after making their choices. Participants can only estimate the probabilities of the outcomes based on experiencing the outcomes.
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Typically in natural settings, however, peoples’ awareness of the probabilities of certain outcomes and their prior experience cannot be separated when they make decisions that involve risk. In
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aptly demonstrates the nature of the gap. Recall that description-based prospects lead to the reflection effect: people are risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses. However,
221:, and that each side has a one in six chance of being rolled. However, a player's decisions in the game must also be influenced by his or her past experiences of playing the game.
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results in a reversal of the reflection effect such that people become risk seeking for gains and risk averse for losses. More specifically, the level of
115:, then, the outcomes and probabilities of the two possible choices are not initially presented to the participants. Instead, participants must
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201:, people tend to underweight the probability of the extreme outcomes and therefore judge them as being even less likely to occur.
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are those where much of the information regarding each choice is clearly stated. That is, the participant is shown the potential
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Barron G, Erev I (2003). "Small feedback-based decisions and their limited correspondence to description-based decisions".
95:. When the choices involve losses, people tend to assign a higher value to the more improbable outcome; this is called the
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tend to assign a higher value to sure or more probable outcomes when the choices involve gains; this is known as the
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Yechiam, E; Busemeyer, J (2006). "The effect of foregone payoffs on underweighting small probability events".
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Previous studies focusing on description-based prospects suffered from one drawback: the lack of
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Ludvig EA, Madan CR, Spetch ML (2014). "Extreme outcomes sway risky decisions from experience".
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Hogarth RM, Einhorn HJ (1992). "Order effects in belief updating: The belief-adjustment model".
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contribute to the gap; some of which will be discussed below.
28:. The gap refers to the observed differences in people's
420:"Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk"
320:Eysenck, Michael W.; Keane, Mark T. (2020-03-09).
686:An introduction to Prospect Theory (econport.com)
262:"The description-experience gap in risky choice"
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