Preschoolers Differ in How They Approach Risky Decisions

• In Event: The Development of Risk Preferences and Exploration Strategies in Human Children and Chimpanzees

Abstract

Imagine you are offered the choice between one of two bets. In the safe bet, there is a 100% chance that you will win $500. In the risky bet, there is a 50% chance that you will win $1,000 and a 50% chance that you will win nothing at all. Which bet would you take? Many adults would go with the safe $500 bet (Tversky & Kahneman, 1992). Would your decision have been the same when you were five years old? In general, people take fewer risks as they get older (Paulsen et al., 2012). However, much of this work only looks at children at the ages of seven or older. Would these results extend to preschoolers?
There are reasons to believe that preschool-aged children would take more risks. For example, recent work has shown that children are more exploratory than adults; children will sacrifice a known reward in order to explore more (Sumner et al. 2019; Schulz et al., 2019). There are also reasons to believe that preschoolers would take fewer risks than adults. For example, children and infants are famously good at tracking statistics of events in their environment and understanding probability distributions of things like language (Aslin et al., 1998) and probability distributions of different colored items (Denison et al., 2013).
Across two studies, we ask the following questions: 1) Do children tend to be more risk seeking or more risk averse? 2) Do children use expected value in a similar way as adults when they make decisions? 3) What is the range of individual differences in how preschool children approach risk-taking tasks? and 4) Do preschoolers approach risk-taking tasks similarly when they are playing for others instead of themselves?
The current study is one of the first to create a risk-taking paradigm that is simple enough for preschool-aged-children (3-to-6-years of age) to understand. The task we created uses spinner wheels to ask children to make a series of decisions between a risky bet and a safe bet. We define risk taking in this talk as picking the risky bet over the safe bet. Using the simplified gambling task, we focus on two aspects of decision making: risk propensity (how willing an individual is to take the risky bet) and understanding of expected value.
Across two experiments, 87 children (mean = 4.45 years old, range = 3.2 -6.3 years old) make a series of eight choices between wheels that were either risky or safe. We then use a latent-mixture model to infer what cognitive strategies children are using. Together, we found that 1) the children who are playing the game with a strategy tend to be risk seeking, 2) children struggle to use expected value in this context, and 3) there are individual differences in how preschoolers approach this task that are not related to age.

Authors

• Emily Sarah Sumner, University of California - Berkeley
  Presenting Author

• Michael Lee, University of California, Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author

• Barbara W Sarnecka, University of California - Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author