The first attribute heuristic influences risky choice preferences

Behavioral science research indicates that people appear to construct their risk preferences ‘on the fly’, informed by decision making context and task (Kusev et al., 2020). However, very little research has explored people’s psychological processing during decision-making ‘on the fly’. Accordingly, in this article we propose, explore, and establish the First Attribute Heuristic (FAH) in the domain of risky decision-making. FAH is a simple decision-making heuristic which is based on binary comparisons of values on the first contextually available attribute (e.g., probability or money). In three studies we found that the participants’ preference and likelihood of selecting the option with the dominant value over the option with the inferior value increase, when these values are presented on the first contextually available attribute. Importantly, our experimental findings provide further evidence that participants’ risk preferences are constructed ‘on the fly’. Specifically, decision-makers use FAH (a simple decision-making heuristic), which contributes to the lability of their preferences. Importantly, this heuristic and its influence on human risky decision-making are not anticipated by well-established behavioral theories such as Expected Utility Theory, Prospect Theory, and the Priority Heuristic.