Developmental reversals in risky decision making: intelligence agents show larger decision biases than college students. Academic Article uri icon

Overview

abstract

  • Intelligence agents make risky decisions routinely, with serious consequences for national security. Although common sense and most theories imply that experienced intelligence professionals should be less prone to irrational inconsistencies than college students, we show the opposite. Moreover, the growth of experience-based intuition predicts this developmental reversal. We presented intelligence agents, college students, and postcollege adults with 30 risky-choice problems in gain and loss frames and then compared the three groups' decisions. The agents not only exhibited larger framing biases than the students, but also were more confident in their decisions. The postcollege adults (who were selected to be similar to the students) occupied an interesting middle ground, being generally as biased as the students (sometimes more biased) but less biased than the agents. An experimental manipulation testing an explanation for these effects, derived from fuzzy-trace theory, made the students look as biased as the agents. These results show that, although framing biases are irrational (because equivalent outcomes are treated differently), they are the ironical output of cognitively advanced mechanisms of meaning making.

publication date

  • October 30, 2013

Research

keywords

  • Decision Making
  • Risk-Taking
  • Students
  • United States Government Agencies

Identity

PubMed Central ID

  • PMC4076289

Scopus Document Identifier

  • 84891956216

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

  • 10.1177/0956797613497022

PubMed ID

  • 24171931

Additional Document Info

volume

  • 25

issue

  • 1