Decision Processes and Decision Trees in Gambles and More Natural Decision Tasks

Abstract

Most of the experimental results on the risky decision behavior of individuals have been in reference to simple gambles. An investigation was conducted to determine whether those results can be generalized to more natural situations; 32 participants were required to make choices in one gambling task and three natural-decision tasks. Half were trained and guided to draw a decision tree during the decision process. Behavior in the gambling tasks differed systematically from that in the natural-decision tasks, in the cognitive representation of the decision situation constructed by the decision maker and in the role of subjective probabilities in such a representation. The results call into question the general claim that the drawing of a decision tree aids decision making. Among other effects, participants who drew a decision tree introduced less background knowledge and more often biased the presented information than did those who did not draw a decision tree.