Reinforcing Rational Decision Making in a Risk Elicitation Task Through Visual Reasoning

Metrics seeking to predict financial risk-taking behaviors typically exhibit limited validity. This is due to the fluid nature of an individual’s risk taking, and the influence of the mode and medium, which presents a decision. This paper presents two experiments that investigate how an existing risk elicitation task’s predictive capacity may be enhanced through the application of an interactive model of visual reasoning in a digitized version. In the first experiment, 60 participants demonstrated their reasoning process. In the second experiment, 225 participants were randomly assigned into three groups, with the validated risk elicitation task compared as a control to interactive digital and non-interactive digital stimuli with pie charts. The experiments yielded significant results, highlighting that when participants interact with a graph to reason their choices, it leads to consistent choices. The findings have implications for improvement of the risk task's validity and the deployment of digital interactive assessments beyond laboratory settings.