Schulte-Mecklenbeck, M., & Kühberger, A. (2014). Out of sight – out of mind? Information acquisition patterns in risky choice framing. Polish Psychological Bulletin, 45, 21–28.
I teamed up with Anton Kühberger to write about one of our old, favorite topics: framing and process tracing …
Here is the abstract:
We investigate whether risky choice framing, i.e., the preference of a sure over an equivalent risky option when choosing among gains, and the reverse when choosing among losses, depends on redundancy and density of information available in a task. Redundancy, the saliency of missing information, and density, the description of options in one or multiple chunks, was manipulated in a matrix setup presented in MouselabWeb. On the choice level we found a framing effect only in setups with non-redundant information. On the process level outcomes attracted more acquisitions than probabilities, irrespective of redundancy. A dissociation between acquisition behavior and choice calls for a critical discussion of the limits of process-tracing measures for understanding and predicting choices in decision making tasks.