Examining how advice differentially influences decisions involving gains and losses

Decisions can be hard to make due to some degree of uncertainty, which can potentially lead to negative outcomes. This can be especially meaningful when decisions affect others. Results from multiple experiments have shown that many factors contribute to pro-social/pro-self behavior when decisions are made. Risk and context are notable moderators; social value orientation (SVO), which looks at an individual’s preference for sharing resources, also influences pro-social/pro-self behaviors. Many social decision-making tasks try to better understand prosocial behaviors in order to predict them. Social value orientation (SVO ) is a measure that is applied in the context of resource allocation by observing how participants prefer to distribute a resource (often monetary) between themselves and others. This application reveals one dimension of how social value may be assessed, therefore to better understand this feature of pro-social behavior we should expand the underlying notion of social value and its application to social decision-making in more generalizable way. We propose to extend previous research by analyzing how people make decisions when given advice from another person. We are interested in how risk preferences change when making decisions for self-others (via giving and receiving advice). Additionally, we seek to explore how SVO and advice will affect choices where both gain and loss information are operationalized as a resource and packaged as a single outcome. Eye-tracking, participant traits, and behavioral measures will be utilized to address our questions.