Center for Adaptive Rationality.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2020 Sep;149(9):1644-1683. doi: 10.1037/xge0000741. Epub 2020 Feb 6.
The canonical conclusion from research on age differences in risky choice is that older adults are more risk averse than younger adults, at least in choices involving gains. Most of the evidence for this conclusion derives from studies that used a specific type of choice problem: choices between a safe and a risky option. However, safe and risky options differ not only in the degree of risk but also in the amount of information to be processed-that is, in their complexity. In both an online and a lab experiment, we demonstrate that differences in option complexity can be a key driver of age differences in risk attitude. When the complexity of the safe option is increased, older adults no longer seem more risk averse than younger adults (in gains). Using computational modeling, we test mechanisms that potentially underlie the effect of option complexity. The results show that participants are not simply averse to complexity, and that increasing the complexity of safe options does more than simply make responses more noisy. Rather, differences in option complexity affect the processing of attribute information: whereas the availability of a simple safe option is associated with the distortion of probability weighting and lower outcome sensitivity, these effects are attenuated when both options are more similar in complexity. We also dissociate these effects of option complexity from an effect of certainty. Our findings may also have implications for age differences in other decision phenomena (e.g., framing effect, loss aversion, immediacy effect). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
研究表明，在风险选择方面，老年人比年轻人更倾向于规避风险，至少在涉及收益的选择中是这样。这一结论的大部分证据来自于使用特定类型的选择问题的研究：在安全选项和风险选项之间进行选择。然而，安全选项和风险选项不仅在风险程度上有所不同，而且在需要处理的信息量（即复杂性）上也有所不同。在一项在线实验和一项实验室实验中，我们证明了选项复杂性的差异可能是风险态度年龄差异的关键驱动因素。当安全选项的复杂性增加时，老年人似乎不再比年轻人更规避风险（在收益方面）。使用计算模型，我们测试了潜在的潜在机制。结果表明，参与者并不是简单地厌恶复杂性，增加安全选项的复杂性并不仅仅是使反应更加嘈杂。相反，选项复杂性的差异会影响属性信息的处理：虽然简单安全选项的可用性与概率加权和较低结果敏感度的扭曲有关，但当两个选项在复杂性上相似时，这些影响会减弱。我们还将这些选项复杂性的影响与确定性的影响区分开来。我们的发现可能对其他决策现象（例如，框架效应、损失厌恶、即时效应）中的年龄差异也有影响。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2020 APA，保留所有权利）。
