The future of decisions from experience: connecting real-world decision problems to cognitive processes

Abstract

In many important real-world decision domains, such as finance, the environment, and health, behavior is strongly influenced by experience. Renewed interest in studying this influence led to important advancements in the understanding of these decisions from experience (DfE) in the last 20 years. Building on this literature, in this perspective, we suggest ways the standard experimental design should be extended to better approach important real-world DfE. These extensions include among others the introduction of more complex choice situations, delayed feedback, and social interactions. Acting upon experiences in these richer and more complicated environments requires extensive cognitive processes to make a decision. Therefore, we argue for integrating cognitive processes more explicitly into experimental research in DfE. These cognitive processes include attention to and perception of numeric and non-numeric experiences, the influence of episodic and semantic memory, and the mental models involved in learning processes. Understanding these basic cognitive processes can advance the modeling, understanding and prediction of DfE in the laboratory and in the real world. We highlight the potential of experimental research in DfE for theory integration across the behavioral, decision, and cognitive sciences. Furthermore, this research could become an important method to better inform decision making and policy interventions.