When experience is better than description: Time delays and complexity

Abstract

Abstract The dominant sampling paradigm of experience‐based choice is extended by exploring two realistic aspects of decisions. First, frequency judgments were studied in situations involving a delay between information acquisition and judgment. This time gap undermines recall from working memory and favors the natural human capacity to encode frequencies effortlessly. Deferred judgments from experience were found to be more accurate than judgments from description, both for absolute and rank‐order judgments. Second, task complexity was varied. This showed that—as decision tasks become more complex—participants are willing to trade‐off detailed but complex descriptive information for less accurate but simpler information sampled from experience. Moreover, there were no individual differences due to numerical/rational abilities. Results from the two studies suggest that information obtained from experience can be more valuable than descriptive information in that it can both lead to better frequency judgments in deferred tasks and simplify cognitive representations of complex choice tasks. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.