The Absence of Positive-Skew Bias for Non-Monetary Realized Risky Decisions

While most research on risky decision making focuses on financial decisions, there are many other types of important choices people make in their daily lives. Moreover, for the studies that do examine non-monetary decisions, the outcomes are typically hypothetical and not experienced in real time. Here, we examine the impact of realized, non-monetary outcomes on risky decision-making. One type of risky decision making that is relevant for both monetary and non-monetary outcomes are those known as skewed decisions, which have asymmetrical risks and outcome distributions. There is an abundant literature finding that in the monetary domain, people tend to select positively-skewed gambles—those with a large but unlikely gain paired with a likely, small-to-moderate loss—more than negatively-skewed and symmetric choices. Using a novel non-monetary skewed decision-making task across two pre-registered (https://osf.io/khfbd/) studies, we find that people do not demonstrate the positive skew preference for realized, non-monetary outcomes. This study lends a better understanding of how individuals make risky decisions that do not specifically pertain to money using a more realistic experience of receiving consequences in the moment.