The experience-description gap and the role of the inter decision interval

Previous research highlights four distinct contributors to the experience-description gap (the observation that people exhibit oversensitivity to rare events in decisions from description and the opposite bias in decisions from experience). These contributors include the nature of small samples, the mere presentation effect, the belief that the environment is dynamic, and overgeneralization from decisions based on estimated risks. This chapter reviews this research and highlights the role of a fifth contributor to the experience-description gap. Three new experiments demonstrate that long deliberation before the decisions increases the weighting of rare events. The increase, however, is not large. People tend to underweight rare events in decisions from experience even after a forced deliberation period of 7.8s. This pattern was documented in pure decisions from experience and when the subjects could rely on both description and experience. In addition, the results show that the existence of inter decisions delay does not increase the weighting of rare events when the subjects are asked to perform a distraction task during the delay. Distraction reduces the weighting of rare events.