Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Warning labels can be considered as descriptions added to repeated decisions-from-experience. Limited researchso far has looked at the theoretical integration of decisions from descriptions and decisions from experience when the two areavailable concurrently. We explore how the presence and timing of such warning labels influence behaviour. We expected theprovision of warning labels to subsequently reduce risk taking, and that more prior experience before the appearance of suchlabels would lead to stronger habit formation and reduce their behavioural impact. Instead, we show how the appearance ofdescriptions warning against risks can have a perverse effect of increasing risk taking. And counter-intuitively, we also observethat the amount of previous experience prior to the appearance of descriptions does not impact behaviour. Briefly presentedwarning labels also have the same effect as constantly present ones. All of these findings have strong implications on the designof effective warning labels.