The description-experience gap and its relation to instructional control: Do people rely more on their experience than in objective descriptions?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.19230/10.19230/jonnpr.1709Keywords:
description-experience gap, decision making, instructional controlAbstract
The present work aims to reveal contradictory results obtained on two different fields; particularly from two sudies conducted on the description-experience gap field showing that descriptions are neglected when prsonal experience is available (1,2), and several others conducted on the instructional control field getting y the opposite conclusion (3–8). To account for this contradiction, we hypothesized that participants from the studies of Jessup, Bishara and Busemeyer (1) and Lejarraga and Gonzalez (2) relied on their experience rather than on the descriptions because of the difficult, demanding nature of the probabilistic descriptions they faced. Enriched descriptions were created in our experiment to assess the contribution of this factor to the differential influence of the descriptions in choice behavior. Nonetheless, our hypothesis did not find support in the results and further research is needed to account for the aforementioned contradiction.
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