Mechera-Ostrovsky Tehilla, Heinke Steven, Andraszewicz Sandra, Rieskamp Jörg
School of Psychology, University of New South Wales Sydney, Sydney, 2052, Australia.
Department of Psychology, Center for Economic Psychology, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2022 Oct;29(5):1719-1750. doi: 10.3758/s13423-021-02053-1. Epub 2022 Mar 30.
When making risky decisions, people should evaluate the consequences and the chances of the outcome occurring. We examine the risk-preference hypothesis, which states that people's cognitive abilities affect their evaluation of choice options and consequently their risk-taking behavior. We compared the risk-preference hypothesis against a parsimonious error hypothesis, which states that lower cognitive abilities increase decision errors. Increased decision errors can be misinterpreted as more risk-seeking behavior because in most risk-taking tasks, random choice behavior is often misclassified as risk-seeking behavior. We tested these two competing hypotheses against each other with a systematic literature review and a Bayesian meta-analysis summarizing the empirical correlations. Results based on 30 studies and 62 effect sizes revealed no credible association between cognitive abilities and risk aversion. Apparent correlations between cognitive abilities and risk aversion can be explained by biased risk-preference-elicitation tasks, where more errors are misinterpreted as specific risk preferences. In sum, the reported associations between cognitive abilities and risk preferences are spurious and mediated by a misinterpretation of erroneous choice behavior. This result also has general implications for any research area in which treatment effects, such as decreased cognitive attention or motivation, could increase decision errors and be misinterpreted as specific preference changes.
在做出风险决策时，人们应该评估后果以及结果发生的可能性。我们检验了风险偏好假说，该假说认为人们的认知能力会影响他们对选择选项的评估，进而影响他们的冒险行为。我们将风险偏好假说与一个简约的错误假说进行了比较，该错误假说认为较低的认知能力会增加决策错误。决策错误的增加可能会被误解为更多的冒险行为，因为在大多数冒险任务中，随机选择行为往往会被错误地归类为冒险行为。我们通过系统的文献综述和总结实证相关性的贝叶斯元分析，对这两个相互竞争的假说进行了相互检验。基于30项研究和62个效应量的结果显示，认知能力与风险厌恶之间没有可靠的关联。认知能力与风险厌恶之间明显的相关性可以通过有偏差的风险偏好诱导任务来解释，在这些任务中，更多的错误被误解为特定的风险偏好。总之，所报道的认知能力与风险偏好之间的关联是虚假的，并且是由对错误选择行为的误解所介导的。这一结果对于任何研究领域也具有普遍意义，在这些领域中，诸如认知注意力或动机下降等治疗效果可能会增加决策错误，并被误解为特定的偏好变化。
