The Relevance of a Probabilistic Mindset in Risky Choice

Choice preferences can shift depending on whether outcome and probability information about the options are provided in a description or learned from the experience of sampling. We explored whether this description-experience “gap” could be explained as a difference in probabilistic mindset, that is, the explicit consideration of probability information in the former but not the latter. We replicated the gap but found little evidence to support our main hypothesis. Nevertheless, the data inspired a number of interesting proposals regarding experimental design, preference for probability information, sampling strategies, optimal presentation format, and the probability judgment probe.