Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Throughout lifetimes, individuals make decisions involving gains and losses. Loss aversion refers to the psychological tendency to overvalue losses over equivalent gains from a reference point, a concept essential for decision-making. The available literature on age and loss aversion yields mixed results. Hence, we conducted a meta-analysis by combining individual data sets. We performed a study-level random-effects meta-analysis (N = 20 data sets) and an individual-participant-level (IPD) meta-analysis, in a subset of data sets (n=1,565; 5 data sets) to model the relationship. We found a small and insignificant linear association between age and loss aversion. The individual-participant-level meta-analysis revealed a small effect characterized by a U-shaped relationship, with a decline in middle age. Incidentally, sex emerged as an explanatory variable for explaining heterogeneity in loss aversion. Overall, the meta-analysis motivates further empirical investigations on age-related changes in decision making across the lifespan.