Comparative inspiration: From puzzles with pigeons to novel discoveries with humans in risky choice

Abstract

Both humans and non-human animals regularly encounter decisions involving risk and uncertainty. This paper provides an overview of our research program examining risky decisions in which the odds and outcomes are learned through experience in people and pigeons. We summarize the results of 15 experiments across 8 publications, with a total of over 1300 participants. We highlight 4 key findings from this research: (1) people choose differently when the odds and outcomes are learned through experience compared to when they are described; (2) when making decisions from experience, people overweight values at or near the ends of the distribution of experienced values (i.e., the best and the worst, termed the "extreme-outcome rule"), which leads to more risk seeking for relative gains than for relative losses; (3) people show biases in self-reported memory whereby they are more likely to report an extreme outcome than an equally-often experienced non-extreme outcome, and they judge these extreme outcomes as having occurred more often; and (4) under certain circumstances pigeons show similar patterns of risky choice as humans, but the underlying processes may not be identical. This line of research has stimulated other research in the field of judgement and decision making, illustrating how investigations from a comparative perspective can lead in surprising directions.

Keywords: Comparative cognition; Decisions from experience; Extreme-outcome rule; Memory biases; Risky choice; Risky decision making.