Choice in the repeated-gambles experiment.
Stretching the pause or fattening the stake flips adult risk taking in lab games.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Adults played a computer gambling game many times in a row.
They could pick a safe bet or a risky bet on each round.
The researchers changed two things: how long people waited between rounds and how much fake money they started with.
What they found
Longer waits made people more careful, but only when the game rules felt unclear.
Bigger starting piles made people take bigger risks.
Small changes in timing or stake size flipped choices back and forth.
How this fits with other research
McKerchar et al. (2019) ran a similar online choice test. They also saw that tiny wording shifts rewired adult choices, so the 1988 result still holds today.
Nickerson et al. (2015) added a twist: if people had to sit and stare at the screen during the wait, they valued the reward less. This extends the 1988 finding by showing that the cost of waiting, not just the length, steers decisions.
Davis et al. (1972) worked with rats and found that longer signaled delays always cut response rates. The 1988 study shows the same delay rule works for adult humans picking gambles, bridging animal and human data.
Why it matters
You can tweak two levers in any token board or delay task: wait time and starting amount. If you want a learner to play it safe, keep waits short and stakes small. If you want bolder responding, front-load tokens and stretch the pause. Test one lever at a time and watch the choice pattern flip.
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Join Free →Run five trials with a 3-second pause, then five with a 10-second pause; graph which condition produces safer choices.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Humans chose 10 times between two roulette wheels projected on a monitor. During the first trial, the left wheel provided a hypothetical $100 with p = .94, and the right wheel provided $250 with p = .39. A titration procedure adjusted the probability of a $250 win across trials to permit estimation of an indifference point between alternatives. In Experiment 1, intertrial-interval duration (25 vs. 90 s) and whether sessions began with an intertrial interval or a trial were varied in a 2 x 2 design in this risky-choice procedure. Risk aversion (preference for the $100 wheel) increased with intertrial interval but was unaffected by whether sessions began with a trial or an intertrial interval. In Experiment 2, all sessions began with a trial, and subjects were informed that the experiment ended after 10 trials. Intertrial-interval duration had no effect on choice. In Experiment 3, intertrial-interval duration and whether subjects were given $10 or $10,000 before beginning were varied among four groups in a 2 x 2 design. In all other ways, the procedure was unchanged from Experiment 2. Intertrial interval had no effect on choice, but the $10,000 groups showed less risk aversion than the $10 groups. These results can be explained more readily in terms of Kahneman and Tversky's (1984) notion of "framing of the prospect" than in terms of Rachlin, Logue, Gibbon, and Frankel's (1986) behavioral account of risky choice.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1988 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1988.50-187