Affect guides decision making in several ways. Previous research has examined how incidental affect (i.e., mood) and anticipatory affect of the possible outcomes of an option impact preference. By contrast, little is known about the effects of affective associations with the options acquired via evaluative conditioning. Evaluative conditioning influences people's attitudes; but does it also influence actual decision behavior? Here we test the effects of evaluative conditioning on choice and search in experience-based risky choice. Participants first learned to associate initially affectively neutral visual stimuli with positively or negatively valenced pictures. In a subsequent risky choice task, the stimuli were used as labels for monetary lotteries and participants chose between pairs of lotteries. In Experiments 1 and 2 participants acquired information about the lotteries' payoff distributions by drawing samples from them before indicating their choice based on the samples they recalled. The results showed two distinct effects of evaluative conditioning on behavior. First, participants drew larger samples from a lottery the more positively valenced its label was relative to the other lottery's label. Second, computational modeling of participants' choices indicated that positively valenced labels biased preference for a lottery irrespective of the information that the participants sampled about the lotteries. This biasing effect of affect on choice disappeared in decisions from description (Experiment 3), where information about the payoff distribution is openly displayed and does not have to be retrieved from memory. Evaluative conditioning may thus sway preference only when other relevant information is costly.