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Frame Preference
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Description: When making decisions involving risk, people tend to be risk-averse when choices are presented in a gain frame and risk-seeking when the same options are in a loss frame (Kahneman & Tversky 1979, Tversky & Kahneman 1981). This observation has been coined the “framing effect” and has led to groundbreaking discoveries in decision-making research. However, it is unknown whether people prefer making decisions when options are in a gain or loss frame and whether this preference is associated with their risk attitude. We have constructed a behavioral paradigm, “The Frame Selection Task,” designed to answer these questions. In the initial phase of the task, participants choose between guaranteed and risky 'gambles' in both frames to measure their risk attitude (following De Martino et al., 2006). In the main phase of the task, participants choose in which frame they want the two gambles to be presented before they choose between them. At the end of the experiment, participants will complete the General Risk Propensity Scale (GRiPS) (Zhang et al. 2018), a questionnaire assessing their risk propensity, so we can determine whether frame preference depends on risk propensity. In a pilot study (n = 46), we found that participants selected the risky gamble more when gambles were presented in a loss frame than in a gain frame in both the initial phase (M = 18%, significantly greater than chance, t(45) = 5.20, p < 0.001) and the main phase (M = 9%, significantly greater than chance, t(45) = 3.00, p < 0.01). We also found that participants preferred making decisions in a gain frame (M = 58%, significantly greater than chance, t(45) = 2.88, p < 0.01) and that people with a stronger preference for the gain frame were more risk-averse (r = 0.33, p < 0.05). We preregister this study to replicate these results in a new sample.