The road not taken: Selective sampling and persisting inaccurate impressions

When individuals learn through experience, they tend to choose the options they believe will produce the most favorable outcomes. Research by Harris and colleagues (2020) indicated that this inclination to consistently engage with the perceived optimal choice can bias the resulting evidence, potentially perpetuating inaccurate beliefs under certain conditions. As it is unclear whether this effect is driven by people attempting to approach positive outcomes, or by their drive to avoid negative outcomes, the current study aims to distinguish between those two motives. Participants completed a two-armed bandit task with identical options, where initial evidence was manipulated to induce the belief that one option was better than the other. Experiment 1 was conducted in a rewarding context, where financial gains served as a reinforcer (as opposed to neutral outcomes), while Experiment 2 featured a negative context, with the omission of an expected aversive event as a reinforcer. Behavioral measures showed signs of a lasting bias in the aversive context of Experiment 2, corroborated by a bias in explicit contingency estimates. No such effects were observed in the positive context of Experiment 1. These findings suggest that lasting biases in experiential learning are driven more strongly by negative than positive outcomes. Implications for the acquisition of irrational aversive beliefs are discussed.