Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Prior research on a possible role of regulatory focus orientation (Higgins, 1998) in financial decision-making has focusedon description-based tasks in which people receive explicit information about the characteristics of a decision problem apriori. However, relatively few real-world decisions resemble this type of laboratory task. Here, we examine how regu-latory focus orientation influences peoples decision behavior in an experience-based sampling paradigm (Hertwig et al.,2004), where people learn about the characteristics of a decision problem only through experience. We investigated ifindividuals chronic regulatory focus orientation (promotion-focus or prevention-focus) predicts process (sampling) andoutcomes (risky versus sure-thing choices) in a sampling paradigm task. Regulatory focus did not predict sampling behav-ior, nor the number of risky choices in the gain domain, but promotion focus orientation was correlated with the prevalenceof risky choices in the loss domain. Also, the big-5 personality trait of Openness was found to be related to number ofsampled outcomes for losses and to risky choices for gains.