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Decisions about extinction risks are ubiquitous in everyday life and for our continued existence as a species. We introduce a new risky-choice task that can be used to study this topic: The Extinction Gambling Task. Here, we investigate two versions of this task: a Keep variant, where participants cannot accumulate any more earnings after the extinction event, and a Lose variant, where extinction also wipes out all previous earnings. We derive optimal solutions for both variants and compare them to behavioural data. Our findings suggest that people understand the difference between the two variants and their behaviour is qualitatively in line with the optimal solution. Further, we find evidence for risk-aversion in the Keep condition but not in the Lose condition. We hope that this task can facilitate further research on this vital topic.
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This content will become publicly available on July 1, 2026
Decision making under extinction risk
In everyday life, people routinely make decisions that involve irredeemable risks such as death (e.g., while driving). Even though these decisions under extinction risk are common, practically important, and have different properties compared to the types of decisions typically studied by decision scientists, they have received little research attention. The present work advances the formal understanding of decision making under extinction risk by introducing a novel experimental paradigm, the Extinction Gambling Task (EGT). We derive optimal strategies for three different types of extinction and near-extinction events, and compare them to participants’ choices in three experiments. Leveraging computational modelling to describe strategies at the individual level, we document strengths and shortcomings in participants’ decisions under extinction risk. Specifically, we find that, while participants are relatively good in terms of the qualitative strategies they employ, their decisions are nevertheless affected by loss chasing, scope insensitivity, and opportunity cost neglect. We hope that by formalising decisions under extinction risk and providing a task to study them, this work will facilitate future research on an important topic that has been largely ignored.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2145308
- PAR ID:
- 10632546
- Publisher / Repository:
- Elsevier
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Volume:
- 159
- Issue:
- C
- ISSN:
- 0010-0285
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 101735
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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