Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent research has found a novel description-experience gap in loss aversion, such that the overweighting of losses relative to gains in risky choice is more pronounced when people make decisions based on experienced rather than on descriptive summary information. Here, we tested two possible mechanisms of this gap: a decision-by-sampling (DbS) account, according to which the relative distributions of gain and loss outcomes that the decision maker encounters differ between description and experience; and an optional stopping account, according to which the role of losses for stopping information search differs between description and experience. Neither of the two mechanisms explained the gap. Whereas in description the relative rank of losses was higher than that of gains, this pattern was not more pronounced in experience (in fact, it was even reversed)—at odds with a DbS account. Further, although individual differences in the tendency of search termination after encountering a loss (vs. a gain) showed some association with individual-level loss aversion, this mechanism did not mediate the description-experience gap in loss aversion. Our results clarify that two prominent mechanisms of preference construction are unlikely to contribute to the description-experience gap in loss aversion, clearing the view on potential contributions of alternative mechanisms (e.g., asymmetric learning of gains and losses).