Incorporating conflicting descriptions into decisions from experience

Decisions in everyday life are commonly made using a combination of descriptive and experiential information, and these two sources of information frequently contradict each other. However, decision-making research has mostly focused on description-only or experience-only tasks. Three experiments show that individuals exposed to description and experience simultaneously are influenced by both, particularly in situations in which descriptions are in conflict with experience. We examined cognitive models of how people integrate their experience with descriptions of choice outcomes, with different weights given to each source of information. Experience was the dominant source of information, but descriptions were taken into consideration, albeit at a discounted level, even after many trials. Models that included the descriptive information fitted the human data more accurately than models that did not. Wider implications for understanding how these two commonly available sources of information are combined for daily decision-making are discussed.