Timid Forecasts and Bold Choices: Description-Experience Gap in the Wild

Abstract

Recent experimental research suggests that decision makers tend to overweight rare events when responding to a description of the possible outcomes, but tend to underweight low probability events in decisions from experience. The current paper examines whether in an experiential setting involving a potentially dangerous situation this implies that people are timid in their forecasts about what they would hypothetically do, and are bold in their actual experience. The participants were 256 visitors of a university building who either had to decide whether to pass below a scaffold or were provided with an “as if” question about this dilemma. In the experiential condition only 0.7% avoided the scaffold compared to 17% in the descriptive condition. In the latter condition participants also grossly over-estimated the danger of the scaffold falling. The findings indicate the robustness of the description experience gap in a field setting.