Attitudes toward risk are complicated: experimental evidence for the re-individuation approach to risk-attitudes

We present experimental evidence that supports the thesis (advanced recently by Stefánsson and Bradley in Philos Sci 82(4):602–625, 2015, Br J Philos Sci 70(1):77–102, 2019; Bradley in Decisions theory with a human face, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017; Goldschmidt and Nissan-Rozen in Synthese 198:7553–7575, 2021 ) that people might positively or negatively desire risky prospects conditional on only some of the prospects’ outcomes obtaining. We argue that this evidence has important normative implications for the central debate in normative decision theory between two general approaches on how to rationalize several common patterns of preference, which are ruled out as irrational by orthodox decision theory, namely the re-individuation approach and the non-expected utility approach.