A Taxonomy of State-Specific Psychological Mechanisms Underlying Decisions Under Risk and Uncertainty

What state-specific psychological mechanisms shape people's decisions under risk and uncertainty? Despite its importance in a complex and dynamic world, answering this question becomes increasingly difficult due to (i) a proliferation of theories in the behavioral sciences that propose potentially relevant mechanisms, (ii) the difficulty of assessing conceptual overlaps between proposed mechanisms, and (iii) a disconnect between verbal and formal theories. These challenges ultimately lead to conceptual clutter, jingle-jangle fallacies, and fragmentation—thus hindering cumulative scientific progress. In this article we aimed to address these issues. We reviewed 100 key theories of the behavioral sciences and applied a standardized procedure for identifying, classifying and integrating theoretically proposed mechanisms. This resulted in a taxonomy of presumably distinct, state-specific psychological mechanisms. Specifically, the taxonomy incorporates 83 mechanisms and 139 variants that were put forth by verbal or formal theories, and which can be grouped into seven major classes: (1) the subjective perception of choice attributes (e.g., an option's subjective value), (2) cognitive resources and control (e.g., memory processes), (3) social influence (e.g., social norms), (4) affect (e.g., feeling regret), (5) goals and motivation (e.g., needs), (6) time factors (e.g., time pressure), and (7) experience and knowledge. The proposed taxonomy and its accompanying online app (i.e., the mechanism explorer; https://explorer.cbdr-lab.net) may constitute a starting point for a more integrative psychological science, and can aid researchers of the behavioral sciences in navigating the complex theory space, thus supporting specific empirical investigations as well as future theory development.