On 25 October, Ruben Arslan visits from the Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, to give a talk as part of the SWE colloquia.

What can we learn from one simple question? Reconciling cognitive scientists with self reports by treating them as a task

If we are to take self-reports of risk preferences seriously, we should understand how people understand our questions and which risks they think about when we ask a general question. People can give us a consistent answer that predicts actual behaviour, but how do they actually do it? I show preliminary data based on coding texts that people wrote about the risks they took. I hope this can help us derive a fuller idea of what the lay conception of risks look like and teach us to ask better questions and design better tasks.