Am I Winning or Losing? Probing the Appraisal of Partial Wins via Response Vigor

TL;DR

This study explores how people evaluate partial wins in gambling-like scenarios and finds that they use simple cues rather than calculating net gains or losses.

Contribution

The study introduces response vigor as a novel proxy for outcome appraisal and reveals how people use heuristic rules to evaluate ambiguous outcomes.

Findings

Participants responded more slowly to partial wins than losses but more quickly than wins.

Outcome appraisal relied on the configuration of cards rather than net win or loss.

Partial wins were appraised as worse than wins but better than losses.

Abstract

Attempts to obtain rewards are not always successful. Despite investing much time, effort, or money, sometimes individuals may not obtain any reward. Other times they may obtain some reward, but the obtained reward may be smaller than their initial investment, such as partial wins in gambling. It remains unclear how such ambiguous outcomes are appraised. To address this question, we systematically varied the payoffs for different outcomes in a computerized scratch card task across three experiments. To test outcome appraisal, we used response vigor as a novel proxy. In the scratch card task, participants turned three cards one by one. Depending on the turned cards, they either received an amount that was higher than the wager (win), an amount lower than the wager (partial win), or nothing (loss). Overall, participants responded to partial wins more slowly than losses, but more quickly than wins. Partial wins were therefore appraised to be better than losses, but worse than wins. Importantly, further analyses showed that outcome appraisal was not based on the net win or loss amount. Instead, participants primarily used the configuration of turned cards as a cue for the relative rank of an outcome within a specific game. Outcome appraisals thus utilize simple heuristic rules, rely on salient information (such as outcome-related cues in gambling), and are specific to a local context. Together, these factors may contribute to the misperception of partial wins as real wins in gambling. Future work may examine how outcome appraisal may be modulated by the salience of certain information, and investigate the appraisal process in contexts beyond gambling.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10899-023-10216-z.

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