11:00 - 12:30
Parallel sessions 8
11:00 - 12:30
Room: HSZ - N2
Chair/s:
Jennifer March, Nuno Busch
What do I want to eat, which item do I want to purchase, and in which stocks should I invest? We make countless decisions every day, but our preferences are typically not stable: They often fluctuate strongly across different contexts and depend heavily on our internal states. This symposium aims to shed light on how decisions are affected across different contexts and states. The contribution by Tibor Stöffel will highlight nutrition as an important factor influencing decision-making. In his talk, he disentangles how different macro-nutritional compositions differentially affect the valuation system in the brain, leading to nutrition-dependent levels of loss aversion in risky choice. In the second talk, Nuno Busch reveals that loss aversion in risky decision-making can also be modulated by the degree of explicit information available about the choice options, and by how we learn about them (i.e., from description or from own experience). In the third talk, Jennifer March will present the mechanisms that give rise to contextual influences on food-related decision making. Specifically, she will demonstrate how subjective values of food options and subsequent choice are altered when presented in bundles. In the fourth talk, Barbara Oberbauer will reveal to what extent search patterns differ depending on the decision goal (i.e., choose the most preferred item vs assess the overall value). Moreover, she will show how the possibility of postponing a decision (i.e., choice deferral) affects search patterns and subsequent choice. The effects of goals on choice also play an important role in the final talk of the symposium, wherein Chih-Chung Ting will demonstrate that flexible decision-making relies on goal-dependent value representations. Together, the symposium combines a diverse range of methodologies, including nutritional manipulations, fMRI, eye-tracking, and state-of-the-art cognitive modelling, to illuminate the contextual nature of choice. The symposium features a multi-ethnic team of female and male speakers at different career stages from three universities across two countries offering rich perspectives and expertise in experimental psychology related to human decision-making. 
Submission 453
What Drives Loss Aversion Across Learning Contexts in Risky Choice?
SymposiumTalk-02
Presented by: Nuno Busch
Nuno BuschThorsten Pachur
Technical University of Munich, Germany
Loss aversion is one of the most prominent concepts in the study of decision-making under risk. Traditionally, previous research has investigated loss aversion in contexts where participants are aware of the payoff distributions of risky options between which they have to choose (i.e., decisions from description). But to what extent does loss aversion also emerge in situations in which the payoff distributions are initially unknown, and only learned from experiential sampling—that is, in decisions from experience? To investigate this question, we first conducted a meta-analysis, synthesizing and re-analyzing all existing datasets (total n > 430 per condition) that allow for a direct comparison of decisions from description and decisions from experience based on mixed gambles (i.e., where the options can lead to either a gain or a loss). Analyzing choices with cumulative prospect theory through a Bayesian multi-level modeling approach revealed substantial differences between learning modes, demonstrating that loss aversion is more pronounced in decisions made from experience compared to decisions made from description. Second, and building on these findings, we ran a large-scale study to address potential caveats of the meta-analysis (e.g., few mixed choice problems, small samples). Our results corroborate the novel and robust description-experience gap. In further analyses, we illuminate potential contributors to the gap in loss aversion between description and experiential paradigms.