Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

What do people learn from experience with repeated decisions?Is it merely implicit behavioral tendencies? If so, wouldarticulating or summarizing what is learned change behavior?Online participants (N=126) experienced 100 trials of adecisions-from-experience problem with outcome feedback.Some participants then verbally summarized what they hadlearned and estimated the probability of the risky gain eitherfor themselves (Self condition) or for another hypotheticalplayer (Other condition); others did not summarize (Controlcondition). Finally, they faced 20 more decision trials.Verbalizing a social message to another person significantlyincreased sure choices (that is, decreased risk-taking) insubsequent decision making. In general, participantsunderestimated the probabilities of both certain and riskyprospects, and articulating a summary message (Self or Other)seemed to increase this conservatism.