Open AccessFraming matters: Effects of framing on older adults’ exploratory decision-making.
Author(s) -
Jessica A. Cooper,
Nathaniel J. Blanco,
W. Todd Maddox
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
psychology and aging
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.468
H-Index - 151
eISSN - 1939-1498
pISSN - 0882-7974
DOI - 10.1037/pag0000146
Subject(s) - psychology , psycinfo , framing effect , framing (construction) , exploratory research , maximization , cognition , young adult , disadvantage , task (project management) , developmental psychology , forgetting , cognitive psychology , social psychology , computer science , medline , artificial intelligence , psychiatry , structural engineering , sociology , political science , persuasion , anthropology , law , engineering , management , economics
We examined framing effects on exploratory decision-making. In Experiment 1 we tested older and younger adults in two decision-making tasks separated by one week, finding that older adults' decision-making performance was preserved when maximizing gains, but it declined when minimizing losses. Computational modeling indicates that younger adults in both conditions, and older adults in gains maximization, utilized a decreasing threshold strategy (which is optimal), but older adults in losses were better fit by a fixed-probability model of exploration. In Experiment 2 we examined within-subject behavior in older and younger adults in the same exploratory decision-making task, but without a time separation between tasks. We replicated the older adult disadvantage in loss minimization from Experiment 1 and found that the older adult deficit was significantly reduced when the loss-minimization task immediately followed the gains-maximization task. We conclude that older adults' performance in exploratory decision-making is hindered when framed as loss minimization, but that this deficit is attenuated when older adults can first develop a strategy in a gains-framed task. (PsycINFO Database Record