Laypeople’s and Researchers’ Perspectives on Real-Life Risky Choices: A Comparative Analysis of Overlaps and Discrepancies

To validate novel measurement instruments of people's decision making, the behavioral sciences often assess how frequently people make specific risky choices in real life. Yet, it remains unclear to what degree the risky choices tapped by such frequency measures reflect those choices people actually (have to) make. To address this issue, we compared 100 risky choices representing laypeople's perspective with 63 risky choices representing researchers' perspective. In study 1, we leveraged natural language processing calibrated on human judgments to gauge the similarity between choices of both perspectives and found that they only had 18% of the choices in common. In study 2, we further examined the implications of this mismatch in terms of the psychological mechanisms that the various choices may tap into by asking 825 participants to rate the perceived relevance of seven classes of psychological mechanisms to their decision making in these choices. Bayesian mixed effects models revealed credible differences between the two perspectives in five out of seven classes of mechanisms: For choices representing laypeople's perspective, choice attributes, time factors, experience and knowledge, and goals and motivation were on average perceived as more relevant, and social factors were perceived as less relevant, relative to the choices representing researchers' perspective. These findings suggest that decision-making paradigms calibrated on frequency measures from the researchers' perspective may have limited generalizability to the broad range of risky choices people face in their lives, underscoring the need to better understand the complexity of real-life decision making