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Boundary Conditions for Positive Skew Bias
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Description: Decisions in real life are rarely deterministic, meaning that decisions made under uncertainty, or risky decisions, are common in daily life. When economists, psychologists, and neuroscientists study risky decision making, they often focus on the mean (or expected value) and variance (or risk), with little attention given to the asymmetry, or skewness, of the distribution. However, skewed risks are common in real life, and recently researchers have begun to examine the influence of skew on risky decision making. There are a number of limitations of the current research on skewed risk taking. Thus far, the research in older adults has been limited to three specific stimuli. This is problematic because only one level of skewness ( = 1.25) has been tested. Research in monkeys suggests that there may be a greater preference for more strongly-skewed options. Thus, it is possible that by using a moderate level of skewness, we have under-estimated the strength of the PS bias. For this reason, additional research is needed to determine how the PS bias observed using these stimuli generalizes beyond the specific circumstances investigated. We predict that the age-related PS bias (as measured by differential acceptance rates) will increase with increasing skewness in both certain (Study 1) and uncertain (Study 2) conditions.