Age differences in risk attitude are shaped by option complexity

The canonical conclusion from research on age differences in risky choice is that older adults are more risk averse than younger adults, at least in choices involving gains. Most of the evidence for this conclusion derives from studies that used a specific type of choice problem: choices between a safe and a risky option. However, safe and risky options differ not only in the degree of risk but also in the amount of information to be processed-that is, in their complexity. In both an online and a lab experiment, we demonstrate that differences in option complexity can be a key driver of age differences in risk attitude. When the complexity of the safe option is increased, older adults no longer seem more risk averse than younger adults (in gains). Using computational modeling, we test mechanisms that potentially underlie the effect of option complexity. The results show that participants are not simply averse to complexity, and that increasing the complexity of safe options does more than simply make responses more noisy. Rather, differences in option complexity affect the processing of attribute information: whereas the availability of a simple safe option is associated with the distortion of probability weighting and lower outcome sensitivity, these effects are attenuated when both options are more similar in complexity. We also dissociate these effects of option complexity from an effect of certainty. Our findings may also have implications for age differences in other decision phenomena (e.g., framing effect, loss aversion, immediacy effect). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).