Feedback-induced attitudinal changes in risk preferences

According to the normative standpoint, decision-making under risk, as it is traditionally instantiated in choice among fully described probabilistic lotteries, should not be affected by the disclosure of outcomes (feedback). Yet, contrary to this normative prescription, empirical studies have repeatedly reported that risk preferences are affected by immediate presentation of choice outcomes. The consensual and intuitive hypothesis is that feedback affects risk preferences via a learning process, whereby experienced outcomes alter the representation of subjective values. However, despite a relatively large body of published studies, available evidence does not allow robustly establishing the direction and the impact of feedback on key decision variables, namely risk propensity and expected value maximization, limiting our ability to establish a clear cognitive mechanism. Here, we ran seven behavioral experiments, tailored to address this gap and found that the presence of feedback consistently increases risk-taking, without any detectable impact on expected value maximization. Crucially, fine-grained analyses of the temporal dynamics of the effect of feedback directly falsified one of the currently most influential models of the role of experience in decisions under risk, and challenges any instantiation of the learning hypotheses. These results rather favor of an attitudinal effect, induced by the anticipation of feedback information. Epistemic curiosity and regret avoidance may drive this effect in partial and complete feedback conditions, respectively.