How robust and how large is the description-experience gap? -- evidence from an eye-tracking research

Abstract recent experimental evidence suggests a description-experience (D-E) gap in decision making, where rare events are overweighted in decisions from description but underweighted in decisions from experience. However, the robustness of the D-E gap is controversial. The role of sampling error and extreme outcomes on the D-E gap is unclear. To investigate the robustness of the D-E gap, we conducted two eye-tracking experiments to examine the magnitude of the D-E gap when sampling error is excluded and how the extremity of outcomes affects the D-E gap subjects’ choices indicated controlling for sampling error, the D-E gap decreased but remained persistent. The fixation rate in description-based tasks was higher than their objective probabilities, but approximately equal to their objective probabilities in experience-based tasks. The impact of extreme outcomes was examined, and the results suggested the D-E gap decreases dramatically or even disappears in the presence of extreme values. Eye movement data suggested a higher fixation rate than its objective probability for extreme outcomes in experience-based tasks, indicating that when the rare event is extreme, it would be overweighted; this effect was not found in the non-extreme values. Our results indicate that the D-E gap is a robust effect, and that the effect is subject to a boundary, i.e., the extremity of the decision outcome.