Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Our everyday decisions are driven by costs, risk, and reward.How do people take these factors into account when they pre-dict and explain the decisions of others? In a two-part exper-iment, we assessed people’s perceptions of other people’s riskpreferences, relative to their own. In Part 1, participants re-ported their relative preference between a guaranteed payoutand lotteries with various probabilities and payouts, and madepredictions about other people’s preferences. In Part 2, partic-ipants estimated the lottery payout that generated a given rela-tive preference between a guaranteed payout and a lottery, bothfor themselves and others. We found considerable individualvariability in how people perceive the risk preferences of oth-ers relative to their own, and consistency in people’s percep-tions across our two measures. Future directions include for-mal computational models and developmental studies of howwe think about our own and each other’s decision-making.