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Tim Pleskac (Max Planck Institute for Human Development)

Ecologically rational choice and the structure of the environment

In life risk is reward. This relationship between risk and reward or probabilities and payoffs seems obvious to many. Yet theories of decision making have largely ignored it. We conducted an ecological analysis of life’s gambles. Across all domains, payoffs and probabilities proved intimately tied, with payoff magnitudes signalling their probabilities. In some cases, the relationship is due to economic constraints, but in others it arises even despite economic constraints. We show that people exploit this relationship in the form of a heuristic—the risk–reward heuristic—to infer the probability of a payoff during decisions under uncertainty. We show how the heuristic can explain ambiguity aversion. More broadly, we argue that this ecological relationship can inform our understanding of choice under risk and uncertainty.

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