The Description-Experience gap in individual risky decisions and beyond

In the first part of the talk, I revisit the widely studied description-experience (DE) gap in individual choice via an experiment investigating the causal role of sampling bias, ambiguity sensitivity, and aspects of cognition. Using a model-free approach, we elicit a DE gap similar in direction and size to the literature’s average and find that when each factor is considered in isolation, sampling bias is the only significant driver of the gap. Model-mediated analysis reveals that rare events are generally overweighted and suggests the presence of a smaller DE gap even in the absence of sampling bias.

In the second part of the talk, I discuss an investigation of the DE gap in the domain of social uncertainty, where individuals learn about the cooperativeness of another agent either through description of through experience.  Contrary to expectations from the individual uncertainty literature, we find that conditional cooperators are more sensitive to rare, cooperative, events in experience relative to description. We illustrate how stronger priors under social than under individual uncertainty can account for this disparity.

In the third and last part of the talk, I will briefly mention an extension of the Description vs. Experience framework into the domain of meta-science that I have recently started working on.

Two papers are relevant to the talk:

• First part of the talk: Cubitt, R., Kopsacheilis, O. & Starmer, C. An inquiry into the nature and causes of the Description - Experience gap. J Risk Uncertain 65, 105–137 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11166-022-09393-w
• Second part of the talk: Kopsacheilis, Orestis and van Dolder, Dennie and Isler, Ozan, Conditional Cooperation under Uncertainty: The Social Description-Experience Gap (May 23, 2024).http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4256844

The nEuro-economics seminar is a monthly seminar series organised by the HRL team. We invite Europe-based early career researchers to speak about their research at the crossroads of neuroscience, psychology and economics.