Nuno Busch at Psychonomics & SJDM

At this year's Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, which brought together almost 3000 scientists from 48 nations, Nuno gave a talk presenting his current project on loss aversion in decisions under risk. Loss aversion describes the phenomenon of seemingly overweighting monetary losses against equally high gains - this can be seen, for example, in the fact that many people tend to reject mixed lotteries despite positive expected value (such as the offer of a coin toss with an equal probability of winning EUR 120 or losing EUR 100). In his research, Nuno demonstrates that loss aversion can be influenced by the mode of how we learn about probability information. Using computational modeling, he shows that people tend to be more averse to monetary losses in risky choices when they have to base their decision on experience-based information because no summary descriptions about the characteristics of the decision options are available. The project is based on an extensive reanalysis of several heterogeneous data sets with a total of over 400 participants per experimental condition. In follow-up projects over the next few years, further data will be collected to enable even more robust conclusions about this novel description-experience gap and its underlying cognitive mechanisms.

A summary of the research project is also available on the poster presented at the SJDM conference.