The impassable gap between experiential and symbolic values

To choose between options of different natures, standard decision models presume that a single representational system ultimately indexes their subjective value on a common scale, regardless of how they are constructed. To challenge this assumption, we systematically investigated hybrid decisions between experiential options, whose value is built from past outcomes experience, and symbolic options which describe probabilistic outcomes. We show that participants' choices exhibited a pattern consistent with a systematic neglect of the experiential values. This normatively irrational decision strategy held after accounting for alternative explanations, and persisted when it bore an economics cost. Overall, our results demonstrate that experiential and symbolic values are not symmetrically considered in hybrid decisions, suggesting that they are not commensurable and recruit different representational systems which may be assigned different priority levels in the decision process. These findings challenge the dominant models commonly used in value-based decision-making research.