The Affect Gap in Risky Choice is Equally Large in Older and Younger Adults

While risky decision making is often studied using monetary outcomes, many decisions in the real-world elicit higher levels of affect (e.g., medical decisions). Research suggests that choices systematically diverge between such more “affect-rich” decisions and more typical “affect-poor” monetary decisions, leading to an ‘affect gap’ in risky choice. However, it is unknown to what extent this pattern holds in older adults, who make some of the most consequential medical and financial decisions among the population and have been shown to process affect distinctly. Thus, in the present study, we examined age-related differences in the affect gap of risky choice. We compared decision quality and risk attitude between affect-rich (medical side effects) and structurally identical and economically matched affect-poor (monetary losses) decisions in 100 older (aged 65-80 years, M = 69.7) and 100 younger (aged 18-29 years, M = 23.5) adults. We found that individuals were more risk-averse (Odds Ratio (OR) = 1.52) and made worse quality decisions (OR = 2.13) for affect-rich, compared to affect-poor, problems and this did not differ between younger and older adults. Computational modeling with Cumulative Prospect Theory indicated that participants tended to weight the probability information less strongly for affect-rich than for affect-poor decisions regardless of age. Yet, while younger adults weighted the value of an outcome more strongly for affect-rich than for affect-poor decisions, older adults weighted value similarly between affect-rich and affect-poor outcomes. These findings better elucidate the mechanism underlying the affect-gap and have implications for risk communication in medical decision making.