The Absence of Positive-Skew Bias for Non-Monetary Realized Risky Decisions

While most of the research on decision making focuses on financial decisions, there are many other types of important choices people make in their daily lives. What’s more, for the studies that do examine non-monetary risky decisions, the outcomes are typically hypothetical and not experienced in real time. One important type of risky decision making that is relevant for both monetary and non-monetary outcomes (e.g., health-related decisions) are those known as skewed decisions—which have asymmetrical risks and outcome distributions. There is an abundant literature finding that in the monetary domain, people tend to select positively skewed, relative to negatively skewed and symmetric, choices in which there is an unlikely, large gain paired with a likely, small to moderate, loss. Using a novel non-monetary skewed decision making task across two pre-registered studies, we find that people do not demonstrate the positive skew preference for non-monetary outcomes. This study lends a better understanding of how individuals make risky decisions that do not specifically pertain to money using a more realistic experience of receiving consequences in the moment.