The Description-Experience Gap in Cooperation

İşler, Ozan; Kopsacheilis, Orestis; Dolder, Dennie van

doi:10.2139/ssrn.4256844

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…This finding dovetails with the idea that in complex or partly ambiguous situations, such as those in which people learn from individual experiences, people can interpret information self-servingly and behave less prosocially ( Dana et al, 2007 ; Olschewski et al, 2019 ) compared with decisions under certainty ( Engel, 2011 ) or in DfD ( Polman & Wu, 2020 ). Relatedly, participants in the prisoner’s dilemma are less responsive to information about the cooperation rates of their fellow participants when that information is presented through experiences rather than through descriptions ( Isler et al, 2022 ).…”

Section: Toward a Better Understanding Of Cognitive Processes In Dfementioning

confidence: 99%

The Future of Decisions From Experience: Connecting Real-World Decision Problems to Cognitive Processes

Olschewski

Luckman

Mason

et al. 2023

Perspect Psychol Sci

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In many important real-world decision domains, such as finance, the environment, and health, behavior is strongly influenced by experience. Renewed interest in studying this influence led to important advancements in the understanding of these decisions from experience (DfE) in the last 20 years. Building on this literature, we suggest ways the standard experimental design should be extended to better approach important real-world DfE. These extensions include, for example, introducing more complex choice situations, delaying feedback, and including social interactions. When acting upon experiences in these richer and more complicated environments, extensive cognitive processes go into making a decision. Therefore, we argue for integrating cognitive processes more explicitly into experimental research in DfE. These cognitive processes include attention to and perception of numeric and nonnumeric experiences, the influence of episodic and semantic memory, and the mental models involved in learning processes. Understanding these basic cognitive processes can advance the modeling, understanding and prediction of DfE in the laboratory and in the real world. We highlight the potential of experimental research in DfE for theory integration across the behavioral, decision, and cognitive sciences. Furthermore, this research could lead to new methodology that better informs decision-making and policy interventions.

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