Gambling and investment are two domains that involve financial decisions. The present research investigates people’s lay theories about gambling and investment, and how these lay theories affect loss aversion in these domains. Lay people’s understanding of gambling and investment is often largely based on information that is immediately available to them. Moreover, information about losing money by gambling and earning money through investments are more predominant than information about earning money by gambling and losing money through investments. Hence, we hypothesized and found that people tend to hold lay theories that gambling is more likely to cause losses and less likely to bring gains compared to investment (Study 1); and we observed a stronger loss aversion when the same monetary decision was framed as gambling rather than as an investment (Studies 2 to 6). This domain-framing effect held in both hypothetical and incentivized settings.

赌博和投资是涉及财务决策的两个领域。本研究调查了人们关于赌博和投资的非专业理论，以及这些非专业理论如何影响这些领域的损失规避。外行人对赌博和投资的理解通常主要基于他们可以立即获得的信息。此外，关于通过赌博和通过投资赚钱的信息比关于通过赌博和通过投资赚钱的信息更为重要。因此，我们进行了假设并发现，人们倾向于持有通俗的理论，即与投资相比，赌博更有可能造成损失，而带来收益的可能性较小（研究1）；当同一货币决策被视为赌博而非投资时，我们观察到了更大的损失规避（研究2至6）。这种域框架效应在假设性和激励性环境中均保持不变。