Olschewski, et al. (2024).
Perspectives on psychological science:
a journal of the Association for Psychological Science,
19(1), 82–102.
Abstract
In many important real-world decision domains, such as finance, the environment, and health, behavior is strongly influenced by experience. Renewed interest in studying this influence led to important advancements in the understanding of these decisions from experience (DfE) in the last 20 years. Building on this literature, we suggest ways the standard experimental design should be extended to better approach important real-world DfE. These extensions include, for example, introducing more complex choice situations, delaying feedback, and including social interactions. When acting upon experiences in these richer and more complicated environments, extensive cognitive processes go into making a decision. Therefore, we argue for integrating cognitive processes more explicitly into experimental research in DfE. These cognitive processes include attention to and perception of numeric and nonnumeric experiences, the influence of episodic and semantic memory, and the mental models involved in learning processes. Understanding these basic cognitive processes can advance the modeling, understanding and prediction of DfE in the laboratory and in the real world. We highlight the potential of experimental research in DfE for theory integration across the behavioral, decision, and cognitive sciences. Furthermore, this research could lead to new methodology that better informs decision-making and policy interventions.
Here are some thoughts:
The article examines how people make choices based on experience rather than descriptions. Traditional research on decisions from experience (DfE) has relied on simplified experiments with immediate feedback, failing to capture real-world complexities such as delayed consequences, multiple options, and social influences.
The authors highlight the need to expand DfE research to better reflect real-world decision-making in finance, health, and environmental policy. Investment decisions are often shaped by personal experience rather than statistical summaries, climate-related choices involve long-term uncertainty, and healthcare decisions rely on non-numeric experiences such as pain or side effects.
To address these gaps, the article emphasizes incorporating cognitive processes—attention, perception, memory, and learning—into DfE studies. The authors propose more complex experimental designs, including delayed feedback and social interactions, to better understand how people process experience-based information.
Ultimately, they advocate for an interdisciplinary approach linking DfE research with cognitive science, neuroscience, and AI. By doing so, researchers can improve decision-making models and inform policies that help people make better choices in uncertain environments.
