Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The cognitive sciences have developed diverse tasks to measure the psychological processes during decision making. Here we focus on the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) and present a Bayesian meta-analysis synthesizing 1,665 effect sizes from 237 studies, thus comprising the data of 51,932 participants. We (i) take stock of the psychometric properties of the BART and (ii) quantify measurement flexibility and its impact on the task's psychometric properties. The BART showed satisfactory levels of test–retest reliability, yet it showed no to low known–groups validity, convergent validity, and external validity. We observed substantial measurement flexibility in the meta-analyzed studies, and specific study characteristics influenced the estimates of the task's psychometric properties.