The long and short of it: Closing the description-experience “gap” by taking the long-run view

Previous research has shown that many choice biases are attenuated when short-run decisions are reframed to the long run. However, this literature has been limited to description-based choice tasks in which possible outcomes and their probabilities are explicitly specified. A recent literature has emerged showing that many core results found using the description paradigm do not generalize to experience-based choice tasks in which possible outcomes and their probabilities are learned from sequential sampling. In the current study, we investigated whether this description-experience choice gap occurs in the long run. We examined description- and experience-based preferences under two traditional short run framed choice tasks (single-play, repeated-play) and also a long-run frame (multi-play). We found a reduction in the size of the description-experience gap in the long-run frame, which was attributable to greater choice maximizing in the description format and reduced overweighting of rare events in the experience format. We interpret these results as a “broad bracketing” effect: the long-run mindset attenuates short-run biases such as loss aversion and reliance on small samples.

• We contrasted description- and experience-based choices framed in the short- and long-run. • Short-run: single- and repeated-play paradigms vs. long-run: multi-play paradigm. • The description-experience gap was reduced under multi-play framing. • Multi-play framing increased choice maximizing in description-based decisions. • Multi-play framing reduced underweighting of rare events in experience-based decisions.