老年人行为决策:领域现状与挑战

The Elderly Decision Making: The Current Situations and Challenges of the Field

老年人的决策特点在多个领域各有不同,具体表现为消费领域的信息搜索数量下降,风险决策中的风险规避倾向,医疗决策中对框架效应敏感性的下降以及日常决策中存在经验优势等。总的来说,老年人在一部分决策任务中表现较差,而在另一部分决策任务中表现与年轻人无差异甚至优于年轻人。老年人的决策效度主要受到个体认知、情绪和任务特征等因素的交互影响,遵循个体-情境拟合理论。未来研究除了要继续探讨老年决策者在不同领域决策任务下的表现及影响因素,并深入解决决策质量及策略等方面争议外,还应进一步加强对被试特征、决策策略、跨文化等一系列变量及认知神经机制的研究。

Decision making in elderly people can be characterized in different areas by the following features： limitation of predecisional information search in consumer decision, risk-avoiding in risky choice situations, diminished sensitivity to the framing effect in medical decision-making, and some advantage based on richer relevant experience in everyday problem-solving. In general, for some decision-making tasks, older adults perform worse than younger adults, whereas they do better or at least as well as younger adults in some other tasks. The validity of elderly decision-making is mainly influenced by the interaction of cognitive aspects, emotional factors and task characteristics, and is in agreement with the person–context fit framework. For future studies, in addition to further clarification of the characteristics of decision makers’ performance in different areas and solving current issues about decision qualities and strategies, we should also pay more attention to the influence of variables related to individual characteristics, decision-making strategies, and cross-cultural factors. Further research on cognitive and neural mechanisms should be strengthened.