Age Differences in Decision Making Skills

A recent study confirms it again: older adults do well with decisions that require emotional skills.

Old age affects our decision-making skills in quite complex ways. Some cognitive skills decline with age, while emotional skills may even improve. This leads to interesting findings: older people do worse on some decision tasks, but they do just as well as younger adults on those same tasks when they get to experience them, rather than read instructions. This recent study, for example, used two ways to present gambling tasks. In the “description-based” task, people received information about different card decks: the probability of winning or losing, and the amount of money that could be won or lost with each card drawn from that particular deck. In the “experience-based” task they received none of that information – they were simply given four card decks, from which they had to start picking cards and figure out over time which card decks were more advantageous than others. In other words, people got to experience wins and losses over time and build an “intuition” as to which gambles are worth playing, and which are worth avoiding, without ever knowing the underlying probabilities for sure. (The researchers used the famous Iowa Gambling Task – which, I just discovered, you can get as a free iPad app).

While older adults (aged 64-90) managed to win less money overall in the description based task, they did just as well as younger adults (aged 18-32) in the experience-based task.

This is in line with the idea that our decision-making skills rely on two systems:

1. The affective or experiential mode, which is fast, automatic, intuitive, and builds from our experiences in similar situations.
2. The deliberative mode, which is is effortful, conscious, analytical, logical, relatively slow, controlled, limited by our working memory capacity, and therefore linked to general intelligence.

As we get older, it is normal for our working memory capacity to decline, in particular the speed with which we can juggle information, and therefore it is not surprising that our deliberative decision-making skills also suffer. However, our affective or experiential abilities seem to remain intact into old age.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR

Selected References:
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Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D., & Damasio, A. R. (2005). The Iowa Gambling Task and the somatic marker hypothesis: some questions and answers. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(4), 159–162. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2005.02.002
Bruine de Bruin, W., Parker, A. M., & Fischhoff, B. (2007). Individual differences in adult decision-making competence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(5), 938–956. http://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.5.938
Cauffman, E., Shulman, E. P., Steinberg, L., Claus, E., Banich, M. T., Graham, S., & Woolard, J. (2010). Age differences in affective decision making as indexed by performance on the Iowa Gambling Task. Developmental Psychology, 46(1), 193–207. http://doi.org/10.1037/a0016128
Huang, Y. H., Wood, S., Berger, D. E., & Hanoch, Y. (2015). Age differences in experiential and deliberative processes in unambiguous and ambiguous decision making. Psychology and Aging, 30(3), 675–687. http://doi.org/10.1037/pag0000038
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MacPherson, S. E., Phillips, L. H., & Della Sala, S. (2002). Age, executive function and social decision making: A dorsolateral prefrontal theory of cognitive aging. Psychology and Aging, 17(4), 598–609. http://doi.org/10.1037/0882-7974.17.4.598
Peters, E., Hess, T. M., Västfjäll, D., & Auman, C. (2007). Adult Age Differences in Dual Information Processes: Implications for the Role of Affective and Deliberative Processes in Older Adults’ Decision Making. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(1), 1–23. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6916.2007.00025.x
Salthouse, T. A., & Babcock, R. L. (1991). Decomposing adult age differences in working memory. Developmental Psychology, 27(5), 763–776. http://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.27.5.763