中国科学院行为科学重点实验室知识库

The debate about whether making a risky choice is based on a weighting and adding process has a long history and is still unresolved. To address this long-standing controversy, we developed a comparative paradigm. Participants' eye movements in 2 risky choice tasks that required participants to choose between risky options in single-play and multiple-play conditions were separately compared with those in a baseline task in which participants naturally performed a deliberate calculation following a weighting and adding process. The results showed that, when participants performed the multiple-play risky choice task, their eye movements were similar to those in the baseline task, suggesting that participants may use a weighting and adding process to make risky choices in multiple-play conditions. In contrast, participants' eye movements were different in the single-play risky choice task versus the baseline task, suggesting that participants were not likely to use a weighting and adding process to make risky choices in single-play conditions and were more likely to use a heuristic process. We concluded that an expectation-based index for predicting risk preferences is applicable in multiple-play conditions but not in single-play conditions, implying the need to improve current theories that postulate the use of a heuristic process.

This research was partially supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program, No. 2011CB711000), the Knowledge Innovation Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. KSCX2-EW-J-8), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 70871110; 31170976), and the Graduate Science and Social Practice Special Funding Innovative Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. We benefited from discussions with Zhu-Yuan Liang and Cheng-Ming Jiang. We thank Rhoda E. Perozzi and Edmund F. Perozzi for English and content editing assistance.